EU Referendum

Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts

Nassur_bear[i-Nassur_bear]... I was wondering about it yesterday morning. Who, I asked myself, could have replaced Assud, the giant Jew-eating pink rabbit on the Al-Aqsa children's TV programme "Pioneers of tomorrow". You see, Assud was killed in the latest unpleasantness in Gaza, so the pretty little child presenter of this psychopathic programme, Saraa, needed another animal.

Well, I need wonder no more. Little Green Footballs and Eye on the World bring us the answer from the invaluable MEMRI TV. Saraa's latest companion is a teddy bear, named Nassur. Cute, eh?

Well, not quite. In line with his psychotically murderous predecessors, Nassur longs to be a suicide/homicide bomber.

Teddy bear Nassur: I have come today to the Gaza Strip. Saraa, Allah willing, I will be one of the mujahideen, one of the fighters. I will join the ranks of the 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, and I will wage Jihad among them and carry a gun. Do you know why?

Child host Saraa: Why?

Nassur: To defend the children of Palestine.

You feed this to children week after week, month after month, year after year and you end up with a bunch of psychopaths, as various Arab leaders like Mahmoud Abbas have realized though somewhat belatedly. Blue Peter, this is not.

There is another aspect that we ought to be wary of and this blog has mentioned it once or twice, and that is the funding of this curious education. The truth is that we are funding it.

We have written about the report produced by the Taxpayers' Alliance (see, we are nice about them sometimes) that showed the amount of money Britain separately and as part of the European Union sent to Gaza for "educational" purposes.

It would be good to know how much of that much-advertised Gaza Appeal will go on the Al-Aqsa TV children's programme.

mosque[i-mosque]Part of Monday was spent at a conference organized jointly by (deep breath) the Center for Security Policy with the New Criterion, Hudson Institute, City Journal – Manhattan Institute and our own Centre for Social Cohesion. With such illustrious sponsors there were illustrious speakers, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mark Steyn, Daniel Johnson, Melanie Phillips, John O’Sullivan and David Pryce-Jones. Several postings will be needed to do it all justice and this is merely a preliminary musing.

The theme was “Free Speech, Jihad and the Future of Western Civilization” with a sub-heading mentioning libel tourism, a peculiarly British problem but that was not one of the main subjects. Since there were no lawyers on either of the panels, there could be no discussion of how the libel laws of this country can be changed as, we all agree, they must be.A repeated theme elaborated by several speakers was the notion that the danger we are facing through soft jihad is greater than any we have faced before as neither Nazism nor Communism were so obviously ensconced in our society. There were no schools named after Lenin or St Adolph churches on street corners. Thus, our refusal to fight the jihad is liable to destroy Western civilization in a way the other two ideologies could not.

Let me, respectfully, disagree with that. Well, I guess you expected that. The long analysis and disagreement is on EUReferendum2, though without pictures as I cannot think of any appropriate ones.

The American blogosphere has been inundated by comments from Russian contributors who call themselves Anton, Sergey, Ivan, Russian, Rossiyanin or plain Anonymous. To be fair, they appear only on blogs that are writing about the war in the Caucasus (the latest war in the Caucasus as the one in Chechnya remains inadequately resolved).

None of them seem to know much English. They do not simply make ordinary Russian mistakes of occasionally picking the wrong word or leaving out articles (there are none in Slavonic languages so it is easy to get it wrong). No, these Sergeys and Antons seem to have a very rudimentary knowledge of English so they are clearly not among those who have been diligently and at some risk to themselves scanning English-language blogs.

They have checked through Google, found the blogs that are covering the war and have proceeded to take part in the discussion though only after a fashion. What they do is reproduce in that rudimentary English, laboriously translated from Russian, the latest line in Kremlin propaganda.

Because they do not actually know enough of either what is being said or shown in the West or what other commenters are saying (that rudimentary knowledge) they cannot get involved in any discussion. When there is a response they repeat the propaganda, still badly translated but in slightly different words.

This, I must say, is pathetic and falls well short of the high level of propaganda I expect from the Comintern's heirs. For all of that, I am more than a little miffed. I have been blogging on the subject on EUReferendum and on the BrugesGroupBlog but have had no Sergeys or Antons or, even, Ivans producing their illiterate version of the Kremlin point of view. Why not?

Do these people not take us seriously? Do they, perhaps, not take the British blogosphere seriously enough to send their rather immature shock-troops to attack us? This is outrageous.

UPDATE: Hurrah, we've acquired one of them as well on my colleague's thread. Phew what a relief.

brothertariq[i-brothertariq]By now I have lost count of the number of talks I have heard from people who should know something about the subject (one of them was Peter Clarke, until recently in charge of the Metropolitan Police Service's section on counter-terrorism), which all come up with the same point. It is so difficult to deal with Islamists and their supporters because we are not used to the way they think, act and organize themselves.

In particular, they tell us, the Islamist groups are not like the IRA. Well, no, they are not. But then, the IRA was a relatively untypical terrorist organization in that its aims were limited and clearly stated; they organized themselves as an army with a command structure; and if they infiltrated any other organization it was for a specific purpose, be that gathering of information or terrorist activity.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of political and terrorist organizations in the past whom our present-day enemy does resemble. These thoughts were once again going through my mind as I was reading Caroline Fourest's "Brother Tariq - The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan", a book I can sincerely recommend to anyone who is interested both in the eponymous hero and in the swirling movements around him.

