Apropos of Kerron’s tale of cat meets firework, comes this story from the Beeb, which speaks for itself…

Backside firework prank backfires

A man suffered internal burns when he tried to launch a rocket from his bottom on Bonfire Night.

Paramedics found the 22-year-old bleeding, with a Black Cat Thunderbolt Rocket lodged inside him, when they attended the scene in Sunderland.

He suffered a scorched colon and is now recovering in hospital, where his condition is described as stable.

A spokesman for the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) said the prank could have been fatal.

Douglas McDougal, from the NEAS, said: “We received a call stating there was a male who had a firework in his bottom and it was bleeding.

“He sustained fairly significant injuries in the fact that there’s huge damage to that particular area.”

Mr McDougal added: “Potentially it could have been a fatal incident.

“There’s a lot of major blood vessels round that area, so infection would probably be a huge problem for him.

“And also the body naturally produces methane gas, so combine that with the firework and the exploding effect with methane’s flammability - it certainly could have been a lot worse than it really was.”

A spokesman for the Firework Association described the bizarre prank as “beyond belief”.

He said: “We have spent a long time working with the government to create laws that make fireworks safer and better for the public.

“This incident is very concerning but hopefully an isolated one.”

Northumbria Police said they were aware of the incident, which happened in the Dame Dorothy Street area of Monkwearmouth, but are understood not to be carrying out further inquiries.

There you go, proof positive of evolution by natural selection and you just know, don’t you, that this’ll have been filmed on someone’s mobile and will up on Youtube in a day or two.

It’s not often I have anything positive to say about the Lib Dems, but just for today I’ll make an exception in the case of their proposed ‘Freedom Bill’ or ‘Great Repeal Bill’, which they also called it.

Okay, so its pretty much a gimmick with little real prospect of going anywhere other than the Lib Dems website, but at least the list of illiberal laws they want to get rid of is pretty good one to be going on with, and with a bit of luck it should spark off a bit more debate on the subject of personal liberty.

1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square - Sections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

No complaints with this one at all.

2. Identity Cards - Identity Cards Act 2006

Nor this one.

3. Extradition to the US - Part 2, Extradition Act 2003

Fine, again, although would have been better to qualify this as ‘Fast Track Extradition to the US’ - it’s not the we object to extraditions to the US outright, we’d just prefer them to follow a fair and equitable judicial process.

4. Conditions on public assemblies - Section 57, Clause 123, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003

Removal of more curbs on the right to peaceful protest? Yep, good one.

5. Criminalising trespass -Sections 128 to 131, Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

And again, no real problems with one either.

6. Control orders - Section 1, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005

Do we want to get rid of indefinite house arrest without trial? Yeah…

7. DNA retention - Sections 78-84, Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Sections 9-10, Criminal Justice Act 2003

Nice to see S78-84 of the 2001 Act get a mention - that’s the Act we passed to cover the Old Bill’s arse after it was found that they’d been illegally retaining DNA samples for years.

8. Public interest defence for whistleblowing, Official Secrets Act 1989

Ah, yes - the Ponting Bill. See, its not just Labour that passes shitty illiberal legislation.

9. Right to silence, Sections 34-39, Public Order Act 1994 - England and Wales

And another Tory Act makes the top ten. Yeah, lets have the right to silence back and not the ‘you sort of have the right to silence but if you don’t cough we’ll string you up anyway’.

10. Hearsay evidence, Sections 114-136, Criminal Justice Act 2003

And another good one to finish on.

Okay, so there are a few omissions from the list that need to be added;

Blasphemy - for starters.

Something to tone down our berserker libel laws which are so pernicious that even Americans come here to sue.

The section in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that deals with data encryption keys that the govenment haven’t enacted due to their inability to figure out how to make it work.

The Inquiries Act - for obvious reasons.

The Emergency Powers provisions in the Civil Contingencies Act - anything that allows the suspension of the Courts and Habeas Corpus is a bad idea.

And given time, I’m sure that I’ll think of plenty more to be going with, especially anything that provides for the creation of a centralised database of personal information that’s not required for the purpose of criminal justice, licencing or tax/benefits.

