Such a sketchy blogger recently.

I'm blogging this from Budapest, where I have gone for a quick getaway. The weather is amazing, thanks. My laptop remains unfixed but internet cafes are so cheap here the only thing holding me back is the need to enjoy this city before I leave. The Jewish quarter is crumbling but reviving itself year by year it seems (I came last summer and I feel convinced it is developing), with the largest Synagogue in Europe. That's the area where I am right now, salivating gently at the thought of my evening meal, and whether it's to be Jewish in character or not. I will fix the laptop situation, and a will not be permanently absent. Budapest is great. Prague is better. Thank you, and good evening.

...And meanwhile, the aforeblogged Mr Fawkes has been sending out tottie reporters. What on earth! I could add to my tourist update by stating that anything London parties can do, Budapest can do better. At the spa on St Margaret's island yesterday, for instance. (see earlier comment for Prague comparison- though there are no spas there)

But back in the real world (ie. the geeky newsy bloggy one), I was fascinated by this story about the London bombers. Could be that Al Qaeda's not so much a nightmare but more a reality, after all.

See you soon.

You can tell it is a big story because Nick Robinson is ignoring it - the Beeb knows this could be fatal for Prezza.

Guido Fawkes

It's a sideshow, I know, but I was struck by the following two articles and have been meaning to share them for a good few days now. I'll generally read anything by PJ O'Rourke, even when it's about Airbus as in this case.

Airbus is one of those typical head in the clouds European Grand Projets- which is not to say it's useless, just hobbled rather by the nature of the grand political design instead of liberated by free cooperation on technical matters.

ps. Still trying to deal with my keyboard situation; an accident with tea I'm afraid. The laptop's a bit old and round here I haven't yet found a motherboard suitable to replace it. I still have many things I'd like to talk about, but my opportunities to write using a keyboard are bit limited.

Had an accident with my keyboard, which is a pity as I had a lot to say. Now operating on alien territory where I don't even know how to open two pages at once. If you want a good read on the subject of the Palestinian beach bombing, follow my link in the sidebar to Tom Gross, and check out his latest dispatches. Fascinating stuff. I'll be back asap, meanwhile.

One shouldn't mock at senior citizens but I do find the
BBC'sJohn Simpson's contributions ever more out of touch. The headline which drew me in to his latest suggested that the killings at Haditha could change the future of the war in Iraq.

It's the Left's own very personal turning point. Never mind the killing of Zarkarwi (let's forget that, soonest). The US, apparently, is 'braced' for the Haditha effect. Well actually, the US is long past 'braced'. If Simpson spent an iota of time on the Internet he would be aware that John 'Haditha' Murtha has been under pressure ever since his comments regarding Haditha. America was 'braced' back then. Michelle Malkin and others have been 'bracing', mitigating, and judging the prejudgers ever since, and to great effect, I would say.

The folly of Simpson is clear in his final line, which you sense all his journalistic juices and prejudices have been yearning for:

'Just as they did in Vietnam.'

(ok, it's not 'just like Vietnam!!!', it's the 'measured', 'balanced' BBC version.)

Meanwhile, BITRW, incidents like this one, killing and capturing terrorists without civilian casualties:

'Several women and children were present at the raid sites, officials said. None was harmed, and all were returned to their homes once the troops ensured the area was secure, they added.' (hat tip to Instapundit)

A Football Story...

Apologies for the last couple of days being without posts. There are a couple of excuses but the summary point is that I was having fun, outside mainly.

Part of this has to do with the fact that I've been entertaining family and doing my tour-guide impression on the streets and trams of Prague, and part of it is to do with football; part is owing to the delicious weather at the moment, and some more to do with trying to maintain a social existence. Oh, and I mustn't omit, work too!

Yesterday I set off with a segment of my family round Prague, and we ended the day at cellar level in a traditional Prague pub- a bad choice for dinner as the national side were about to kick off. Knowing the menu to be totally obscure- all boar's knee and sow's ear-lobe- I asked for an English menu. Sadly with all the misty-eyed patriotism it seemed, errm, that they couldn't find it, so we struggled. As did the Czech football team.