Tariq Ramadan, who is, to my great embarrassment but no suprise, a fellow of my old college at Oxford, is a very dangerous man. He confuses many of his Western interlocutors because he appears to be a steady follower of the rules of action laid down by his maternal grandfather, Hassan al-Bana, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is what Ms Fourest, a highly regarded French writer and journalist and a woman of the left, says about the Muslim Brotherhood:

From the very start, the Muslim Brotherhood has been based on an ambiguity: that of being at one and the same time an organized movement and a way of thinking. The movement's founding law, which dates from 1945, defines an 'active member' as someone who has pledged allegiance to the Guide, but the great majority of those committed to serve the Brotherhood's ideology do so on an informal basis. These agents spread al-Banna's message and his methods, without being an integral part of the organization.

The movement had, to be sure, an official structure that represented it in political dealings with institutions. The Brotherhood even ahd a flag: two crossed swords with the Koran as a background. The organization's officers intoduced themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood if, in so doing, negotiations with the Egyptian government or other administrations were facilitated.

But the Brotherhood consisted of much more than this official façade. Some sections were engaged in infiltration operations that were of necessity undercover. Other sections organized terrorist attacks that had to be publicly condemned so as not to discredit the official line taken by the head office.

Steps were taken to separate, as far as possible, the sections that were in the public eye from the undercover cells, either because the latter were more radical or because their mission had to remain confidential.

This led to the creation of an unofficial branch, knowns as the Secret Organization, in charge of the most sensitive operations.

Well, well, I thought, now who does that remind me of? Could it be the Communist Party and the Communist International, who created parallel structures in most countries where it was possible, from the very beginning? Not much changed between the early days of 1920 - 21 when gold was exported from starving Russia (famine caused, naturally enough, by the Bolshevik government's policies) not to buy in grain but to fund subversive organizations in the United States and Britain and the situation in the seventies and eighties when the mighty Soviet Union secretly sent funds to such organizations as the German "Generals for Peace".

Why do we have to re-learn the same lesson over and over again? It is bad enough that the powers that be refused to deal with that "unknown unknown" the need for anti-subversion. That has damaged the West and this country in particular a great deal. Our refusal to learn those lessons will harm us again now and in the future.

Assud[i-Assud]Yes it is boring and tiresome to keep repeating the same things over and over again, be they about the European Union, the UN, assorted tranzis and NGOs or the evil that aid does in developing countries. We are not alone in doing this and there are people whose dedication to this duty fills me with the most astonished admiration.

One such organization is the Palestinian Media Watch that keeps on dripping water on rock of political stupidity and self-righteous victimology (though I would like them to keep their website a little more up-to-date).

Their director, Itamar Marcus, visited Norway recently and managed to spark something of an important political debate there about the money that goes to the Palestinian Authority and what use it is put to.

It seems that the shocked Norwegian politicians and media pundits (a.k.a. news readers) had known nothing about the psychotic mouse, named Farfur, his cousin and successor as presenter of children's programmes, Nahul the Killer Bee or the homicidal rabbit named Assud who thinks he is a lion with a diet exclusively of Jews. Even if they had heard of all these horrors the Norwegians appear not to have worked out that possibly the money they so generously hand over to the Palestinian Authority pays for some of this.

At least now they are debating the subject and, at least, one political party is calling for the cessation of payments though, I have no doubt, that if ever that became serious government policy the weeping and wailing about humanitarian crises would go up.

Still, it is good to know that the media and politicians of at least one donor country are beginning to wake up. Of course, we wrote about this problem extensively in February when the Taxpayers' Alliance produced a report on the subject, and referred our readers back to previous postings. We wrote about NGO funding that goes on hate-filled books and children's programmes in May. I have no doubt we shall return to the subject again. Who knows: maybe Norway will, by then, have shown the way to do things and cut off aid to the pernicious Palestinian Authority.

We have written about this before but there is no harm in reiterating that taxpayers' money is being spent through government sponsored aid, EU and UN organizations and our friends the NGOs on hate-filled, anti-Israeli and anti-semitic propaganda.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal goes through the subject again and names some organizations involved. As I used to say on the One London Blog, it's your money and mine, folks.

Stone_Castro[i-Stone_Castro]Every now and then there is a story around that is marginally related to the various themes we try to cover on this blog and this is one of them. It comes via that excellent conservative film blog Libertas.

There is a link to an interview with Oliver Stone on the subject of the now retired (if, indeed, he is alive) Cuban dictator and mass murderer Fidel Castro. Rather amusingly, Mr Stone compares Barack Obama to Castro, which is unlikely to be welcomed in Mr Obama’s camp. At least, I don’t think it would be welcomed but I cannot be sure. A comparison with Fidel Castro is unlikely to endear him to many voters when the real campaign will start.

What is of particular interest is Oliver Stone’s explanation as to why he admires Castro. No, for once there is nothing about the free health care (which was not good enough for the dictator himself) or the education system or suchlike trivialities.

No, no, Mr Stone admires Mr Castro for two reasons. One is because he is particularly drawn to the underdog and, secondly, because Castro “didn’t do it for the money”. As we know, for the likes of Mr Stone, who has never shown himself to be averse to earning mega-bucks for films of variable quality, to put at its most charitable, doing something for money is the ultimate sin. Well, if you are running a business that is.

But Castro, the man who established a bloody dictatorship, ruined Cuba’s economy (and no, it was not the American refusal to trade with the country), imprisoned, tortured and murdered anyone who disagreed with his rule, is an “underdog” and quite a good guy because he did not do it for the money.

Which, presumably means, that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many others are to be applauded as well. They did not do it for the money. Well, of course, their lives were much better than those of their unhappy countrymen and there are all those rumours about Castro being really quite a rich person, what with Forbes estimating his private fortune at $900 million as long ago as 2006 but I accept that his primary motivation was probably not money.

The pursuit of power and obsessive desire to impose ideology have resulted in far more deaths and suffering than doing something for the money, the latter being a healthy desire to better one’s life and expand business activity.

