Just another mindless, fucking Nazi in his CCTV Panopticon

Recently I have been focusing on the British Secret State and its attendant Police State as well as the manner in which the Blair/Brown junta is busily denying Brits their right to enjoy European civil rights protection.

The sad truth is that none of this could have happened without the silent consent of the British people. And in that sense the old adage, "People get the governments they deserve," remains very true. There is a strong authoritarian streak amongst those who rule Britain. This has existed for centuries. Some say it was imposed on Anglo-Saxon culture by the caste-ridden Normans who conquered Britain almost a thousand years ago.

That same authoritarian racism must, inevitably, have been stamped indelibly on the British psyche and lies there smoldering, flaring up as arrogance, xenophobia, racism and a general resentment of all things foreign. Of course, their rulers know and share these sentiments and put them to good use in order to exercise even greater control over the masses.

I came across an example of it today.

Firenzo is an East European gipsy immigrant who, most days, can be seen outside the local supermarket selling copies of The Big Issue, a magazine published especially for the homeless to sell and to make a little money from. He doesn't sell many but still he stands there in his padded jacket, braving the bleak winter winds, a smile on his face, shivering.

He's a long way away from his beloved homeland, an economic migrant trying to eke a living in this hostile society in order that he can send a little of his earnings back to the family he left behind. Homeless, he lives illegally in a derelict building, hoping the Police don't know or are turning a blind eye.

He's a friendly guy and always says hello.

"Ça va bien, mon ami?" he says in French, which he speaks more of than English.

"Ah, le temps, il fait si froid. Il est chié!" I reply in a bad temper.

"Oh, ce n'est pas trop mauvais," he replies cheerfully.

People like Firenzo. They stop and chat with him before going into the supermarket. He's become part of the local scene. Even the Municipal Council is including him in their latest tourist brochure.

Walking towards the supermarket today, I saw him at his usual post outside the entrance chatting with someone. All of a sudden a man with an English accent shouts at him.

"People like you should be digging trenches, doing hard labour twenty-four-seven, that's what you should be doing!" he screams, his face distorted with hate.

Firenzo looked on in astonishment taking the brunt of this attack quite calmly but with an expression of incredulity.

I stepped in, pointing at his assailant and shouting back, "It's fucking Nazis like you that're turning this country into a fascist state!"

"Who me?" he replied, wide-eyed with disbelief that suddenly it was he who was under attack.

"Yes you, you fucking Nazi!" I replied, and to underline the point shouted in German, "Scheisskoepf!" at a rapidly receding figure who, seeking refuge in his car, drove off still screaming abuse at us. Returning the compliment, I gave him the finger.

Poor Firenzo shook my hand and thanked me. I bought a copy of his magazine, commiserated with him and went in to do my shopping. When I came out he was gone, probably afraid that the incident would attract the attention of the Police who would then move him on. His intuition was correct. Five minutes later a Police van drove past slowly.

A few minutes later I saw him walk past waving. I returned the wave with a clenched fist sign of solidarity. For I too have known what it is to be homeless and on the street. But much worse, like Firenzo I too have experienced the brunt of mindless prejudice and racism from cowards no different to that hate-filled man.

So sad, when I think about it, that narrow-minded bigots such as he, choosing scapegoats and racial stereotypes against which to spill all his pent-up anger and resentment, through such misdirected rage only play into the waiting hands of cynical and opportunist politicians who calculatedly play the race card and flirt with the prejudices of the gutter for their own personal gain. Something which in Britain both Nu Labour and Tory are doing alike with no heed of the consequences.

It is on those politicians our bigot should be offloading his toxic waste, not on ordinary, fellow humans. But of course, he can't because they're well out of his range, well-protected in their bubble of unreality, protected from the hoi-polloi by body-guards, who drive around in armour-plated cars.

Britain's chickenhawk dictators, leaders of a new managerial aristocracy who live in gated, secure communities, separated from an increasingly impoverished underclass by both invisible economic walls as well as CCTV cameras.

This bigot will continue voting for the chickenhawk dictators who kill millions of innocents in his name. Not that he cares a damn. To him they're just "Dirty Arab Terrorists." He will continue to blame all his troubles on the closest available victim. He will whinge and complain and do nothing to challenge the real cause of his unhappiness, the Police State around him. And in his narrow-minded, nasty little way he will, as he always has, keep helping to build that open prison.

He's just a mindless, fucking Nazi who's turned this country into a CCTV Panopticon.

Secret State-terrorism Rules, OK?

The recent attack by the fascist, Scottish Judge, Lord (Colin Sutherland) Carloway (picture above), on the lawyer, Aamer Anwar, was not only an expression, on the former's part, of a redcoat arrogance but must be seen as a calculated attack on the Scottish judiciary itself.

The entire Thought Crime Trial against the Scots-born Mohammed Siddique smacks, from beginning to end, of having been instigated by the secret services under the cover of the State. The message is clearly meant to terrorise the British Muslim community into fear and subservience. It is a notable fact that whereas Muslims of colour are being punished thus, whites convicted of similar offences are being treated leniently.

British law, on either side of the border, remains institutionally racist and apparently above any criticism. For if it is the Law then it goes to say, does it not, that the manner in which it is practised must be, without question, right and proper?

Well, certainly in the pompous minds of those such as the stern-faced Colin Sutherland who would have Scotland remain under the iron heel of the terrorism of its ruling elite, his very name evoking the infamous Duke of Sutherland of the Highland Clearances.

Very relevant to the encroaching police state in Britain are a collection of essays, Writing by Candlelight, by the late radical historian, Edward Thompson. Published nearly thirty years ago, Thompson describes how the current police state developed over successive Labour and Tory governments. And significantly how a police state can only grow through the previous existence of a secret state (a state within a state answerable to no one but itself).


Edward Thompson

After all these years and having purchased another copy of Thompson's essays for just one penny from Amazon (40-odd copies left) I am re-reading them with care in order to comment in the hope that readers not familiar with Thompson may see for themselves how Britain's very own brand of fascism has been so long in the making.

Of course, it can be taken much, much further back, at least into Victorian times. The British ruling classes have always possessed a ruthlessness, particularly against its subject races, of the type that later became associated with Hitler. But in the real world it is more likely that Hitler copied the cruelty of British imperialists!

Thus Thompson:

we are now approaching a point of crisis [1980] in which not fascism but a peculiarly British form of authoritarianism, working behind the back of of the democratic process, is now bringing national life within its general closure ... Britain, as we enter the 1980s, has the most reactionary government in Western Europe, which is simultaneously attacking the livelihood and democratic rights of its own people, and accepting, with bellicose subservience, a client role for the state as a station of NATO. In compensation for the abject collapse of traditional British influence and power, Mrs Thatcher is repeating history as a farce, and attempting to mimic (before bored auditoriums) Churchill's post-war role as the leading ideologist of Cold War in the Western world.

Writing by Candlelight, Introduction, p. ix

Now, anyone who has a memory of the old British colonies will know exactly what Thompson means by "a peculiarly British form of authoritarianism" because that's how they were ruled until bankruptcy required them all to be ditched. But authoritarianism didn't just disappear. It returned home to roost in what's now left of the dysfunctional, motley entity still jokingly referred-to as the United Kingdom. The empty ideology of Empire was replaced by an equally fake Cold War propaganda and that, in turn, by the nonsense of the 'War on Terror', a straight import with the former from Washington, DC.

Faced with suddenly having to replace a brainwashing of plebs with Hollywood lies about a Red Menace &c, the British secret state, along with its US counterpart, had to find a replacement to justify its ongoing imperialist ravaging of the Planet. Enter the 'War on Terror' which it promoted simultaneously in both the UK and the US as well as the other Anglo-Saxon countries. Such a promotion simply side-stepped parliaments and was taken-up by a few political figure-heads, such as Bush, Blair, Aznar and Howard, who were fed in turn by their secret services.

About which Thompson observed:

The inter-operation of and exchange of information, intercepts, etc., between British and US security services (CIA, NSA, etc.) is total: ... 'anything and everything would be possible if it was considered necessary to protect the Anglo-American joint Intelligence arrangement.'

ibid, p. 118

And not only did the spooks, in their incestuous, pan-Atlantic relationship, cooperate totally with each other, they both fed and controlled politicians through constant threats of blackmail and political destabilisation. Thompson mentions Harold Wilson's sudden decision to step-down from the premiership as an example of this, quoting Chapman Pincher, "that Sir Harold Wilson said, last year, that MI5 'plotted against him, tried to secure his downfall'," (ibid, p. 121)

Arguing the desperate need for a parliamentary inquiry into the danger coming from MI5 and MI6, Thompson goes on to say, "But the unpleasant truth is that this inquiry cannot and will not be made." (ibid, p. 120)

It is becoming evident that the reason why the Prime Minister, the Government, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the House of Commons, will do nothing whatsoever about the situation is that they lie under a state of blackmail to the security services.

I know of no historical precedent for this ...

ibid, p. 121

Now, think about this: a rumour has long been circulating that Tony Blair's unquestioning support for George Bush's illegal attack and occupation of Iraq came as a direct result of pressure put on him by the secret services. Pressure of blackmail that would have destroyed his political career.

We already have it from ex-spook, David Shayler, that he was assured by one of his MI5 colleagues they had a dossier on Blair (and many others no doubt, including Brown). So, knowing that the CIA and its British counterparts work so closely together, nothing could have been easier for Bush's rogue cabal to have ensured that he, Blair, stayed in line. And this despite all the more recent talk of Bush not having pressured Blair to support his murderous war.

The conclusion is clear: Britain, from what Thompson warned us of thirty years ago, is run by a secret-state that manipulates elected politicians like rag-dolls. And it is that secret-state that pressured the rag-dolls to legislate away all our hard-won freedoms to replace them with the police state which has come to be.

Meantime, the secret services in Britain continue their totalitarian agenda without any question or challenge from the Mother of Parliaments itself.

In a very real sense, the symbol of the state in the form of the Parliament, has not only lost all legitimacy, sitting in splendid isolation in its Victorian Gothic pile, which just like the government, masquerades as something it’s not, it has also relinquished whatever power it had over the functioning of the state to Blair’s vampires who are in reality ‘asset-stripping’ public resources under the guise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘reorganisation’.

Sooner or later people are going to wise up to what ‘Blatcherism’ has done, the question is, will we have a voice and the means to turn the tide?

William Bowles, Democracy Inaction

How the Mighty have Fallen!

Yet Blair's coup against British parliamentary democracy did not arise from thin air. It followed similar coups by Thatcher and, before that, through concerted attacks against democracy by the secret state and its services in MI5 which, no doubt, were following directives given the CIA by Washington, DC. That must never be forgotten and it's why books like Thompson's must be read and re-read.

For without the Secret State, neither Blair nor his successor Brown, or the Redcoat Judge, Carloway, could get away with the terrorist crimes they continue to perpetrate against the people of Britain.

__________

Addendum: And by a remarkable coincidence this article is published on the very day that the BBC News 24 programme gave MI5 and MI6 a free recruitment ad in its 9AM News. I forgot to mention, of course, that the BBC plays a significant role in Britain's secret state.

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!

Now go here to WeWillNotBeSilenced.Com and be inspired!

This is what the Internet is for!

A Bad Day for Bennelong's Baboon-Lookalike

The champagne corks will be popping in Kangaroo Valley in London tonight. And it's a good day for the rest of us as well because, finally, the Ozzies got to kick out the baboon-like fascist thug, John Howard, described by OpEd as "Bush's rectal appendage" in a humiliating electoral defeat.

Howard always reminded me of one of those classical, idiot Ozzie archetypes straight out of the Edna Everage Show. The kind that any Ozzie would squirm with embarrassment over. And it was this utter shitbag, to continue in the antipodean vernacular, who was responsible for the killings of thousands of innocent Iraqis and who shoved Australia up a place in Bush where the Sun don't shine.

He also turned Australia into a police state as have his partners-in-crime, Tony Blair and Gordon 'The Toad' Brown, Britain. The arrogant Toad knows his come-uppance is still delayable.

But for how much longer?

In the classic manner of all robber barons, Brown has so overstretched the capabilities of the British military that it is no longer viable as a fighting-machine. While social spending has been severely cut back, military expenditure spirals. Imperialist, warmongering Britain comes only second to the USA in military expenditure and leaves the rest of Europe behind.

What a sad epitaph for Britain's End-of-the-Empire-Show!

The baboon Howard even lost his own parliamentary seat, keeping him out of the Australian parliament altogether. Let's hope The Toad is given the same treatment in Britain's next elections. For the only place he belongs is behind bars along with serial-killer, Blair.

A Rebellion has now Arisen Over the Land

It is by no accident that I have invoked the Mother-of-all-Jihads against the would-be dictator Brown and his ruling junta of ministers. There is a rebellion that is burning over the land. A rebellion fed by an anger that has been building over the last six years since that other traitor and war-criminal, Tony Blair, dragged a reluctant people into the killing-fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This revolt is now so widespread that it can no longer be dismissed or ignored by either the British state or its servile mainstream media (MSM). And it is coming from every sector of British society, from both its establishment and from the streets and market-places. On the one hand, we see it emanate from hoary old Peers in the House of Lords complaining of the shameless irresponsibility of a Premier who sends ill-equipped soldiers to fight and die in Washington's imperialist wars. And on the other we see it in the total disaffection of Joe Public with the two-party dictatorship and oppressive State apparat that rules over him.

The rebellion that burns today will, I forecast, sooner or later turn into some sort of popular velvet revolution. I can predict that with certainty because, as with all revolutions, it is the growing dissatisfaction and unrest provoked by the oppressive and disastrous follies of the State itself that is bringing this about.

When the Berlin Wall finally fell in late 1989 I was in Lübeck, Germany, visiting an old relative. I remember telling him then that once the old regimes of Eastern Europe fell that, sooner or later, their demise would be reflected in a similar collapse of their mirror-images in the West. For despite all the empty talk about 'democracy', blah, blah, western governments are themselves carefully-contrived dictatorships of one sort or another. There is no true freedom of expression. Dare to express your political views too loudly and you're guaranteed to get a visit from the Men-in-Black. Or worse, especially if you're a brown-skinned Muslim in Britain's racist, police state.

It happened to me in Edinburgh ten years ago just before the first elections to the Scottish Parliament. At the time people were being actively encouraged to take a real political interest and to put themselves forward as candidates for the new Parliament. Having played a very active role, to say the least, in Highland politics in the 'nineties I decided to have a go. Being an anarchist by nature, I formed my own political party calling it Rainbow Alliance Alba (or RAA). The idea of RAA was to form a rainbow alliance of people of all political hues in order to create a true, peoples' party.

Having entered RAA onto the electoral list, I printed out some leaflets and distributed them around Edinburgh and Glasgow. From the RAA leaflet it was clear that my sentiments were unashamedly anti-capitalist and against its wage slavery.

Two weeks later I received a knock on the door and two plain-clothes cops from ostensibly the CID (Special Branch more likely) insisted on entering my home and questioning me about RAA. Very polite they were but still extremely curious about my reasons for standing for the Scottish Parliament. In the event, I assured them it had all come to nothing and that RAA had died a quiet death in the backstreets of Portobello. They went away.

So much for free-speech in Britain.

In the real world, Britain is a parliamentary dictatorship where each citizen is heavily but discreetly surveilled and where no one is very far from the midnight knock on the door. Not even the slightest attempt at political dissent goes unnoticed or is not investigated by an inquisitive State. If you are an Asian, a person of colour, or God forbid, a Muslim, then you're really asking for trouble. So the rule is just keep your mouth shut, don't attract attention to yourself and go quietly about your daily business.