We ate while craning our necks to see the big screen in one direction, and in the other trying to gain the waiter's attention for our small requirements, in between mouthfuls. By the time we left the match was almost over. Drama galore in Germany and the Czesi one-nil down and ten men strong. We strolled to the old town square. A roar erupted from its packed historic centre, but it was a small eruption which soon subsided and never quite rose to the pitch occupied by Czech national fervour. 2-0.

Oops. But the story that has helped me over the brotherly sympathy I tend to have for disappointed Czechs is that a courageous Ghanaian player made a tiny little gesture in the heart of Euroland. Making good a promise he waved an Israeli flag on the occasion of their first goal, identifying with the people among whom he makes his professional living. Good match.

Two Bits from Europe.

It's a struggle out there. I have a friend married to a Belgian, so I get a few updates about the country. Did you know there are only just over 500 homeschooled children in Belgium? Paul Belien and wife have been doing their best, but the Belgian State's distrust of homeschoolers is startling, as their latest troubles prove.

Fjordman, who comes from... well it's fairly clear roughly where, meditates on the ideological origins of Europe's malaise in Gramsci. He takes a global view though, and his perspective ends up focussing on North America, as the grand ideological battle ground.

The BBC's Rush to Judgements.

As Andrew noted on Biased BBC, the BBC offered widespread coverage to the immediate assumption of Israeli responsibility for the deaths on a Gaza beach on Friday.

The BBC have naturally reported the subsequent Israeli rebuttals. There is a subtle difference though in reporting claims that the deaths were 'not Israel's fault', as the BBC headlines, rather than as the Washington Post reports, not their 'responsibility', but I could let that pass. I could point out though that 'responsibility' is strictly accurate: Israel is not saying that the deaths were a regrettable side effect of an action that could be justified, but that they weren't involved. This is different from, say, a terror organisation admitting responsibility but claiming that the deaths were the fault of their belligerent opponents rather than themselves. It's a somewhat fine distinction, but such is language, and such is the news. I appreciate that with the BBC's global role they would seek a form of 'Easy English', the better to spread their gospel, no doubt, but the distinctions must be, not just observed, but promulgated.

[Update 14/6: Unsurprisingly, the BBC article has now been edited to include the term 'not responsible', along with other edits. That's how it works, folks]

Anyway, more serious is the typical BBC cutting down of a public and official statement to a set of empty soundbytes, when a perfectly clear and good quote is ignored. The WaPo reports:

'"We checked each and every shell that was fired from the sea, the air and from the artillery on the land and we found out that we can track each and every one according to a timetable and according to the accuracy of where they hit the ground.

"We are very sorry for the deaths of the seven Palestinians, but that
does not mean that we are responsible,"'

The BBC message is by comparison garbled by the range of pressure groups they quote first, from the totally unbiased Human Rights Watch to Kofi Annan to the Palestinian 'authority'. Finally we get to the Israelis and their bald denial accompanied by the innuendo that 'they did not say what might have caused the blast.' and another fine bulky quote from those military experts at Human Rights Watch.

I am not sure, but if the Israelis were not involved I see no reason for them to try to unravel the secrets of the latest blockbuster from Pallywood's snuff industry. The BBC would had done much better by quoting the Israelis and their detailed explanation- but instead they preferred 'balance' after their own fashion. I would support any real investigative journalism that factually contradicted the Israeli statement, but I cannot condone this journalism by insinuation and biased quotage from people who already have more than their say on things they are not in a position to know.

And by the way, the BBC have helpfully pointed out that this biased and slanted story is their world number one today, which just goes to show that, as Gerald Ratner might metaphorically say, crap 'sells'. It would be interesting to see if it actually did.

If you have just a little time, give it to reading this Mark Steyn essay. On Somalia, topic of the post below, he parodies the Liberal-Left:

'And in Mogadishu, well, that's just one bunch of crazy Africans killing another bunch of crazy Africans -- who the hell can figure that out? If Bono holds a celebrity fund-raising gala, we'll all be glad to chip in 20 bucks.'

incoming... long post

Recently I bookmarked Eritrea...