Hamas+rabbit[i-Hamas+rabbit]First there was the psychotic mouse, a rather obvious copy of Mickey. His name was Farfur and every week he would spew hatred on a Hamas children’s programme. He and his charmingly pretty co-presenter Sara would encourage Palestinian children to phone in and sing little ditties about bringing death to Jerusalem.

Then, in a rather horrific episode, Farfur was clubbed to death by a thuggish looking Israeli settler. The programme went on with Farfur’s cousin, Nahul the Killer Bee. Can’t help feeling that it might be more useful if those Gazan children learnt some biology. For instance, it might be useful to know that bees and mice are rarely related to each other even in Disney films, never mind real life.

As we have pointed out before, in connection with the rather inane statement made by the Council of European Union after the pointless Annapolis Conference, other children’s programmes on the Hamas Al-Aqsa TV are equally horrifying.

Word reaches me that Nahul the Killer Bee has died because he could not get to the hospital fast enough. The reason? Well, naturally enough, the “Israeli siege of Gaza”. Which hospital was the little fellow trying to get to, I wonder, as a number of Palestinian children and adults are routinely treated in Israeli hospitals. Not an Egyptian one, perchance?

He has been replaced by a homicidal rabbit, whose name is not Rabbit, as that is a nickname given to “a bad person and a coward” (just goes to show how little they know) but Assud, which means lion. I assume the homicidal rabbit is related to the killer bee and the psychotic mouse as he proclaims here to the same pretty little girl that his intention is to kill all Jews and eat them.

It seems that he managed to sneak in from Egypt when the Gazans blew up the border between Gaza and Israel Egypt and rushed in to buy lots of goodies before they were beaten back by the Egyptian police. As we know a suicide bomber then did manage to get into Israel through Egypt.

So there we are dear reader, the indoctrination of those little psychopaths children continues unabated, using electricity provided by Israel and money provided by? Ah yes, very interesting. It seems a good deal of that money is provided by us.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, an extremely useful and sensible body has recently produced a report on the subject. The report goes through the various ways British and EU taxpayers’ money makes its way to Hamas and comes to the sad conclusion that we contribute in two different ways:

Direct funding from the British government. Britain has donated £15 million to the Temporary International Mechanism, the new financial arrangement designed to bypass Hamas, since it was founded in June 2006. The Department for International Development has also given £3 million to the Palestinian Authority to help pay off the Authority’s debts.

Funding through the European Commission. The European Commission donated €340 million to Palestinian causes in 2006. This represented 0.28 per cent of the €121 billion European Union budget in 2006. Around £29.5 million of this will have been paid by the UK, i.e. 0.28 per cent of
Britain’s £10.5 billion gross contribution to the EU budget.

How does this help that loathsome propaganda for children?

Through the new aid spending, part of the £47.5 million donated by Britain is helping to fund hate education and promote violence in the Palestinian territories. It is doing this in three ways:

- Funding the Palestinian education system. The Palestinian authorities have produced textbooks that promote martyrdom, support the execution of apostates and support insurgents fighting British troops in Iraq.

- Funding the Palestinian Authority directly. Direct financial support has effectively given the Palestinian Authority more money to spend on, among other things, hateful propaganda.

- Freeing up resources by funding services Palestinian authorities would otherwise be expected to provide. Bypassing the Palestinian authorities by paying directly for basic services that a government would usually be expected to provide has actually left a greater proportion of the budgets of the Palestinian authorities free to be spent on propaganda and violence.

The report is well worth reading as it gives excellent references and is copiously illustrated with little tots totting very big guns; textbooks that extol suicide/homicide bombing and murder of other children; as well as pictures of the psychotic mouse and the killer bee. Presumably, the report was completed before the homicidal rabbit made his appearance.

I do not agree with all the conclusions. Well, actually, there is one particular conclusion I do not agree with. There is no possible method whereby aid given to the Palestinian Authority could influence that body of men could contribute to peace and stability in the region. As I recall, Hamas campaigned on being less corrupt and more efficient than Fatah. Well, let them prove it all to the people of Gaza.

rumsfeld[i-rumsfeld]The follow-up question there would be: and do we care that there are things we do not know we do not know.

First, let me deal with a seemingly small problem that has arisen and about which my colleague wrote in what I thought was a very moderate fashion (well, at first, anyway). It is related to the main theme, I promise you.

The point at issue was the use of material laboriously put together by the editors of this blog, chiefly my colleague, by members of the MSM without any acknowledgement and the subsequent mutual admiration society between them, their friends and sundry bloggers. Devil’s Kitchen is excepted as are all bloggers who use our material and link back to the original. That is what the blogosphere is for and we have no desire to stop that.

On the other hand, neither of us is very keen on the advice that we should shrug our shoulders and get on with life; these things happen and anyway the cause matters more than the individual. Well, that’s very nice, of course, but it is not your work that is being nobbled and we have not empowered anyone to accept apologies on our behalf.

A longish piece on all these matters on EUReferendum2.

Green+Helmet+02[i-Green+Helmet+02]We are not altogether surprised to find that John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN, agrees with this blog. He does not say it in so many words but that does not matter.

According to Ha'aretz, John Bolton has publicly disagreed with Prime Minister Olmert's account of what motivated UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and the international pressure put on Israel to stop before it could destroy Hezbollah (who has since shown its gratitude by destroying Lebanon's political structure).

It was not Israel's ground offensive but the shock caused by the Qana episode or, to be precise, the way the Qana episode, about which we still do not know the truth, was presented by Hezbollywood and its willing agents, most of the Western MSM.

However, the former ambassador said, the main reason for America's retreat from its initial position was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who "changed her mind fundamentally" after an Israeli aerial assault killed 28 civilians in Kana on July 30. "Rice exerted enormous pressure on me to reach an agreement already," he said. "Until Kana, the U.S. wasn't interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated."

