Harry's Place

This is a guest post by Terry Fitz

It must have seemed a good idea at the time to the Tory Central Office staff or the think tank policy wonks that devised it but the hustings system being used by the Tories to select Parliamentary candidates went seriously wrong on the seventh of this month in London’s East End.

It may well have been a good thing in places like Cambridge, Exeter or Frimley but ,as the leadership of the ultra left Socialist Workers Party found out to their cost, no system is proof against the power of the leaders of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets to manipulate the block votes under their command.

The venue for the hustings was St Hilda’s, a charitable institution set up by Cheltenham Ladies College in the last century and very near to Brick Lane. As the Bangladeshi family groups arrived they immediately segregated themselves and when the debate started there were about two hundred and fifty people in the hall.

The whole thing was a charade from the beginning and was shown to be so when one of the white candidates, a woman who by her accent would have been much happier speaking to an audience in South Ken or Cheltenham, asked actual Tory Party members to put their hands up. About twenty did so, all white.

As expected Zakir Khan won the nomination with seventy per cent of the vote so avoiding a run off. What was interesting was that there were a number of Labour and Lib Dem members who turned up to vote the reasons for which make the politics of Byzantium positively straghtforward.

It is now possible to state the actually situation in terms of the relative strengths of the pro and anti IFE groups in Tower Hamlets and this is what is at the heart of the campaign over the next eight weeks. IFE is now grouped around Respect and the Lutfur Rahman group in the Labour Party. Of the IFE/Labour group two of those not selected who defected to Respect, Salim Ullah and Fazlu Hoque, if elected will defect back to Labour in order to vote for Lutfur Rahman as leader of the Labour Group. Those of you who saw the Despatches programme will remember him as the shifty character who kept licking his lips and refusing to answer Gilligans questions.

It is vital for IFE to keep Rahman as leader as it is from control of the council and its PVE money and other funds that a great deal of IFE’s money comes from. It is the election of the actual councillors that presents the biggest problem as Rahman and IFE could just end up with enough candidates to retain control of the Labour Group and therefore the leadership.

Questions are being asked as to why more known IFE Labour Cllrs were not deselected by Ken Clark and the London Regional Party. There was always the situation where if too many were deslected they would simply leave with their block of voters, join with Respect and still end up running the borough. Even so London Labour could definately have culled a few more and not provoked a rebellion. In order to appear politically correct they actually deselected a really good white councillor, Alex Hislop, so they wouldn’t be accused of racism.

The Parlimentary race is now a three way fight. Although the successful Tory candidate Zakir Khan has IFE connections, his brother Dilwar Hussein is the current CE of the London Muslim Centre and a first cousin is the current treasurer, he is running his own campaign and has his own political ambitions. The reason that Labour and Lib Dem members and supporters voted for him in the hustings was to try to dilute the IFE vote across the three parties to ensure that the Labour candidate Rushanara Ali is elected.

To give any guarantee of this it was necessary to have a three horse race but at the moment she is so low profile she isn’t even in the radar and while she owes her selection to the chattering classes of Bow, that’s our local Islington, she simply hasn’t been campaigning and has had to rely on outside canvassers from around the Young Foundation think tank of which she is a Fellow.

Her strategy has been to say nothing controversial, in fact she has been totally silent on everything, and rely on the residual Labour vote and the splits in Respect to get herself elected. Some observers see the emergence of Zakir Khan as enough to get her in but others are not so sure, this is Tower Hamlets after all.

Another factor going against Labour is that all of the candidates on the Bethnal Green and Bow slate are Asian in a borough that still has a majority of white people. My soundings in the pubs across the area, always a useful indication of what’s going on, is that a lot of white people just aren’t going to vote at all. Apart from the tactics that the parties use and the morality of them, a population with roots going back many generations now feel totally disenfranchised to the extent that they have just given up. This syndrome is leading, in other parts of the country, to the rise of the BNP, fact that the great and the good have woken up to at last even if a little late.