No one seriously believes all that nonsense about democracy anymore. A cynical public is only too aware that that was all ideological crap that was forced down our throats, along with Thatcher's notorious reds-under-the-bed, to keep us standing to attention and in line during the days of the West's Cold War against China and the Soviet Union. Since then not only have all ideas of democracy been ditched but so have any remaining thoughts of individual freedom. The State rules over all.

And that brings me back to the present rebellion and the coming Revolution. Because this will not be led by a Marxist-Trotskyist elite or British Left that is no more capable of organising a revolution than a common piss-up in a brewery. Nor will it be led by some precious liberal-minded pseuds or a foppish and mercenary literati from the intellectual salons of the Internet, although no doubt they will all attach themselves like limpets to anything that might get going.

It will be fuelled, if anything, by a libertarian Right who, in their eyes, see that an Englishman's home is no longer his castle and that a 'Marxist State' (sic) has now encroached upon all that is sacred to the British way of life. And joining them will be the surly middle-classes who see their pensions being eroded and their privileges being taken away. To these can be added the raggle-taggle Left as well as the economically and socially marginalized sectors of the population, all threatened by the encroaching dictatorship of the Brown junta and its farcical ID cards.

Sadly, the Muslim population of Britain --the real canary-in-the-cage when it comes to Britain's encroaching police state-- will, with a few notable exceptions, continue to play the role of a passive victim no different to that of a Pakistani or Bangladeshi waiter abused and attacked by a bunch of racist thugs on a late-night binge. The British State's highly-politicized, racist judiciary will continue to hand out impossibly harsh sentences to brown-skinned 'terrorists' in a manner which would have put their Victorian counterparts to shame. And in Scotland, Lord Carloway and Butcher Cumberland's Red-coats still rule, OK?

The rebellion and the slow revolution-in-the-making will come from precisely the same place where Eastern European uprisings originated. It will have nothing to do with ideological dogmas or Marxist dialectics. It will arise from a common disaffection that people all around the Planet harbour against the encroaching oppression of the State in people's private affairs. Something that already unites conservative and right-wing libertarians with liberal-minded democrats, Christian evangelists, anarchists, armchair Lefties and yer average bloke dahn-the-marketplace.

It will be from that unlikely and unexpected quarter that our dictators will find themselves hauled away by the tumbrils whence, indeed, heads shall roll. For Both Brown and Bush are really now in the very same place that the failing Romanian tyrant, Ceausescu, once found himself.

Up against the Wall.

Britain's Ceausescu
An Open Call for the Mother-of-all-Jihads Upon this Evil Government!

The openly racist oppression of Muslims by the State and its politicised judiciary in Britain goes on. The latest case is that of the 25-year-old Pakistan-born Abdul Rahman who has been convicted for having a letter encouraging a call-to-arms in Afghanistan!

Not in Britain but in Afghanistan!

According to the BBC, "Rahman admitted having the letter with a view to circulating it to encourage others to join the jihad." And when Police raided Rahman's house in Manchester,

they found computer disks of speeches given to crowds in Pakistan claiming, "Allah is calling for jihad."

Although the BBC avoids telling us exactly what it further observes that,

Rahman was also accused [but not convicted] of assisting another person to commit or prepare a terrorist act, which carries a possible life sentence.

What utter drivel! What does the BBC take us for if it expects us to believe this latest vomiting of state terrorism nicely timed, as always, to knock the public back into shape just as Gordon 'The Toad' Brown's Nu Labour fascists are reeling from one scandal to another?

Since the sacking of Greg Dyke who dared to challenge the warmonger Blair the BBC has become a shamelessly servile tool and conduit for state propaganda favouring whichever of the two parties presently holding power in Britain's police state, parliamentary dictatorship.

This last show trial was covered by BBC News 24 last night after a lengthy coverage of sports news (bread and circuses to keep the proles distracted) in which Rahman was alleged to be running "military training schools" in northern England. To emphasise the point, the BBC showed us a brief clip of what appeared to be two men dressed in anoraks sliding down a hill in the snow!

Britain's show trials against Muslims are becoming increasingly farcical: first Mohammed Siddique in Scotland's first thought-crime trial and conviction followed by the persecution of Siddique's lawyer by the tyrannical Lord Carloway; then the conviction of the so-called Lyrical Terrorist for having written her thoughts on the back of a bus-ticket; and now Rahman for his support of Afghan freedom fighters who are bravely standing up to the imperialist USUK occupiers in occupied Afghanistan.

And by saying that last do I also become guilty of promoting a so-called jihad?

Sobeit.

Let me make it very clear to The Toad and his closet-fascist government: if that is what you, in your abject ignorance, call 'jihad' then yes, I (a non-Muslim) do indeed call on all that is Holy to bring down on your miserable heads the Mother-of-all-Jihads in order that this vile government and the system it seeks to perpetuate is forever consigned into the sewers of history!

Mr Gordon, The Lying Toad, Brown, Britain's latter-day Ceausescu, are you listening to the anger that is spreading across the land?

Ari Fleischer’s Freedom’s Watch Involved In ‘Marketing Sessions’ To ‘Sell’ Iran War

In September, the New York Times reported that the White House front group Freedom’s Watch, led by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, was considering a “national advertising campaign” to make the case for war with Iran, claiming that “Iran poses a direct threat” to U.S. security. Previously, Freedom’s Watch doled out $15 million to flack for the Iraq escalation.

While 63 percent of Americans oppose to military action in Iran, Freedom’s Watch apparently believes it can coax the public into another war. Laura Rozen reports that Freedom’s Watch is involved in test-marketing “language” to sell war with Iran. Laura Sonnemark, an attendee of the sessions, describes her experience:

After joining a half dozen other women in a conference room, she found, to her surprise, that she had been called in to help some of the country’s most prominent hawks test-market language that could be used to sell a war against Iran to the American public. […]

“He was asking questions about [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad going to speak at Columbia University, how terrible it was that he was able to go to Columbia and was invited,” Sonnemark says. “And he used lots of catch phrases, like ‘victory’ and ‘failure is not an option.’” […]

“After two hours, [the leader] asked three final questions,” Sonnemark recalls: “How would you feel if Hillary [Clinton] bombed Iran? How would you feel if George Bush bombed Iran? And how would you feel if Israel bombed Iran?”

While the focus group was commissioned by another organization, Freedom’s Watch reportedly “shared information” produced by the session.

In the next step of their PR campaign, the Freedom’s Watch announced a redesigned website yesterday, complete with a new blog, “guest posts by prominent conservative figures,” and ways for visitors to be “heard directly by their members of Congress.” In an e-mail blast to supporters today, President Bradley Blakeman states, “our efforts have just begun.”

These attempts to sell war with Iran smack of the White House’s efforts to sell the Iraq war. In August 2002, Karl Rove chaired the White House Iraq Group, whose mission was to “develop a strategy for publicizing the White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.” At the same time, Fleischer was propagating these false assertions to the public.

As a founding member of Freedom’s Watch, it is no surprise Fleischer is importing his White House propaganda tactics for war with Iran.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/20/freedomswatch-iran-sell/

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Where's the outcry about our police state?
Dogs have better safeguards than the nameless suspects being hauled into custody
THE INDEPENDENT, 10 October 2005

"Woolgathering" is a brilliant new word I have just learnt. It describes the state of being heedless, thoughtless, neglectful, distracted. It is also apt to describe a new national affliction. While we are woolgathering, twittering and tittering about Beckham's fortunes, the catwalks, Jude Law's love life, the dating games of blind sex-pot ministers, the Brown/Blair power struggle and the Tory leadership contest, the country is being redesigned, reconfigured, dominated, fouled and corrupted by a hubristic government which feels entitled to rule over us forever and in whichever way it chooses.

We need to wake up and put away the languorous good living supplements and whatever novel is causing a buzz in clever circles. None of it matters. British culture, art, politics, society, the media, the justice system, are being forced to submit to the will of New Labour under Tony Blair who wants to compel us to become subject to his will rather than free citizens of a free nation. L'Etat c'est moi, he now appears to believe. Absolutely.

No other British leader in modern times has gone this far. Internment, arbitrary and punitive deportation, barbaric laws, shoot-to-kill policies have now established themselves on this soil. Yet the majority of Britons do not demur or baulk. Through default they consent. Some energy has, admittedly, gone into protests over planned identity cards and the law against religious incitement. But the even more serious raids on liberal democracy don't generate too much concern.

President Blair wants a wifey media, a tame judiciary, obliging lawyers, public adoration, a poodle parliament, power which answers to nobody but George Bush. On the international stage, he issues commands and threats, seeks acclaim and deference. Last week he ordered Iran to lay off Iraq, to stop sending arms to insurgents who have the temerity to attack our soldiers in their tanks. Meanwhile we claim legitimacy, the right to blast the shit out of Iraqis, good and bad.

Yesterday, three alarmed jurors spoke up to protest against the re-arrest and planned expulsion of four Algerian men accused of making ricin to use in terrorist attacks. One man, Kamel Bourgass, who also killed a policeman, was found guilty of this plot. No evidence was found to implicate any of the others charged. They were acquitted by a jury.

For days I have been fretting about the arrests of these legally freed Algerians. It's what Presidents Milton Obote and Idi Amin used to do in Uganda, to bang up people who had been duly freed by the courts. Now, finally, the jury members have come out. 'Before the trial," said one, " I had a lot of faith in the authorities to be making the right decisions on my behalf ... Whereas having been through this trial, I am very sceptical now as to the real reasons why this new legislation has been pushed through".

I completely accept that intelligence has to be gathered and it will be essential to get sharper, smarter policing and spying which may well require exceptional temporary powers granted by an independent judge. At times I even find myself applauding when some fanatic Muslim preacher is put away without due process, a burst of populism which is unbecoming and immoral. But I do not wish to live in a police state which uses democracy as a clever disguise to encroach on our liberties.

Every day men and women in this country are being hauled into custody as nameless suspects. They may or may not be guilty. It doesn't really matter any more. They are Muslims. Dogs have better safeguards than these presumed terrorists. The rules of the game have changed, Blair tells us. But, as the newly retired, immensely wise judge Lord Steyn says in an interview in this newspaper today: "This is not a game, this is a deathly serious and earnest matter".

Blair and his gang, imbued with granite Christian certainties, claim our acquiescence to keep us safe, they say, in a dangerous world. Are we really living in more perilous times than during the two World Wars or the Cold War when weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of war-makers on both sides?

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, has capitulated on the pernicious proposed legislation which would have outlawed the "glorification" of terrorism, whatever that meant or was meant to mean. But he still wants the right to hold for 90 days people who have not been explicitly charged and to pack them off to their old countries so they don't bother us. It is a double whammy. If you are marked out as a "terrorist" you can be incarcerated and deported, all in the silence imposed by the new anti-terrorism measures.

All too soon, this cowboy justice begins to apply to others. Internment, exiling human beings, curtailing freedom of expression, have become responses to a range of difficult problems. The duffing up of the Labour Conference heckler Walter Wolfgang illustrated the point perfectly. (I do wonder though whether there would have been such a fuss around the country if the victim had not been an elderly refugee who fled Nazism, but, say, a young Asian or Afro-Caribbean man?)

Countless more people, including children seeking asylum are being cruelly deported. Every day campaigners get e-mails about these wretched people, the latest I have had is from Jessica Levy, a desperate English woman whose husband Hossain is being sent back to Iran where torture is a gadget liberally used by the state to inflict docility and compliance. Even Middle Englanders in some places are rising in protest when they witness obvious miscarriages of natural justice in such cases.

Blair has, in effect, torn up the Geneva convention on refugees, and disdains the substance and spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.

You would have thought waves of resistance would rise to stop these outrages. But no. The Tories are too enamoured of authoritarianism themselves. Lib Dems play polite and earnest and are no match for the indomitable ruling clique. Peers and MPs - with some brave exceptions - have retreated from principled opposition since the London bombs. Ken Livingstone is in the pocket. Journalists "friendly" to the Blairite project, of whom there are too many, follow the leader like needy cult members. Blair is their visionary Maharishi and as mesmerising and untrustworthy as the original. The rest of us try without making any impact.

New Labour, it seems, will not be stopped and searched as it vandalises precious principles and thuggishly knocks out checks and balances. Cherie Blair warned in August: "It is all too easy for us to respond to such terror in a way which undermines commitment to our most deeply held values and convictions and which cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation". I wonder if we have this right any more, Cherie, or if it is too late already.

__________

Rory's Comments: An article dated 2005, it's true but nevertheless so relevant two years on. How long is it before the Great British Public is going to do something about the Nu Labour fascist bully-boys?

Dr Israel Shahak: The Weight of Three Thousand Years

In a recent column in the INDEPENDENT, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, recalls a memory of her friend, Hugh Blaschko, a Berlin Jew who escaped Nazi Germany for England.

"He escaped to Britain in the late 1930s to become a world-class scientist. Israel would bring out the worst in his people, he always said, and I argued with him. Survivors of the Holocaust, I believed, were on the side of the angels. "No, my dear," he would respond, "the Jewish state will make us nationalists, and will one day make us racialists." I am glad he is not alive to see his prophetic words turned flesh," Yasmin concludes.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14024.htm

Who else but racists would treat any other human the way the Israelis treat Palestinians, Lebanese and other non-Jews? Since the creation of the state of Israel all we have seen is the nationalist chauvinism and racism of which Blaschko warned. Thousands of innocents, predominantly Palestinians, have died and continue to die while slowly the outside world begins to wake up and ask, do Israelis consider Arab lives to be inferior to theirs?

In his book, The Weight of 3000 Years, Professor Israel Shahak, himself a holocaust survivor and unremitting critic of Judaism, explains the origins of this terrible truth. Yes, according to the Talmudic law that Orthodox Jews practise the life of a Gentile (non-Jew) is as of nothing compared to that of a Jew. And this hoary old teaching remains a fundamental cornerstone of Judaism, right up to the present day, even though it sometimes comes into conflict with Israeli secular law. It is written into the military manuals used to train Israeli soldiers and preached by rabbis to their communities. There is one law for Jews and another for Gentiles.

In her article, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown refers to Rabbi Goldberg who writes in his book, The Divided Self, "since 1967, [Israel] has been a Herrenvolk democracy, a term used to describe South Africa under apartheid, in which one group of subjects, the Israeli citizens, enjoys full rights while a disenfranchised group, the Palestinians, enjoys none of any significance."

She goes onto use the word apartheid to describe Israel's arrogant behaviour. But according to Professor Shahak, she is wrong: Jewish chauvinism is worse than apartheid because, in the territorial sense of the word, Jewish separatism makes no allowance for the Gentile in its midst. There are just Jews, the chosen children of God and there's the rest of us beast-like heathens. Every day, an Orthodox Jew begins his prayers by thanking God for not having been born a Gentile.

This black-and-white ideology has, to date, been little understood by non-Jews, particularly of the Liberal kind who unthinkingly assume that Israelis think no different to other races where the respect for the sanctity of life is taken for granted as a given norm. That has proven, at best, to be wishful thinking. Singularly lacking the universalism of other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Judaism is a religion and culture that thrives on exclusivism, separatism and intolerance. For centuries, the darker side of Judaism lay well-hidden, protected by its teachers whose first purpose was to defend Judaism from the persecution of others. It could be argued that it is this self-interest that led to the layers of deceit and concealment found in the laws of the Talmud, that it was necessary to hide the true meanings from the hostility of Gentiles. But on closer examination it becomes difficult to see where self-interest takes over from ideological exclusivism.

