The talk started late – about 5 or 10 minutes late.
Response to a very unpleasant blogger
I just sent a tweet to a man called Bruce Everiss.
He claims to be a political expert, but when writing on the Middle East, he just parrots classical anti-semitic drivel dressed up as libertarian anti-Zionism.
I usually find left-wing anti-semites to be the most obnoxious, as they believe strongly that they are anti-racist, and so frequently don’t even think through, or realise that, what they are saying is racist: he is very similar.
Here is one of his blogs. http://www.bruceonpolitics.com/2014/09/11/digging-through-all-the-lies-in-israel/.
Here is my response https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ePx2qxeCiJH9hQcRdMtGb2SMlj-Y1JOiLZED4SRZaOA/edit
I invited him to comment. I doubt he has the guts to respond: let’s see shall we.
[ 30-9-14 update: he blocked me.
What an utterly pathetic coward he is. In the great tradition of British Trotskyites, his blog doesn’t accept comments either.
It appears that he is scared. So many of them are scared of me on Twitter.
With the Palestinian Twitteristas, every time I offer to discuss peace, or explain the situation, they run for their lives. They block, mute, or send an offensive cartoon/picture, or even just start swearing and being insulting. How sad.
Bruce has other pieces that are similarly racist (anti-semitic) and anti-Jewish.
There is a stupid and hateful racist one entitled “is-the-talmud-the-most-evil-book-on-earth?”
He claims that he is quoted by the Sun and hobnobs with senior Conservative politicians.
As always, do let me know your thoughts
Someone on Twitter asked if Hamas used tunnels for food. Here’s my response
It is from information given to me by a friend at the Begin Sadat Institute:
Humanitarian Aid
Contrary to Hamas propaganda on the siege of Gaza, in fact there are no limitations on the
import of goods except weapons and certain dual-use items (for example chemical
fertilizer is a major ingredient for manufacturing explosives).
From 8 July, when Israel escalated its response to the rocket attacks from Gaza, until the
ceasefire began in the evening of 26 August (50 days) a total of 5,779 trucks entered Gaza
with approximately 85,000 tons of food *, 997 tons of medical supplies, 20.37 million liters
of various types of fuel (diesel, benzene etc.), 4,843 tons of gas for domestic use and a
few thousand tons of other products. The fighting in general, and the deliberate targeting
of the crossings by Hamas, reduced the flow of goods because many drivers feared to
show up (on any given day only a quarter to a half of the trucks planned for actually came).
Open letter sent to the editor of The Lancet (formerly one of the UK’s most respected and well-known medical publications)
Dear Mr Horton,
- please try and regain the 200 years of respect that you have lost in one foul swoop,
- explain to your readership what has happened and that you and all your readers were hoodwinked
- or continue to be a defender of antisemitic, racist charlatans.
A few words for Western and Arab feminists (and others)
I am sorry that this blog may appear harsh. I have had enough of hypocrisy and double standards.
There are c. 40 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South / West Asia
There is one country where a proud Arab Muslim woman can stand in the street and shout loudly that she wants to bring down the government – without being shot, sexually abused, raped, arrested or tortured.
- It’s not Egypt, where female Western reporters are groped while reporting and Arab women are openly molested and chased by gangs of men (such brave men eh?)
- It’s not India – where women are gang-raped on the orders of village elders and literally hung to die from trees, or a women was gang-raped on a bus in the capital and sexually tortured till she died an awful, brutal death.
- It’s not Pakistan, where women are actually stoned to death for causing embarrassment to the family. Oops, I forgot, if they are “lucky” they have acid thrown in their face instead – ooh, such brave men they have in Pakistan.
- It’s not Afghanistan, where beating of women and children is such a frequent occurrence that it is accepted as normal
- It’s not Saudi Arabia where women are not even permitted to drive a car and can be bundled into a police van for not wearing a headscarf
- It’s not in Iran where they have tens of thousands of “religious Police” (Revolutionary Guards) who can order you to cover your face, or will just punch you in the face if they wish.
- It’s not in Nigeria, where Boko Haram (literally “Western education is forbidden”) have kidnapped hundreds of girls and publicly glorified this act and threatened to sell them as sex slaves, for a life of rape and misery
- It’s not in Pakistan (Oh dear, have I mentioned there already) where the Taliban publicly threaten and murder nurses trying to end polio vaccinations, with the utterly bizarre excuse that it’s a Western plot. Well yes, it is a Western plot ; to save children, you stupid, murdering idiots.
- … It’s not Pakistan where girls (remember Malala Yousafzai) who want an education get a bullet in their head instead.