This blog was convinced at the time that the Qana episode was crucial in the propaganda war, which is an intrinsic part of the war against terror we are all fighting and which Israel had to fight in the summer of 2006 against Hezbollah.

Superman[i-Superman]Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the UN trying to get some credibility. According to a report in the Financial Times

In a move reminiscent of storylines developed during the second world war, the UN is joining forces with Marvel Comics, creators of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, to create a comic book showing the international body working with superheroes to solve bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.

The comic, initially to be distributed free to 1m US schoolchildren, will be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature superheroes such as Spider-Man working with UN agencies such as Unicef and the “blue hats”, the UN peacekeepers.

One wonders whether the Incredible Hulk or, for that matter, Spider-Man might not be better employed sorting out the real problems why the UN’s image is, ahem, a little tarnished.

It is not, pace Deborah Brewster of the FT, the United States government alone who find the UN a somewhat unpalatable organization. The reasons for that tarnished image might lie in stories like this. A week ago the Washington Post, among others, reported that

A U.N. task force has uncovered a pervasive pattern of corruption and mismanagement involving hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for fuel, food, construction and other materials and services used by U.N. peacekeeping operations, which are in the midst of their largest expansion in 15 years.

In recent weeks, 10 procurement officials have been charged with misconduct for allegedly soliciting bribes and rigging bids in Congo and Haiti. It has been the largest single crackdown on U.N. staff malfeasance in the field in more than a decade.

The story is not precisely new and that may be why most of the media, old and new, leaves it wearily alone. But think what Spider-Man could achieve if he teamed up not with the “blue hats” who have been known to rape women and children or buy sexual favours for food in countries such as DR Congo but with Claudia Rossett, the woman who has doggedly pursued every scandal and every investigation that, somehow, never manages to lead to anything except for a few arrests and the odd conviction here and there.

Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, not to mention Superman and Batman could all team up with Ms Rossett and divide between them the various scandals, such as the membership of the Human Rights Council or of the Committee for the 2009 UN World Conference against Racism, that is likely to become another America and Israel-bashing anti-Semitic, anti-Western performance.

While Spider-Man and Superman could help Claudia Rossett (after all, Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, is a journalist), the Incredible Hulk could rush into meetings of various UN organizations and ensure that there was freedom of speech. Otherwise, you never know, the organization’s image might be tarnished.

He might prevent this bit of censorship, for instance, when a well-researched, carefully argued speech by Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch was deemed to be “inadmissible” by the President of the UN Human Rights Council. With or without the Incredible Hulk, we referred to the incident when it happened.

Captain+America[i-Captain+America]Sadly, the Financial Times does not refer to any of this or speculate as to how the Marvel Comic heroes might deal with a lost cause like the UN’s image. Instead, there is a sneering reference of American use of comics during World War II.

The latest UN initiative is not the first time US comics have been used for political purposes. During the second world war, superheroes were shown taking on Germany’s Nazi regime. Marvel’s Captain America, together with other characters such as Superman, were shown beating up Adolf Hitler.

The UN’s goals are somewhat different: according to its website, it hopes the comics will teach children the value of international co- operation and sensitise them to the problems faced in other parts of the world.

And that just goes to show how superior the UN’s goals are to that of the US government in that bit of unpleasantness in the early forties. Beating up Adolf Hitler? Oh my, my, my. How violent and insensitive. Pass me the smelling salts. Failing that, pass me the sick-bag.

Mention of Captain America (not one I know except by hearsay) reminds me of another attempt to harness the power of comic strips to tranzi political propaganda. I am sure our readers will reall Captain Euro, the intrepid and distinctly Aryan looking fighter for peace, harmony and European integration.

Captain+Euro[i-Captain+Euro]Captain Euro and his cohorts were part of an attempt at a concerted effort by the EU’s propaganda machine to use our money (no agreements with Marvel Comics for them) to produce propaganda for our children. As Daniel Hannan describes here, it failed miserably.

Captain Euro’s great enemy was Dr D. Vider (gettit?) a truly evil man. The Free Will blog had a good deal of fun at the expense of the whole concept [you’ll have to excuse the language].

Now let's meet Captain Euro's archenemy, "Dr. D. Vider". (Get it? "D. Vider"? He divides people! He's anti-unity! He's bad! The only thing missing is his girlfriend, "Uni L. Ateral".)

DAVID VIDERIUS is a former financier. He is a multi-millionaire, used to making money no matter if it might involve the suffering of others. Banned and ostracised from the financial world for unprofessional conduct he managed to escape arrest despite his involvement in financial scandal.

I shit you not, the villain who threatens Europe is a wealthy "corporate criminal".

Having disappeared for many years, he reappeared as DR D VIDER. He manages a holding company, DIVIDEX, controlling hundreds of different businesses across Europe and beyond. His son and only family, Junior, helps him in his quest for power. His ambition for his son sometimes clouds his judgment.

Junior?

THE GLOBAL TOURING CIRCUS, a huge travelling company that he secured when it was on the edge of bankruptcy, is now DIVIDEX'S base. Dr D Vider uses the circus as a cover for recruiting new members to his evil team from all over the world.

So, let me get this straight. He runs an evil Euro-circus? Couldn't possibly be... What about Junior? Why is he so evil?

The lack of attention he received as a child, has turned Junior into a sociopath.

These people are for real. Other villains in Dr. D. Vider's little circus include a midget with a yo-yo and an Amazonian parrot that likes caviar.

In other words, the evil enemy of the wondrous Captain Euro and his superlative team that consists of people who are Gaia enthusiasts, fabulous gymnasts and people who get their scientific ideas from science fiction is - ta-dah – a businessman, who is clearly crooked, as all businessmen are.