The biggest danger is from the Mayoral referendum for the whole of the borough which takes place on election day. The yes vote is being coordinated by IFE and is supported by Galloway, Livingston and Andy E Neuman and his fellow Spartists on SU. The no vote is officially all of the other parties but on election day a significant section of IFE/Labour voters will vote yes.

IFE sees the office of Mayor as its number one priority. Elected for four years the post has control of the one billion pound budget that is available at the moment, with more in the pipeline, and as importantly the power of patronage to place IFE members in position of power. While an IFE member of Parliament would be ideal it is only a possibility. IFE have got their options open on the control of the council. Either Lutfur Rahman gets back as leader or the referendum leads to the election of an IFE Mayor with Azad Ali as a possible candidate and a strong chance of winning.

All in all not a good scenario. Direct rule from Westminster? Well it has been used elswhere and might be the last chance and we are definately in the last chance saloon.

Asscociated Press: Suicide attack in northwest Pakistan kills 13

Pakistan — A suicide bomber driving a motorized rickshaw blew himself up at a security checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan on Saturday, officials said, killing at least 13 people, injuring 52 and underscoring the nation’s relentless security threat.

The blast in the small town of Saidu Sharif in Pakistan’s violence-battered Swat Valley was the second major attack in the country in less than 24 hours, raising fears of a new wave of violence by anti-government militants. Suicide bombers killed 55 people in near-simultaneous blasts Friday in the eastern city of Lahore.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is clearly unhappy about the heavy sentences handed down to the Starbucks-trashers last week. Very unhappy indeed. Almost frothing you might say.

Wind her up. Here she goes:

But this week even I, even I, can see that for the British establishment Muslims are contemptible creatures, devalued humans. As I prayed before starting this column I felt tears stinging my eyes and my face was burning as if I had been slapped many times over. Do they expect me to turn the other cheek? Millions of other Muslims must have felt what I did. And some may well go on to do things they shouldn’t. Their acts will intensify anti-Muslim prejudices and will be used to justify injustice. The cycle is vicious and unrelenting.

Once again at weddings and birthday parties, in quiet, tranquil mosques, at dinner tables across the land, including those of millionaire Muslims, I am hearing murmurs of trepidation and disquiet – voices kept low, sometimes vanishing into whispers, just in case; you never know if they will break down the door. These people are, like myself, well incorporated into the nation’s busy life. Some own restaurants and businesses, others work in the City or law firms and chambers. At one gathering a frightfully posh, Muslim public school boy (aged 14), an excellent cricketer, said in his jagged, breaking voice: “I will never live in this country after finishing my education. They hate us. They’ll put us all in prison. Nothing we do is OK. Do you think I am wrong Mrs Yasmin?”

That’s funny, I was speaking to one of several Muslim lawyers I know the other day - well integrated into the nation’s life just like Yasmin’s examples above: and when we discussed the very same issue he managed to get through to the end of the conversation without choking up in impotent rage about the sentencing of rioters or informing me he’s off to join Al-Qaeda because of a television programme. But then again, he’d come to Britain from a country where people’s doors really were kicked down in the night and could tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And he wouldn’t dream about telling lies about Muslims in the national press for money either.

This is a guest post by The Insider

Here is a letter which has been passed to me, and which deserves a wider audience.

Dear Mr Hewitt

In your letter to the Independent newspaper this morning, written in your capacity as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the charity Interpal, you say:

“For years we have all been implementing ever more demanding ‘risk management’ and ‘due diligence’ procedures to ensure the correct use of donations.”

You have been Chairman of Interpal for many years. Do you also claim to have conducted “for years…due diligence” over the activities of some of your partner charities in the West Bank and Gaza?

I ask because video evidence exists of incitement to violence and hatred and the promotion of terrorist ideology in respect of several of your major partner charities which have been in receipt of substantial funds from Interpal over the years.