So … where is that bastion of freedom, in a sea of utter awfulness?
I will enlighten you. It’s a tiny little place called Israel, where Muslim Arabs are a minority.
Why aren’t the world’s feminists flocking there, writing blogs and praising it to the hills??
******* me, I don’t know either. Please leave your comments and explanations.
“Apartheid Israel? Only if you haven’t a clue.”
ISIS and me
I believe that I now share common cause with ISIS. Yes, seriously.
I am totally outraged at the woman who posted this truly laughable nonsense (please see the link below).
http://www.timesofisrael.com/senior-dutch-govt-employee-isis-a-zionist-conspiracy/
However, while ISIS’s reaction might be to declare jihad against her, for besmirching their name and calling them Zionist lackeys / 5th columnists, whatever, I have moved on and now laughing my head off at her absolute stupidity.
“ISIS is a Zionist plot” …
It’s brilliant, You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
It must be the most insane thing I have heard since the 1980’s when (I swear to god) I went to hear a talk by a radical left group, at the UK’s National Union of Students conference.
There were about 6 of us, including a dog, and including the speaker, in the rather large room.
The speaker told us, in all seriousness, that “Arthur Scargill was a class traitor”… (If you were born after the 1970s and don’t know who Arthur Scargill was, you really really really must google him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill)
I couldn’t believe my ears.
I left the room (to stop myself laughing my head off in full view of the speaker). I still remember the talk to this day.
I sent this to every UK national broadsheet newspaper Fri 8/8/2014
Dear Editor,
I wish to express my astonishment about the appalling Israeli army tactics in the recent war in Gaza.
To the best of my knowledge, never in the entire history of warfare (in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of wars the world has ever experienced) has there been such poor military behaviour.
I saw news reports on TV of it. I could not believe my eyes. I watched it over and over again.
Israel has set a new standard in warfare: it plumbed the depths and should leave the rest of the world ashamed for our inaction.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the element of surprise is arguably the most significant factor in any battle. It is crucial to shortening battles, winning battles, and minimising casualties on both sides.
Three things shocked me :-
1. I saw that Israel’s army dropped leaflets, way in advance, saying exactly which areas they were going to target and which they were not, even giving clear explanatory maps of safe areas and routes to these.
2. I saw that they went to the incredible trouble of painstakingly assembling every single telephone number, of every single house and apartment, in every single district of Gaza and then simultaneously and repeatedly telephoned to warn people that their home was a target (e.g. because there is a missile stored there, or a tunnel there, or someone is shooting from it, or there is a terror tunnel).
3. I saw that then they often dropped a small, loud but harmless, warning bomb, to precede the main one, to give civilians even more time to leave.
Meanwhile, the Hamas fighters immediately hid in their tunnels, and demanded on television and in newspapers that civilians stay put, and even deliberately rush to the roofs of threatened buildings, leaving defenceless civilians to stay and die in appalling numbers. Even a senior Iranian commander castigated Hamas’ shameless complicity to murder: http://www.timesofisrael.com/top-iranian-criticizes-hamas-for-civilian-casualties/
Surely, giving warnings and telegraphing your tactics so openly is really terrible military tactics, hugely endangering your own soldiers and allowing your enemy to escape? It seems blatantly obvious that they went to such ridiculous lengths, in order to minimise civilian casualties.
With this in mind, doesn’t it strike you as utter hypocrisy for some British politicians to criticise Israel for being “disproportionate”, especially when Hamas flagrantly and purposely fires deadly missiles at kindergartens, schools and apartment blocks.
It’s very peculiar to find that no-one is rioting on the streets, lambasting Hamas for war crimes. Double standards anyone, (un?) conscious antisemitism perhaps?
Returning to the point about warnings, why are so many people and politicians accusing Israel of war crimes, when they should actually be accusing every single other army in human history (that did not give those three warnings, thus endangering their own soldiers in order to save the lives of enemy civilians) of war crimes?
Best regards,
,,,
PS In passing, and purely on behalf of dictators everywhere, I would also like to thank Israel for diverting the entire world’s attention from some utterly disgusting crimes:-
-
in Syria and Iraq where they behead Christians and Shia Muslims and stick their heads on poles or eat their body parts for the camera;
-
in apartheid Tunisia where they sentenced a woman to death for becoming a Christian,
-
in Pakistan where they stone women to death if they marry a man the family does not like … etc etc ad nauseam
Worldwide conspiracy of silence over children being murdered in Gaza
“due to the heroic fighting” :