大象传媒

How can society ever hope to progress forward if we stifle free speech? It's good to see that the brighter younger generation are more keen on upholding free speech than the older generation dinosaurs like Trevor Phillips and Julian Lewis. It sounds to me like Trevor Phillips and Julian Lewis just want to surround themselves with like minded 'yes' men and don't want to hear any alternative viewpoints. Saddam Hussein surrounded himself with like minded 'yes' men, all simply telling him what he wanted to hear, and look what happened to him. If we want our society to progress forward, then we mustn't make the mistake of only surrounding ourselves with like minded 'yes' men. If we do that then we will be on the road to ruin.

When multiculturalism was at the height of fashion, men like Nick Griffin stood alone in their opposition to it, and took a lot of flack for it too. Now, in 2007, we all realise that multiculturalism has been a disaster, if we had listened to men like him earlier, July 7 might not have happened and our civil liberties might not be so threatened. So it is important that we listen to those with a challenging alternative perspective.

We are now living in the aftermath of the failed multicultural experiment. We are also experiencing the biggest wave of immigration in our history and are struggling to cope with the consequences of mass immigration - whether it be through the housing shortage, overcrowding, strain on public services or the home grown terror threat. This makes the BNP very relevant to the current political climate.

It's not just Britain that's struggling to cope with the consequences of mass immigration, France is too. Last night there was fresh rioting in Paris. If we stifle the debate and go around shouting "racist" and "Nazi" all the time, then the situation will never be addressed, society will not progress forward and the rioting in places like the Paris suburbs will continue and will probably get worse with the increased amounts of immigration.

Please stop reporting the northern Rock "crisis" as if it holds any real lasting political relevence for the majority of viewers. It is beyond parody that you're leading on this when mid-east peace is trying to be achieved for the first time in a decade. You really couldn't make it up.

I hope that Newsnight will not be tarring with the same brush (no pun or racism intended)both David Irwin and Nick Griffin. The former trivialised and denied a proven act of genocide; the latter was, until recently, the only voice protesting at the devastating levels of uncontrolled immigration of alien cultures. Griffin should be listened to at last.

hillsideboy (#4) "The former [Irving] trivialised and denied a proven act of genocide"

Hardly. Irving was a relatively late-comer to this controversial issue which is a far more critical issue in the context of freedom of speech tan most people appreciate. More people should look critically into what Faurisson, Zundel, Germar and others have said over the years and they should do so in the context of the 1943 Tehran Conference and the Autumn 1944 Quebec II which covered the (Stalin absent but driven) Morgenthau Plan to punish ALL of Germans. See Dietrich Deutch (2002) on this. What's the betting there's far more to this than meets the eye even 60 years on? One needs to look critically at the London Agreement and Articles of the IMT at Nuremberg, as well as who supplied the damning 'evidence'.

/blogs/newsnight/2007/11/mondays_prospects_1.html

and much earlier posts.

On the latest Labour funding shambles, it beggars belief that this lot were the ones who brought in the Act in 2000 and, not for the first time, have "misunderstood" the rules. As this looks like being the lead item tonight, I trust you will be giving them an extemely hard time. This has nothing to do with the Tories or the Lib Dems, it's entirely of their own making.

On the Oxford Union debate, where free speech is concerned I have a question to ask those who would like to ban certain individuals from speaking in public, however tastless their views may be. Who is to decide who may and may not speak, and on what authority will they make such decisions?

All importan stories - but please let Scotland see the Peter Marshall piece from Annapolis before you cut out to deal with more Labour sleaze in England. We've written Brown off.
But up here in Dundee we still have a
twinning link with Nablus - which is in Palestine, as well as with Alexandria which like Annapolis
is in Virginia. The hotline to
Hamas & Gaza runs via The Tay?!

- Today's Quote for the Day: "You talk about it in our system and people think you are a nutter" - Tony Blair on religion and politics. -

You talk about ANYTHING at odds with the Gramscist/Lukacsian/Frankfurt School programme of Cultural Marxism (PC) "in our system and people think you are a nutter" (the attack on Christianity being just one thread).

That's precisely how the programme was designed to work, and the sooner that more people wake up to this the better for us all.

