'When Obama took out Osama, at the Copacabana (Abbottabada). ' Kareokee! - Pure Class!

The BBC has responded to Louise Bagshawe MP over their lack of coverage concerning the murders of the Fogel family

Louise Bagshawe MP has complained and has now got a response.

The BBC's lack of coverage of this massacre (which many of you never heard of) was very typical of the corporation, some murders it seems are more newsworthy than others. This is particularly important when the longstanding bias against Israel and in favour of (or at least whitewashing of) the terrorist groups that face Israel. Time and time again the BBC has been called out for such bias and along with other examples it is highlighted brilliantly by Robin Aitken here.

Anyway this example has led to Louise Bagshawe MP complaining about it and she has at last extracted a response from our state broadcaster here. Well done Louise! But before we go any further it is worth pointing out that the worse part of this whole story was the appalling massacre itself, my sympathies are with the Fogel family whose tragic story has already left the front pages and in the case of the BBC was not mentioned.

Full text below:

MP Bagshawe: Overwhelmed by response

The BBC has admitted that the horrific murders of the Fogel family last month should have been covered on their 24 hour news channel. The massacre, in which a three-month-old baby was decapitated and her siblings' throats were slashed, did not appear anywhere across the BBC's television channels, and was mentioned only briefly on the broadcaster's news website. The BBC gave no mention of Hamas' statement praising the attack or of celebrations about the killings in the West Bank, yet did cover the Israeli government's announcement about settlement construction the following day. The broadcaster's poor coverage was highlighted by Louise Bagshawe, Conservative MP for Corby, who registered her disgust at what she called the BBC's "inexcusable" failure, in the JC as well as on Twitter and in a comment piece for the Daily Telegraph.

Ms. Bagshawe, a member of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, called on the BBC to admit their "lack of even handedness". She also demanded a list of the other stories which were featured on BBC News 24 on March 11, in preference. Her complaint was passed to the BBC's director of news, Helen Boaden, but it was five days before Ms. Boaden replied. During that time Ms Bagshawe received thousands of messages of support. In her response Ms Boaden said: "I agree with you that the significant nature of this murder of an entire family meant it should have been included on our television news output." However, she denied that the BBC had ignored the story "either because we did not care or because we pursue an anti-Israel agenda". She instead blamed "a remarkably busy weekend" because of the disaster in Japan, events in Libya and the spring meetings of the Liberal Democrats and the SNP which had to be covered "to ensure due political impartiality". "[These] left little room in the main television bulletins for a host of competing stories". Ms. Bagshawe said: "I'm not wholly satisfied with the answer which does not reflect the gravity of the lack of coverage. I would consider the matter finished if the BBC gave an expression of regret because of the hurt they have caused the Jewish community." She added: "I believe that this shows that the BBC will listen and will not merely reflexively defend a clear mistake."

Major 'Dick' Winters - Legend of WWII has passed away

Major Winters died aged 92 on 02 January.

British actor Damien Lewis portrayed
Dick Winters in the HBO mini series
'Band of Brothers'.







This is very sad news Richard Winters, the former CO of 'E' Company, 506 PIR has passed away in Pennsylvania to which he had retired. His actions during World War Two were immortalised in the television series 'Band of Brothers' which was based on the book by Stephen Ambrose. Firstly I would like to say how sorry I am and pass on condolences to his many friends and family. Major Richard Winters was a hero and a good man and as is typical of such characters was modest and reserved. A good article in the DT on Winters can be found here. I've also embedded a video clip that has his former soldiers discussing their CO. The free world owes gentleman such as Dick Winters a great deal, RIP soldier, stand easy.

PM reduce fuel tax now! Don't increase it!

Now what could be better for the discerning

Libertarian concerned at rising fuel taxes

than an ethanol fuelled Hummer! (That ain't

me in the picture by the way!)

Well it has been a while since I blogged, I won't bore anyone with the reasons, but family and work commitments plus blogger's block all contributed. It seems that our PM Dave Cameron may be considering ditching another election promise (the previous ones were to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Constitution and carry out a referendum on the Lisbon treaty). This time Dave Cameron may be thinking of allowing a Labour instigated rise on fuel duty to occur. Please don't PM, in fact you must reduce the cost of fuel tax, here's why:

1. Fuel tax hurts lower and middle income earners the most, it hinders small businesses like taxi firms etc.

2. Reducing it would increase substantially individual liberty as well as freeing up the aforementioned small businesses. An individual could travel further and thus sell more and earn more.

3. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest that an increase in it is in any way better for the environment, confining people to fuel poverty is a no-brainer.

4. We pay far too bloody much at the pumps already!

5. Fuel taxes are amongst the most regressive and authoritarian as they hurt individual mobility and freedom of movement the most.