To use a modern-day analogy, it could be argued that contemporary Israelis feel surrounded by hostile people and cultures very different to their own and it is this fear that has made them into such an aggressive, warlike culture; that the new chauvinism for Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) grew out of this fear born out of the desperate vulnerability of the holocaust victims: never again!

Well yes, take several thousand Europeans and plant them on someone else's land in the Middle East and you've got an instant recipe for trouble. A sense of vulnerability is the least of your concerns when you come into direct physical collision with an indigenous (Palestinian) population wondering what the hell all these Europeans are after, invading their homes and treating them with such inhuman abuse. Is it that difficult to see where hospitality ended to be replaced with a burning hate?

The story of the enforced colonization of Palestine by European aliens is only part of the story. A significant part but by no means the whole story. And, at a time well past the eleventh hour, when the Middle East's tinder-box fires begin to rage again and the world lurches towards another great conflagration, it behooves us all to spend some time to find out how in heaven's name a "chosen people" could have collectively become a spectre of the Apocalypse.

Professor Shahak's book provides vital reading-material for anyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, who wishes to understand how the sins of the fathers (and mothers) keep visiting themselves on the children.

THE WEIGHT OF 3000 YEARS, Download PDF here

Chávez and Ahmadineyad agree that the dollar empire is collapsing

TEHRAN, November 19.— Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez stated today in Teheran that “the dollar empire is collapsing,” according to ANSA.

“Soon we won’t be talking about dollars anymore because the value of the dollar is in free fall and the dollar empire is collapsing,” Chávez said to a group of journalists.

The Bolivarian leader visited Tehran, coming from Riyadh where he had attended a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) where Venezuelan and Iranian leaders proposed “de-dollarizing” crude oil operations.

In this capital city, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadineyad and his Venezuelan counterpart confirmed that two their countries "will be together to the end,” EFE reports.

"Fortunately, we are witnessing the fall of a system of arrogance (the United States) and continuing victories of the people,” Ahmadineyad said during a joint press conference in which Chávez also reiterated his support of the Iranian nuclear program directed towards peaceful ends.

At the same time, Chávez pointed out that the cooperative relations between the two countries are of special importance to Caracas from a moral, political, economic and social point of view, and cited the $4.6 billion in joint investments. Chávez later traveled to Paris where he was received Monday night.

IRAN CUTS LINKS TO DOLLAR

From London, Reuters reports that Iran has effectively cut all ties with the dollar when it comes to oil revenues, according to Iranian authorities.

"This is an economic decision and we've been proven right. Over time the dollar has got weaker and weaker," Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, international affairs director of the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), informed Reuters."

Translated by Granma International

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Why Britain is being turned into an Internal Prison and an External Fortress

Fifteen years ago, driving to catch the ferry from Scotland to Ulster, I was stopped by a policeman and asked the question, "Where are you coming from and where are you going?" It's a question that was repeated many more times at police and military check-points throughout Ulster to end only when crossing into Eire which felt to be a haven of tranquillity after occupied Ulster.

Finally, on return to Britain via the ferry from Cork another police-check was made of my car. I assured the cop that I wasn't carrying any 'Dublin Rock' (dynamite) and he laughed. Fifteen years on, if I dared to say that, I'd likely be arrested, my car impounded and its upholstery ripped apart. I could expect to be interrogated for hours on end, strip-searched, DNA-tested and my details fed into the police national database.

Britain has become both an internal prison and a fortress from outside.

Hence, some further observations to make after the publishing on this blog of a series of several articles about the encroaching police state in Britain, a series which has received well over 1600 hits on this blog in the last three days or so:

In the Guardian article below, Anas Altakriti asks why it is that, despite all the draconian security measures implemented by Blair and Brown in the past few years, Britain is now more susceptible to terrorism than ever before.

Part of the answer must be that a lot of what has been labelled 'terrorism' by Washington's quislings in London was part of a fabricated, thus quite artificial, contrivance by secret service spooks in the classical manner they are known for throughout the annals of British imperial rule both abroad, in Ireland and now in mainland Britain. It was precisely the kind of thing that the radical historian, the late Edward Thompson, warned about in his book, Writing by Candlelight.

Add to that we must bear in mind that NATO has a history of using secret operations meant to deliberately cause 'terrorist' incidents within NATO countries in order to frighten and more easily control populations as well as to scapegoat target groups and organizations. Operation Gladio was a NATO-run operation in the 'fifties which was employed to do just that.

The infamous Bologna bombings of the 'seventies was a Gladio operation which was then conveniently blamed on the Red Brigade. There is nothing to show that this kind of operation is still not used by NATO and its associates in the western secret services, including the Israeli Mossad.

In fact, it [Operation Gladio] wasn’t even an American idea – it was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.”

The Strategy of Tension, N.M. Ahmed, The Cutting Edge

In his excellent article, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed goes on to observe that,

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

The Strategy of Tension simply isn’t part of our historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics working in international relations and political science. This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental role in physically constructing a threat, projected into the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.

But not quite because, at least since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, it was revived by the CIA and its British and Israeli friends in the form of the infamous 'Al Qaeda' ("the Database") where it can be proven that Al Qaeda was a creation for which the CIA itself was responsible. So everytime you hear mention of "Al Qaeda" (or, more appropriately, Al-CIA-duh) be sure you can smell a rat.

The Bush cabal and their minions in London would rather we didn't know that. Strange, was it not that Britain's ex-Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned that post when Blair dragged Britain into the bloodbath of Iraq, met a sudden death whilst hill-walking on Ministry of Defence land in the Scottish Highlands? Was Cook's death the result of something rash he said in the House of Commons when he identified Al Qaeda as The Database and because he just knew too much about why Blair insisted, as even he admits, that British soldiers should go into the killing fields?

Whether Tony Blair was in any way personally involved with the circumstances around the death of Robin Cook as well as those surrounding the "suicide" of whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly must yet remain a mystery. What is extremely clear is that he is a war criminal who still walks free. His time must come. He has a huge deficit to pay not only on his house mortgage but in terms of the millions of human deaths for which he is directly responsible.


The Coven Dines

Blair will, doubtless, know something about the principle of karma. Although it's rather late in the day now he would do well to ponder on karma as well as to recall the Christian version seeing as he claims to be a religious person: "As you sow so shall you reap." But when he talks about religion it's more likely that, as we have seen in practice, his is of a more diabolic nature! Anyway, his appointment with the rest of Eternity is of his making and not of our concern.

But the police-state this arch-traitor and his minion, Gordon 'The Toad' Brown, have created are most certainly another matter. For by adopting a copy-cat foreign policy with that of the imperialist Neocons, who twice stole the White House from the people of the USA, he has used Bush's fake 'War on Terror' to create a replica police-state in Britain along the lines of those which have been created in the other English-speaking countries, the USA, Canada and Australia.

As Anas Altakriti says, on his several journeys all over the world nowhere does he encounter so much police surveillance as he does whenever he returns to Britain. Six years ago at Reading Station, on returning from south Asia, I had occasion to leave my suitcase unattended for a moment. Literally minutes later, on my return, I found a policeman rifling through its contents, just in case there was a bomb inside. This was weeks after 911. I wasn't arrested. Today I might have been tasered.

And it is a sobering thought that while Britain has become so oppressive the chances are that a walk through Moscow Central Station would encounter less suspicion from the men in black.

And that brings me to the second point why Britain has been turned into a police-state: it is because the British government --no matter who might be running it-- is now solidly welded to an aggressive US foreign policy. A policy based on decades of permanent war to rob Oil, Gas and other material resources needed to perpetuate the American-led capitalist economies. These wars being presently --and which in future will be-- fought all over the Planet are bound to attract resistance and retaliation from their victims. Hence the plans for blast-proof public buildings, extra surveillance, border controls etc.

It is reminiscent of the barbed-wire and CCTV cameras that encircled public buildings during the 'nineties in northern Ireland. Nothing has changed just magnified and where surveillance is now far more sophisticated and extensive.

"Where are you coming from and where are you going?"

As my foreign readers will see, Britain has been a tightly-controlled police-state for much longer than most others and always because of its imperialist interventions abroad. 911 provided the psychological gateway for this present blitzkrieg on our freedoms. Blair knew that when he made his notorious, sleight-of-hand speech saying that "the kaleidoscope had been shaken" and when the pieces settled there would be "a new world." A rather bad attempt at verbal mesmerism, I thought at the time. But, for at least a while it served to trick the masses into a kind of hypnosis.

Just as Ulster was then reduced to a country in permanent siege, as Edward Thompson predicted would happen it is now the turn of mainland Britain. Whether the 'terrorists' are 'from the IRA' or 'from Al Qaeda' is, ultimately, of little relevance. Both are a deceit. Instead, what should concern us, are the reasons why succeeding British governments invite such retaliation through their constant and unwanted interference in the affairs of other peoples and their countries.

It is not only Blair who has his karma to face. It is our rulers who while so afraid of their world-in-collapse resurrected a Frankenstein of their own making, the very thing they lied to us about while deceitfully claiming to 'protect' our freedoms.

For it is they who are the terrorists we were warned to expect.

Losing the fight

Anas Altikriti

November 16, 2007

THE GUARDIAN

The prime minister's statement [last] Wednesday that terrorists could strike anywhere, at any time, hardly provides any useful information, let alone induces confidence in the government or security agencies actually knowing what threat they claim to be facing or capable of successfully overcoming.

It was similar to the recent MI5 report which left one wondering what was expected of ordinary citizens if not to go into a state of frenzy, panic, fear and suspicion.

More than six years after the declaration of the revamped and replenished "war on terror", this leads us to a very important question: has the world become any safer or more secure over those years? And if not, why not?

To put this in basic terms, the balance sheet does not look good. Actually, it looks extremely bad on all fronts. Even "our way of life" which was Tony Blair's favourite chorus line, seems to have changed for ever. Reports that intensive security measures at UK airports are to be stepped up will bring a sense of dread to millions of people travelling into and out of the UK every year. Anyone travelling out of Heathrow over the past 16 months would have realised that "our way of life" has changed, and quite profoundly at that, whether we like it or not and as a direct result of our reaction to alleged terror threats, rather than to the attacks themselves.

Travelling across more than four continents in the past three months, I couldn't help but wonder why it was that Sydney, Cape Town, Vienna and Amman airport security staff don't feel the need to impose similar draconian and often un-dignifying security searches upon their travellers. Don't terrorists know the way to Australia? Don't they think that striking in South Africa is of any particular use? Or do they approve of the "way of life" that Austrians lead?

Yet travel is merely one strand of life, and while frequent flyers like myself may feel the brunt more than most, one can argue that it isn't the most important or pressing issue within this whole argument. What is important, however, is the issue of human rights.

It is a terrible travesty of a nation that has come so far in winning the right for people to express themselves, to have an opinion, to choose their governors and hold them accountable, to worship, to move freely and to enjoy their basic freedoms without any threat of those being violated under any circumstance, that we have long been defeated by the absurd argument that it is all right to violate the rights of a few in order to preserve the rights of the many.

As the MI5 report along with the prime minister's statement on terrorism both nicely coincide with the re-opening of the debate on extending detention periods for terror suspects well beyond 28 days, one would expect an open, transparent and clear debate on whether the line we are pursuing, as a point of principle, is actually working or not. However, the problem is that it has become beyond contempt to even suggest that upping security, in the way that we have in recent years, may be leading to increased insecurity.

Security of a nation is only achieved when all parties, particularly its citizens, work together for that ultimate aim and objective. It is when a culture of driving safely becomes the norm that we prevent or lower the fatalities on our roads. It is through the embedded culture of keeping one's street and city tidy that we successfully overcome littering and it is by the unshakeable mentality of respecting other people's property and sanctities that we manage to fight theft and robbery. We can employ as many police as we think necessary, but if that embedded culture or mentality is lacking, individuals will break the law on the given fact that there simply isn't someone watching everywhere all the time.

In recent years, anti-terror legislation, coupled with a multi-fold increase in stop-and-search rates, hundreds of false raids and detentions, control orders that are based on flimsy evidence and inconsistent judicial sentences have created a sense of suspicion, fear, intimidation, distrust and possibly even hatred throughout society. And not only within the Muslim community for whom these measures seem to have been designed, but throughout society as a whole.

Imagine how a businessman or someone going on holiday would feel if they were made to go through such intrusive measures when travelling out of or into the UK, only then to hear that there are possibly 2,000 youngsters groomed to blow themselves up throughout the country over the next 10 years or so. How would a person feel if they saw their street cordoned off at dawn by the anti-terror squad who then move to blast into their neighbour's house and drag one or two people out handcuffed and blindfolded? Would it even matter if that person was released after 28 days or more, with no explanation as to what happened or why.

How should we view Atif Siddique, charged with possessing material (downloadable from the internet) being handed an eight-year prison sentence when Robert Cottage, formerly of the BNP and found with what was described as the largest haul of chemical explosives, a rocket launcher and a nuclear biological suit, was jailed for quarter of that term?

What of Samina Malik, or the "lyrical terrorist" who wrote silly and childish poems glorifying terrorism on the back of WH Smith receipts and who now expects to be handed a prison sentence following a media frenzy, and is seen and described in the same light as the DVLA bomber, Miles Cooper?

The UK already has the longest pre-charge detention period in the western world and, by all accounts, it doesn't seem to be working. What is required is a new and creative line of thinking as to what mistakes have been committed and how new approaches can be adopted so that the fight for our collective security, safety and prosperity, can become a common ambition of everyone who lives in this country. That would be a way of life worth fighting for.

1984 is Now!

Despite the smug-faced comments of wannabe MP, Mr Dale, he of the Tory, Zionist Right, it is daily becoming clear that a backlash is now growing throughout every quarter of the British mainstream media to the police-state legislation announced by Britain's Stalinist Premier-by-Diktat, Gordon 'The Toad' Brown.

'The Toad' because, when flustered as he so often is, he does that funny thing with his jaw as if he were swallowing a fly. And now it looks like The Toad is going to find himself in a constant state of fluster as his public support drops to 30% (like Bush) and he faces a likely rebellion by Labour MPs against his attempt to increase police detention time to 56 days from 28 days, already the longest pre-charge detention time anywhere in the western hemisphere.

The Observer article by Henry Porter simply adds a further dimension to my own, A New Dark Age is Upon Us, which 'Apoplectic from Tunbridge Wells' attempted to dismiss. Ironically, his attempts to fob it off brought 1500 hits to this blog, suggesting that even if the comfortably privileged of the Home Counties might not have much truck with a Scots Eurosocialist they were certainly interested to read what he had to say.

And so they would for despite all the calculated fear-mongering that has been going on in this country ever since the 911 and 77 false flags, and despite their tendency to whinge and moan about things and to look for scape-goats to blame it all on, deep down the Brit remains a sensible type who is not easily taken in by the kind of hysteria that characterizes the average dumb Joe from Stateside.

Things, as Henry Porter rightly says, have deteriorated in Britain where the fear-factor plays just as much a part as it does in the rest of the English-speaking world where the Bush cabal's invented 'War on Terror' has been cynically used as a weapon to bludgeon us all into a planetary Gulag.


US Internment Camp

It is no accident that Britain, which became Washington's vassal-state nearly seventy years ago when Churchill went cap-in-hand to Roosevelt for more money to fight the war, has now the most draconian police-state of all the English-speaking countries. For not only have Washington's London quislings obeyed the Bush cabal's orders in full but it has always been a natural tendency of the British ruling classes who, whilst pretending to be awfully nice chaps, rule over their peasantry with an iron heel.