/blogs/newsnight/2007/11/fridays_prospects_1.html

The debate on free speech and David Irving was one of the issues that I was asked about in Gaza back in feb 2000 when Blair and Clinton nearly got the last Oslo breakthrough with help from Arafat and Ehud Barak. It came as a bit of a shock when one of the young people whose class I drop in on in Gaza asked whether I had a view on Holocaust denial. That was during the Irvin trial in Vienna - so I drew their attention to that
and I pointed out that this was a
civil case ( a libel trial) and he lost it and went to jail. I then spoke to them a bit about history
and left them in no doubt that the Holcaust took place and Germany was
now recognising their responsibility to make sure the world never forgot.

A few days later I was in a hubbly bubbly restaurant in Remal in Gaza sipping tea and taking shelter from the rain while reading an Scottish newspaper (The Herald) which I had
in my rucksack. The rest of the folk in the bar were playing cards with a great deal of noise and increasingly outrageous displays of passion as the cards went on the table amid the puffs of smoke - interspersed with typical Gazan bursts of humour as they squinted at the foreigner in their midst to see if he was scared.

It was pelting down outside - and the lights had gone because of a power failure - when one man who was in overalls and who had been in the muddy trench outside the bar trying to get the electrics fixed emerged and sought refuge from the rain at the table by the door where I was.

He spoke no English - but after we exchanged greetings, he took a pair of pliers out of his electrician's overall and plonked them proudly
down on the table for admiration.
He then picked them up and said to me: 'Hitler! Adolf Hitler! Hitler good!'

Needless to say this caused a bit of momentary panic - until the shekel dropped and I realised that these
pliers were German and that he was commending German engineeering skill not lining up with David Irvine. So I then pick them up - check the mark of origin - and agree: 'German good!'

He then fished in the other pocket of his overalls and brought out a roll of green electrician's masking tape with the star of David on the sellophane packet. It was made in Israel. Holding it up, the old man then said: 'Ehud Barak! barak good!'
he then disappeared back into the mud and rain to continue plying his trade and trying to get the power going again to bring light to gaza.

Watching this, the other hard guys in the bar then gestured and asked if I knew this man? And I said no.
They then looked at my newspaper and asked: 'British?' To which I replied:
'No. Scottish!' At which point grins broke out all round and one of them shouted over: 'Scottish. Robin Cook.
Cook good!' To which another then replied: 'Cook good! Chirac good!' before resuming their card games.

Webcast no worky.

Maybe, if the parties who have the most to gain can make the problem simple enough for Mr Bush to understand, all parties may understand the problem.

Fingers crossed!

The Oxford Union protests do not surprise me at all, I'm sure in coming years those same protestors will be recruited into the intelligence services where they will silence the Dr David Kellys of the world, and others who have the temerity to use their free speech to expose the governments crimes.

Luckily the webcast did kick in up here in Scotland so we did see the
wonderful scenes from Chiang Mai as well as Peter Marshall's report even if the Newsnight Scotland opt-out on analog in the background dealing with the SNP's new MRSA policy of
washing hands and prescreening was
also of huge interest - as was news that Brown's long-term plans on new nuclear power stations and kicking the unemployed remain unpopular and rejected in his own native land ...

It is always irritating when New Labour rows about party funding irregularities force the Middle
East Peace process on to a back
foot: this too was a problem in
2000 when the activities of the
unofficial UK Middle East envoy
Lord Levy cause bemusement down
in Gaza about what kind of signal was being sent by Britain after he was exposed by 'The Sunday Times' as having also provided electoral help to the Israeli Labor Party when it was trying to hang on to power under Ehud Barak to deliver a settlement.

As somebody on Peter Marshall's film mentioned, a few of the same people are involved at Annapolis 7 years on - but I regard the involvement of both Barak and Blair as positives (a minority view I guess!)It also helps that Cheney has been hospitalised I guess - though we all wish him well.

Condi's strength on this issue is not just that she is black and she
knows a bit about discrimination -
but also that her focus has been on the practicalities of everyday life in Palestine under occupation and an unblocking of borders in particular.