You will also recall the Commission found that your charity fell short of the due diligence expected from a charity operating in a region as volatile as the occupied Palestinian Territories. I refer to the following extracts of the Commission’s report of their inquiry into your charity published in February 2009 following transmission of the BBC Panorama programme “Faith Hate and Charity“:

• “…the Inquiry concluded that the charity trustees: had not taken sufficiently rigorous steps to investigate allegations about some of their partner organisations, (Paragraphs 49-68)

• had not put in place adequate due diligence and monitoring procedures to be satisfied that these organisations were not promoting terrorist ideologies or activities. Where procedures were in place, they were not sufficient nor fully implemented.(Paragraphs 115-147)

• had not adequately managed the charity’s relationship with the organisation the Union for Good (whose President  is Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi). The Inquiry concluded that the charity’s continued membership of the Union for Good was not appropriate for a number of reasons set out in the report, including the involvement of designated entities in projects co-ordinated through the Union for Good, that designated entities had been amongst the Union for Good’s membership, and that one of the charity’s trustees was closely linked to the organisation.”

The Commission’s report disclosed that the trustees “regularly reassured” the Commission that they would co-operate with their inquiry. Indeed, responding to the Commission’s announcement after transmission of the Panorama programme  that they would review their previous (and second) inquiry into your charity, you issued the following statement: “We will continue to cooperate fully with the UK authorities  including the Charity Commission  in any enquiries they may wish to raise with us and to grant them unfettered access to our records, as we have always done to-date”.

In the event, the Commission say they encountered significant difficulties in securing the cooperation of your charity. For example, the Commission said the trustees had

• “Missed extended deadlines for specific requests” such that the Commission had to resort to their powers under Section 8 of the Charities Act to get answers.

• Claimed to have conducted what amounted to a “thorough investigation” into the BBC’s allegations whereas in fact the trustees appear to have done little more than accept assurances from your Palestinian partner charities with simple questionnaires. E.g. Q: “Does your charity urge hatred and violence?”  A: “We don’t support hatred or violence..”

• Should have acted with “greater dilligence to satisfy” yourselves that your partner charities were “not directly or indirectly promoting terrorist ideology or activities.”

The precise matter over which you claim today your charity has been duly diligent for so long is ensuring the correct use of Interpal’s funds. And yet the Commission suspected this had been just a paper exercise:

“The Charity’s partners were required to sign and adhere to a Funding Agreement committing them to use the Charity’s funds for charitable purposes only and setting out the sanctions that may apply should they not do so. The trustees could give no indication of how they monitored whether partners complied with the Funding Agreement, or any examples of when they would consider it necessary to take steps to check compliance. It appeared to be a paper exercise.” (para 133 b)

Interpal’s partner charities were also required to fill in “Project Evaluation” requesting the justification for continued funding. However, the Commission found that these forms were “frequently left blank or inadequately filled in.” (para 133c)

What struck me about your latest claim to have practised “due diligence” for so long is that all of the above failures of due diligence by your charity were discovered by the Commission several years after the trustees had undertaken to the Commission to implement due diligence in monitoring your partner charities. This undertaking was given in 2003 following the Commission’s second inquiry into Interpal’s affairs.

When the Charity Commission published their inquiry report you said your charity had been “vindicated.” This was not the case.  Your claim prompted the Commission’s Chief Executive Andrew Hind to issue the following statement: “Our report does not give the charity a clean bill of health.”

What weight, do you suggest any objective reader should attach to any of your claims that Interpal has been run with due diligence uppermost in your charity’s collective mind?

Sincerely

John Ware

BBC Current Affairs

John McHugo is chair of Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine.

Who reports the group’s “Members news”? Jenny Tonge.