And every time we hear one of our traitors vow allegiance to their Massah in the White House we are sure to hear the same servile commitment to a "special relationship" which we are now assured is something that nobody else, least of all America, pays any attention to. What the British quislings mean is, of course, coded language for, "Help preserve our capitalist interests so that we can continue to exploit the World while you, America, acts as our Bully on the Block." And so incestuous is the Anglo-American relationship between $ and £ that it's impossible to tell them apart. So dependent is one upon the other that the two countries, along with their Anglo-Saxon relatives in Canada and Australia are now in a Goetterdaemmerung-like nuclear death pact which is already limbering-up in preparation to fight the Sino-Soviet Alliance by taking out its chief ally in Westasia, Iran.

The comparison with Orwell's 1984 is so apposite right down to the contrived terrorist incidents meant to persuade the proles of the threat from Eastasia. And however uncomfortable it may make us all feel so are the comparisons between the Anglo-Saxon police states and Nazi Germany. The style is, of course, different. Howevermuch Bush, Blair and Brown would yearn to strut and pose as Hitler did in the Nuremburg rallies they've never approached the mad, hypnotic power of that Austrian drug-addict who once woke up screaming, foaming at the mouth, claiming that he had seen the Uebermensch (Superman) and was mortally afraid.

What was Hitler's drug-induced Superman but a vision of a future where the horrors of a technologized war would create a hell-on-Earth over vast swathes of land? As they have done with our robotized armies in the Middle East and elsewhere? Perhaps the horror he saw then was no more than the nightmare which we are now collectively living through? Something which as in Nazi Germany has been carefully kept hidden from the people by a controlled, embedded Media?


The new RAF Uebermensch

And now the nightmare comes back where the Holocaust shall not only be in ever greater numbers among the innocent and helpless in the targeted countries but among all those who dare to dissent at the great crime against humanity that is being carried out by evil men in suits and ties who smile as they kill millions only to deny the slightest responsibility for having done so. Untried war criminals.



All things must finally return to their origins.

The open prisons that are now being created by those same suited, smiling men are only at the other end of the horror they inflict daily on their battlefields which lie mostly hidden from the eyes of the news cameras. News is tightly managed before it is regurgitated to the proles. Public opinion is similarly kept on a leash by governments which are in constant fear of the truth being told. The fear-mongering which is used to control the masses is simultaneously felt by their rulers who are also ruled by a fear that the entire lying facade which they are employed to keep up is about to collapse around them.

Dominated by this fear they scheme endlessly to find ways of ever more controlling their populations in order that when the collapse finally comes everyone and everything can be kept tightly-corralled like demonstrators in an anti-war rally.

The Toad currently hiding in 10 Downing Street is the very epitome of this fear. That is why as each day goes by his style of government gets more and more to resemble an hysterical Ceausescu who knows his number's almost up, that people are not going to keep taking his Stalinist dictatorship much longer.

It is time for the people to start mobilising into a broad front against Britain's tin-pot dictators. Of essence such a mobilisation should be one taking-in all shades of opinion in a popular campaign to save and reinstitute the liberties which these common traitors have sought to take away from us. Henry Porter rightly quotes Winston Churchill. What faces us now is in many ways far more insidious than the first Battle of Britain. For today we face an enemy from within: a cabal of traitors. An enemy which should be fought just as determinedly as before for to lose now will mean the end of Britain's story.

We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms
A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government's sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them

Henry Porter,
The Observer, Sunday November 18, 2007

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.

There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.

Combined with the ID card information, which comes on stream in a few years' time, the new travel data means there will be very little the state won't be able to find out about you. The information will be sifted for patterns of travel and expenditure. Conclusions will be drawn from missed planes, visits extended, illness and all the accidents of life, and because this is a government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.

Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.

Who pays for the £1.2bn cost over the next decade? You will, with additional charges made by your travel agent and in a new travel tax designed to recoup the cost of the data collection. But much of the money will go to Raytheon Systems, the US company that developed the cruise missile and which, no coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour's information project by supporting security research at the party's favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The odour that arises from the Home Office contract with Raytheon is as nothing compared to that created last week when the Home Secretary and Prime Minister used the announcement of the 'E-borders' scheme as well as increased security at shopping centres, airports and railway stations to create an atmosphere that would push MPs to double the time a terrorist suspect can be held without trial. It also helped to divert attention from the mess in another Home Office database concerning upwards of 10,000 security guards who may be illegal immigrants.

On detention without trial, no new arguments have been produced by Gordon Brown. He won't say how many days he wants and he won't answer David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, who points out that all the necessary powers to keep people in jail after a large-scale attack are provided in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

To this, Brown replies that declaring a state of emergency would give terrorists 'the oxygen of publicity'. How does he square this absurd statement with the high alert being sounded by police, politicians and spies over the past two weeks, which has given the greatest possible publicity to the power of the Muslim extremists to change our lives?

The truth is that while his government limps, heaves and splutters with an incompetence only matched by its unearthly sense of entitlement, the Prime Minister has become fixated with this issue as though it were a virility test. So his chief Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, who had voiced his doubts about raising detention without trial on Radio 4, was hauled into Number 10 to have his thoughts rearranged. Less than an hour later, he appeared like an off-duty ballroom dancing champion and adjusted his conviction as though it was no more than a troublesome knot in his very plump, very yellow silk tie. He will not resign of course. What is a mere principle placed against his recent elevation to the Lords and the thrilling proximity to power?

How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.

Is it simply that the fear of terrorism has stunned us? The threat is genuine and the government is right to step up some security measures, but let us put it into perspective by reminding ourselves that in the period since 7/7, about 6,000 people have been killed on our roads. And let's not forget the bombings, assassinations, sieges, machine-gunning of restaurants and slaughter that occurred on mainland Britain during the IRA campaign. We survived these without giving up our freedoms .

Or is there some greater as yet undefined malaise that allows a sinister American corporation to infiltrate the fabric of government and supply a system that will monitor everyone going abroad? I cannot say, but I do know that an awful lot depends on the 40 or so Labour MPs needed to defeat Brown's proposals on pre-trial detention. They should be given every encouragement to defy the whips on the vote, which is expected within the next fortnight

It is important that the press has moved to the side of liberty. The Daily Mail, which I wrongly excluded from the roll of honour last week, attacked Jacqui Smith for 'her utter contempt for privacy' and warned against the travel delays and inevitable failure of another expensive government database. And Timothy Garton Ash, who has so far stayed above the fray, wrote in the Guardian last week that 'we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might not otherwise have been alienated'. Labour MPs should listen to these voices.

The Prime Minister is fond of quoting Churchill, so I will again: 'If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance for survival.'

henry.porter@observer.co.uk

When Reality comes Crashing through the Door

Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of India's huge Satyagraha Movement was once asked by the BBC what he thought of western civilization. He paused for a moment to ponder the question and then replied saying, "I think that it would be a very good idea!"

It is a sad truth that in many areas of human rights not only has western 'civilization' not progressed since Gandhi's days but it has actually retrogressed. The ongoing war crime against Iraq is a perfect microcosm of the way that the western world has descended into a new, technological barbarism.

And yet there are those who, ensconced in the distracting comforts of a capitalist Rome that is already burning around them, choose blindly and arrogantly to ignore the reality when it stares them in the face.

One such is blogger Iain Dale, a self-proclaimed right-of-centre (sic) Thatcherite, wannabe Tory MP, "radio pundit" (that'll be Radio 4 of course), Zionist, Daily Telegraph writer, Jack Russell owner and resident of the leafy, upper middle-class avenues of the very Tory 'Royal' Tunbridge Wells, Kent (got the picture?)

In that sickenly smug manner only privileged English overlords have (despite his Scots name) this apologist for the British secret state ridicules my recent piece, A New Dark Age is Upon Us, by not only describing me as an idiot but by belittling the excellent Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK website for having kindly published same on its front-page.



Self-satisfied establishment-hack, Dale (see picture above), goes on to say, "we shouldn't underestimate how widely held these fantasist views are," acknowledging that the public's awareness of the British police state is now beginning to snowball as inevitably it was bound to.

Yes, Mr Dale. You cannot simply hijack a country in the way that several successive governments --and in particular the Brown/Blair regime-- have without people noticing, however hard you try to hide it.

It is no accident I am sure that the British establishment, as Dale has, is now waking up to this reality. Some months ago that serial liar and war criminal, Tony Blair, angrily denied on TV that Britain was turning into a police state. Well, let me underscore the obvious: when a scum-bag like that is provoked into denial you can be sure that the opposite of what is said is true!

Of course, Blair is in a class of his own when it comes to a murderous nastiness that has led to his earning a pariah status amongst even his own people. Whereas the ever-unpopular Gordon 'The Toad' Brown is simply despised as a piece of detritus left behind by the Blair dictatorship. A highly toxic piece of detritus nevertheless as witness the latest draconian legislation invented by his 'Security' Minister, the gormless ex-Admiral West (below), who sees Britain to be at war with unseen forces conveniently labelled Al Qaeda (and we all know who's behind 'the Database', don't we?)



Dale is probably a genial sort who has, on the whole, only the best intentions at heart (especially for himself) while he drives about in his Audi world of self-gratification, privilege and comfort, well insulated from the miseries of life daily experienced by the marginalized, the economically underprivileged and those under daily persecution, mostly Muslims, people of colour and poor whites who due to a lack of education and a resulting illiteracy are treated contemptuously and cruelly by the socially and materially privileged from which his ilk springs.

Dale accuses me of being a fantasist when it is he who has much more in common with a Marie Antoinette who, when advised that the French peasantry was dying of starvation, is popularly thought to have suggested, "Let them eat cake!"

Indeed, Mr Dale. I suggest you review your article in a year or two and then see how far down the totalitarian road this two-party dictatorship of chickenhawks has gone. But, living in the divided and gated world that is modern Britain it is doubtful even then you will be able to see beyond the rose-tinted bubble of unreality you so obviously live in.



So, see you in your nightmares, Iain, where the likes of this author and the millions he represents will haunt you as an unwanted spectral visitation from that world out there you'd rather pretend (Cuchachoo, Mrs Robinson) didn't exist or you wish would just go away as you open another bottle of expensive Montrachet.

Dwell upon that thought, Mr Dale, one of these fine days that reality's gonna come crashing through your door!

Growing Western Totalitarianism: Polish Immigrant tasered to death by Canadian RCMP

(CNN) -- A video showing the last moments of a Polish immigrant, who died after Canadian police shot him with a stun gun at Vancouver International Airport, has been made public.

Watch it here

Robert Dziekanski, 40, was traveling to join his mother, who lives in British Columbia, when he ended up spending about 10 hours in the airport's arrivals area, The Canadian Press said.

The video shows Dziekanski, who had never flown before, becoming agitated. It then shows Mounties purportedly shocking Robert Dziekanski with a Taser device after confronting him. Dziekanski did not speak English.

The recording was captured by bystander Paul Pritchard on October 14 and was in police hands until he threatened legal action and it was returned to him last week, The Canadian Press reported.

"Probably the most disturbing part is one of the officers uses his leg and his knee to pin his neck and his head to the ground," Pritchard told CBC News.

The dead man's mother, Zofia Cisowski, told CBC News that Tasers should not be used by police

"They should do something because that is a killer, a people killer."

The incident is being investigated by police, Canada's national police complaints commission and by the coroner, CBC News reported.

__________

Rory's Comment: Of course, CNN would have to cover its ass by adding "purportedly" when the taser attack is clear for all to hear and see! And what a priceless quote from the victim's mother. Obviously taken well out of context. Can you imagine a dead man's mother coolly making the observation (what incredible sang froid!) that "they should do something"?

Damn right they should but it'll take a revolution for it to happen!

Peak Oil And Silence
By Peter Goodchild
16 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org

The fact that the world’s oil supply is going to run out has been known for a long time: M. King Hubbert was spreading the word in the 1950s, and there are persistent rumors that many oil engineers in those days had a good idea of what was going on, but they were afraid to speak because they might risk losing their jobs. But that was fifty years ago. Why is there still such a remarkable silence?

How is it that only about one in ten million people is concerned about the world’s decline in oil? Pathological denial might account for a few cases, but surely not for all. A state of denial could be found in people in the days leading up to the Second World War, but those who were convinced of the onset of war surely numbered more than one out of ten million.

The answer, in part, may be that the issue is too complicated for people to understand. Whenever there are articles written on the subject, they receive various comments from readers, showing that each of those people is lacking in a knowledge of one or more aspects of the problem. There are too many side-issues for people to grasp. They cannot grasp how large or small the oil reserves are, they cannot grasp the number of uses there are for oil, or how dependent our entire industrial society is on it, they cannot grasp the general foolishness of "alternative energy," and they cannot grasp the fact that the "authorities" don’t have some Grand Plan to deal with it all.

Another reason for the low number of concerned people may be that there are so many other people trying to push the opposite belief: that there is no problem of oil depletion. Many such "peak-oil debunkers" are perhaps simply afraid of the facts, and they may feel that they need to shelter themselves by sharing their beliefs with others. The rest of such people are politicians and business leaders who know — consciously or otherwise — that they would have nothing to gain by rocking the boat, and that in fact they might well risk their own jobs if they gained a reputation for spreading doom and gloom.

Some people in positions of authority may have an even better grasp of the consequences: they may have realized that a public announcement of the end of oil could lead to a general panic, a collapse of the stock market and money market, a complete lack of faith in the hypercapitalist dream-world, where ordinary citizens are duped into working for less and less, and at the same time encouraged to spend more and more. The entire illusion could be shattered if anyone in power were willing to speak a word of truth.

It is also true, no doubt, that humans have great intelligence but a poor grasp of time. Most young people cannot think ahead more than about a year, whatever issue may be involved. Middle-aged people think ahead about as far as retirement. Older people can only think ahead about as far as their own deaths. Elderly people often say they have great love for their grandchildren, yet when told about the oil problem they are likely to reply, "Oh, well, what do I care? I’ll be dead by then"; that’s not hypocrisy, it’s just a poor understanding of the fact that the world can change significantly over time.

Illiteracy doesn’t help, of course. To the slight extent that anyone is willing to discuss world events, the opening line is likely to be, "Did you see X on TV last night?" rather than, "Have you ever read X?" Television, movies, and glossy magazines present a kaleidoscope of half-truths, fragments that are strong on shape and color, weak on intellectual content or interconnection. Dinner-party conversation must likewise consist of paratactic bits and pieces if it is not to elicit an embarrassed smile. We live in an age in which it is heresy to suggest that schoolchildren be subjected to either placement or achievement tests, and the politically-respectable definition of "average" sinks ever lower. The publishing of a book with spelling errors in the 1950s would have been scandalous, whereas books published nowadays seem to have been proofread by drunkards. It may not be entirely true that bad spelling is the end of civilization as we know it, but it is not entirely false either. No one is individually to blame for illiteracy, but it is a growing trend that only rarely arouses indignation, and the decision to resist being dazzled by "the media" often means choosing to stand alone. Fundamentally, illiteracy is a kind of mental cannibalism: such food is nutritious, but only for as long as the supply holds out.

Perhaps the silence will never end. Most people will never personally see the oil wells running dry, so they will never really know who or what to blame. Modern surveillance techniques will ensure that no protester gets more than half a mile down a street. The process of erosion will be so slow at first that people will wonder if they are imagining the whole thing: higher costs for food and fuel, lower quality of goods and services, a general third-world ambience to what were supposed to be first-world cities. One day, however, there will be a realization that the Grand Plan is not forthcoming, and that staying alive will depend on the Small Plan, person by person, family by family.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. He can be reached at petergoodchild@interhop.net.