I’ve taken the time to add another of Orwell’s essays, ‘Anti-Semitism in Britain’, to the sidebar and for no better reason that I consider it to be worth reading.

By way of a related matter, to my mind at least, an article of Mad Mel’s on which I previously commented includes this rather curious comment…

The Islamists, whose shrewdness and perspicacity are consistently overlooked by racist European liberals who believe that Arabs and Muslims are too backward to have anything intelligent to say…

Now one could, with some justification, spend a considerable amount of time discussing the suggestion that liberal disapproval of certain Islamic doctrines and values are animated by a racist view of the ‘backwardness’ of Islamic society, however that’s not what caught my attention. Rather its her reference to the percieved ’shrewdness’ and ‘perspicacity’ of the ‘Islamist’ that I find extremely interesting.

Both these qualities or, if you prefer, character traits have a long and unduntinguished history as part of the common currency of anti-Semitic discourse in European society and form part of what is the classic Jewish stereotype; that of the guileful and avaracious merchant/financier whose miserly shrewdness, low cunning and business acumen marks them out as fundamentally untrustworthy and prone to intrigue.

These are qualities that animate the two most notable literary expressions of the Jewish stereotype in English Literature, these being Shylock, the chief protagonist of Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’, and, of course Dickens’ creation, the quasi-demonic ‘kidsman’, Fagin.

Each of these two characters has, at various times, held aloft as alleged evidence of  anti-Semitism on the part of the author, for all that, in the case of Fagin, there is considerable evidence to show that Dickens was anything but anti-Semitic in his views and the real origins of Fagin derive from a real person, a Jewish petty criminal named Ikey Solomon, whose faith was transposed wholesale into the character of Fagin without Dickens ever giving thought to how that might come to interpreted. What cannot, however, be denied is that both the characters of Shylock and Fagin have transcended their (likely) origins as derivations of the Jewish stereotype to capture the wider public imagination in such a way as to engender a ‘feedback loop’ and become archetypal expressions very of the anti-Semitic stereotype from which they stem.

There is, it would seem, a rather curious and highly questionable inversion taking place in Mad Mel’s comments, one in which she (a Jew) has (perhaps unconsciously) elected to transpose qualities and characteristics more traditionally seen as belonging to the Jewish stereotype and which have traditionally supported and animated the anti-Semitic view of Jews as being untrustworty and conniving onto her Islamist ‘opponents’ such that it would appear, in a strange bout of illogic, that she has deployed not only a racist stereotype against her opponents, but the self-same stereotype that has, throughout history, been deployed routinely against her own people, while in the same sentence she castigates European liberals for their alleged racism.

In short, it would appear that her comments belong to the school of thought which begins with the phrase, ‘I’m not racist, but…’ that Orwell highlights in two of the conversational examples cited his essay on anti-Semitism:

“Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: “No, I do not like Jews. I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-Semitic, of course.”

“Middle-class woman: “Well, no one could call me anti-Semitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of what happens to them.”

…

Speaking of curious inversions, while mooching around on a US-based ‘quotations’ website, which I won’t embarrasing by naming them, I came across one of Ken Livingston’s comments from his statement about the ‘concentration camp guard’ incident with a Daily Mail journalist;

To the Daily Mail group I say that no-one in Britain is less qualified than they to complain about anti-semitism. Their papers were not, as some have reported, guilty of “a brief flirtation” with Adolf Hitler in the l930s. In truth these papers were the leading advocates of anti-semitism in Britain for half a century. 

The curious thing being that site attributes this comment, which in incomplete and peters out after, “Their papers were not…” to Adolf Hitler.

I wonder, what do you think are likely to be the main outcomes/repercussions of the Democrat’s victory in the US mid-term elections?

One we certainly know already; the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, who quickly identified himself as the Bush Administration’s designated fall-guy, but, beyond that, what else is likely to follow?

Is this likely to be a springboard to another Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election and the beginning of new blue era in US domestic politics. The Democrats obviously hope so, although Gerard Baker, in the Times, is rather more equivocal in his views.

Will we see Bush spending his final two years in office as a traditional lame duck, hopelessly bogged down in Congressional gridlock, perhaps?

