A huge row, involving the government and inspiring public protests, has broken out in Britain over the BBC’s refusal to broadcast an appeal for aid to Gaza. The reason the corporation has given is that to do so would damage its reputation for impartiality.   

This is amazing! Staggering!! Incredible!!! 

The BBC has not had a reputation for impartiality for decades. Quite the contrary. It has been blatantly and consistently pro-left, anti-conservative, anti-Israel, anti-America, and above all pro-Muslim.

Melanie Phillips comments:

The BBC surely bears a far broader responsibility [than the government] for this row. In particular, its claim that it was anxious to safeguard its reputation for impartiality will have caused a sharp intake of breath among the many who think it no longer has a reputation of impartiality to defend.

One of the great ironies of this situation, after all, is that most people in Britain have no idea about claims that Hamas has apparently been stealing the aid supplies and blowing up the crossing points – because the BBC’s reporters haven’t told them. 

More news of that intercepted Iranian arms-smuggling ship:

The Iranian ship boarded by a US Navy Coast Guard team on the Red Sea last week before it could smuggle arms to Hamas is now disclosed by DEBKAfile’s military sources to have tried to trick the search team by enclosing its rocket cargo in secret compartments behind layers of steel. Furthermore, our sources reveal, the US has not yet found a harbor in the region for carrying out a thorough search.

The Cypriot-flagged Iranian freighter Nochegorsk was intercepted last week by the new US Combined Task Force 151 in the Bab al-Mandeb Straits. Its presence in the Red Sea was first revealed by DEBKAfile on Jan. 20. For this article click HERE.

The Americans decided not to give the Israeli Navy a chance to seize the vessel and tow it to Eilat for fear of a Tehran ultimatum to Jerusalem, followed by Iranian attacks on Israeli naval craft patrolling the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea.

Iran maintains two warships in those waters to guard its shipping against Somali pirates as well as a military presence in the Eritrean port of Assab. The arms smuggling ship was first reported escorted out of the Suez Canal Saturday night, Jan. 23, after which Washington imposed a blackout on the incident. It is now moored at an Egyptian Red Sea port at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez.

But the US and Egyptian governments are in a fix. To break the Iranian ship’s holds open and expose the rockets destined for Hamas, the facilities of a sizeable port are needed. It would have to be Egyptian because the other coastal nations – Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia – are hostile or controlled by pirates. Both the US and Egypt are hesitant about precipitating a full-blown armed confrontation with Iran. The timing is wrong for the new Barack Obama administration, which is set on smoothing relations with Tehran through diplomatic engagement. Cairo has just launched a campaign to limit Tehran’s aggressive drive in the Middle East but does not want a premature clash. [What can this mean? Is a clash intended? If so, when? – JB]

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources disclose that the ship’s captain had orders not to resist an American boarding team but impede a close look at its freight. The Navy Coast Guard searchers first found a large amount of ordnance and explosives in the ship’s hold, which the Iranian captain claimed were necessary for securing Iranian freighters heading from the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. But then, the US searchers using metal detectors perceived welded steel compartments packed with more hardware concealed at the bottom of the hull.

The option of towing it to a Persian Gulf port for an intensive search was rejected because the Gulf emirates hosting US bases were almost certain to shy away from involvement in the affair. Moreover, Tehran would be close enough to mount a naval commando operation to scuttle the ship before it was searched.

Our military sources estimate that eventually the US government may decide to let the Iranian arms ship sail through the Suez Canal out to the Mediterranean for lack of other options.

 From The Blog of the Weekly Standard:

The Wall Street Journal reports on the suspicious case of OneUnited Bank, which received a TARP bailout thanks to Barney Frank, despite running afoul of state and federal regulators due to shady investing and lending practices, as well as the perks it granted to senior executives. The case is an object lesson on the opportunities that massive bills like TARP create for payoffs by those in power, and the power to hide those payoffs. First, the background:

 Troubled OneUnited Bank in Boston didn’t look much like a candidate for aid from the Treasury Department’s bank bailout fund last fall…

Nonetheless, in December OneUnited got a $12 million injection from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. One apparent factor: the intercession of Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee.

Mr. Frank, by his own account, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically aimed at helping this particular home-state bank. And later, he acknowledges, he spoke to regulators urging that OneUnited be considered for a cash injection.