D.Vider[i-D.Vider]The man who creates employment, provides financial services and adds to the wealth of wherever he happens to be (incidentally, what is wrong with international business which breaks down national barriers?) is evil, evil, evil. The goodies are people who prat around as parasites on the body politic, financed by the taxpayer.

Despite a certain amount of excitement the idea did not take off. To be fair, even the Guardian thought it entertaining rather than a serious educational idea.

The good Captain is invested with the sort of history only a marketing company besieged by focus groups could devise. 'Born Adam Andros - the only child of a famous European ambassador and a professor of palaeontology,' reads his resume.

'Travelling the world with his parents, Adam learned to cope with the adult social world from an early age. As a child, participation in an experimental language programme enabled Adam to become a polyglot.' Ah - so that's how to become a good European.

But it's not all plain sailing for Captain Euro. Shunning the life of canapés and ambassadorial receptions that surely awaited him, he has taken a vow: 'to use, wherever possible, intellect, culture and logic - not violence - to take control of difficult criminal situations'. Oh, and in his spare time he paints European landscapes. 'The fingers that tap scientific data into Captain Euro's palmtop computer are often stained with paint.'

Yet despite the glossy packaging, it remains unclear just what Captain Euro is promoting. A single currency? Sure. But with his strong jaw and clean-cut morals, there is something more. Is Captain Euro a proponent of fortress Europe, an us-and-them world, secure for the haves and inaccessible to the have-nots? Asylum-seekers, take note.

This article points to the main problem with the comic – the looks of the characters. Captain Euro and his cohorts are superb specimens of physical attraction mostly on the Aryan side. Even the scientist is sexy and attractive.

Their main enemy Dr D. Vider has a distinctly semitic look and resembles the villains of cartoons in Der Stürmer of evil memory. He is assisted by “moustachioed, dusky-skinned cohorts”. Ooops!

Setting aside the political problem there, the creation shows a certain lack of knowledge. Comic heroes are not handsome. Superman may be clean-cut and strong-jawed but his alter ego is distinctly nerdy. Captain America is well-hidden behind his mask but his alter ego is weak and sickly.

Batman and Spider-Man are on the weird side and the others, such as the Incredible Hulk are complete fantasy. Nothing clean-cut or handsome about them.

Cacofonix[i-Cacofonix]As for the best-known European comics the idea of good-looking heroes does not arise. The only remotely handsome character in Asterix is Cacophonix, the poet, who usually ends the story gagged and trussed up as he is about to spoil the feast of roast boar by singing some new-fangled composition.

Tintin, whom I like a good deal more than Mr Hannan seems to, is a funny-looking boy reporter. His friends, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and the ineffable Thompson twins, are not handsome gymnasts though the good captain has plenty of muscle power. Some people might admire Bianca Castafiore but for my money the only good looking character is Snowy the dog (Milou in French).

Tintin[i-Tintin]One can’t help feeling that there might be a reason for this. Maybe the creators of Captain Euro should have spent less time in focus groups and more time reading successful comics.

That leaves us with the UN and Spider-Man who “is preparing to take on a group that might be his most formidable nemesis: the likes of former American Ambassador John Bolton and other major critics of the United Nations”.

Here is a much better idea, developed by this blog without any focus groups or taxpayers’ money. Instead of producing idiotic stories about Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and whoever else being sensitive and Gaia-focused, why not have them fight the real baddies in the world, for example people who go around assassinating former prime ministers and present opposition leaders as they travel round some fictitious country on an election campaign?

Or here is another storyline that might work: how about Superman setting up a super-organization that whizzes round the world rescuing real journalists and bloggers who are trying to tell the truth about certain countries and political systems.

There would be plenty of righteous indignation and a great deal of pow! Wham! Kerpow! In fact, just like Captain America during World War II these comics could be so popular, they would not have to be sent out free to anybody using, one assumes, taxpayers’ money. Kids would queue up to buy them.

Arlette+Chabot[i-Arlette+Chabot]Sadly, a pressing engagement in London meant that I could not go over to Paris to see the much-trumpeted film rushes of what is known as the al-Dura episode, which France2 was going to show in court, though I was asked. So, I have to rely on other people’s accounts to continue the story and my own analysis of what Charles Enderlin and his employers as well as their colleagues might be up to.

In some ways we, on this blog, are fortunate. Absolutely nobody in Britain, certainly not in the MSM (I may have missed blog postings on the subject) has displayed the slightest interest in what is a major media scandal. A quick check on Google will show all kinds of references but the only British one is our story as republished by the Free Market News Network to whom we are duly grateful.

The story so far can be followed through our postings and the links in them. The latest update was on the November 13, the day before the showing of the "raw footage".

As was noted at the time, though still not by anyone in the British media, old or new, the "raw footage" had shrunk. Instead of the 27 minutes that a few people had seen, only 18 minutes were shown, explained by Charles Enderlin variously as never being more than 18 minutes and having some irrelevant material that he had cut out.

The raw footage was not so raw. And it was barely al Dura. If we take the cameraman’s word for it, given under oath a few days after the incident, not something but everything is missing. This is supposed to be the raw footage of the al Dura death scene. What we get is raw footage of Palestinian youths throwing stones, firebombs, and burning tires at the Israeli outpost. And provoking no reaction, except for one teargas bomb. Real provocations alternate with those familiar fake battle scenes with instantaneous ambulance evacuations.

Between them Richard Landes and Nidra Poller have an interesting time showing up the various anomalies in the rushes that were shown though this was only two thirds of what was there originally. Landes had seen the original rushes before, Poller was new to them but noted the various cuts and splices as well as Karsenty’s comments about inconsistencies in the film and the commentary.