Readers may recall that McHugo chaired an event in London last November where Bill and Kathleen Christison, an odd couple of former CIA officers, presented their new book, “Palestine in Pieces”. The event was backed by Daud Abdullah’s Middle East Monitor and the Cordoba Foundation, the political vehicle of British Islamist Anas al Tikriti. The Christisons were also hosted by Amnesty International UK when they were in London.

McHugo, on the left, Kathleen Christison, Anas al Tikriti, Daud Abdullah, Bill Christison and Oliver McTernan of “Forward Thinking” at the event

The audience. The man on the left in the front is South African Islamist thug and antisemite Achmad Cassiem.

Now McHugo has sung his praises (pdf, pp. 60-62) for the Christisons in Arches Quarterly, a publication of the Cordoba Foundation. They are so good that schools and universities should make their book “a basic text”:

The Israeli ‘new historians’ have shown that crucial elements of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession in 1947-9 were confirmed by Israeli archival sources. According to Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, when Likud was returned to power in Israel in 2001 orders were given that no trace of the influence of these new historians should remain in history text books used in schools. This is only one example of a whole culture of denial which extends beyond history to what Israel is doing in the occupied territories today. That is why Palestine in Pieces is so valuable. It is written in simple, clear English. The powerful photographs relate directly to the text. You can read it in a couple of hours, and it will make you understand the violence, pillage, and ‘memoricide’ that underpin Israel’s occupation, and how that occupation deprives Palestinian Muslims and Christians of their rights, possessions, dignity and sometimes even their lives. I hope it will become a basic text used in Sixth Form and University courses in this country, and that it will be equally successful in America.

Melanie Phillips and Michael Gove, by contrast, should be banished from the media. After quoting from a Times article written by Gove in 2002 and Gove’s book “Celsius 7/7”, McHugo says:

Until Gove withdraws these remarks, I suggest that, like Phillips, he is not a fit and proper person to write columns in a mainstream newspaper or to appear on the BBC.

How fit and proper are the Christisons? Well, Bill is a 9/11 troofer:

Let’s address the real issues here. Why is it important that we not let the so-called conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 be drowned out? After spending the better part of the last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and have also carefully watched several videos that are available on the subject. I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the “official story” put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false. I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission would have us believe. The items below highlight the major questions surrounding 9/11 but do not constitute a detailed recounting of the evidence available.

ONE: An airliner almost certainly did not hit The Pentagon. Hard physical evidence supports this conclusion; among other things, the hole in the Pentagon was considerably smaller than an airliner would create. The building was thus presumably hit by something smaller, possibly a missile, or a drone or, less possibly, a smaller manned aircraft. Absolutely no information is available on what happened to the original aircraft (American Airlines Flight 77), the crew, the “hijackers”, and the passengers. The “official story”, as it appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report simply says, “At 9:37:46, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, traveling at approximately 530 miles per hour. All on board, as well as many civilians and military personnel in the building, were killed.” This allows readers to assume that pieces of the aircraft and some bodies of passengers were found in the rubble of the crash, but information so far released by the government does not show that such evidence was in fact found. The story put out by the Pentagon is that the plane and its passengers were incinerated; yet video footage of offices in the Pentagon situated at the edge of the hole clearly shows office furniture undamaged. The size of the hole in the Pentagon wall still remains as valid evidence and so far seems irrefutable.

TWO: The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11. A substantial volume of evidence shows that typical residues and byproducts from such demolition charges were present in the three buildings after they collapsed. The quality of the research done on this subject is quite impressive.
…
At the Los Angeles meeting of the American Scholars’ Symposium, one of the main speakers, Webster Tarpley, summarized his own views on the events of 9/11. He emphasized that “neocon fascist madmen” had perpetrated the 9/11 “myth.” He went on to say, “The most important thing is that the 9/11 myth is the premise and the root of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War and the coming attack on Iran. … We must … deprive [the myth's perpetrators] of the ability to stampede and manipulate hundreds of millions of people [with their] … cynically planned terrorist events.”