6. The sort of people who argue in favour of fuel taxes and even for increases in them tend to be very peculiar, usually neo-Marxist environmentalist head cases. Such people are extremely antagonistic towards freedom of the individual needless to say.

Please do not increase fuel tax PM!

Oh and happy New Year!

Was the Iraq Worth it? Irish Man Paul Kane's View

A marine

I will post this out of interest. It's a well written individual war memoir by USMC Reservist Paul Kane. It appreared in the Irish Times here. I wish all the best for Paul and thank him for his story, its a good account of how many veterans feel. Plus it is a well articulated view of it from a Serviceman's perspective. Full text below:











VOICE OF EXPERIENCE: Marines we interviewed consistently expressed two hopes to us: that by this war the Iraqi people would have a better future; and that their own kids would never fight in the Middle East, writes PAUL KANE



IN 2003, I was an unlikely and unexpected participant in the Iraq war. At age 39, I was a “recovering venture capitalist” who’d made millions, and lost them and his business in Ireland, everything lost in the tech-stock crash of 2000. I lost everything I thought at the time was important.



Following Hemingway’s invocation that the world is a fine place well worth fighting for, I decided in the wake of my failure to make myself useful. Life experience and being Catholic had taught me that everything usually comes down to a handful of people. That in a tight spot an individual can make the difference, change the course of events, and maybe save lives.



I had been a US Marine in the late Eighties and decided just before 9/11 to return again, doing part-time service with a Marine Corps reserve intelligence and training unit at Quantico. On March 17th, 2003, a few days before the Iraq war began, my Marine colonel called: “Two questions, Kane. What’s an Irishman doing home and sober on St Patrick’s Day? Second, what are you doing for the next 15-weeks or 15-months?” The next day, I reported to Quantico and prepared for deployment to Iraq.



I will never forget my experiences or what I saw in Iraq. I would never want to forget. It was a brush with the “very real” world; there is a positive power to adversity that makes you appreciate what you have, what should be a priority, that makes you stronger and sounder, rich in what matters.
The surreal nights at Diwaniya sleeping rough in 115 degree temperatures in an abandoned building that had been looted of everything but the dust, listening to automatic weapons firing on our perimeter and howling wild dogs and cats; the Pioneer spy drone buzzing overhead looking for bad men trying to sneak up on our patch of earth; driving at 90 miles an hour in convoys, lickety-split through sniper zones; carrying an injured British soldier to a chopper only to later get the radio call, “He’s gone”; two fanatical black-clad Fedayeen discovering that their ambition to kill us exceeded their ability, eviscerated by a stream of 50-calibre rounds from the sky; seeing an eight-year-old Shia boy sent airborne and bloodied by a speeding hit-and-run taxi as he stood beaming at the roadside, waving us welcomes.



As I lay on that kiln-hot concrete among snoring Marines trying to ignore the night sounds and steal some sleep, an irony hit me. Three years ago now, I was likely sitting in Dobbin’s posh Dublin bistro with a crisp white table cloth having lunch and noshing with the brie-and-fine-Chablis set.
The ching-ching of glasses and chortling with a colleague in the Aer Lingus Elite Club; him off to Marco Island, me off to Palm Beach; him happily our consiglieri for years, enjoying the dosh and media limelight, me later “Paul who?” when we went down, denied three times to three papers. During our last session together as bits of our company fell to earth, he, our own Captain Renault from Casablanca, hysterically blurted: “I am shocked, shocked to hear that gambling was going on here!” We handed him his last fat fee. During those dark days of the Irish elite, only Zig and Zag still returned calls.



But in the end, the only one responsible was the captain who found the iceberg, that fella in the mirror. Now I’m here on hell’s half acre cuddling up to an M-16 rifle and serving as an appetiser for sand fleas. My first year nuns from St Camillus, reached in retirement with this news, not one whit surprised.



Holy mackerel, how I musta really pissed off God! Sweet Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Fadder Abraham you grew up in this neighbourhood, whoever has their radio set on “receive”, wake me from this, help me out here. I remember thinking to myself: “If I ever get out of here, I am gonna settle down, and have a zillion kids.”



Part of our mission in Iraq was to do “collections”. This was military parlance for gathering insight from Marines. What worked? What didn’t? Lessons learned. Dawn to dark daily, we were “Oscar Mike” (On the Move) tracking units, interviewing and surveying more than 6,000 combat Marines across Iraq in Hillah, Safwan, Ur, Nasiriya, Karbala, Kut and points in between. It was Club Med on a budget with rifles. The war in Iraq officially ended on August 31st. But war never ends for those who fight, nor for the Iraqis who live in this war’s wake. Unfortunately, Plato got it right: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”



It has been eight years of strife and suffering and seeing the face of evil, not infrequently all made worse by our own civilian leaders’ misreads, hubris and missteps. The list is long. But there were the small victories, small kindnesses, and small noble acts that never make the news. The evil of war is made smaller by the camaraderie that warriors experience in a world where every decision may mean life or death and by manifestations of concern for others that you would never witness were you not in combat.