I've long been concerned about East Africa. I went to what could be considered the wild heart of the region, the Highlands of Kenya, towards the end of the nineties, and spent perhaps the most deeply impressing few months of my life there- six of them, to be precise.

It was World Cup time when I left for Africa on Air France via Charles De Gaulle, after the previous night watching a French victory mainly achieved by black men, and we had the Euro by the time I returned- or rather, part of the Continent of Europe did. In between times there was the bomb attack on the US Embassy in Nairobi and Bill Clinton's missile attack retaliation against Afghanistan and Sudan.

I remember these events because I listened most evenings to the BBC world service, and I could concentrate on what I was hearing without too much distraction. There was barely enough light even to read, and the evenings were consistently lengthy, with the onset of darkness anytime between 6.45 and 8 O'clock leaving plenty of time for the oil lamps to burn in earnest, and the radio to receive full attention.

No-one I knew then could understand for the life of them why that schmaltzy philanderer Clinton should cause his missiles to penetrate such distant and alien nations as Sudan and Afghanistan. In fact they were rather angry with him, despite the major death toll among Kenyans -many of the 220 plus victims were Kenyan- in the blast. I bet they understand better now, when the perpetrators of the bombing are more widely known and understood.

The backdrop to these events though was also interesting. I became aware, in my fastness of the north-western hills (mountains in actuality, though scarcely comparable with their European cousins), of a steady pressure, a drum beat almost, coming from Islam in the North and heading Southwards. There were reports of conversions taking place of Christians to Islam, of Islamic polygamy; I sensed that Islam was starting to stir in the region.

This sense was confirmed in Nairobi. Among the reasons for the extensive migration from the North East of Kenya was certainly the instability caused by the breakdown of order in Somalia, and this has consistently had an Islamic component, maybe even an Al Qaeda component. Immigrants to Nairobi from the North East and from Somalia filled the slums of the city, but, even among these, those who left the faith of Islam were hunted down by armed gangs of Somali Islamists.

There has been a strong Islamic component to the unrest in Somalia for well over a decade now, so it's not really surprising that a group of Islamists has coordinated itself to 'take over' Mogadishu. But it is alarming and interesting simultaneously.

Somalia is an interesting country, racially and geographically. The appearance of Somalis, with wiry swirling hair, skinny frames and the sharp features of their faces, is quite different from that of the people further to the south.

Geographically Somalia hugs the East Coast of Africa and almost touches the tip of Yemen at its northernmost point, which makes it an ideal through-road for Arab, predominantly Saudi, influence.

I am interested to place the Islamist takeover in a little more context; I can only see it as part of its region, and subject to the regional ambitions of the most vigorous creed in the market at the moment: Islam.

I have heard quite a lot of wailing that the US was supporting warlords in Somalia to fight the rising Islamist camp there. I'd heard it on the BBC, and found a number of liberal media outlets wailing about it. Of much more interest to me though is the question of who is supporting the Islamists.

The most vigorous regional power at the moment, although it is of North Eastern Africa, is Sudan.

I was interested today to learn from the BBC about the President of Chad's version of how the Sudanese were sponsoring armed rebellion against his regime.

The BBC helpfully pointed out that 'in fact, according to the United Nations refugee agency, both countries openly support rebel activities against the other.

Well thanks Aunty, but it might be significant that the Chadian population is estimated at under ten million, while the Sudanese population is over four times that, and Sudan is Africa's largest country. It also has around nine times the military expenditure of Chad. Not sure whether that includes the Jangaweed.

The point is that Sudan's interference is potentially much more consequential than Chad's.

I think what I am getting at is quite simple: there is a strategy to extend Islamic domination across North-East and Eastern Africa (there's one for West Africa too, and that is focussed on Nigeria). It's summarised quite effectively by this post from Jihad Watch. In this schema, Ethiopia is seen as the stumbling block to Islamic ambition, just as it historically has been. It is however a mouldering stumbling block, both due to its poverty and the fact that nowadays upwards of 50% of its population are Muslim.