The Journal later described the provision Frank inserted into the bill to help UnitedOne. Frank apparently recognized that it would prompt unpleasant ethical questions if he simply earmarked money for UnitedOne, so instead he created a pool that would benefit the bank without having to name it:

 Mr. Frank says that in order to protect OneUnited bank, he inserted into the bill a provision to give special consideration to banks that had less than $1 billion of assets, had been well-capitalized as of June 30, served low- and moderate-income areas, and had taken a capital hit in the federal seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Frank saw fit to provide this legup to OneUnited despite it running afoul of federal regulators:

 The allegations against the bank included "operating without effective underwriting standards and practices," "operating without an effective loan documentation program" and "engaging in speculative investment practices."

The action also alleged excessive executive compensation. The FDIC ordered OneUnited to "sell all bank-owned automobiles," and to require that executives reimburse the company for any vehicles that had been purchased. The Boston Business Journal reported in November that the bank owns a 2008 Porsche sport-utility vehicle that is registered at the address of OneUnited CEO Kevin Cohee.

The FDIC also ordered the bank to stop paying for a beachfront house in Santa Monica that, according to the Boston Business Journal, was purchased for more than $6 million in early 2007 by a group that included Cohee and his wife Teri Williams, the bank’s president.

Is Commander-in-Chief Obama aware that the US navy is intercepting arms shipments from Iran to Hamas? If he is, does it mean that he recognizes Hamas as Iran’s proxy,  wants to thwart the Iranians, and prevent the re-arming of Gaza? If not, will he stop the navy doing this useful task when it comes to his attention? 

US Coast Guard boarding team

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that a US Navy Coast Guard team this week boarded an Iranian arms ship flying a Cypriot flag in the Red Sea and found weapons in its hold.

This was the first time an America warship had ever intercepted an Iranian vessel in international water. The incident activated the Memo of Understanding the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice signed with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni a week ago on actions to halt the flow of Iranian arms to Hamas as part of the Gaza ceasefire.

The Iranian ship’s captain showed the US boarding team documents recording the Syrian port of Latakia as its cargo’s destination. DEBKAfile reports that both US and Israeli intelligence are certain the arms were bound for Hamas. But according to international law, the US Navy’s Combined Task Force (CTF) 151, set up last week to combat piracy, was not authorized to confiscate the cargo or stop the ship because no enforcement mechanism was yet in place.

After a few hours, therefore, the US force released the Iranian vessel and two warships escorted it out of Red Sea waters. The ship and its escort are due to enter the Suez Canal heading north Saturday night, Jan. 23, after being prevented from unloading its arms freight on the coast of Sinai or Gaza.

Tehran has so far not reacted to the incident.

DEBKAfile revealed last week that the new US task force policing the waters of the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and Red Sea, under the command of Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, had been additionally assigned with intercepting Iranian ships smuggling arms for Hamas, often in conjunction with Somali pirates and Sinai Bedouin militias.

Massed on the lead ship San Antonio is a helicopter detachment, a "surgical team" for dealing with small speedboats trying to hem the ship in and 14 Navy VBSS members, including two Navy boarding officers. The Coast Guard detachment is made up of eight members, all of them qualified as boarding officers.

 They’re doling it out to their friends. From Power Line:

Barack Obama says his administration represents the end of "business as usual" in Washington. So far that appears to be true. What’s happening these days is considerably worse than what has previously passed for standard practice. Currently, the politically powerful are lined up to receive billions in federal bailout funds.Glenn Reynolds best described what is going on in Obama’s Washington:

      This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.

 From the Onion:

Obama appeared most frustrated about halfway through the address when reverberations from the pneumatic drill set off several dozen nearby car alarms, drowning out the new president’s attempt to describe his vision for America’s future in a changing world.

"If the person currently operating the jackhammer can hear me, please stop," Obama said at approximately the eight-minute mark of his speech. "Seriously, please. Stop it now."

The unremitting pounding caused the first African-American president to sigh or roll his eyes a combined 17 times, most notably during an apparently eloquent passage conveying his "lifelong desire to [unify or commit] the United States to a [common goal, higher purpose, or challenge] by 2012."

During a particularly loud spell of thuds, Obama muttered, "Oh, come on."

Footage of the event shows that when the president tried to explain how perseverence and pride could help rebuild a better society for all, he was interrupted not only by the jackhammer, but by several audience members who shouted, "Speak up," "Louder," and "I can’t hear you over all this jackhammering."

At one point during the address, Obama stopped talking entirely and walked off the stage for nearly five minutes. When he returned, he asked the restless crowd for calm and understanding.

"Okay, so, it looks like they’re not going to stop jackhammering. We’re just going to have to keep going, I guess," Obama told the massive group, many of whom had already begun walking to their cars. "I’ll try to speed through it."

A transcript released by his campaign prior to the address revealed that Obama ultimately cut the speech short by six pages, omitting a section about the conflict in Afghanistan and a point-by-point explanation of his economic recovery plan.