However different a culture is there will always be a difference between “the boy is dead” and “the boy is in danger of dying”. As Richard Landes says,

And the courtroom laughed. It was one of Charles’ less briliant moments.

As I recall France2 had been ordered to show the entire raw footage. Cutting that down by one third and brazenly showing what remains could be called contempt of court.

The court case will resume in February but an interesting gap in the story remains. There is still no evidence of Mohammed al-Dura’s death. On the other hand, there is an interesting story about his father’s wounds.

This is by Nidra Poller again, who has followed up the story on Metula News Agency. It seems that there is evidence that Jamil al-Dura’s wounds were not caused by Israeli bullets in 2000 but an axe and possibly something else attack in 1992.

To add a certain piquancy to the tale, it would appear that it was Israeli surgeons who had restored almost full use of Jamil al-Dura’s hand.

According to the Metula release, Jamal al Dura declared on medical records in 1992 that Palestinian militia had attacked him with axes. Doctors at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital* were able to save his life but he lost the use of his right hand because they could not repair a ruptured tendon in the forearm. Palestinian doctors referred Jamal to Tal Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv in March 1994. Dr. Yehuda performed reconstructive surgery, grafting a tendon taken from the foot,
and restoring almost normal use of the hand. The medical record of that operation also refers to the removal of “foreign bodies,” suggesting that other instruments besides axes were used in the 1992 attack.

Alerted by the Ména [Metula News Agency] to the film of Jamal’s wounds produced in 2004 by Talal Abu Rahma at the demand of France 2 news director Arlette Chabot, to silence investigators, Dr. Yehuda and his colleagues declare that the scars shown in that film were incurred in 1992 and result from axe blade wounds and definitely not from gunshot. They are ready and willing to testify to this in any court.

So far, this is only one story and until some medical records are shown, that is how we must view it. Somehow I feel that the story will be supported by evidence and that evidence is going to be ignored by large sections of the MSM.

In the case of the British MSM, I suspect, the whole story will be ignored, though at the time they were happy enough to use the dubious picture without asking any questions. And talking of pictures, the one at the top of this posting is of Arlette Chabot, the highly regarded French journalist, head of France2’s editorial team and a lady that seems to have no more than a nodding acquaintance with the concept of truth. Then again, I am rather tired of that phony photo of the crouching man and boy.

Oxford+Union[i-Oxford+Union]One’s first reaction to the recent tale of the Oxford Union meeting, their invited guests, David Irving and Nick Griffin plus the inevitable uproar was a weary shrug of shoulders – another clever-dick story. As time went on, the story took on a more interesting character, especially if one links it to a couple of other reports, not much noted by the British MSM, one of a set of events in Russia at the end of October and the other a report about Ukraine that appeared, though not in the British press, a few days ago.

A longish piece with some very gruesome pictures posted on Umbrella Blog 3

mohammed_al_dura[i-mohammed_al_dura] Yes, indeed, dear readers, this is another piece about the MSM and its less than glorious record in some parts of the world. We have followed the crucial Mohammed al-Dura story, with the latest posting in October.

Tomorrow is the day on which France2 will supposedly show the unedited rushes of the episode to the court and, presumably, all other interested parties. Unless there is a fire in the warehouse, of course. Awfully flammable, film is and so are those new-fangled disks.

In the meantime, Richard Landes, the man who must have done more than anybody else to unravel the tale has another long piece on the subject.

Discussed at length by Helen on Umbrella Blog 3

Margot.03[i-Margot.03]Life is full of disappointments. When the fragrant Margot Wallström first started haunting the blogosphere I thought I was well set up for entertainment for many years to come. Sadly, the woman and her blog turned out to be so utterly boring that, together with most other people, I stopped reading her stream of consciousness burblings.

Still, she does, from time to time, brighten up the horizon of EU politics with her insouciance and, frankly, rather silly suggestions. Whenever the Fragrant Margot appears I cannot help being reminded of a scene in that great film, “All About Eve”, when the very clever and poisonous critic Addison DeWitt, played by the incomparable George Sanders, replies to a comment made by Miss Claudia Carswell, of the Copacabana School of Acting, played by Marilyn Monroe with the words: “You have a point there. An idiotic one, but a point.”

Anyway, she is back with some more idiotic points.

Yesterday EurActiv informed us all that a new plan would be unveiled to encourage the citizens of the European Union to love said Union. It is to be proposed that

member states and EU institutions put an end to the "Brussels blame game" and join forces around a common communications strategy in order to win back support from citizens for the 2009 European elections.

Well, it’s a thought. An idiotic one, but a thought. Let us see what this will consist of. It seems that the first thing to be achieved is for the EU institutions, the Commission, the Toy Parliament and the Council to stop communicating with the people separately through their own organizations and channels but to unite in a new “inter-institutional agreement”.

A new plan to "Communicate Europe in partnership", to be unveiled on 3 October by the Commission, proposes an "inter-institutional agreement" to align communication priorities among EU institutions and member states.

Priorities are to be laid down in "management partnership" agreements negotiated with each national government, in order to try to get the message across at the local level.

Climate change and energy, the EU's new 'Reform Treaty', growth and jobs and mobilising voters in the run-up to the 2009 European elections should all be among the common priorities for such an inter-institutional agreement, said Margot Wallström, Commission Vice-President in charge of institutional relations and communications strategy.

But the laughter dies when one reads the next two paragraphs:

It is also the Commission's wish that member states do more explanatory work at an early age with the inclusion of basic education about European integration in school curricula.

"It has to start with the civic competences and the civic education. EU citizens have a right to know and to be heard," Wallström told a group of Brussels journalists on 2 October.

Now that, oh Fragrant One, is known as brainwashing of children. Well, actually, attempted brainwashing. Since teachers in most schools teach next to nothing anyway and pupils manage to ignore the little they are taught, most of this rubbish will be water off a duck’s back. But as a matter of principle, this must not be allowed.