It struck me as quite encouraging to hear Flynt Leverett mention that GW Bush had also grasped the importance of such basic everyday life reality matters in an earlier negotiation - even if I think that Leverett is completely wrong to dismiss such
views as 'politically naive'. If
Leverett lived in Palestine for a bit he might change his view. The Blair input is also useful in this respect - focussing on e.g. sewage projects in Gaza, water sharing, tourism access to Bethlehem and getting local government working in Nablus. That may at some point need to be followed up with a Mo Mowlem style visit to Bhargouti in a jail in Israel - but first things first.

But what was especially encouraging about Peter Marshall's film was the vox pop interviews with Americans of Jewish descent and their pragmatism as well as their optimism in the main. In an election year that is a positive as well if representative.

So let's see what transpires - the floating balloons in Thailand are
perhaps an omen that things may be about to change for the better ...
even if Commander Yates may bring further bad news for Gordon Brown in the morning ....... and the press in Britain will be scurrying to dig out
Andrew Rawnsley's 'Servants of the People' to remind themselves exactly of what Gordon said and when about an earlier donation from Ecclestone!

Perhaps someone should point out that the "Palestinian leader" you refer to runs a non elected government in the West Bank, Hamas won the Palestinian elections, remember? Or did that little fact go down the "Memory Hole"?

大象传媒 = MiniTrue

I'm phoning Winston Smith to complain.

If i take my shirt off whilst near the oxford uni looking for the nearest pub, will i get a police escort?
Thanks to the hard left, who yet again make their appearance whenever Griffins about, inadvertently helps his cause everytime. Why was Griffin and Irving at the Oxford union?.. to debate free speech...oooh the irony of it-and base irony at its most simplistic form...Griffin and Irving 1, the hard left 0

Andrew Rawnsley wrote, remember, on page 96: "During that limousine ride with the Chancellor, Blair developed with Brown an alternative ruse ...."

Post #15 is, of course, right to recall that Hamas won elections.

Hamas have also a reputation for taking a tough line on corruption.

But Abbas won the Presidential election so also has a mandate.

And Salaam Fayaad - who was a
highly respected IMF official
who went on to serve as PNA's
Finance Minister under both
Fatah and Hamas - is also a
member of the Palestinian Legislative body. He stood
as an independent MP and is
in my key to any settlement.

Fiscal probity remains the
key issue in restoring the
confidence of Palestinians
in their own governmental
processes - and it is also
essential to reassure public
opinion in Israel that funds
will not be diverted .......

Getting the automatic cash
machines working in Gaza is
something I would also like
to see happen soon as well:
it is ridiculous that PNA
ministers have to carry the
cash to pay salaries over a
border with Egypt in cases!

Learn lessons from Southern
Africa where even when there
was huge tension between the apartheid government in SA and its black African neighbours, the Southern African Customs and Monetary Unions continued to
function - in large part due
to the professionalism of the
officials (customs officers,
central bankers, statisticians)
whos gruff respect for each other
developed across racial barriers
over the years. Water and sewage is another area where technical experts on both sides can perhaps establish 'functional communities' in these everyday real world areas.

An interesting family history given many recent topics? The 1976 Race Relations Act has a lot to answer for if it ends up being responsible for formenting the very behaviour which is was designed to protect people from, i.e. if some minority groups can use other minority groups to their advantage.

"Councillor Bennie Abrahams disliked me. He was in the Labour Party. Abrahams was a local businessman and a Jew. He was in control of race relations in the North East."

What Stalin, Dexter-White and Morgenthau wanted, and to some extent did to the Germans after the war, limited what type of government was possible in Germany over the following decades. So what the Germans have said since WWII is inevitable given the laws proscribing anything else surely? This is what the 'freedom of speech' issue is now all about in my view. If one legally PROSCRIBES one political position, one effectively PRESCRIBES another, and if that is the case, where is the freedom to choose? Those protesting in Oxford last night were not campaigning for free-speech and civil liberties at all, quite the contrary,a dn it isn't the 'far left' that benefits from these protests, it's the major parties (see second part of this comment).