But if we look to Ethiopia's east we can see that ringing it are a series of smaller nations: Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. Of these only Eritrea is pluralistic in its religious beliefs; the others are Muslim, although even in Eritrea Muslims are easily the largest single grouping. Significantly, towards the coast Eritrea is mainly Muslim. Coming back to the question of who has backed the Islamist takeover in Somlia, there are any number of candidates, but this corridor of Islamic opportunity down the East Coast is certainly a likely source of support.

I suppose I imagine that one of the goals of the Islamic war on the West is to secure for itself large regions which make good nestbeds for its operatives and schemes, where a civilian population can be a cost-free shield, where the use of conventional weapons would create only pin-pricks in a territory that an invading ground force would find forbidding and vast. The East African Caliphate would represent all of that.

The Jordanian and the President Agree.

That is to say, A Jordanian victim of Zarqawi and the President of the USA:

'He said U.S. special operations forces confirmed Zarqawi's location based on intelligence from Iraqis and "delivered justice to the most wanted terrorist in Iraq."'


'"I felt God has brought His heavenly justice on earth today."'

Here's the victim's tale.

Yay. And here's a better link, for a round up.

I had the killer post and then the key board jammed. Honest. (I would have posted the last couple of days but a frenzy of busyness combined with general lack of time to think held me back)

Well, actually I didn't, but Scott Burgess has a fairly-likely-to-cause-death post which I was going to link, and pontificate on.

The target is a Guardianista, naturally, who thinks only white people can be racist. Leave aside the fact that I dispute the existence of a thing called racism, preferring to think instead about crimes that are visited by one person upon another, it's still predictably bizarre to think that, as Scott points out the Guardianista thinks, Mugabe (to take one instance) can't have racist politics because he's black.

The real problem I have is with the future, rather than the past. If the Guardianista's position becomes the accepted one in a globalised world where white westerners have squandered their headstarts, whichever people of colour who come to dominate would have a made-to-measure argument for de facto racism: revenge for unjust humiliation. I don't, you see, have any sense that we whites really are racially superior: we're just quite inclined (a thing historically attested to) to get things together with limited resources. In a future where togetherness is assumed and resources unlimited because of man's established ingenuity, who knows? Maybe it'll be fun to be really racist, for some.

Though no Hirsi Ali watcher, I do begin to believe that I've underplayed her virtues. This interview with a pretty fine writer, Carlin Romano, does come with obligatory star quality, but I love the way her mind ranges across so many subjects and zeros in on them all. And she calls a certain nonagenarian orientalist 'Bernard'.

Entertainment aside, this is a great piece of commentary on the Haditha situation (a link which came, like many such good things, from Glenn Reynolds).

Online Entertainment.

Not only do I live outside the UK, I also have no TV. Were it not that the internet is increasingly providing multi-media, that situation would have to change.

I think though that having a TV as well as the internet might well give too much of a good thing. Instead, the good things- and in my view the better things, things that I can really personally endorse- are to be found online.

There have been some terrific podcasts and vlogs that I've tuned into recently.

Ever heard Mark Steyn speak? Well, his interviews are always well worth the time, and his latest with Hugh Hewitt can be downloaded here.

The most recent two 'Vents' from Michelle Malkin show the potential for independent journalism and grass roots awarenss that Vlogs can offer- the earlier one (1st June) was about social action against illegal workers, Dunkin' Donuts style. Yesterday's was about media news 'management'- a subject of great interest to me.

Meanwhile, I do think David Vance's presentation of his Vlog has potential cult-value, as well as being powerful, direct and correct.

But I should give a nod to the printed word, since that is enduringly important. Nathalie Solent is back good and proper, and really funny. The in-jokes tend to make her hard to quote- you'll just have to READ IT.

Reason to suspect...

The politicisation of the BBC is on full display at the moment. I do not refer to a Right or Left division, but to the naked desire to influence political events. Not any particular events that I can think of, such as an election, but simply the way things unfold in a country where all our political interests are invested- Iraq.

According to people such as Peter Glover, the BBC's treatment of the alleged Haditha killings has been appalling.