Was the war worth it?





If only there was a simple answer. Were I king, would I have led us into war? No. Hindsight is 20/20, but those calling the shots were combat innocents and clueless as to what they were unleashing. Would that in 2003 we had a military veteran like Abraham Lincoln at the helm rather than someone who landed, ironically, on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln to pronounce: “Mission accomplished!” Do tell, who neglected to route that memo updating those nice men in the insurgency?



President Lincoln’s brilliance at wartime execution was well chronicled in a recent biography by James McPherson, Tried by War. It was Lincoln’s hard-earned personal wisdom, ability to endure serial failures and constant challenges, daring use of strategy and available resource, balancing of interests, and keeping his friends close and his rivals even closer, that enabled him to prevail. In a word, Lincoln was a leader.



Similarly, President John F Kennedy’s brush with war left him an idealist without illusions. He kept his own counsel during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly brought nuclear Armageddon, precisely because he had served in uniform, been to war, and had his ship sunk in combat. Kennedy was not overawed by the cigar-chopping general with a constellation of stars on his collar who disdainfully told him, “Sir, you have few options on Cuba except ‘surgical strikes’.” JFK knew that using terms for precision and for bombing in the same sentence was nonsense. Kennedy knew that generals, like senior leaders in any human enterprise or endeavour, deserve no quarter or special deference. And generals, like many banksters, regulators and politicians, recent events have revealed, usually fall into one of three categories. There are the exceptionally sound and capable, the committed mediocre, and the stunningly incompetent. No bell-curve distribution assumed.



Do I think the Iraqis will now have a better future?



My gut says yes, despite our bungling. Did it have to be so painful? No. Could Saddam have been dispatched by another strategy? Likely, yes. Were more combat veterans in the room when wars were discussed, there would likely be fewer wars, and the ones we did fight would be fought with fewer blunders and prosecuted so as to prevail.



Those who fight in wars, be they just or unjust, morally or immorally executed, have the noble experience of having been actively engaged in protecting those around them in war, fellow soldiers and many civilians, and saved and protected lives. Not many people wake up in the morning with that being a life experience they possess.



Men who knew nothing of combat like pro consul L Paul Bremer sacked the Iraqi army in May 2003 and left us Marines scratching our heads in disbelief. With the stroke of a pen, Bremer beggared soldiers and their families, more than three million Iraqis, overnight, giving untold momentum to insurgency. And then there was The Quartet: Rummy, Cheney, Blair and W. Enough said. But despite us, and the bad hand they were dealt, I do believe the Iraqi people will prevail and the unseen force that moves through life accompanying adversity will see them on to better lives – little consolation though this is to the dead, wounded, mourning or displaced. We had leaders, but we had little in the way of leadership. Personally, I owe a big thank you to Saddam and W.



One door closes and another opens and the unforeseen comes to you. Failing in business was the best thing that ever happened to me. Had I not failed, I would have bounded along, an oblivious fat-cat businessman, and never gone back to the Marines. I would have maintained my steady diet of suits as colleagues and compadres. Never really seeing outside that circle, never getting down in the dirt and meeting some of the most able, tough and resourceful, wickedly funny and selfless human beings it became my pleasure to know. There would have been no war for me. Some innocent Iraqis and perhaps Marines who are alive today would be dead. I never would have gone on to accept an appointment to hide at Harvard after the war, where I met my lovely wife.



Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Iraq. Or the fact that there are Marines in harm’s way somewhere, right now, while I go about my life. I think back about those things we Marines hoped would come from this war. Aside from the nuts and bolts issues, those 6,000 Marines we interviewed consistently expressed two hopes to us. They hoped by this war the Iraqi people would have a better future. And they hoped their own kids would never return to fight in the Middle East.



I hope and pray for those things every night when I tuck Kieron and baby Ella into bed.



Paul Kane was a Fellow from 2004-2008 of the John F Kennedy School’s International Security Programme at Harvard University. President Obama awarded him the Navy and Marine Corps Medal last year for heroism during a 2008 subway rescue.

Freedom on Trial in the 21st Century!

This is it folks, the first day of Geert Wilders trial in the Netherlands for shock horror offending Muslims. All I will say is that Geert Wilders should not be on trial, even if people find his statements offensive he should not be tried. Freedom is ebbing away any decent democrat would defend Wilders in this instance. He has not incited violence or harm against anyone. The trial is political, immoral and if successful the death knell of democracy in the Netherlands. Please debate me on this below if you wish. I support Wilders 100% even if I don't 100% agree with him. He has a right to a say. I will reiterate, he has not incited harm upon anybody.