New ‘Disaster’ Movie Warns World of Oil Apocalypse
The latest gloves-off documentary to hit screens predicts a global meltdown as vital fuel runs out
by Robin McKie, THE GUARDIAN

Oil is ‘the bloodstain of the earth’s economy’ and will soon trigger a global conflict that will cost millions of lives. That is the stark claim of a controversial new film, which says a crash in oil production is about to set off worldwide recession and economic collapse.

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, which opens in UK cinemas this week, shows stark images of rusting Texan and Venezuelan wells and fuel riots in Asia and Africa. Such scenes will be repeated thousands of times around the planet in the near future, argue the film’s makers, who say the world is facing changes ‘more frightening than a horror movie’.

The film is the latest of several polemical documentaries to achieve nationwide release. Others include Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore’s Sicko, and the forthcoming Darfur Now, in which Don Cheadle provides a voice-over about the Sudanese civil war.

However, A Crude Awakening has had a boost not available to the rest. Just as its screenings were scheduled to begin here, crude oil prices soared to their highest level for decades, reaching $96 a barrel last week. Petrol and diesel at more than £1 a litre at UK garages is now common.

‘This is a bleak and very worrying topic, but we have tried very hard to make it entertaining and exciting,’ said Basil Gelpke, who - with Ray McCormack - wrote, directed and produced the film.

And to judge by film festival screenings, they may have succeeded. A Crude Awakening has won prizes at the Zurich and Palm Beach festivals. It is a dramatic depiction of the arguments of economists and geologists who say that the day of ‘peak oil’ has either occurred or is imminent. Peak oil is defined as the time when the world produces its maximum output of oil and enters a period when prices start to soar as demand rises - thanks in part to the industrialisation of China and India - while supplies dwindle.

The US Energy Information Administration said recently it believed production had peaked last year. Others say it has not yet occurred but is imminent, a point backed by geologist Professor Stuart Haszeldine, of Edinburgh University. ‘If we have not reached peak oil already, then I am sure it will be upon us within the next two years.’

In the North Sea, oil production has been declining for years, America reached its maximum output decades ago, and in other parts of the world stocks of easily accessible oil are slowly being used up. ‘We have reached the peak of oil production, the question is: how steep is the slope downwards on the other side,’ said Matt Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

Oil companies say that there are still major reserves to be exploited. In particular, Arctic and Antarctic fields - which are being freed of ice and snow as the world heats up - are being sized up for their reserve potential.

In Burma, protests over rising fuel prices led to a crackdown by the country’s military authorities while in China, where there have been critical fuel shortages recently, one man was shot for trying to jump a petrol queue. Such events are destined to become the norm across the planet, it is argued.

As prices soar and production falters, the world will hurtle into a future of pitched battles over dwindling oil supplies. ‘It is not just the threat to transport, ‘ added David Strahan, author of The Last Oil Shock. ‘All across Asia, particularly in India and Bangladesh, farmers use diesel generators to pump water in and out of their fields. If oil prices soar, they will not be able to afford to irrigate their crops. The result could be starvation and food riots.’

In addition, crude oil is a basic necessity in the manufacture of materials such as asphalt and plastic. The construction of a desktop computer consumes 10 times its weight in fossil fuels, for example. Without cheap oil, such products will no longer be affordable.

It is an alarming scenario, although a note of caution was sounded by John Loughhead, director of the UK Energy Research Centre. ‘It is true that we may very soon run out of oil from accessible sources, but there are many other types of fuel that we could exploit,’ he said.

At present, energy companies exploit a field only if they think they can get oil out of the ground at a cost of less than $18 a barrel. This is a very conservative estimate, given current prices. At present oil is being sold at over $90 a barrel. ‘If, in future, companies use a more realistic figure of $40 a barrel instead of $18, that would make many, many more reserves suddenly become economical - the oil tar fields of Alaska, deep water reservoirs, and others,’ Loughhead said.

‘The trouble is that it is very difficult to estimate future oil prices. Ten years ago they stood at around $10 a barrel. Now they are almost 10 times that. Certainly, I doubt oil will be cheaper than $40 a barrel again, so that means many more fields which once seemed uneconomical will become better bets for exploitation.’

Loughhead said oil was just a small part of the range of hydrocarbons found in the ground. ‘It is becoming easier and easier to turn substances like coal and gas into liquid form and use that as a substitute for oil, so fuels based on hydrocarbons will still be with us in some form for a few decades yet,’ he said.

Fuel figures

· The United States has 2 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and consumes 25 per cent of its annual production.

· 98 per cent of all energy used for road, rail, ocean and aviation transport is provided by oil products.

· A barrel of oil is 42 US gallons, or 34.97 British gallons or 159 litres.

· It is thought there are between 1,000 and 2,000 billion barrels of oil left in the planet’s reserves. The world produces 75,000 barrels a day*.

· It would take a man working for 25,000 hours to generate the same amount of energy that is stored in one barrelful of oil.

*This article was amended on November 11 2007. Daily global oil production is 75 million barrels a day, not 750,000 as we stated in the article above. This has been corrected.

A Native American Indian Thanksgiving



Link

EMINEM MOSH - Original Version



Link

Thanks, again, to AP, alias 'Anonymous', for these great contributions.

I hear your anger and add mine to it in synergy!

¡Viva la Revolución Planetaria!

Long live the Planetary Revolution!

Let it Roll!

"Tony Blair should be brought before the ICC in the Hague"
November 14, 2007, by Kees van der pijl
SPECTREZINE

Political scientist Kees van der Pijl is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, England. In his latest book Global rivalries, from the cold war to Iraq, he offers an intriguing analysis of international relations. He views as central the relationship between Anglo-American capitalism and the two powers themselves. Willem Bos, of the Dutch Socialist Party monthly De Tribune, interviewed him about the war in Iraq.

Now Read On

A New Dark Age is Upon Us

Just how oppressive must a government become before we can justifiably say that it has turned a country into a police-state? Midnight knocks on the door? Security squads in black uniforms? The indefinite imprisonment of innocent individuals in prison cells and the immediate assumption of their guilt until proved innocent? Imprisonment for thought crimes? The use of torture to extricate information which may never otherwise be given? The permanent surveillance of a population at large?

If these were the criteria then there can be no doubt that Britain has become a police-state. Using the pretence of 'Anti-Terror' laws, themselves the product of an entirely fabricated 'War on Terror' which resulted from a false-flag incident involving the mass-murder of over 3000 innocent people, 911, and again 52 innocents in another false-flag incident involving Britain's secret services, 7/7.

People have been dragged out of their beds in dawn raids --not only under 'Anti-Terror' but under immigration laws-- by violent, often racist, thugs hiding behind police uniforms. Uniforms which are a shade closer to black than the supposed blue serge and caps whose peaks are more reminiscent of the Gestapo.

People (mostly people of colour or Muslims, or both) have been banged-up for long periods of time with most then being allowed to go free. At least two British Muslims, Mohammed Siddique in Scotland and another fancifully called the Lyrical Terrorist have been given long prison sentences for nothing more than thought crimes. And in the case of Siddique's lawyer, Ahmed Anwar, even he is now being terrorised by the judge, Lord Carloway, whose behaviour and appearance is more reminiscent of a ruthless redcoat determined to control the judiciary of Scotland with an iron heel.

Torture is by export order and thousands of CCTV cameras endlessly surveil the public. And all this under the pretext of a security which the average prole has meekly accepted as something good for her and him. Aldous Huxley was quite right to predict that totalitarianism would come, not with a fight but by invitation. Using their insidious techniques, the British government has persuaded the average prole that these 'security measures' are actually in his interest, that there's a Muslim terrorist just around the corner waiting for him and so "we must step up security."

"Stepping-up security" is the fatuous description that the talking heads on the BBC News gave it today in announcing our Stalinist Premier-by-appointment, Brown's, announcement of a raft of draconian new laws which pull Britain even deeper into the depths of a police state.

The face of Britain will now be changed to look like a country under armed occupation. Now railway stations will be given baggage surveillance, hence making it at last possible for the State to know what every one carries in their suitcases.

Only the countryside, as in Orwell's 1984, will seem to be free of surveillance.

First airports, now railway stations. But it doesn't stop there:

Mr Brown said guidance would be sent to thousands of cinemas, theatres, restaurants, hotels, sporting venues and commercial centres, as well as all hospitals, schools and places of worship to advise them on how to keep visitors safe against terrorism.

BBC

So, you see, it's going to be everywhere. The whole country is to be turned into a super-Belfast open internment camp for the entire population. We are all suspects now!

But it doesn't stop there for,

The prime minister also outlined measures to counter the influence of radical fundamentalists in Britain's schools, universities, mosques, youth clubs and prisons, as well as on the internet.

BBC

The long-expected attack on the freedom of the internet has thus begun. My predictions that blogs like mine will be banned and pulled-down off the Net within the next five years was, after all, perhaps optimistic. It could be very much sooner than that.

The legislation for just that kind of thing has been prepared in the US with HR1955. Like a nightmare unfolding predictably, chapter by chapter, the new fascist totalitarianism that was behind 911, Madrid, Bali and 7/7 is now rapidly gaining ground, moving fast at the speed that Hitler's panzer divisions overran a bewildered western Europe in 1940.

As with that attack, the battleplans were laid a long time ago by people like Samuel Huntington, the guru of Washington's neocons, ex-spook and writer of the seminal Clash of Civilizations, the intellectual cover for Islamophobia and the fake 'War on Terror.'

Just as Bush and Blair agreed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq a long time before 911 (of course they did, 911 was the excuse they both knew about) so the plans for the implementation of police states in the English-speaking countries can be taken a long while back before the events which were calculatedly manufactured to terrorize and bully a passive western population into submission.

Utilizing a blueprint of commonality the tin-pot Atlanticist Hitlers and their quislings are working to a schedule to take our remaining freedoms and bury them in a deep grave before the next Oil and Resource wars are launched. It is no accident that only days ago, Britain's Number One Traitor and Quisling, Gordon Brown, once again swore allegiance to his bosses in Washington DC whilst condemning all those who in Britain dare to criticise the death-pact of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance to be "anti-American."

That death-pact is nothing less than the totalitarian gauntlet which Brown threw down not only to declare his unending allegiance to the dark forces in the White House but as a deliberate taunt against his own people, do as you're told or I will punish you horribly! It was nothing more than an arrogant, rather overweight feudal baron making public his scorn for the peasantry over which he rules as a divine right.

And the new "stepping-up of security" announced by the lying Big Brother Cooperation (BBC) is only a further tightening of the fascist ratchet as per orders issued to the English-speaking countries by Washington DC.

It is no accident, either, that the so-called review issued by the idiot Lord West, Britain's Sicherheitsminister, used the false-flag bombings of London and Glasgow Airport as the grounds for the new draconian laws. I have no doubt whatsoever that those incidents, using the classical methods of secret services' entrapment, were deliberately caused in order to justify what has now been announced. Anyone naive enough to think I am talking nonsense should look at how all this was prepared-for and given a testbed in Ireland a long time before it started in earnest in mainland Britain.

The comparison with Nazi Germany is perfect, even to the everyday persecution of Muslims by both the police and by thugs on the streets. Not only Muslims are being attacked but so are all people of colour. A new wave of racist violence is growing in the USA, Britain and Australia where even the aboriginal people are under a fresh wave of attacks. In continental Europe, fascism together with racism has raised its ugly head once more.

And 8 million Muslims have died as a direct result of USUK imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 16 years. The comparison is complete.

The shadow of a New Dark Age is upon Us.

Power in the Darkness - Tom Robinson Band



Link

Here's a great video featuring the immortal Tom Robinson Band sent in by 'Pink' who has made several comments to this blog under various pseudonyms but whose language and syntax always gives him away.

Though his comments were totally off-topic and therefore not published, I thank him for sending this great video link.

US House of Representatives Passes Thought Crime Prevention Bill
www.roguegovernment.com

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.

This bill is one of the most blatant attacks against the Constitution yet and actually defines thought crimes as homegrown terrorism. If passed into law, it will also establish a commission and a Center of Excellence to study and defeat so called thought criminals. Unlike previous anti-terror legislation, this bill specifically targets the civilian population of the United States and uses vague language to define homegrown terrorism. Amazingly, 404 of our elected representatives from both the Democrat and Republican parties voted in favor of this bill. There is little doubt that this bill is specifically targeting the growing patriot community that is demanding the restoration of the Constitution.

First let’s take a look at the definitions of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as defined in Section 899A of the bill.

The definition of violent radicalization uses vague language to define this term of promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. Since the bill doesn’t specifically define what an extremist belief system is, it is entirely up to the interpretation of the government. Considering how much the government has done to destroy the Constitution they could even define Ron Paul supporters as promoting an extremist belief system. Literally, the government according to this definition can define whatever they want as an extremist belief system. Essentially they have defined violent radicalization as thought crime. The definition as defined in the bill is shown below.

(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term 'violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

The definition of homegrown terrorism uses equally vague language to further define thought crime. The bill includes the planned use of force or violence as homegrown terrorism which could be interpreted as thinking about using force or violence. Not only that but the definition is so vaguely defined, that petty crimes could even fall into the category of homegrown terrorism. The definition as defined in the bill is shown below.

(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term 'homegrown terrorism' means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

Section 899B of the bill goes over the findings of Congress as it pertains to homegrown terrorism. Particularly alarming is that the bill mentions the Internet as a main source for terrorist propaganda. The bill even mentions streams in obvious reference to many of the patriot and pro-constitution Internet radio networks that have been formed. It also mentions that homegrown terrorists span all ages and races indicating that the Congress is stating that everyone is a potential terrorist. Even worse is that Congress states in their findings that they should look at draconian police states like Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom as models to defeat homegrown terrorists. Literally, these findings of Congress fall right in line with the growing patriot community.

The biggest joke of all is that this section also says that any measure to prevent violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism should not violate the constitutional rights of citizens. However, the definition of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism as they are defined in section 899A are themselves unconstitutional. The Constitution does not allow the government to arrest people for thought crimes, so any promises not to violate the constitutional rights of citizens are already broken by their own definitions.

SEC. 899B. FINDINGS.

The Congress finds the following:

(1) The development and implementation of methods and processes that can be utilized to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States is critical to combating domestic terrorism.

(2) The promotion of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence exists in the United States and poses a threat to homeland security.

(3) The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.

(4) While the United States must continue its vigilant efforts to combat international terrorism, it must also strengthen efforts to combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States.

(5) Understanding the motivational factors that lead to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence is a vital step toward eradicating these threats in the United States.

(6) The potential rise of self radicalized, unaffiliated terrorists domestically cannot be easily prevented through traditional Federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts, and requires the incorporation of State and local solutions.

(7) Individuals prone to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence span all races, ethnicities, and religious beliefs, and individuals should not be targeted based solely on race, ethnicity, or religion.

(8) Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism in the United States should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.

(9) Certain governments, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have significant experience with homegrown terrorism and the United States can benefit from lessons learned by those nations.

Section 899C calls for a commission on the prevention of violent radicalization and ideologically based violence. The commission will consist of ten members appointed by various individuals that hold different positions in government. Essentially, this is a commission that will examine and report on how they are going to deal with violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. So basically, the commission is being formed specifically on how to deal with thought criminals in the United States. The bill requires that the commission submit their final report 18 months following the commission’s first meeting as well as submit interim reports every 6 months leading up to the final report. Below is the bill’s defined purpose of the commission. Amazingly they even define one of the purposes of the commission to determine the causes of lone wolf violent radicalization.