Will the Democrats use their newly won control of Congress and the investigative machinery of the US state to try an bury Bush under a mass of inquiries into his conduct of the war against terror and the war in Iraq, as the Republicans did to Clinton on altogether more trivial grounds? Its certainly possible, although there is a broad consensus building around the idea that too great a concentration on hunting the President might prove counterproductive at a time when many Americans are more concerned with the question of how they get out of Iraq rather than how they got in, in the first place.

Overall, the general mood, outside of that of died-in-the-wool Republicans, seems one of cautious optimism that Democratic success this week may not only curb the worst excesses of the Bush Administration but maybe even bring some fresh ideas to the table on the thorny question of where the US goes next in its commitments to Iraq and bring about a softening of its unilaterist stance toward greater UN involvement…

And then there’s this…

Hmmn. I think something different: that the most likely outcome of these mid-term elections is another major terror attack on America. Whatever the smart analysis of the likely shape of domestic American politics over the next two years, America has now signalled a faltering of resolve; and that’s the cue for a redoubled Islamist attack.

Guess who?

Yep, tinfoil helments at the ready, its Mad Mel (again) off on another jihadist jeremiad on the general theme of ‘the only way to beat a bunch of mad dog, shit-kicking, religious wing-nut terrorists, is to put your own bunch of mad dog, shit-kicking, religious wing-nuts in charge.

And its not just the fault of the politicians, either…

To vote in a bunch of people who have no stomach at all for fighting for the country’s defence, simply through impatience that the country hasn’t fought for it effectively enough, betrays serious confusion and lack of resolve. And it is precisely that which will now give such heart to our enemies. Have they not said, over and over again, that the west no longer has the determination or staying power to fight for its beliefs?

So, people of America, if there is another terrorist attack on US soil, it’ll be your own fault…

…which, curiously enough, is what everyone from the Stop The War Coalition to Al Qaeda have also been saying for years.

Welcome to part 647 in the Chronicle of Mad Mel Phillips’ inexorably descent into total insanity, which today seems to be accelerating, hence…

The British Broadcasting Jihad

The extent and implications of the BBC’s bias towards the enemies of western civilisation is still not properly understood, even by many of those who are constantly appalled by what they hear in Britain from its domestic services. The lethal damage it may be doing in parts of the world where such an ideological bent turns it into an active supporter of tyranny is something else again.

Pardon? What are you suggesting here, Mel? That the BBC’s World Service has suddenly mutated into Radio Bil Laden? (Well I guess DLT might well fit in nicely, but it still seems a bit unlikely).

Okay, you’ve made a pretty strong proposition, lets see the evidence…

On this website, Bill Roggio describes how the Islamic Courts Union is progressively spreading jihad through Somalia. But as he also notes, and according to this report, the BBC has been actively supporting this Somali wing of the Islamic jihad.

Bill Roggio? No, bit of a new one on me. New York Times, yes. Washington Post, yes. Bill Roggio, no - never come across him before.

A quick look over his website reveals Bill Roggio to be a right-wing blogger cum journalist whose CV includes having written for the distinctly Neo-Conservative Weekly Standard and National Review - nice unbiased source you have there, Mel…

Now we have the quote…

A motion against the BBC Somali Service radio was introduced in the Puntland Parliament on Monday in Garowe, the Puntland capital. Some 8 Puntland legislators introduced the bill to ban the BBC Somali Service from operating in Puntland regions. Sources said another 22 lawmakers supported the motion and a debate opened.

The Puntland MPs voted after the debate, with more than 35 lawmakers voting to have the BBC radio banned from operating inside Puntland. Lawmakers who proposed the motion accused the BBC Somali Service – the radio with the largest reach inside Somalia – of being partisan and pro-Islamic Courts, to the detriment of Puntland and other political factions.

Puntland? Isn’t that somewhere near the Channel Islands?

Despite its quaint and very British-sounding name - which sounds as if it belongs to the works of PG Wodehouse, Puntland is, it seems, a region in the North East of Somalia that declared its own autonomy in 1998. It appears to have no particular aspirations of actual nationhood and, instread, favours Somalia becoming a federal state in which it can retain its autonomy.