What I think is clear is that, as with Abu Graib, though I would say with a little more substance to work with, the BBC is both pre-emptively judging one incident, and integrating it into a large and long-running news item. Both are inappropriate in the extreme when the organisation is the British Broadcasting Corporation.

It angered me in particular to find a 'new' incident roped into the coverage. It should, of course, be dealt with, but the snowballing of disparate incidents into a frontpage avalanche is totally wrong when both cases are still alleged, when enquiries are ongoing, and when a process of justice, if required, has yet to take place.

But worse is the BBC's conflation of these issues in accordance with the wishes of both the anti-war lobby and the so-called insurgents, as exemplified by Ian Pannel in the above-linked report:

'The news of ethical training for US-led troops is likely to be greeted with cynicism by many Iraqis, the BBC's Ian Pannell in Baghdad says, as the troops have long been accused of deliberately targeting civilians.'


Well, I do not believe this journalism and I consider it poisonous. I do not believe the Iraqi people generally believe themselves targeted by American troops. We have thousand upon thousand of photos and anecdotes to demonstrate that Iraqi children often make a bee-line for US troops on patrol, in the hope of sweets usually. The Iraqi people may be cynical because shit happens, unfortunately, but they are unlikely to feel that Don Rumsfeld sent a memo decreeing their extermination wherever possible.

The BBC's conflation of accident with indiscipline, indiscipline with intent, intent with policy, is journalistically totally indefensible in my view- and mirrors what they attempted to do with Abu Graib, as they tried to shift the blame higher and higher and have never apologised or shown the slightest backtracking from the position that Abu Graib was part of a systematic US torture network. The BBC however is not thinking about journalism, true or false, but about exerting influence- and that is the problem.

Free Speech and Consequences

Have you seen how a disabled US Iraq veteran is suing Michael Moore for mispresenting him and exploiting his wounds during the making of Fahrenheit 9/11?

Well, maybe you haven't because I see nothing about it on the BBC. The BBC's coverage of the film when it was released in the run up to the US election in 2004 was fulsome, but it seems that after selling a story dearly they don't concern themselves about aftersale care.

This was a man whose very real trauma and experience of war was misrepresented and abused by a so-called champion of dissent.

The BBC though are ploughing on with the theme that Bush represses free speech by giving this move against whistle-blowers a lot of exposure.

The fact that the same wave of enthusiasm for Michael Moore swept along a raft of other 'leaks' that were politically motivated seems to be beyond their comprehension. Politically motivated whistle-blowers are anti-democratic and endanger their society for the sake of self interest or ideological gratification. But then, I suppose the saying is fairly true that birds of a feather flock together.

Update 1st June: The BBC reach the story... after I do... and do quite a business-like job of reporting the case. Saying that, I think that the case is not as clearly presented as it should be- the reason for the suit is the alleged misrepresentation of the plaintiff's views and situation, rather than failure to gain his consent. Since the BBC don't do court reports, I would expect the general interest angle to be pursued, and that is most certainly that Moore is a lying sack of... [insult to taste]. I didn't see it anywhere near the headlines either, unlike Moore's success.

A Shiver Through Fairy-Land

On Iranian Badges: the National Post apologises, as Melanie Phillips reports,

'for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story.'

But surely such consternation could only be found among those living in liberal fairy-land, where innuendo is read into each word of each speech of those purporting to represent the Right, while prescriptive Islamofascists have to make it really, really clear in big bold colours that they're the big bogeymen before notice is taken?

What kind of a Government legislates a dress code anyway (which they certainly are doing)? Anyone with the slightest understanding of legislation and the machinations of governments should have seen immediately the nature of the case, and the National Post should have been savvy enough to phrase their report artfully to straddle a number of possibilities. However, that said, readers have no reason to cry out: they read between the lines all the time when it suits them. The real reason is that it sends a shiver through fairy-land.

Spinning Iran, yet again: Iraq the Model catches CNN out good and proper.

Today I've been reading Ahmadinejad's letter to George Bush (via Hugh Hewitt) and it's fascinating stuff. I found this understanding of it very direct and helpful, too.