(b) Purpose- The purposes of the Commission are the following:

(1) Examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States, including United States connections to non-United States persons and networks, violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in prison, individual or 'lone wolf' violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and other faces of the phenomena of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence that the Commission considers important.

(2) Build upon and bring together the work of other entities and avoid unnecessary duplication, by reviewing the findings, conclusions, and recommendations of--

(A) the Center of Excellence established or designated under section 899D, and other academic work, as appropriate;

(B) Federal, State, local, or tribal studies of, reviews of, and experiences with violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence; and

(C) foreign government studies of, reviews of, and experiences with violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence.

Section 899D of the bill establishes a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States. Essentially, this will be a Department of Homeland Security affiliated institution that will study and determine how to defeat thought criminals.

Section 899E of the bill discusses how the government is going to defeat violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism through international cooperation. As stated in the findings section earlier in the legislation, they will unquestionably seek the advice of countries with draconian police states like the United Kingdom to determine how to deal with this growing threat of thought crime.

Possibly the most ridiculous section of the bill is Section 899F which states how they plan on protecting civil rights and civil liberties while preventing ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism. Here is what the section says.

SEC. 899F. PROTECTING CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES WHILE PREVENTING IDEOLOGICALLY-BASED VIOLENCE AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.

(a) In General- The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically-based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.

(b) Commitment to Racial Neutrality- The Secretary shall ensure that the activities and operations of the entities created by this subtitle are in compliance with the Department of Homeland Security's commitment to racial neutrality.

(c) Auditing Mechanism- The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer of the Department of Homeland Security will develop and implement an auditing mechanism to ensure that compliance with this subtitle does not result in a disproportionate impact, without a rational basis, on any particular race, ethnicity, or religion and include the results of its audit in its annual report to Congress required under section 705.'

(b) Clerical Amendment- The table of contents in section 1(b) of such Act is amended by inserting at the end of the items relating to title VIII the following:

It states in the first subsection that in general the efforts to defeat thought crime shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights and civil liberties of the United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.

How does this protect constitutional rights if they use vague language such as in general that prefaces the statement? This means that the Department of Homeland Security does not have to abide by the Constitution in their attempts to prevent so called homegrown terrorism.

This bill is completely insane. It literally allows the government to define any and all crimes including thought crime as violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Obviously, this legislation is unconstitutional on a number of levels and it is clear that all 404 representatives who voted in favor of this bill are traitors and should be removed from office immediately. The treason spans both political parties and it shows us all that there is no difference between them. The bill will go on to the Senate and will likely be passed and signed into the law by George W. Bush. Considering that draconian legislation like the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act have already been passed, there seems little question that this one will get passed as well. This is more proof that our country has been completely sold out by a group of traitors at all levels of government.

BBC To Apologize For 9/11 Truth Hit Piece?
Scandal-hit network desperately scrambles to offset legal action over lies and bias in February 2007 documentary

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, November 12, 2007

The BBC could be forced to apologize and admit mass public deception for airing a documentary on the 9/11 truth movement that was clearly riddled with errors, lies and bias, as the scandal-hit corporation desperately squirms to avoid a potential court case brought by a British scientist.

John A. Blacker, a qualified physicist & mechanical engineer and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, is currently engaged in a pre-action protocol with the BBC in an attempt to settle out of court and get an apology from the broadcaster as well as a guarantee that the program will never be shown on television again.

In a letter to the BBC, Blacker cites a catalogue of errors, distortions and outright lies that were contained in the program, arguing that the documentary is an insult to those that lost their lives on 9/11.

"The Conspiracy files team spoke to and recorded the testimony of many eyewitnesses, fire fighters, police officers, and public high witnesses, plus also officialdom high witnesses and had access to written testimony from many high witnesses via official sites on the WWW," writes Blacker. "YET NOT ONE SINGLE HIGH WITNESS WAS PRESENTED IN THE DOCUMENTARY TO PUT THE TRUTH PERSPECTIVE," he adds.

"The Conspiracy Files Documentary was a work of Total Public deception from start to end, perfectly crafted to stealthily deceive and forward nothing which was conclusive either one way or the other, in other words, perfect propaganda YELLOW journalism by stealth, omission & deception," Blacker concludes, after citing dozens of examples of bias, fraud and agenda-driven presentation.

In a clear sign that BBC are struggling to form a case for the legal defense of the program, they have put back a meeting with Blacker for the third time in succession, now agreeing to a late November date.

In our review of the documentary, we slammed the program as a tissue of lies, bias and emotional manipulation from beginning to end, listing 17 clear examples of gross inaccuracy, distortions, obfuscations and character smears.

After the show aired in the UK, Producer Guy Smith subsequently appeared on The Alex Jones Show but failed miserably to address these concerns, only being able to repeat empty sound bites about how the show was intended to be an impartial investigation.

The BBC were embroiled in a similar spat later that same month when footage emerged of one of their correspondents reporting the collapse of WTC Building 7 on 9/11 over 20 minutes before it actually fell, leading to claims that the broadcaster was, either wittingly or unwittingly, being fed a script as events unfolded on the day. At the very least, the saga painfully illustrated why the establishment media cannot be trusted when major news events occur because they simply act as a feedback loop for whatever the authorities tell them, no matter how dubious the facts of the matter are.

If the BBC are forced to admit mass public deception it will mire the corporation in a new scandal hot on the heels of numerous allegations of rampant corruption regarding phone-in contests. The public broadcaster, which is financed by the British public by way of mandatory TV licensing, has also been slammed for staging scenes in documentaries and asking members of the public to lie for contrived interviews, causing trust in "Auntie Beeb" to plummet to all time lows.

Meeting Resistance



Link

I found this video on One Tenacious Baby Mama, that great blog by Darkdaughta, "Pistol Whipping the Hell Out of Things Political, Since 1968."

Wow! We need lots more No-Bullshit blogs like these in days when so-called Lefties pussyfoot around trying not to upset the Opposition.

Goferit, girl! Tell it like it is!

Say No to Africom from Black Agenda Report Tuesday, 06 November 2007

by Danny Glover and Nicole C. Lee Cloaked in "humanitarian" guise, the U.S. military's new Africa Command, or Africom, poses an imminent threat to self-determination on the continent. By grouping every country but Egypt under one military umbrella - as if they were already protectorates of the United States - the Pentagon telegraphs its intention to "secure" Africa's wealth for other people's purposes. Leaders of the Washington-based TransAfrica Forum warn that "misguided unilateral US military policy" has "led to inflamed local conflicts, destabilization of entire regions, billions of wasted dollars and the unnecessary deaths of US soldiers." Rather than accept a U.S.-imposed order, Africans should "develop Africa's own strong, effective and timely security capacities."

Read more...

Freedom Rider: Gangster Giuliani

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Black New Yorkers remember Rudy Giuliani well - the race-baiting, gangster-mayor who unleashed police goon (and death) squads on suddenly Constitution-free Black neighborhoods. Almost single-handedly, Giuliani destroyed the myth of white New Yorker liberalism, while at the same time enhancing the city's reputation for corruption. Yet, this petty- and mean-minded former prosecutor is a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, due to "his warmongering and inclination to inflict physical pain on dark people." Rudy Giuliani in the Oval Office - a man who held a press conference to inform his wife he was divorcing her for a younger woman - is a "nightmare scenario."

Read more...

BMI Calls National Rally To Defend Religious Freedom And End To Attacks On Muslims MCB, Thu 19 Oct 2006

Freedom of religion is one of our most precious democratic rights. It took hundreds of years, including international and civil wars, to establish the right of every individual to freely pursue their religious beliefs subject only to their conscience. It must be defended against every challenge. Britain today faces a systematic campaign by sections of the media and some politicians, fanned by the BNP, to undermine this right by sowing hatred against Muslims. This has culminated in physical attacks, fire bombings and assaults on women. This campaign constitutes an attack on civil and religious liberties including an attempt to suppress the right of persons of all faiths to dress in accordance with their religious convictions. It must be strongly opposed - as indeed should any attack on the rights of Christians, Jews, Sikhs or any other religious group. It is necessary for all democrats, of all faiths and none, to come together to defend these basic principles of freedom of religion and culture. As the first step, Faith groups are coming together with all political parties and communities to a central London public rally to support Freedom of religion and culture and to call for an end to the recent attacks on Muslims. The aim is to develop a national campaign to defend freedom of religion and culture and to combat the rise of Islamophobia. For further information, contact: Ihtisham Hibatullah 07786 257 120 Intissar Khreeji 07887 853 455

This scapegoating is rolling back the gains of anti-racism

Anti-terror stunts and a barrage of propaganda are demonising Muslims and making Islamophobia the acceptable face of racism

Martin Jacques
Thursday February 15, 2007
The Guardian

Predictably enough, the action of the police in last year's Forest Gate raid has been excused with the mildest of rebukes. Out of more than 150 complaints, only a tiny number were upheld. The whole operation, you will recall, was a figment of the security services' imagination. A fortnight ago, there was another spectacular anti-terrorist operation, this time in Birmingham, concerning an alleged plot to kidnap a Muslim member of the armed forces. The pattern of these operations is now well established. The police swoop on an area, make dozens of arrests, accompanied by lurid media reports about the would-be plotters' intentions. There have now been charges, although an innocent party who was arrested and then released has given a disturbing account of his experience in custody. The most alarming example was last summer, when it was alleged there was a plot hatched in Pakistan to blow up as many as 10 aircraft, which resulted in a huge security clampdown at Heathrow and new hand-luggage rules. But, despite a number of charges, a degree of scepticism would be wise, given the experience of cases such as the ricin plot that never was.

Just what are these operations about? You may remember MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller suggested last November that the intelligence services had discovered 30 "plots to kill people and to damage our economy", often with "links back to al-Qaida in Pakistan and through those links al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale". The authority for such a statement, I assume, comes from MI5 agents. The quality of such reports, though, must be treated with profound scepticism, dependent as they are on the doubtful calibre and knowledge of these agents and the tendency of such people to live in a semi-fantasy world of endless conspiracy. The fact remains that, notwithstanding the huge security operations and the large numbers arrested, relatively few people have actually been charged. The test of justice is, fortunately, more demanding than the criteria used to justify headlines and political hyperbole.

Of course, we must take terrorist threats seriously - but also the price we pay for these alarums. They magnify our sense of trepidation and persuade people the worst is about to happen: it is under the cloak of such fear that governments on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to impose swingeing restrictions on civil liberties. The fact remains, however, that deaths in the UK from Islamist terrorism have been far fewer than those perpetrated by the IRA. Meanwhile, the price for these constant security operations is paid, above all, by our Muslim communities. Every such operation tars them with the brush of terrorism, an intimation to rest of society that extremism lurks within their ranks.

The scapegoating of the Muslim community has become the stock in trade of politicians, the Conservatives recently accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of separatist tendencies, and New Labour all too frequently indulging in the same kind of refrain - notably during the most disgraceful period of its domestic rule last autumn, when cabinet ministers were falling over themselves to make disparaging remarks about the Muslim community.

The argument typically starts from the global terrorist threat and ends up by suggesting the Muslim community nurtures and sustains such a terrorist mentality by its failure to integrate. Jack Straw squirmed about the veil, Ruth Kelly inveighed against imams, Alan Johnson proposed that faith schools admit up to 25% not of the same faith (patently directed against the Muslim community), and John Reid warned a Muslim audience of "fanatics looking to groom and brainwash [your] children ... for suicide bombing". Amid this panic-inducing rhetoric, there was little acknowledgment that Muslims suffer more discrimination than any other section of society, no recognition that every attack on their community can only intensify that prejudice. Imagine what it feels like to be a Muslim, stalked by a constant sense of distrust and suspicion? As a society we may condemn racism, but when it comes to Muslims, it seems to be somehow acceptable, from the cabinet downwards.

And what is to blame for this failure to integrate? Prejudice, perhaps? Discrimination? Racism? No, according to David Cameron, Ruth Kelly and many others, the cause would appear to be multiculturalism. Pause for a moment and spot the slippage in the argument. It is no longer only about Muslims but all our ethnic minorities. For enshrined in the principle of multiculturalism is the idea that the white community does not insist on the assimilation of ethnic minorities but recognises the importance of pluralism. It is not about separatism but a respect for difference - from colour and dress to customs and religion. The attack on multiculturalism is the thin end of the racism wedge. It seeks to narrow the acceptable boundaries of difference at a time when Britain is becoming ever more diverse and heterogeneous.

None of this is to deny the importance of finding ways of integrating the Muslim community. It is hardly surprising, though, that many young Muslims feel alienated. They face worse discrimination in education and employment than any other ethnic minority, Anglo-American policy in the Middle East has had the effect of demonising the Muslim world, and the Muslim community here finds itself the victim of a barrage of hostile propaganda. A major assault on discrimination involving the government, the media and the Muslim community is long overdue. But while British foreign policy so profoundly discriminates against the Muslim world, and New Labour remains in denial about the connection between domestic Muslim attitudes and its foreign policy, there seems little prospect of making a new start.

Antipathy towards Muslims, meanwhile, threatens to roll back hard-fought anti-racist gains, which, over the decades, have won a degree of respect for ethnic minorities and an acceptance of the principle of difference. These gains have always been fragile. Important ground is now being ceded as Islamophobia becomes the acceptable face of racism and the attack on multiculturalism finds important new recruits.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics.

Dr Bari: Government stoking Muslim tension

Obscenity of War behind the Red Poppy

Today is Remembrance Sunday, the day when the dead of two Great Capitalist Wars are remembered not only by their surviving comrades-in-arms but by the pompous and shameless hypocrites among the ruling classes of the Western establishments and their conduits in the Christian Churches and Mainstream Media.

The irony of this hypocritical nonsense is, of course, unmentioned. For it was these very same establishments, their flunkeys in the churches and the media that were quite happy for these unfortunate men and women to be sacrificed in the name of their capitalist Behemoth. And sacrificed they were in the most horrendous nightmares of WWI and WWII.

The British soldier, Wilfred Owen, is known for his anti-war poetry and particularly Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, a bitter commentary on the reality of the horrible deaths that soldiers met on the battlefield in contrast to the jingoistic nonsense put about back home of how sweet it was to die for one's country.

Along with Remembrance Sunday goes the Red Poppy Movement which purports to be a symbol of respect for the dead. But is it really? Has it not become just a part of the poisonous, hypocritical nonsense promoted by a ruling class who continue to send their country's men and women into the killing fields, to slaughter and be slaughtered?

How long must this grotesque hypocrisy go on without being challenged by its would-be victims?

And, as always, the Establishment and its media have an extremely selective memory about exactly who it was who sacrificed their lives to keep the British Empire going. The other day, the rather bovine Peter Sissons on BBC News 24 interviewed a young Muslim student about a Press Release from Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari of the conservative Muslim Council of Britain warning of the dangers of Britain going down the road that Nazi Germany did.

It's something I have been shouting from the rooftops for sometime from this blog so it was a great relief to hear a conservative Muslim leader take up the message. A Youtube clip of Dr Bari saying this, by the way, has mysteriously been taken down.

This was all too much for the pompous Sissons who suggested that with Remembrance Sunday coming, wasn't it a bad time to make allusions to Nazi Germany?

Which shows what an ignorant man Sissons really is. His statement was not only nonsensical but it was an obscene insult to all the many thousands of Muslims (mainly from the Indian subcontinent) who died in both those wars defending the very Empire that oppressed them! Bearing in mind that they along with so many others from the Empire fought fascist totalitarianism, isn't it ironic that it is their children and grandchildren who are now being turned into the scapegoats and victims of Britain's new police-state chickenhawks?