So far so good.

The back story here is that there’s a civil war going in Somalia (when isn’t there) between an internationally recognised transitional government (i.e. a rag-bag collective of secular tribal warlords) on one side and the fundamentalist Supreme Islamic Courts Council on the other - not much of a choice there, then.

The problem, here, should be fairly obvious - Mad Mel’s ‘case’ for the existence of Jihadis at the Beeb rests squarely on her belief that the mad dog tribal warlords are telling the truth in crying foul over alleged BBC bias, which is akin to trying to settle a dispute by taking the word of Peter Sutcliffe over that of Ian Brady.

That she has no evidence, whatsoever, to support her claim, is immaterial - the mad dog warlords say its true so it must be, notwithstanding the fact that the usual reason that foreign regimes try to block the Beeb’s World Service tend to be that its style of factual reporting rather runs at odds with their propaganda.
Mel concludes with…

Why is the British tax-payer, who pays for the BBC World Service, expected to subsidise support for the jihad in Somalia?

One might also ask why Mad Mel persists in writing this crap when anyone with half a brain can see that she’s talking utter rubbish as usual.

One can’t help but credit Luke Akehurst for his predictive abilities…

This is probably a sure-fire way to make myself political toast with Labour colleagues…

…if not for his judgment of character.

but I actually feel rather sorry for Donald Rumsfeld and find the gloating at his resignation distasteful.

Why?

1) Well for a start off his strategy in Iraq was our Labour government’s too so if he’s such a bad/wrong person so are we - or at least everyone of us that supported the government line.

Well aside the bit about ‘if’, Luke, you’re right on the money here. Actually that’s a bit unfair, its not that those who supported the government line are bad people so much as they were often desperately naive in their desire to think the best of the government’s actions, as I’ll demonstrate when I get to Stuart’s comments.

2) If you are going to have Republicans in power (and I’d rather we were now 6 years into an Al Gore Presidency) I would rather they were idealistic ones that believed in spreading democracy to the Middle East than Kissinger/Nixon style cynics practicising real-politik and focussed just on national self-interest rather than some higher ideological ends.

There are two basic problems with this statement.

First, the realpoltik arguments for invading Iraq in 2003 (I.e. regional stability as the key to ensuring secure access to strategicially valuable resources, including those of the nearby Caspian Basin) were always far more substantive and rational than any number of fictions based on either Saddam’s non-existent WMDs or the idea of spreading democracy to the Middle East, give or take the impediment of the UN charter which says that you can’t do that kind of thing any more.
The second problem is the mistaken belief that the invasion wasn’t primarily motivated by considerations of realpolitik - it was - everything else (WMDs, Democracy, etc.) was simply a false pretext designed to bypass the little impediment I mentioned in the last paragraph.

3) He’s the fall guy for his boss in the White House who in a European political system would be the one resigning after these elections.

That’s not quite true - it depends entirely on where in Europe you’re talking about.

Where there is a more or less complete separation between the directly-elected executive (usually a President) and the legislature, as in France, then El Presidente remains near enough bomb-proof.

Under parliamentary-type systems where the separation is much less complete, say in the UK or Germany, then yes, Luke is essentially correct in thinking that it would the PM/Chancellor who’d eventually take the bullet - although I still wouldn’t like to be against them having pushed both their Defence Secretary and Foreign Minister into the firing line first, before any ordinance actually got through to them.

And then, of course, there’s Italy, where they’d probably fire the PM simply because the wind had changed direction.

4) He actually did the traditional job of Defense Secretary very well - overseeing two stunning military victories in Afganistan and Iraq in a matter of weeks - what he is being blamed for is the subsequent failiure to rebuild Iraq and of the US armed forces to peacekeep - neither of which traditionally were or should be core US military functions.

Hmmm… as someone with a keen personal interest in military history, strategy and tactics, I’d have to disagree with this.

In the case of Afghanistan, the US did successfully remove the Taliban regime and close down Al Qaeda’s main training/operational capacity but also failed to complete other primary objectives, not least the capture of Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban.