Let’s give Webster Tarpley and other mistakenly labeled conspiracists who have labored in the wilderness for so long three cheers.

Webster Tarpley is a nutter who has worked with Lyndon LaRouche. He sees troof everywhere. Did you know the undie bomber was a “patsy” of US intelligence?

On Israel, both Christisons write one poisonous piece after another. An example from Counterpunch:

We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives’ agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being “Israeli-occupied territory.” Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It’s time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.

Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties — the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel’s safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.

You see, Zionism is racism, and the state of Israel is best eliminated, they say in another Counterpunch piece:

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism’s racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are “right” for ignoring Zionism’s fundamental racism.

In fact, Israel is like Nazi Germany:

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel.

The Christisons’ diatribes are greatly appreciated by fans such as the Holocaust deniers at the “Institute for Historical Review” and KKK hater David Duke.

John McHugo wants the work of the Christisons to be taught in schools? He is not well.

This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog

On 2 March I posted an article expressing concern about John Pilger: and, more importantly, about what would appear to be the repeated failure of his publishers at the New Statesman to moderate or edit his rhetoric concerning Zionism and Jews.

I summarised my concerns in a letter to the New Statesman. They had the decency to publish (most of) it as follows:

Having correctly demanded public decency about Muslims and Islam (15 February), the NS keeps publishing John Pilger’s feverish rhetoric against Jews and Zionism (”Listen to the heroes of Israel”, 1 March).

Pilger lambasts “the murderous, racist toll of Zionism” and approves Gilad Atzmon depicting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a recent essay as being “at the heart of the battle for a better world”. Atzmon states: “Considering Zionism is a murderous, racist, expansionist ideology, it is natural to stress that people who are affiliated with Israel and Zionism must be removed immediately from any political, government, military or strategic posts and so on.”

Nevertheless, Atzmon stresses that he doesn’t mean Jews, unlike Pilger, who asserts “[Atzmon’s] fellow Jews in western countries . . . whose influence is crucial, are still mostly silent . . . it renders them culpable should their silence persist”. Pilger must know that Jews have extensive and bloody experience of their tiny number being collectively blamed for preventing the birth of a better world. In any other context, NS editors would recognise such claims of mass culpability as racist.

Regrettably, they cut the ending

Furthermore, when citing Rami Elhanan as his hero, Pilger should consider this: “I am a Zionist in the sense that I deeply believe that the Jewish people, like any other people in the world, deserve their right to self-determination, in their ancient homeland…the only way out of this endless cycle of violence, is the “Two states” solution”. The author? Rami Elhanan.

Pilger can have his own mass Jewish culpability; Elhanan’s empathy; or Atzmon’s Zionist exclusion. But surely not all three.

Even more regrettably, someone at the New Statesman saw fit to put “On Israel” as the title of my letter. In its own small way, this epitomises much of the current disconnect between Israel’s critics and the bulk of the Jewish community. My letter was about the danger of antisemitism. It was not about Israel. That much will have been obvious to the vast majority of Jewish readers: but why the New Statesman missed that simple fact is a hugely more complex and contentious matter.

Meanwhile, this week, Pilger criticises Australian media magnate, Rupert Murdoch. According to Pilger

Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press, the only national newspaper, Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy.

Pilger’s article explores the consequences of this “murdochracy” upon Australia and her citizens, one of which is

The message is undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia’s highest calling.

Such false flags are flown for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers such as Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, in the 1930s.

I confess that Zionist financial control of Australian journalists is not one of my specialist subjects.  Still, I am worried as to what Pilger means by “Zionist groups“: and even more worried as to what his readers will think he means by such a loose expression.

Does he mean Zionist as in the sense of his “hero” Rami Elhanan?

I am a Zionist in the sense that I believe that Jewish people, like any other people in the world, deserve their right to self-determination

Or does he mean “Zionist” as Gilad Atzmon uses it?