Anyone in doubt should look very closely at 'The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy' by John Dietrich (2002) in conjunction with the declassified minutes of the 1943 Tehran Conference and Quebec II. They should also look into what Eisenhower said and did, as well as the scale and duration of the de-nazification programme. What Morgenthau wanted was pretty much what the IMT later tried Germans for doing. Roosevelt and Churchill were initially agreeable to summary executions, Stalin had wanted 50,000-100,000 and Morgenthau and the US Treasury, Roosevelt and Eisenhower wanted punishment of the German people. Stimpson and the State Department was largely responsible for curbing those excessess, but it wasn't 100% successful.

One can't accept all that history has recorded, as only declassified material is published.

Why do so many so readily mistakenly believe that Irving went to prison for losing a libel case which HE had brought? He didn't of course, but he was criticised by the judge, and he was judged an anti-Semite and holocaust denier. He is a holocaust sceptic and a fan of Hitler, just as Deborah Lipstadt had written. but more of us should perhaps ask why anyone is subject to such extreme vilification for expressing doubts given that it's not the job of courts to prove or disprove historical fact, especially given that the IMT trials were unique in ot following the normal Western conventions of rules of evidence:

See articles 19,20,21 especially.

The Soviets had a major hand in the drafting of the Charter.

Irving, it should be noted, went to prison last year for 'Holocaust Denial' in Europe because this behaviour is illegal in several EU states. If Germany had had its way recently, it would have become illegal throughout the EU. One should perhaps ask who this law has advantaged and whether it is justified. That is the critical issue to focus upon. As Justice Gray said in the 2000 libel trial, it is not the job of courts to decide what is true and false in history, that is the job of historians. The job of the courts is to uphold and judge in terms of the law, but what law is being upheld throughout all of these trials and why was it passed? This requires some VERY careful research/thought, as the answer is not at all obvious, nor will it be for many years to come if I am on the right track.

2) Still on the subject of Europe:

- "This is not about freedom of speech, it's about providing a free platform to disseminate fear in the British community of Jews, Asians, and black people," Mr. Irving and Mr. Griffin, he says, "have had freedom of speech. They have had their day in court and were convicted of Holocaust denial which is one of most egregious forms of anti-Semitism." -

The Christian Science Monitor, quoting Denis MacShane,
Labour MP and & former Minister for Europe

What many would still wish the post war generations to forget (or just not clearly understand perhaps even though it's well documented), is that WWII was, from Germany and its Axis allies' perspective, initially a pact's war against the Communist International (COMINTERN). It was, let's be crystal clear here, an explicit war against what Hitler described as Jewish BOLSHEVISM and its supporters. Russia was Japan's neighbour in the East (and China was about to go communist) and the German communist party was, i8n te 20s and 30s, the largest outside the USSR. Stalin had earlier told the German communists that their future lay with Hitler. Even Stalin was anti-Bolshevik. Like Hitler, he tried, from Lenin's death, to establish Socialism in One Country, i.e National Socialism. The Nazi party was a LEFT wing party, it was a workers party, and anti-speculative capitalist which it made illegal. Stalin too was regarded as an 'anti-Semite', especially after his treatment of the Bolsheviks. International Bolshevism was Zinovite-Trotskite (pretty much what we know today as Anarcho-Capitalist, or NeoCon). That's why the original Bolsheviks were all tried (in the 1930s Moscow Trials). They confessed, and were executed for subversion. At the same time, Stalin was purging his red army of Bolsheviks.

Look into the people who presided in the Moscow Trials and at the IMT at Nuremberg after WWII. Look at the 'evidence' provided by the USSR and what they said about Katyn (and the Eastern camps). Look critically at the demographics for Europe before WWII and after. Look especially at where the Eastern camps were, and the size of the Jewish population of Poland and 'Russia' (Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine), and when the Iron Curtain went up. Politics is a form of demographic psychological warfare.

At Nuremberg and after, who did the counting? Who presented the soap, shrunken heads, lampshade and other (now discredited) 'evidence' at the IMT? What did they assert about Katyn? Why is that important?

Today, note how few people look critically at what was said and done?

Why one might ask? Too many of us fail to question the assumptions we take to be obvious. It isn't our logical reasoning which lets us down, it's our uncritical affirmation of the assumptions which we are fed and which we infer from.