A new Aim for our Coalition- Repeal the hand guns ban of 1997. The facts are Liberal Firearms law = Less Crime

As civilian ownership of firearms has been curtailed
by Parliament the Police use and variety of weaponry has
increased exponentially (I support the cops but our government
should not have all this power)

This I accept to many (usually the ill-informed) is a strange subject to blog on. Namely the very important need as I see it to liberalise Britain’s gun laws. Why you may think as well as shudder and regard the issue as well as the author as crazy. In fact in British culture in general people who like guns or want to keep them are often regarded as being a bit loopy. But for me the issue is simple. A law abiding citizen should be allowed to own firearms, further more they should be allowed to use them in self defence of their property until the police eventually arrive.

Also did you know that gun crime has increased fourfold since the 1998 ban on handguns was introduced? Did you also know that countries with more liberal gun laws such as Switzerland and Israel have a fraction of our crime? Finally when someone attacks your property, what is your sole choice in the UK? You guessed it to be a victim of crime? That is all. I am calling for as a minimum, the hand guns ban of 1997 to be repealed. The law that exists in Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands should be the norm. Finally I will show below the article from BBC online in which the American academic Joyce Malcolm provides her view. My view is that HMG should be willing to trust its citizens to be armed, otherwise why should we trust HMG? Please debate this issue in the comments I warmly welcome contributions from the US and those opposed to my view below. Onto Joyce Malcolm:











Yet what we need is more guns, not fewer, says a US academic.
"If guns are outlawed," an American bumper sticker warns, "only outlaws will have guns." With gun crime in Britain soaring in the face of the strictest gun control laws of any democracy, the UK seems about to prove that warning prophetic.



For 80 years the safety of the British people has been staked on the premise that fewer private guns means less crime, indeed that any weapons in the hands of men and women, however law-abiding, pose a danger.
JOYCE L MALCOLM
Professor of history, Bentley College, US
Author of Guns & Violence: the English Experience
Senior Advisor, MIT Security Studies Program
Click here to have you say on this story
Government assured Britons they needed no weapons, society would protect them. If that were so in 1920 when the first firearms restrictions were passed, or in 1953 when Britons were forbidden to carry any article for their protection, it no longer is.
The failure of this general disarmament to stem, or even slow, armed and violent crime could not be more blatant. According to a recent UN study, England and Wales have the highest crime rate and worst record for "very serious" offences of the 18 industrial countries surveyed.
But would allowing law-abiding people to "have arms for their defence", as the 1689 English Bill of Rights promised, increase violence? Would Britain be following America's bad example?




Old stereotypes die hard and the vision of Britain as a peaceable kingdom, America as "the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic" is out of date. It is true that in contrast to Britain's tight gun restrictions, half of American households have firearms, and 33 states now permit law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons.
But despite, or because, of this, violent crime in America has been plummeting for 10 consecutive years, even as British violence has been rising. By 1995 English rates of violent crime were already far higher than America's for every major violent crime except murder and rape.
You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York. Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them. They help keep the peace. A study found American burglars fear armed home-owners more than the police. As a result burglaries are much rarer and only 13% occur when people are at home, in contrast to 53% in England.




Much is made of the higher American rate for murder. That is true and has been for some time. But as the Office of Health Economics in London found, not weapons availability, but "particular cultural factors" are to blame.



A study comparing New York and London over 200 years found the New York homicide rate consistently five times the London rate, although for most of that period residents of both cities had unrestricted access to firearms.



When guns were available in England they were seldom used in crime. A government study for 1890-1892 found an average of one handgun homicide a year in a population of 30 million. But murder rates for both countries are now changing. In 1981 the American rate was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and by last year it was 3.5 times. With American rates described as "in startling free-fall" and British rates as of October 2002 the highest for 100 years the two are on a path to converge.

The price of British government insistence upon a monopoly of force comes at a high social cost.
First, it is unrealistic. No police force, however large, can protect everyone. Further, hundreds of thousands of police hours are spent monitoring firearms restrictions, rather than patrolling the streets. And changes in the law of self-defence have left ordinary people at the mercy of thugs.
According to Glanville Williams in his Textbook of Criminal Law, self-defence is "now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it still forms part of the law".
Nearly a century before that American bumper sticker was slapped on the first bumper, the great English jurist, AV Dicey cautioned: "Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians." He knew public safety is not enhanced by depriving people of their right to personal safety.



Joyce Lee Malcolm, professor of history, is author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, published in June 2002.