As it happens, there is legislation in this country that prevents or tries to prevent one-sided political propaganda in schools and there is really no point in saying this is merely civic information.

We, on this blog, are all in favour of information about the EU being as widely disseminated as possible. We want people to know from an early age that somewhere around 80 per cent of the legislation comes from Brussels and our own Parliament cannot stop it.

We want everyone to know that the highest court in the land is not the House of Lords but the European Court of Justice.

We want children at a certain age to understand that inadequate scrutiny by a powerless committee is not the same of legislation.

But, when it comes to European integration, it is a political issue and a highly contentious one at that. Therefore, it should be rehearsed only as one side of a debate.

The proposals were duly presented. Apparently we got the usual canard about people out there neither knowing nor caring what the various institutions are and merely wanting Europe to get on with its job of making everybody’s life wonderful.

Actually, they are wrong. People do not know and may not care about the different institutions. But they do seem to care about the fact that the chasm between them and the people who have taken upon themselves to run their lives is becoming ever wider. They do care about their liberties and about accountability in government.

Yet again, the Fragrant Commissar is making a point, which is seriously idiotic but essential to her self-delusion.

In case we have forgotten what this structure is like, there is a reminder:

The latest paper is a follow-up to a White Paper published in February 2006. This called for joint action by all the major players – EU institutions, Member States, European political parties and NGOs and invited all interested parties to submit comments. Hundreds of replies were received and several conferences were organised to discuss the issues further. The current paper is the
result.

Ah yes, those interested parties, carefully chosen by the Commission to give the sort of responses they want to hear. Let us not trouble ourselves with people who actually would like to see a real discussion of what the future of European countries should be.

Still there is something to be grateful for – no extra money is to be allotted to this new inter-institutional agreement that will look upon the member states as partners in the dissemination of propaganda.

COMMENT THREAD

mohammed_al_dura[i-mohammed_al_dura]
COMMENT THREAD

Al-Dura02[i-Al-Dura02]One of the stories that has been poorly covered by the MSM (or should that be one of the many stories?) has been the saga of Mohammed Al-Dura and France2. Yet, this is enormously important in our understanding of the way the media functions and, in particular, the way the Western media reports news from the Middle East.

Mohammed Al-Dura was the little boy whose picture as he was cowering behind his father trying to escape from the bullets of the wicked Israelis back in 2000 was brodcast to all. The report, by France2 informed the world, whose conscience, naturally, was shocked, that the boy was shot dead.

Almost from the very beginning the story was doubted and a court case resulted when France2 and Charles Enderly, its correspondent in Israel, sued Philippe Karsenty of Media Watch that had challenged the story and, above all, the film, for libel.

We wrote about the case here and here. Karsenty lost the case and France2 were not forced to make the uncut rushes public, though the two senior journalists who have seen it, say that there was no footage of the boy’s death. Worse, nobody has ever been able to locate the boy, dead or alive, certainly not under the name of Mohammed Al-Dura.

The case is back in the public eye (though not its conscience) as Karsenty’s appeal against the verdict, whose rightness was disputed by everyone who followed the case in the court, is coming up and a petition is being circulated that urges France II to release those crucial tapes as well as any films they might have of pigs flying.

Richard Landes who has ensured that the case is treated with the seriousness it deserves, gives the text of the petition in French and English on his excellent blog, Augean Stables. Here is another discussion of the story and its significance. For anyone who wants to go through the chronology of the case, Richard Landes helpfully provides one.

If ever a picture was worth many thousands of words (though, to be fair, it also generated many thousands of words) it was that. Little Mohammed became the symbol of the Palestinian martyrdom and the evil that was Israel. Since the pictures of children blown up by suicide/homicide bombers inside Israel were too horrific to be shown, the world had to make do with Mohammed the Martyr.

The idea that the whole episode was staged; that Mohammed was not really Mohammed Al-Dura, was not cowering from Israeli bullets and was not shot naturally discombobulates too many people. Nor does the media particularly want the world and its conscience pay too much attention to the many other cases in which it followed the scenario as set out by Hezobollah. (This may be a good opportunity to remind our readers of the sterling work done by my colleague and a number of his assistants on our forum in uncovering some of the murky doings in Qana last year.)

Should anyone have doubts about the lopsidedness of reporting from the Middle East, let me remind them about the curious lack of interest in the four-month long siege of Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp by the Lebanese army.

Naturally enough, we covered the story here, here, here and mentioned it in other pieces on the situation in Lebanon. (Yes, yes, I promise to do a round-up soon. If nothing else, we need to know if UNIFIL is still alive.)

The siege of the camp is now over. David Pryce-Jones sums up:

After a pretty dismal performance dragged out over these four months, the Lebanese army has finally routed Fatah al-Islam, killed Shakir al-Absi and his deputy, and identified some of the dead terrorists as Saudis and others as men who have fought in Iraq. Between two and three hundred have been killed, about half of them Lebanese soldiers. And meanwhile 40,000 Palestinians have fled from their homes, most probably never to return. Lebanese artillery has turned Nahr al-Bared into the sort of ruin the Russians have made of Grozny in Chechnya.

He may be a little too harsh on the Lebanese army. It is not easy to fight in those circumstances. Even the Russians have not been able to impose total control on the wreck that used to be Grozny and they have been at it for considerably longer than four months.