I would urge NASA to join in and to make a special effort to find a suitable alternative planet for the Zionist homeland in outer space or even in another galaxy. The Galactic Zionist project would signify the immediate move from ‘promised land’ to ‘promised planet’…

…In a planet of their own the galactic Zionists wouldn’t need to oppress anyone, they wouldn’t ethnically cleanse either, they wouldn’t have to lock the indigenous people in concentration camps, for there won’t be any indigenous people around to abuse, starve, murder and cleanse.

One thing that we can be grateful for is that Pilger, as a principled anti-racist campaigner, most certainly does not mean Zionist in the sense of merely substituting it for the word Jew. After all, if he meant that, then Zionist groups paying for journalists would sound horribly similar to the old antisemitic theme about Jews running the media.

Still, if Pilger and his publishers at the New Statesman were more alive to the corrosive effects of linguistic imprecision, then we wouldn’t have the same old story in every edition.

On the Facebook page of Cageprisoners, you will find this from Moazzam Begg:

What’s he recommending? Why, himself, of course, telling tales again, on a Youtube channel for jihad. Other speakers featured on “westlondondawah” include the following charmers:

- al Qaeda preacher Anwar al Awlaki
- extremist, 9/11 troofer and fraudster Khalid Yasin
- Hamas supporter and absurd conspiracy theorist Haitham al Haddad
- Tameem al Adnani, deputy of jihadi hero Abdullah Azzam
- Hate preacher Murtaza Khan

The channel belongs to a website called fisabeelillah, a reference to “jihad fi sabeelillah”, jihad in the path of Allah. It offers tapes by Awlaki, Abu Hamza, Murtaza Khan, Uthman Lateef, and more.

How nice to see Mr Begg still contributing to the jihadi message.

The luvvies will fete him this weekend at the Southbank Centre:

Waiting – A play by Victoria Brittain

Date: March 12th and 13th
Time: 7.45pm
Venue: Purcell Room
Southbank Centre (near Waterloo station)

Hear the words of the wives of men detained in Guantanamo, Belmarsh, and Broadmoor for the first time in, Waiting, a play, with music, by Victoria Brittain.

After the play, panel discussion will take place on both nights, including Helena Kennedy QC, Salma Yacoob, Gareth Peirce, Manjinder Virk, Riz Ahmed, and Moazzam Begg

Jihad is just so trendy, isn’t it.

This is a crosspost by efrafandays

Alex Salmond and Ieuan Wyn Jones have continued their Violet Elizabeth Bott routine over failure to be included in three head-to-head televised leadership debates in the run-up to the General Election by writing a letter to the Director General of the BBC.

It is, we are told, a breach of human rights (that of “the people” of Scotland/Wales, not theirs: they are far too humble to make it about themselves).

Meanwhile, the aspic-preserved State Peace and Development Council in Burma have annulled the results of the 1990 General Election which the National League for Democracy is assumed to have won. In advance of new polls anticipated this year, the SPDC has banned senior NLD figures, including its incareated leader, Aung San Suu Kyi from participated; as well as announcing that they willhand-pick members of the Electoral Commission.

Visiting the country always has placed even the most ethically-minded tourist in a quandary, due to the SPDC’s involvement with most business and tendency to confiscate US dollars which they then use to access the international market.

US citizen, Nyi Nyi Aung had left Burma after his involvement in the failed pro-democracy movement in 1988. In February 2010, he was sentenced to three years hard labour in one of those Gulags which are not of our time. As his fiance discusses, although the formal charge was illegally importing foreign currency, his arrest occurred on arrival before he was able to declare to Customs.

Following an assassination attempt on the South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan during a visit to the country in 1994, which was attributed to North Korean agents, diplomatic relations between the Burma and the DPRK were broken. The two regiemes now have established a dictatorial tag-team with a 2007 rapprochement, with the assumption that the DPRK is seeking access to the natural resources in the region.