According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the lasting images of the 2009 presidential inauguration will be Vice President Joe Biden, seated just 20 feet behind Obama, cupping his right ear in a desperate attempt to hear what the 44th president was saying.

"Inauguration addresses have always brought us inspirational and defining moments," Goodwin said. "FDR reminded Americans that all they had to fear was fear itself. John F. Kennedy encouraged citizens to ask what they could do for their country."

"And now President Barack Obama offers his own stirring message," Goodwin continued. "’Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.’"

Those in attendance agreed that it was nearly impossible to make out a single sentence of the historic address.

"I wanted to leave the speech with a feeling that this man was a beacon of hope, that he was going to lead us out of the doldrums and into a bold new beginning," said Nathaniel Washburn, a 72-year-old African-American who brought his grandchildren to the inauguration. "But I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing."

"I thought it was really, really cool," said Washburn’s 7-year-old grandson, Gregory. "When I grow up, I want to be a jackhammer operator." 

 

 On the signing by President Obama of an executive order to close the terrorist-holding prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year, Ben Johnson writes:

At the signing ceremony Thursday, Obama said, "The message that we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly, we are going to do so effectively, and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." 

The actual message Obama sent is that the United States now places "world opinion" above its own well-being; that the commander-in-chief of the War on Terror is willing to grant the other side tactical advantages; that the leader of the free world acts on image without thinking out the practical consequences his actions might have for his country or his soldiers. The only silver lining is the president’s hypocrisy. Thursday’s signing ceremony was the triumph of style over substance, of emotional masturbation over hard-headed analysis, of the politics of guilt over the duty of self-defense. It was certainly no way to inaugurate a new era of responsibility.

In the post below, we explained that the revolutionary left has claimed to act in the name of aims and ends that most people agree with. To do this was one of the tactics taught by SAUL ALINSKY, the left revolutionary whose disciples, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are now President and Secretary of State respectively. His instructions required them to work their way to power through the institutions, not to flaunt their radicalism but to ‘cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within’; to start with ‘community organizing’, the role of the organizer ‘or master manipulator’ being supremely important.

A full account of his ‘blueprint for revolution’, which ‘he and his disciples euphemistically refer to as "change”’, can be found here.

President Obama now has a very big community to organize, the entire United States of America. Its citizens can only benefit by being informed about their organizer’s master and his theories. 

If you don’t know about SLAVOJ ZIZEK of Slovenia, you should, because he is dangerous.

He’s a passionate communist who thinks Lenin was the greatest hero in history. The man he seems to hate most is the former (good, courageous, altogether admirable) Czech president, Vaclav Havel.

At home in Ljubljana, Zizek is no more than a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, but further west he is more highly valued with a professorship at the European Graduate School and an appointment as international director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities in London. Despite the extreme hostility he expresses towards the United States – or because of it – he has been a visiting professor at Princeton and numerous other American universities including Chicago, Columbia, Minnesota, Michigan, and UC Irvine.

He ran for the presidency of Slovenia in 1990, but failed. It is not, however, as an active politician that he is immediately dangerous, but as one of those intellectuals whose pernicious influence on fellow academics, and consequently on rising generations of students, do profound harm by subverting freedom and supporting tyranny. Typically, he derives pleasure from rebelling and shocking, in the irresponsible spirit of a perpetual adolescent. His fans, safe in their well-funded ivory towers, applaud him with the hideous glee of spoilt children. He is the darling of media chat shows and organs of the left such as The Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker. A characteristic ‘look at me how daring I am’ statement on TV last year in New York was: ‘Everybody in the world except US citizens should be allowed to elect the American government.’

In the style of the enfant terrible he likes to invert the values of civilization. By doing so he appears to his admirers as heroic, witty, original and profound. He is none of those things. He is brutal, blind of imagination, emotionally stunted, vicious, arrogant, and stupid in the specially obscurantist way all leftist professors of philosophy and sociology are stupid.

His chief intellectual influences – in addition to Marx and Lenin – have been members of what I call the French pandemonium, such as Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. (A pandemonium is a gathering of all demons.) Their repulsive ideas, enthusiastically endorsed and handed on by academics in America, have been given a new lease of life by late-comer Zizek, whose country had been sleeping for decades under the spell of communism. Most East Europeans woke happily in the dawn of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, and have brought new vigor to the decadent spirit of the West. But here is an intellectual who lived under the oppression of communism and yet is nostalgic for it; who idealizes cruelty and suffering, and abominates freedom – while making use of it to build a lucrative reputation as its implacable enemy.

