WMD or a new Tesco?
Stupid people run our lives. This was made obvious back in February 2013 when the footballer Paul Elliott resigned his posts at the Football Association as well as trusteeship of the anti-racism campaign group Kick It Out because he used the word “nigger” in a text message argument with another black football player.
Elliott has received the CBE for services to equality and diversity in football and is quite obviously not a racist yet he was forced to resign by the witch hunt mentality that prevails in British public life.
The reason that we oppose racism is that it causes harm to people. We’re not against racism when an American is deemed friendly, a German efficient or an Englishman polite. We’re against it when certain groups are discriminated against. When they lose out to other groups when applying for work or are unjustly hassled by the police. Of course we should avoid using racially derogative terms when referring to people but the single use of such a word should not be a litmus test of racism.
Public life is dominated by people so lacking in judgment that they rely on idiotic rules and this is the way with much of 21st Century life. This same knee jerk mentality seems now to be pushing the United States into another war. President Obama has previously said that the use of chemical weapons by Syria would be a “red line” that could trigger U.S. reaction. Today, the United States Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel, put out a statement saying that “that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.” - the talk now is of whether Syria has crossed that red line.
HANG ON A MINUTE! - Statements put out by government departments are always very very carefully worded and this statement reeks of indecision – “WITH SOME DEGREE OF VARYING CONFIDENCE”???!!!!!…..They’re TALKING BOLLOCKS!
Obviously the statement has been constructed under pressure and the authors have made damn sure they express themselves in terms which commit themselves to precisely nothing. It’s interesting to speculate on how the story originated. A brief perusal of the web reveals that a vague article in the London Times on 13th April 2013 stated “Forensic evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria has been found for the first time in a soil sample smuggled out of the country in a secret British operation. Defence sources, who declined to be named, said yesterday that conclusive proof that “some kind of chemical weapon” had been fired in Syria had been established by scientists at the Ministry of Defence’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire.”
So we have a story from an unnamed source that some soil in Syria may be contaminated by some unspecified chemical weapon. The Times is a News International rag and, for Rupert Murdoch, this constitutes hard news.
First we should question whether this story and the subsequent statement by Mr. Hagel have any merit at all. If the British government do have contaminated soil from Syria then let them say so; it’s worth investigating. But rather than setting trip wires that commit Americans to combat and potentially death let’s think this through.
Why do we abhor Weapons of Mass Destruction? It’s not because they kill people, many weapons do that. It’s because they kill masses of people. Hydrogen bombs are an obvious example but gas attacks are another. So if we are looking for evidence of the use of WMD we should be looking for far far more than traces of some bloody substance in a plastic tub of questionable providence. We should be looking for masses of dead people. If Assad is using Sarin to run his lawn mower we should not give a toss. If he’s exterminating thousands with pick axe handles we should sit up and take notice. We should consider the crime not the mechanism used to commit the crime.
Like the absurdity of discerning racism by a single casual word the existence of a few grams of chemical is not a defining piece of evidence. The West has a history of intervening in the Middle East and all interventions are couched in altruistic arguments designed to placate the electorate but fundamentality all interventions have been for the benefit of Western countries.
The decision of whether to intervene in Syria is a difficult one but the United States should resist being bounced into another war by idiots and war mongers.
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Gaza Ceasefire – But the agression continues
Tags: bollocks, ceasefire, ex-pats, gaza, hamas, israel, Mark Regev, palestine, rockets, wanker, white phosphorous
Mr Regev in front of one of “his” cities
Today BBC TV news had an interview with Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev who complained, in his Australian accent, that Palestinians were shooting missiles into “our cities”. A quick reference to Wikipedia reveals that he was born Mark Freiberg in Australia and emigrated to Israel at the age of 22. This seems not to be atypical. Recently I heard another Israeli official with a British accent and most of the Israeli settlers I’ve heard interviewed have come from the United States.
Nice. Very nice. It must be great to be born in a liberal Western democracy where religious and political freedom are guaranteed and diversity promoted; to then find your “spiritual self” and fuck off to Israel to go on International TV and start spouting off about how the local people are firing missiles into “our cities”.
Wikipedia states that Mr. Regev was a prominent member of the Socialist-Zionist youth movement, Ichud Habonim, and was active in the Melbourne University Jewish Students Society and this is the trouble with people whose recent ancestors come from other countries: They tend to be wankers. They idolise a nation that never really existed. The second generation Irish of Boston drink green Guinness, bang on about “the craic” and (in the past) threw money into buckets in pubs to fund the IRA’s bombing campaign. The second generation Scots walk around Heathrow airport draped in bloody Tartan and stinking of Whisky. The second generation British brag about the SAS and the second generation Pakistanis in Britain follow an idiotic fundamentalist version of their religion which is at odds with the freedom they enjoy in the UK.
The descendent of emigrants can develop stupid romanticised ideas of how their supposed home country should be. When all they do is go on holiday and make a nuisance of themselves this is tolerable. When they “return” to Palestine/Israel and start taking yet more Palestinian territory for their “settlements” and aiding the attacks on a people who have been under occupation for over fifty years then they become a problem for everyone.
Mr. Regev is a idealogical fanatic. Here he is quibbling about who is a journalists to try to legitimise air strikes on buildings occupied by journalists and here he is trying to evade allegations that Israel used white phosphorous against civilians.
A previous Talking Bollocks article documented him talking bollocks while attempting to justify continued settlement activity. His mechanical, preprogrammed and self supporting rhetoric is reminiscent of any fundamentalists Islamist. That Israel appoints such a person to be an official spokesman is indicative of the lunacy which allows Israel to claim to be a liberal democracy while simultaneously settling foreign land with religious fundamentalists.
We now have another ceasefire and that can only be good news. However it is not enough to call for the Israelis to stop attacking Gaza or for Hamas to stop firing missiles into Israel. These are merely the overt and violent forms of aggression prevalent in Palestine/Israel.
While the ceasefire holds the Palestinians will be forced to continue to live under occupation in the West bank or under siege in Gaza while yet more starry eyed religious tossers arrive from abroad to take yet more of their land. The BBC World Service reported that between the start of the Oslo peace process and the date that it collapsed Israel doubled the number of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land – What incentive have the Palestinians to negotiate under those conditions?
The settlements activity is provocation for future conflict and while it continues Israel remains the aggressor and the Palestinians the victims. If there is to be peace in the area it will not be hammered out by ideologues but by pragmatists. Israel would do better to appoint ordinary Israelis to positions of power rather than wankers like Mr. Regev.
Australia – Not good enough for Mark Regev
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