Perhaps recognizing one of the failings of their vision of socialism, the diplomatic-capitalists of DPRK has long since been suspected ofsupplying illegal narcotics to other nations. I would not be surprised if they were are seeking access to opportunities such as the nichevacated by Khun Sa at the time of renewed relations.

Whilst the Burmese military was cracking monks’ skulls in 2007, Alex Salmond wrote a letter to the SPDC and 188 other signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty requesting Observer status for Scotland at future talks.  One wonders if such ambition elicited a similar confusion to that which is being felt by at least some of the 30 international media organizations to whom he and Ieuan Wyn Jones wrote a similar letter.

(Note also a schoolboy titter from Osama Saeed suggesting that currying favour with the SPDC would be less significant than mistaking the RoK for the DPRK.)

Sit down man, you are a bloody tragedy.

This is a press release from One Voice Israel

Tel Aviv, March 11, 2010—OneVoice Israel staff and youth leaders urged hundreds of people attending United States Vice President Joe Biden’s speech at Tel Aviv University on Thursday not to let the extremists on either side seize the peace process.

Eight youth leaders joined OneVoice Israel Interim Director Tal Harris and Coordinator Guy Lupo in distributing nearly 1,000 flyers to attendees in support of the renewal of talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

“The agenda in Israel is being hijacked by extremists who work to undermine our government’s strategy for peace,” said Harris. “Today, we witnessed 700 students at Tel Aviv University eager for change, who disagree with the appeasement of extreme settlers.”

OneVoice Israel’s staff and youth leaders wearing the movement’s t-shirts stood out from the audience during Biden’s talk. Noticing their presence, the vice president gave the first question to our youth leader Danny Shaket.

Shaket asked Biden for his opinion on what the U.S. administration, the Israeli government, and the Palestinian Authority would need from the moderate majority in order to reach an agreement.

“The United States cannot want peace more than the Palestinians want it or more than the Israelis want it,” Biden said. “You have got to get to the point where the leaders are actually able to sit and hopefully what we can do in these proximity talks, being available to both parties, we can be a bridging mechanism.”

Throughout his speech, Biden voiced his commitment to end the conflict through a two-state solution.

“For Israel, then, this is about both preserving your identity and achieving the security you deserve, lasting security,” Biden said. “For Palestinians, statehood will not just fulfill a legitimate and long-sought aspiration common to all peoples; it will restore the fundamental dignity and self-respect that their current predicament denies them.”

Israel’s announcement of plans to build 1,600 Jewish homes in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in Arab East Jerusalem marred Biden’s visit and was condemned by the United States.

“[T]hat decision, in my view, undermined the trust required for productive negotiations,” Biden said on Thursday. “I — and at the request of President Obama condemned it immediately and unequivocally.”

The vice president’s comments were met with applause from the mainly Israeli audience, many of whom were students at Tel Aviv University.

“It’s unfortunate and dangerous that the Israeli government’s actions are not in sync with their two-state strategy,” said Tal Harris of OneVoice Israel.

Click here to listen to Danny Shaket’s question and U.S. Vice President’s Joe Biden’s response, starting at 37 minutes and 35 seconds.

Click here to listen to BBC World Service interview with OneVoice Israel’s Interim Director Tal Harris and youth leader Daniella Shlomo.

Click here to view pictures from the event.

The OneVoice is an international grassroots movement amplifying the voice of Israeli and Palestinian moderates. OneVoice works with Israelis and Palestinians in parallel, empowering them to seize back the agenda for conflict resolution and demand that their leaders achieve a two-state solution, guaranteeing the end of occupation and the establishment of Palestinian state, while ensuring the safety and security of the State of Israel.

BBC: Two suicide bombers have killed at least 20 people in the Pakistani city of Lahore, officials say.

REUTERS: Suicide bombers targeting the Pakistani military killed at least 39 people in the city of Lahore on Friday, officials said, despite government assertions that crackdowns had weakened Taliban insurgents.