Showing how a State is quite prepared to sacrifice lives by the thousand and, now, according to Dr Gideon Polya's figures of a Muslim Holocaust, of millions only to turn round and abuse both the dead and their descendants with the hypocritical trappings of pomp and circumstance.

For this reason I condemn the Red Poppy Movement as an empty and grotesque thing which does nothing but glorify the State's death machine. If folk truly care about those who died fighting for freedom they should wear the White Poppy launched in the 'twenties by the Women's Cooperative Movement as the socialist and anti-war alternative.

"The wearing of a white poppy on Armistice Day became a focus for the peace movement, and the Peace Pledge Union took it up in 1936 as 'a definite pledge to peace that war must not happen again'. In 1938 'Alternative Remembrance' events began: a pacifist religious service was held in London's Regent's Park, followed by a march to Westminster and the laying of a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph. 85,000 white poppies, by then an acknowledged symbol of peace, were sold that year. Many people wore them alone, others wore a red poppy as well.

When an ex-serviceman broke the Armistice Silence at the Cenotaph in 1937, with his loud cry of protest against the hypocrisy of praying for peace while preparing for war, he had made clear what everyone was beginning to realise: the people who shared the Silence were not of one mind about what Remembrance meant."

Movement for the Abolition of War

Hurrah for Free Enterprise, Granma's Apple-Pie, the 4th of July and the Land of the Free!

from THE REGISTER

Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail strike out Iran -- Sanctions bite, but not at Gmail

Exclusive Yahoo! and Microsoft have removed Iran from the country lists of their webmail services as stronger US sanctions against the Islamic republic begin to bite.

Google has kept Iran as an option on the Gmail registration page, however.

The US administration stepped up economic pressure on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's eccentric government less than two weeks ago.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman told The Reg: "Yahoo! continually reviews its business operations to ensure compliance with these restrictions. Consistent with this policy, we cannot accept registrations from countries subject to these restrictions.

So essentially, you can't choose Iran as a country option because we are restricted from conducting business there – all US companies must comply with this policy." She was unable to tell us exactly when Yahoo! applied the rules.

Microsoft said it was unable to comment on the issue.

Google insists the sanctions do not preclude it from including Iran in its Gmail country list. A statement from the firm said: "Google is committed to full compliance with US export controls and sanctions programs and is confident in our compliance with those controls and programs."

A representative of the Iranian embassy in London was unable to provide an immediate response.

On 30 October, the Tehran correspondent of Netherlands newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported (in Dutch) that his paid Skype account had been cancelled. An email from the VoIP outfit said its financial services provider had been forced to stop taking payments from Iran.

That's perhaps more easily understandable than a blockade on free email. Whether Yahoo! and Microsoft's apparent action is the result of an over-zealous compliance lawyer or not, the effect on US interests of denying ordinary Iranians access to free international communications is questionable at best.

Of course, the Iranian government itself heavily restricts what its citizens can access online. The OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of Harvard, Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, describes it as having installed "one of the most extensive technical filtering systems in the world". ®
Update

Yahoo! got back to us with details of when the change was made:

"In June of this year, Yahoo! updated this [user information gathering] process to capture more relevant information about new users in order to provide more personalized services for users and more targeted advertising for its customers. The user information requested includes country of residence. Because the United States restricts U.S. businesses from conducting business in certain countries, Yahoo! also ensured that these countries do not appear in the drop down menu."

This is a picture of the new British Air Force. A picture to chill your soul.

"I have seen the Superman and I was afraid."

Adolf Hitler

Britain's Ministry of Defence shows off a prototype helmet for pilots flying the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

"It is certainly dangerous when its citizens have a conscience; what it needs is men without conscience, or, better still, men whose conscience is in conformity with reasons of state, men in whom the feeling of personal responsibility has been replaced by the automatic impulse to act in the interests of the state."


Rudolf Rocker

from Medialens

Would You trust your Life with this Man?

The Independent Police Complaints Committee (IPCC) has produced a damning report about the events two years ago when a Brazilian, Jean-Charles de Menezes, was shot dead with seven dum-dum bullets at close range by three police officers from London's notorious Metropolitan Police.

Witnesses deny that police identified themselves before firing. Dum-dum bullets are a special type of ammunition that has been deliberately weakened so that when the bullets enter the victim they deform rapidly and create a huge amount of damage to the victim’s internal organs, usually causing multiple organ failure and therefore death in very quick succession.



The subsequent court case brought by the relatives of Jean-Charles under health and safety legislation, found that there were no less than 19 separate “catastrophic” failures on the day of the tragedy. The judge, Mr Justice Henrique found “corporate failure, not an individual failure" in the Metropolitan police. It is clear that systematic failure is the responsibility of the man at the top.

In particular, its head, Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair who with an embarrassing record of being a pathological liar and an arrogant would-be dictator, was criticized in the IPCC report for attempting to block the IPCC investigation from ever taking place. This is the same copper who secretly taped a telephone conversation with the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith in 2006.

Typical to past form Blair continues to refuse to accept responsibility for the shocking killing of De Menezes and to resign. This despite calls for resignation from all political quarters including the Liberal and Tory Party and the Greater London Assembly. Predictably his allies in Nu Labour through their mouthpiece, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, continue to support their ideological placeman, Blair, who has done so much to assist Nu Labour's authoritarian style of rule justified by their fake 'War on Terror' which has scape-goated the British Muslim community ever since being told to do so by the Bush cabal after 911.

Whilst Muslims rightly feel targeted by this legislation, the wider public have been drawn into a false sense of security, that these laws are needed to protect everyone from fanatics hell-bent on destroying our way of life and that these laws will only be used on “Islamic Extremists”.

The manner in which Smith insists on supporting the lying Blair (Ian not Tony) shows just how much of a political appointment this awful man in black continues to be in Nu Labour's drive to transform Britain into a full-blown police state after the model the Bush cabal has already introduced in the USA.


Jean-Charles

Two of Jean-Charles' cousins were seen on BBC News 24 today commenting upon the IPCC's findings. They claim that after these, Commissioner Blair's position is untenable and that he should go. Even were he to go, they said, that would not bring their cousin, Jean-Charles, back to life. The least that should be done therefore is that the police officers responsible for his killing should be tried and brought to account. Until that is done, they said, justice will not have been served.

They also mentioned, in passing, the subsequent smear campaign the police launched against Jean-Charles. This disgusting campaign was then enthusiastically picked-up by Britain's Press in a manner that was nothing less than racist.

www.justice4jean family website

Sinister group gets full publicity on BBC
Posted by RMS on Medialens on November 8, 2007

A sinister bunch of unelected neolithic imperialists have formed a UK National Defence Association and given full publicity by the BBC. If they were left wing and called for a cut in defence they would not get a mention.

Some of the choice quotes include the gung ho Col Bob Stewart saying that soldiers are "suffering" on OUR behalf! I would say suffering on Bush and Blair's behalf and the Oil bosses behind them.

"Britain's armed forces are over-stretched and under-funded, a group of former senior military leaders and politicians has warned.
They have formed the UK National Defence Association, led by three ex-chiefs of the defence staff."

"In addition to Lord Guthrie, its patrons are former defence chiefs Admiral Lord Boyce and Marshal of the RAF Lord Craig, as well as ex-foreign secretary Lord Owen.

Other prominent supporters include Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, and Patrick Mercer, the Conservative MP who serves as a defence adviser to the prime minister."

"Col Bob Stewart, a former British commander with UN forces in Bosnia, told the BBC's Breakfast that underfunding meant Britain was "sleepwalking into disaster".

He urged the public to "wake up and listen because the soldiers are suffering on our behalf".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7084303.stm

The Toadlike Judge Carloway
Aamer Anwar to face contempt charges

Aamer Anwar is to face contempt of court proceedings over statements he made after the verdict was announced in the Siddique trial. The case will be heard before a panel of up to three judges in Edinburgh High Court. The date of the hearing has yet to be announced. The move was announced in a lengthy "note" issued by Lord Carloway, the judge in the Siddique case.

It is clear from the detailed contents of the note that this is a wide-ranging attack meant to remove from defence lawyers any possibility of dealing in a politically-aware way with politically-driven cases. Lord Carloway particularly objects to Aamer Anwar's public comment that the the prosecution was driven by the state. Yet there is clear evidence - for example in statements made by senior officials to parliamentary committees - that many arms of the state are routinely involved in the decisions leading up to a "terrorism" arrest.

The ongoing involvement of the security services in the presentation of the Siddique case was made clear to anyone who doubted it by their public intervention as soon as the verdict was announced. Anonymous "security" sources told the press of startling new allegations against the convicted man - even though nothing relating to these allegations had been mentioned during the trial.

Lord Carloway seems to think that the legal/political facts of life should never be mentioned in public - at least, not by any anyone connected with the Scottish justice system. And he seems to think that a guilty verdict should bind everyone connected with the system to stick to the judge's interpretation of the evidence heard in court. Apparently the traditional lawyer's statement from the steps of the court is good enough for England, but not for Scotland.

Lord Carloway's vendetta risks bringing the whole Scottish justice system into disrepute. As if it wasn't in enough trouble already, with the fingerprint scandal not quite behind it, with the William Gage and Stuart Gair miscarriages of justice still fresh in many people's memory, and with the Lockerbie trial still rolling around in the basement like an unexploded hand grenade.

It would be nice to see the Scottish legal profession stand up in defence of freedom of speech and the right of people targeted by the state to an effective defence. But these seem to be ideas that the Scottish legal establishment hardly dare whisper even to itself.

BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7080649.stm

from Scotland Against Criminalising Communities

Invitation to join the Pro-Europa Mailing List

I have launched a Mailing List for those of Pro-European sentiments: 'those' include everything from federalist to decentralist and supporters of European bioregions.

But clearly not a list for the Little Englander whingers!

If you are interested in joining the List please mail me at greengorilla47@googlemail.com and I will put you on the List and keep you updated.

Mob Rules
Link

Closing keynote of WebDirections South 2007 - an exploration of the future of mobile communications, now that half of humanity has a mobile phone.

Washington's New English Quisling
Why are Tony Blair and Gordon Brown trying to deny us the Charter of Fundamental Rights?

Spy.blog, 23 June 2007

What with all the media spin by the UK Government and the European Union and the shallow analysis and reporting by the mainstream media, we are puzzled as to what exactly has been agreed at the European Union summit in Brussels this weekend.

We are still especially worried about what exactly Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have agreed to with regard to the European Union Reform Treaty and especially, the legally binding Charter of Fundamental Rights (.pdf) These sort of follow the European Convention on Human Rights and the UK's Human Rights Act 2000:

Article 7 Respect for private and family life

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

Article 8 Protection of personal data

1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her.

2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.

3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent authority.

However, there are significant differences i,e, there are no explicit exemptions for the Government using vague weasel words like "national security" or "the prevention or detection of crime" or "public health" or "the economic interests of the UK" etc. which so much UK legislation has embedded into it.

Nothing seems to have changed since we commented on this back in 2004: Have the pundits actually bothered to read the EU Constitution ?

See also this confusing BBC background article on Charter of Fundamental Rights

Is there really a workable United Kingdom "opt out" from these clauses ?

If so, then why should we tolerate authoritarian Labour politicians who seek to deny us these human rights, which are enjoyed and legally enforced by the rest of the European Union ?

We demand that these existing human rights are upheld now and ratified by this UK Government and all future ones.

__________

Rory's Comments:

Although this article was published last June the points being made are still highly relevant. The Blair/Brown regime has cunningly cashed in on the innate Europhobia of the British (and in particular the English) by using a wholly unfounded disaffection among Brits for the European Union to exert pressure on other member nations and the Commission in order to extract 'concessions' from the Union, not in the interests of the common people but on behalf of the vested interests of British capital and the ruling classes.

The high level of ignorance and Europhobic prejudice amongst Brits was deliberately nurtured by British politicians and their attendant media in order to use it as a weapon against progressive European social and civil rights.

At the recent meeting at Lisbon, not only did the Brits insist on their right to opt put of the new Charter but went out of their way to water-down the Charter nevertheless. Proof indeed of the mischievous intent of the Brits to act as a reactionary force within the EU working, no doubt, in the interests of Washington's neocons.

The British, along with others on the Right in countries like Poland, are now seen by other Europeans to be a trojan horse for Washington. They play an entirely destructive role as an adversary of the EU. While doing so they ensure that their own people are kept ignorant of the deceptive game they are playing.

Ultimately, it is the British people who will pay the price and that they have now begun to do with Britain's inexorable slide into becoming a full-blown police state. The time has already come when those of us in Britain who consider ourselves to be rightfully citizens of Europe to mobilize ourselves against these tinpot dictators. All is not yet lost and I believe the time has come, as European citizens, to make a direct appeal to the European Union to help us protect our fundamental civil rights against an oppressive, domestic government.

These are the Fundamental Rights which the Brown government has opted out of. This amounts to nothing less than an all-out attack by Brown & Co on the fundamental rights of people in Britain!

__________

You, Europe, and your rights

The Government is blocking an EU charter which would protect these fundamental rights for British people. Why?
The Independent, 22 June 2007

Eugenics

Prohibition of eugenic practices, particularly those aiming at the selection of person. Article 3

What's at stake: Science is seeking to eradicatedisabilities by genetic manipulation. It might be possible for parents to order a "designer" baby.

Expert opinion: "I would be totally opposed to any attempt to socially engineer people."

Ian Gibson, vice-president, Royal Society for Public Understanding of Science

Torture

No one should be subjected to torture. Article 4

What's at stake: Since the invasion of Iraq, British soldiers have found themselves in the dock over the abuse of civilian detainees

Expert opinion: "It is all the more deplorable when some of the most powerful men on earth seek to justify the use of torture."

Moazzam Begg, a torture victim and former prisoner in Guantanamo Bay

Human trafficking

Trafficking in human beings is prohibited. Article 5

What's at stake: This year the UN said that human trafficking had reached epidemic proportions. The Home Office said that in 2003, 4,000 women were trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation

Expert opinion: "It is shameful that this country is trying to duck out of a charter that specifically prohibits child trafficking."

Louise Christian, human rights lawyer

Data protection

Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her. Article 8

What's at stake: A vast amount of data is stored on each of us already. From 2010, ID cards will be compulsory for anyone applying for a passport in the UK.

Expert opinion: "It's... a safeguard to protect the right of the individual in relation to the state."

Maurice Frankel, director, Campaign for Freedom of Information

Right to protest

Everyone has the right to freedom of assembly and of association. Article 12

What's at stake: Anti-war protests prompted the Government to bring in legislation to prevent unlicensed demos within quarter of a mile of Parliament

Expert opinion: "Allowing dissent in the form of peaceful protest is the hallmark of a country that understands respect for human rights."

Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK director

Working rights

Every citizen of the Union has the freedom to seek employment... in any Member state. Article 15

What's at stake: The Conservatives' fear is that Poles and other east Europeans have taken up jobs and housing at British workers' expense

Expert opinion: "People who come to work in the UK are providing vital services which would collapse without them."

Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary

Deportation

No one can be removed to a state where there is a serious risk of torture. Article 19

What's at stake: The Government's determination to deport terror suspects to countries with questionable human rights records

Expert opinion: "In an effort to circumvent its obligations, the Government has secured 'memoranda of understanding' with Jordan, Libya and Lebanon."

Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty director

Industrial action

Workers have the right to take collective action to defend their interests, including strike action. Article 28

What's at stake: The right to strike has been restricted in the UK since the 1980s. There are rules about ballots andpicketing. None of these restrictions is mentioned in the charter

Expert opinion: "We back the right to strike, to negotiate, to fight against unfair dismissal."

John Monks, European TUC leader

Child exploitation

The employment of children is prohibited... except for limited derogations. Article 32

What's at stake: Could be a threat to family-run corner shops where children help out, or to the pocket money others earn from babysitting or paper rounds

Expert opinion: "To keep children safe, we must ensure parents and employers are clear about how and when children and young people can be employed."

NSPCC statement

Health care

Everyone has the right to preventative health care. Article 35

What's at stake: Earlier this month, The Independent highlighted a new pill that could help hay fever sufferers, which the NHS will not prescribe because of cost. Critics say this clause could open the NHS to litigation

Expert opinion: "This article would not give much backing to any patient who took on the NHS."

Dr Evan Harris, member Medical Ethics Committee

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Rory's Comments:

And now the point has to be made and loudly: it is not 'Europe' or a European Constitution which threatens the fundamental rights of the British. It is the fascist attitude of our own governments (both Nu Labour and Tory) which are creating the police state!

It is Britain that is the odd-man-out when it comes to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. That is the reality. Yet what we read in most of the mass media (utter lies of course) makes out 'Europe' to be the threat! These lies must be challenged by folk like you and me. The fascist policies of British governments must be challenged, by civil disobedience if necessary, and we must appeal to the European Union for help. It is our only, last chance!

This goes for all of us but especially for minority groups who are at the sharp end of the British government's fascist persecution.

The people of Britain are the victims of the treason of their own political leaders. In the name of God, how long will it be before they wake up to see the truth. The truth, not the shit that is being shoved down our throats by a Right wing, fascist establishment?

There is still time to fight these fascist chickenhawks. To give up the struggle before the battle is over is to be a coward and a defeatist. Worse still, to do so is to betray ourselves, our families and our most precious beliefs.

We must not surrender to them!

A US Air Force F-22 Raptor, an F-117 Nighthawk, an F-4 Phantom and an F-15 Eagle fly over Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.
Photo: US Air Force

'USAF struck Syrian nuclear site'

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JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
Nov. 2, 2007

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The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

At the beginning of October, Israel's military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.

On October 28, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet that he had apologized to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan if Israel violated Turkish airspace during a strike on an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last month.

In a carefully worded statement that was given to reporters after the cabinet meeting, Olmert said: "In my conversation with the Turkish prime minister, I told him that if Israeli planes indeed penetrated Turkish airspace, then there was no intention thereby, either in advance or in any case, to - in any way - violate or undermine Turkish sovereignty, which we respect."

The New York Times reported on October 13 that Israeli planes struck at what US and Israeli intelligence believed was a partly constructed nuclear reactor in Syria on September 6, citing American and foreign officials who had seen the relevant intelligence reports.

According to the report, Israel carried out the report to send a message that it would not tolerate even a nuclear program in its initial stages of construction in any neighboring state.

On October 17, Syria denied that one of its representatives to the United Nations told a panel that an Israeli air strike hit a Syrian nuclear facility and added that "such facilities do not exist in Syria."

A UN document released by the press office had provided an account of a meeting of the First Committee, Disarmament and International Security, in New York, and paraphrased an unnamed Syrian representative as saying that a nuclear facility was hit by the raid.

However, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA said media reports, apparently based on a UN press release, misquoted the Syrian diplomat.

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: The EU Treaty is the same as the Constitution

Lift the lid and look in the toolbox, and all the same innovative tools are there

The Independent, 30 October 2007

The difference between the original Constitution and the present Lisbon Treaty is one of approach, rather than content. The draft constitution resulted from a political desire to simplify European institutions, rendered inefficient by recent expansions. It was about creating more democracy and transparency within the European Union. It was about opening the way for a "Constitution for the people of Europe".

These goals were reflected in the composition of the treaty-drafting Convention which brought together representatives from the European Parliament and national parliaments, from the governments of member states, as well as from the European Commission. The debates were very public. The resulting draft constitution was a new text and replaced all previous treaties.

For the Treaty of Lisbon the process has been very different. It was the legal experts for the European Council who were charged with drafting the new text. They have not made any new suggestions. They have taken the original draft constitution, blown it apart into separate elements, and have then attached them, one by one, to existing treaties. The Treaty of Lisbon is thus a catalogue of amendments. It is unpenetrable for the public.

In terms of content, the proposed institutional reforms – the only ones which mattered to the drafting Convention – are all to be found in the Treaty of Lisbon. They have merely been ordered differently and split up between previous treaties. There are, however, some differences. Firstly, the noun "constitution" and the adjective "constitutional" have been banished from the text, as though they describe something inadmissible. At the same time, all mention of the symbols of the EU have been suppressed, including the flag (which already flies everywhere), and the European anthem (Beethoven's Ode to Joy). However ridiculous they seem, these decisions are significant. They are intended to chase away any suggestion that Europe may one day have a formal political status. They sound a significant retreat from European political ambition.

The concessions given to French opponents of the constitutional treaty are more symbolic than substantial. The expression "free and undistorted competition" has been taken out at the request of President Sarkozy. It reappears at the request of the British, in an annexed protocol to the new treaty which stipulates that "the internal market, such as is defined in Article 3 of the treaty, includes a system guaranteeing that competition is undistorted".

Far more important are the concessions made to the British. The Charter of Fundamental Rights – an improved and updated version of the Charter of Human Rights – has been withdrawn from the draft treaty and made into a separate text, to which Britain will not be bound. In the area of judicial harmonisation and co-operation, Britain will have the right to duck in and out of the system as it pleases. Having already weakened all attempts at further European integration – such as by refusing the title of Minister for Foreign Affairs – Britain has also been allowed to be the odd man out whenever it feels like it.

Otherwise, the proposals in the original constitutional treaty are practically unchanged. They have simply been dispersed through old treaties in the form of amendments. Why this subtle change? Above all, to head off any threat of referenda by avoiding any form of constitutional vocabulary.

The Brussels institutions have also cleverly reclaimed the process from the – to them – unwelcome intrusion of parliamentarians and politicians in the work of the original drafting Convention. The institutions have re-imposed their language and their procedures – taking us even further away from ordinary citizens.

Now comes the ratification process. There should not be any big problems – except in Britain where a referendum would obviously lead to a "No" vote. Elsewhere, the complexity of the new text, and the apparent surrender of all sweeping ambitions, should be enough to smooth over all difficulties.

But lift the lid and look in the toolbox: all the same innovative and effective tools are there, just as they were carefully crafted by the European Convention: a stable Presidency; a streamlined Commission; a Parliament with genuine legislative rights; a Foreign Minister, even if he has been given another inadequate title; decisions taken by a double majority of governments and citizens; and the most advanced charter of fundamental rights in the world.

When men and women with sweeping ambitions for Europe decide to make use of this treaty, they will be able to rekindle from the ashes of today the flame of a United Europe.

The writer, a former French President (1974-81), was president of the Convention on the Future of Europe, which drafted a new constitution, 2002-03

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Rory's Comments:

Giscard d'Estaing's comments about the 'concessions' made to the British bear out what I have already said in a previous article, Eurosocialist and Antifascist.

The 'concessions' made to the British government by the Lisbon Treaty are those which will benefit British capitalism and the ruling classes, not the ordinary person. By allowing Britain not to be bound by the new Charter of Fundamental Rights and to duck in and out of judicial harmonisation and cooperation the Treaty of Lisbon has effectually allowed the encroaching British police state an unfettered freedom to do as it will and its judiciary to continue as a law unto itself.

All this amounts to very bad news for the average Brit who, as I have said, was bamboozled by the British right into thinking of a new European Constitution as somehow a danger to it. As always, the British Right was able to turn reality on its head and to use a gullible and misinformed public to serve its own purposes.

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Here is what the European Greens had to say about Britain's opt-out of the Charter of Fundamental Rights:



EU Summit : British opt-out from Fundamental Rights Charter is unacceptable
23.06.2007

Commenting on the outcome of the EU summit Johannes Vogggenhuber, MEPand Vice-President of the Constitutional Affairs Committee in the European Parliament, today said:

"Europe has come close to a deep division, which has only been avoided at the very last moment. This summit has shown that the political integration of the continent, which has been pursued for 50 years now, has adversaries within. An alliance of nationalists, neoliberal ideologues and Rumsfeld's New Europe is at work to reduce the continent to an internal market plus NATO. The 18 member states, which ratified the Constitutional treaty, underestimated the determination of this coalition and closed ranks too late.

Despite the absurd menaces and blackmail attempts of the [Polish] Kaczynski twins, the real bad guy of the summit is Tony Blair. The opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights he secured for the United Kingdom is unacceptable. Bearing in mind the universal principle of human and citizen rights', this opt-out is extremely destructive for the credibility of the European Union as a community of shared values both at home and abroad. These values are at the very heart of Europe and if the UK doesn't share in them is it openly putting into question its own Community membership. Instead of allowing an opt-out, the EU should rather accept that the UK leaves the European project for good."

http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/pressr...summit@f r.htm

CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS PDF Version, download it here

Britz: a Commentary

I've just finished watching the second part of Britz on Channel Four. I very rarely watch Channel Four these days due to the unceasing torrent of so-called docudramas on 'terrorism'. Of the little I have watched it was very clear to me that it was all psy ops stuff, propaganda based on the already-established principal of being guilty before having been proved to be so.

Since Tony Blair, taking his orders from the criminal Bush junta, gave the green light to the British mainstream media (MSM) to adopt sly, racist innuendo against Muslims and to demonise them, it is very clear to me that not only is Britain still very much a racist country but that that racism has now come out in the open with a nod and a wink from the Blair/Brown governments.

I watched this movie with interest because it seemed to me to be a brave attempt by predominantly white folk to show to a predominantly white audience just what it is that drives certain individuals in the British Muslim community in different directions, one to join the British establishment's secret services and the other to become a suicide bomber.

Yes, of course the plot presented us with caricatures of reality but that was deliberate and intended to make a point: in this case about a cultural group with immigrant roots that finds itself divided in a western society which, with its own agenda, is now persecuting that group and its British-born children.

And yes, that persecution all results from the need of US and British capital to dominate the planet's Oil and Gas resources leading to a US foreign policy based on all-out aggression and imperialism. A foreign policy which the then Premier of the USA's Number One Vassal State, Britain, adopted in its entirety with no questions asked.

The movie ends with a video recording of the dead suicide bomber warning the British that until they cease to support quisling governments supporting aggressive US foreign policy the bombing will go on.

The bombing will go on as long as the West's bombing goes on. This is a war. An asymmetrical war, but a war nonetheless.

The makers of the movie point to the 7/7 bombers as having had a similar intention. The problem there, in my opinion, is that the 7/7 plot was never proven. To this day it has remained an allegation against a group of Muslims by a British government that is characterised, if anything, by the lies it told its people about why Britain joined Bush's war crime against Iraq.

As an ex-colonial I learnt as a young child never to trust the British (government). No British colonial, whether white or of colour, trusted Whitehall. So treating British governments with suspicion comes as easily to me as it might to the Irish. For that and other reasons I never believed the official conspiracy story about 911 nor 7/7. And the fact that to this day there has been no investigation about 7/7, independent or otherwise, must remain the greatest indicator of the British government's complicity in that event.

Britz hammered out the reality of how Control Orders are being used against British Muslims in a manner reminiscent of White Apartheid South Africa. Even the Irish, who for 800 years were the victims of British imperialism, were never subjected to such oppression. An oppression which was solely the result of one man, Tony Blair, whose very credentials for having joined the Labour Party must themselves remain in doubt and as a thing of suspicion.

For it is a fact that Blair was recruited by MI5 when he was at Oxford University and his track record indicates that his political mission was not only to destroy the foundations of Labour Party social democracy but to tie Britain in a death-pact of "shared values" with US capitalism. The fabricated 'War on Terrorism' which was a straight import from the Bush cabal was part of that death-pact. As for Brown, the foundations of a British police state having been laid for him, all he has to do is to build upon it and to keep steering the ship of state on that course.

It is in that light that Britz should be seen, where Muslims finding themselves at the sharp edge of 21st century British imperialism, are very much the 'canary in the cage', the first societal group in mainland Britain to experience the new fascism of the British state.

The rest won't be long coming because, having used their fake 'War on Terrorism' in order to destroy our freedom, having used the inherent racism of whites to scapegoat a sector of British society of colour, these pretend 'anti-terrorist' laws will be used, sickeningly predictably, against all those, white or of colour, who disagree with government policy.

Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that this article will be unpublishable within the next five years.

Britz was a warning to the people of Britain what will happen if they continue to turn their heads away from reality. For, in the name of their fabricated 'war on terror' the real agenda of both US and British capital is to turn their societies into internal police states and external aggressors conducting a war against the rest of humanity on a permanent footing.

Rising Islamophobia in UK

Tuesday, 30 October 2007 MPACUK

Islamophobia is increasingly on the rise and new anti-terror legislations are frequently being discussed in Parliament. Muslims continue to be belittled and ridiculed and MPACUK continue to struggle. The media continues with their regular uproar, politicians continue playing with Iran. Israel is still abusing Palestinian rights and Iraq is still being bombed. Afghanistan is still crawling with troops and George Bush still thinks he can hear God. What are the Muslims doing? *Digging their heads deeper into the soil in the hope that no-one will notice them? *Throwing shoes at George Bush when he appears on TV and claiming he is the dajjal? *Seeing a bomb go off in Palestine and switching the TV off with just a murmur of sympathy? *Sitting in the corner of a dark room reading 'la howla wala kua tha illa billa'? *Blinking like dummies while non-Muslim campaigners try to fight for their rights? *Tutting disapprovingly about respect when a sister goes out to campaign when they couldn't be bothered to move their own backsides? Did you know? 1) 'The pre-charge detention refers to the period of time that an individual can be held and questioned by police, prior to being charged with an offence. For individuals suspected of terrorism, the maximum period is currently 28 days – seven times the pre-charge detention limit for someone suspected of murder.'? (Liberty) 2) The current 28-day limit of detention without trial is already the longest in Europe? 3) The UK police terrorism arrest statistics (excluding Northern Ireland) show that from 11 September 2001 – 31 March 2007, 96.6% of those arrested under the Terrorism Act, usually in the full glare of publicity, were innocent of any terrorist activity? (Link) 4) The pre-charge detention consultation by the Home Office admits that the case for further extension does not have any evidential basis stating “…since the 2006 legislation came into effect, there has been no case in which a suspect was released but a higher limit than 28 days would definitely have led to a charge.”? 5) “There is a real danger that the longest periods of pre-charge detention will be used for those people against whom there is the least evidence.” ‘Pre-charge detention in terrorism cases.’ NEW LAW Journal, 20 October 2006? Are Muslims going to do anything about this? THE MPACUK RESPONSE MPACUK are alerting the public of the seriousness of such legislation which as shown above is likely to affect the Muslim community above all others. We must ensure that before Gordon Brown formally proposes a bill to Parliament doubling detention without charge to 56 days, MPs are lobbied to vote against this. If you are living in Manchester or the surrounding areas come to our next campaigns meeting to find out how you can get involved. Join MPACUK North with our talk on the rise of Islamophobia and participate in the Jihad! Date: 3rd November 2007 Timings: 4pm - 7pm Venue: Villa Cafe Wilmslow Road, Rusholme, Manchester. Email us now at info@mpacuk.org for more information. If you can't do anything else, then please at least sign the petition against the 56 day detention here