His stardom in the academic firmament is due to his wishing even worse evils upon us than did Lacan – whose psychoanalytic therapy consisted of trying to drive his patients insane; or Foucault – who wrote of ‘the joy of torture’, longed to carry out human sacrifice, and taught that cruelty should be a perpetual condition of existence, so that life would be the experience of unmitigated pain, hate and aggression.

Zizek writes in the customarily opaque language of the left. (I think they hope that unintelligibility will be mistaken for profundity. As Nietzsche – another spreader of evil but one who could write better – once said: ‘They muddy the waters that they may seem deep’.) For example:

‘To put it simply [!]: If we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals are “living” their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled with this richness; this original void, this lack of symbolic structure, is the subject.’ (The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London 1989, pp174-175.)

The only meaning I can extract from this is that if you take everything out of something, it will be empty. For this we need a philosopher?

Zizek’s appalling political ideas can with effort be discerned in his writings. They are consistent with what he admires in the acts of individuals: extreme sadism, terrorism, motiveless murder. Crime is his delight. Only crime, he feels, is ‘authentically ethical’, because it subverts the coercion of law. But this is not mere antinomianism. Zizek revels in the suffering of other people; so the more horrific the crime is, the better. He adores suicide bombing. He loved the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11; they gave him such as aesthetic thrill. America he calls ‘the enemy’. Anyone – any state, any terrorist, any traitor – who acts against America is laudable. He wants all people everywhere to live in fearful obedience to totalitarian despotism. Voluntary subordination to an ’authentic Leader’, he preaches, is ‘the highest act of freedom’. (Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, London 2001 pp246-247.)

So if you are free, the best use you can make of your freedom is to choose to be unfree. This sort of nonsense is common among academic writers of the left. But Zizek is praised for his fresh originality. In what does it lie – apart from his being even more evil than his philosophical models? It is said to be in his allusions to popular culture, especially films, and such sub-philosophical phenomena as chocolate eggs with toys in them; but Rolande Barthes (another of the French demons) did that sort of thing too. In this way they make themselves seem less esoteric; philosophers for the common man. Yet – like Lacan, who tried to be as impenetrable to his readers and audiences as possible – Zizek strives not to be understood, so that he can counter any criticism by maintaining that the critic was too dumb to grasp what he meant. He contradicts himself frequently. For instance, while he holds that torture is a splendid thing, Americans ‘torturing’ Iraqis at Abu Ghraib is deplorable.

Thinkers have been the guiding lights of civilization, but in the 20^th and 21^st centuries the intellectuals of the left have been preaching against it. Until now they claimed a pretext for doing so, insisting that the subversions they practiced, the revolutions they encouraged, the oppressions they excused, were heroic efforts on behalf of the wretched of the earth: the poor, the colonized, the dispossessed, workers, women, lunatics, prisoners, aborigines… They pretended it was all for the eventual happiness of the human race: iron heartlessness in the cause of compassion. Multitudes received their message indirectly; and because they believed in the pretext, they followed them. The evil has soaked our culture. That is why Europe is letting itself be raped by Islam; why millions cheer for Hamas and hate Israel; why the media in the US suppressed the information that a presidential candidate had spent his whole political life among communists, terrorists, and America-haters; why George W Bush was loathed for overthrowing an Arab tyrant; why universities oppose free speech; why the Greens threaten us with hellfire on earth.

But now the pretext has been dropped. Now, with Zizek, the sheath is off, the naked truth revealed. Zizek and his flock are against freedom. They are against reason. They are against happiness. They want us in anguish. They want us in chains. Thrilled by their own daring, and out of malice and egotism, they would light our way to subjugation and suffering without end.

We must grasp what Zizek is saying, however he fudges it. ‘Don’t take him seriously – he doesn’t really mean it,’ is often heard from commentators on the left when his assertions make them feel uneasy. But it is urgent and necessary that we do take him seriously, attend to his message and all that it implies for every one of us, because he is speaking for this age.

Jillian Becker

January 2009

 A report from Chad:

N’DJAMENA, 16 January 2009 (IRIN) – A government ban on charcoal in the Chadian capital N’djamena has created what one observer called “explosive” conditions as families desperately seek the means to cook. 

“As we speak women and children are on the outskirts of N’djamena scavenging for dead branches, cow dung or the occasional scrap of charcoal,” Merlin Totinon Nguébétan of the UN Human Settlements Programme (HABITAT) in Chad, told IRIN from the capital. “People cannot cook.” …

Unions and other civil society groups say the government failed to prepare the population or make alternative household fuels available when it halted all transport of charcoal and cooking wood into the capital in December in a move, officials said, to protect the environment.