As to why they failed in those objectives, the answer is basically political timidity.

The US’s standard approach to warfare, i.e. build-up an overwhelming superiority of forces, establish air superiority, destroy key command and control and enemy offensive capacilities by means of aerial bombardment and then send in ground forces is fine against a static enemy in defensive formation (i.e. the Iraqis) and has the political benefit of keeping US casualties to an absolute minimum. For a US administration its basically a low-risk strategy given the marked sensitivity that its citizens have tended to exhibit towards the sight of plane loads of body bags arriving in the country, since the Vietnam war.
Against a highly mobile guerilla army in difficult terrain of which the enemy has intimate knowledge (i.e Afghanistan), its next to useless - great for capturing urban centres but of no great value in terms of defeating the enemy in actual combat.

To take out Bin Laden, in particular, the US needed to take risks and put forces in on the ground immediately, without waiting for their usual build-up, etc. - in fact what the US really needed to do was to deploy their own special forces troops in a diversionary strike, while we took care of rooting out Bin Laden - in terms of terrain and ground conditions in Afghanistan , our forces, particularly the SAS and Gurkhas, would have been far better suited to the task than anything the US could deploy.

The invasion of Iraq, while successful, was nowhere near as well executed as that which was mounted in the Gulf War- not least for the lack of Schwartzkopf who was by far the best military strategist of his generation - and was fought against Iraqi forces at half the strength they were in 1991. Worse still, the invasion of Iraq, and its aftermath, overstretched US capabilities by opening up a second live front to the point of allowing the Taliban to regain a foothold in Afghanistan - even if you support(ed) the invasion of Iraq on broadly humanitarian grounds you would have been justified in opposing the invasion of Iraq, at the time it was mounted, purely out of recognition of the need to finish the job in Afghanistan before opening up another front.

My hunch is history will say Rumsfeld made all of us a lot safer by destroying the Taliban/al-Qaeda base in Afghanistan and removing Saddam from power so he wasn’t around to refresh his WMD arsenal and marry it with N Korean missile technology.

I think history is more likely to consider Rumsfeld a failure for having overreached even the massive capabilities of the US military-industrial complex and set back the cause of humanitarian intervention to at best where it was before Kosovo due to the unilaterist stance taken by the US and its disregard for importance of the UN and the rule of international law, but that’s a rather lengthy argument that I’ll save for another time.

There are a lot of Afghans and Iraqis (particularly Kurds and Shiites) who have a lot to thank him for. 

And a lot who would happily salt the ground he’s walked on.

I mentioned comments from Stuart (Bruce) a bit earlier, and what he had to say was this…

No Luke it wasn’t our Labour government’s strategy.

We did the right thing for the right reasons.

Bush and Rumsfeld did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Our motivation was to make the world a better place. Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney did it for greed and national self-interest.

I am still pro the Atlantic alliance, despite the actions of these nasty foolish men who have done more to damage American and British interests than all who have gone before.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but I’m afraid it doesn’t fit the facts.

The arguments that Blair put to parliament and to the British people about Saddam’s WMD capabilities were no more real or substantial than those put forward by the Bush Administration and the ultimate reason why we went to war was not out of rational judgement of the threat posed by Saddam - which didn’t exist - or humanitarian concern - an argument - that didn’t appear at all until 12 February 2003 and then only in response to the work of Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors whose findings were beginning to undermine the WMD-based case for war.

We went to war because Blair allowed himself to be boxed into a corner by the Bush administration, which was set on going in whether it had our support or not, which happened because Blair put altogether too much emphasis on the value of the so-called ’special relationship’ with the US to the point of leaving himself in a position where he couldn’t back out.

We were railroaded and joined the invasion for no better reason than that we (meaning Blair) was clinging on to the coat tails of the US so tightly that he couldn’t get off.

Talk of wanting to make the world a better place is fine in the context of ordinary Labour members and supporters, whose support for the war may well, and probably did, come from just such considerations, but one cannot honestly say the same of the Labour government, or at least those members of it who we most intimately involved in the decisions that took us into the war.

Does all that count as political toast? Not sure, maybe only a light grilling this time out.