Mr Pryce-Jones does make the point we have made over and over again, notably in the first part of this posting:

The media is no help, of course, hardly reporting the Nahr al-Bared crisis unless in a paragraph on some inside page. In contrast, just cast your mind back to 2002 when the Israeli army cleared Fatah terrorists from the refugee camp of Jenin on the West Bank. No artillery, no indiscriminate destruction, no 40,000 fleeing for their lives, less than a hundred dead all told, but pretty well every front page and every news bulletin accused Israel of war crimes and atrocities. I particularly remember one Professor Derrick Pounder on behalf of Amnesty speaking of massacre, and proclaiming that the dead under the rubble were too numerous to be counted. The absence of such media professors and human-rights groups from Nahr al-Bared now certifies the whole lot of them as foremost specialists in the double standards underpinning the usual Western representations of the Middle East.

Nobody is going to compare Nahr al-Bared to Stalingrad or any other important battle.

The Palestinians may be perennial victims but some victims are more equal than others. If you want the West to pay attention to what is happening to you, try to ensure that you get under the Israelis' feet. Then it really does not matter that you are treated far better than your brethren in Lebanon or Gaza – the world will know with many advantages of your plight.

blogs_of_war[i-blogs_of_war]This is really a subject for my colleague who is described as being obsessive if he writes about anything except the European Union and monomaniacal if he concentrates on the latter and the Constitutional Reform Treaty. This being a family-friendly blog I shall not repeat the abuse that is heaped on me. We must both be doing something right.

Through Tim Worstall’s blog I was led to an article in the Guardian that informed the world of the MoD’s latest wonderful decision: ban servicemen and women from taking part in any discussion of what might perhaps be going wrong in various theatres of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan.

I understand from the article and from my colleague, who will write about this in greater detail as soon as he finishes his day jobbing, that ARRSE, the army rumour service, that is exchange of information, is up in arms about this, if I may use such a hackneyed expression.

As the Guardian puts it:

Soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel will not be able to blog, take part in surveys, speak in public, post on bulletin boards, play in multi-player computer games or send text messages or photographs without the permission of a superior if the information they use concerns matters of defence.

They also cannot release video, still images or audio - material which has previously led to investigations into the abuse of Iraqis. Instead, the guidelines state that "all such communication must help to maintain and, where possible, enhance the reputation of defence".

The reason given is the row about the former Iranian hostages being paid for their stories (and seriously pathetic those stories were, too). Furthermore, the question of security is being raised.
I think we can be certain that neither of those reasons is the right one. The episode with HMS Cornwall, Iranian hostage-taking and Mr Bean’s iPod is not really something on which blanket bans can be based. Stories in newspapers would always have to be cleared as, indeed, they were. If memory serves it was the MoD’s press office and senior officers in the Royal Navy who thought concentrating on the human side of the whole mess would detract attention from the fact that it was a mess.

Nor is security a problem. It is easy enough to make sure that no information about forthcoming engagements be released. Nothing of that kind has been alleged at any time. The only problem was with the BBC who at one point asked for photos or films of troop movements in Iraq in their “Were you there?” section. This has now been removed so I cannot link.

It is, of course, criticism of the higher command or MoD decisions that is being banned and my colleague will have plenty to say about that.

I shall make a few very general points. Firstly, this has not always been true about the British military. Books that criticized severely the conduct of the Boer War, for instance, were published by serving officers at the time. Nowadays, they would have had to go through the whole military and PR hierarchy to ensure that nothing but the most anodyne stuff was produced.

Secondly, this plays into the hands of the enemy, who does put out a great deal of information on the internet, including pictures and videos of their attacks. Given the general ignorance in this country of what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and the media’s campaign of disinformation, it is not surprising that all one hears from supposedly well-informed people is that it is all a mess, a failure, the surge is not working etc etc.

Well, I have news for this people. The surge is working. It is very successful and slowly, very slowly, control is being established in Iraq. How do I know this? Ah well, you see there is this thing called the blogosphere, which has been highly successful in the United States in undermining the stranglehold of the drive-by media on information. And among the blogosphere there are the milbloggers, the soldiers and officers who blog from the theatre of war, giving accounts of what had happened and what they had gone through.

Whenever I have mentioned milbloggers to former or present military people in Britain, they have thrown their hands up in horror. Allowing soldiers to voice opinions, to communicate? But that might undermine security. There is no understanding of the fact that we are fighting a war on two fronts – military and propaganda. If we do not win the propaganda war we shall lose the military one as well.

When a little while ago the Pentagon, which is no better than our own MoD, tried to shut down the milbloggers there was uproar on the American blogosphere, which spread to the MSM. The Pentagon backed down almost immediately. We shall see whether our own servicemen and women and their supporters will display the same gutsy attitude. In a way this is a test of the British blogosphere as well.

COMMENT THREAD

News outlets and blogs that pay attention to the Middle East are buzzing with the story published in the Jerusalem Post two days ago.

An unnamed Hezbollah officer has gone on Israeli Channel 10 TV and said several things that we, on this blog, have affirmed in the past, particularly last year during and after the Israeli war against Hezbollah.

In the first place, he stated that Hezbollah would have surrendered within the next 10 days if the Israelis had not agreed to the peace drive insisted on by the "international community". Secondly, he pointed out that Israeli responses to katyusha attacks were bewilderingly fast and accurate. Thirdly, he explained that this speed and accuracy could be used against Israel in the other war - that or propaganda - when the rockets were fired from among the civilian population.

None of this is particularly surprising but confirms what this blog has said about the Middle East, the Gulf and Afghanistan, as well as matters nearer home: it is not enough to have the upper hand in military terms if you lose the propaganda war and have that wonderful tranzi weapon, "international public opinion" against you.

It always seemed to me to be too good to be true when I heard that the evil Mickey Mouse clone, Farfur, who was spouting death worshipping jihadism on an Al Aqsa children's programme, was killed. It seems I was right.

Charles Johnson on Little Green Footballs links to a MEMRI tape and translation of the new character on the programme: Farfur's cousin, Nahoul the Killer Bee. Enjoy if you can.