From American Thinker:

In fact, it is the media themselves who are criminally complicit in the internment of Gaza’s civilians in the line of fire. They could stop the terrorists simply by headlining Hamas’ responsibility for the plight of the Arabs of Gaza, over and over again. That’s the real story — if only they could headline the facts right in front of their eyes.  But they don’t.

That shows us the real values of CNN and BBC; morally they are no better than the terrorists. The media are essential to the Kabuki play of terror, response, and renewed terror. They are constantly fanning the flames.

So when the media and the Left predictably demand Israeli appeasement of Hamas, let’s just ask them: where is your compassion for the Arab victims of a jihadist internment camp called Gaza? How much longer do you want civilians to be turned into the bloody victims of the terrorist publicity machine?

The next time you turn on CNN, remember that you are looking at smiling faces that knowingly collude in the deaths of civilians, both Jews and Arabs. Without the leftist media there is no payoff for terrorists. Shut off the oxygen of publicity and Hamas shrivels to a powerless gang of thugs.

The media-terrorist collusion is completely symbiotic – they are both essential for the drama to work. Separate the terrorists from the media, and you have heat without oxygen – no explosion.

The simple fact is that we are seeing repeated crimes against humanity, an endless collusion between the terror masters and the dominant media, resulting in a reign of terror that blights the lives of millions of people and kills unforgiveable numbers, both in Israel and its neighbors.

 Joe the Plumber reports from Israel on PJTV.

In our view, this modest, intelligent, independent, sensible, honest man – brave too, making sure others get into a rocket-shelter before himself, as the video shows – embodies much that is good about America. 

We’d also like to think of him as typical of Americans, but after the recent election we know that cannot, unfortunately, be the case.

The New York Times claims that President Bush turned down an Israeli request for bunker-busting bombs and permission to overfly Iraq so that the Israeli Air Force could disable or destroy Iran’s nuclear-bomb production.

The NYT cannot be trusted to report the truth, but in this instance it’s not easy to see how lying would be in the interests of that traitorous newspaper.

If the report is true, then Bush has imperiled the world. By letting Iran become a nuclear power, he becomes a co-author of the terror and destruction Iran will inflict on Israel and all of us.  

We praise President Bush for eliminating the tyrant Saddam Hussein, for leading America to victory in Iraq, and for keeping Americans safe from more terrorist attacks after 9/11.

But if he is now tolerating Iran’s arming itself with nuclear bombs, he is undoing the good he has done. A nuclear armed Iran is a far greater threat to America than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ever were.

President Clinton had a number of opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden and each time made the bad judgment not to do so. If President Bush has really stopped Israel from destroying Iran’s bomb-producing sites,  he has made a worse misjudgment. America will pay dearly for it.

All hope that the US itself will act effectively to stop Iran ends, we believe, with the Bush presidency. It seems to us most unlikely that Obama will do anything but make futile attempts to appease that evil regime.

 Mark Steyn writes and comments – right-on as always:

"I want Hizb’Allah to wipe the state of terrorism off the planet…"   

"The state of terrorism – Israel – will be wiped off the planet, Inshallah."

Teheran? Ramallah? Islamabad? No, a speaker at yesterday’s demo in Toronto. And, for those who patiently point out that measured criticism of Israeli government policies is not anti-Semitism, check out the lady yelling, "Jewish child, you’re gonna f—-in’ die!"

During the last year, as the Canadian Islamic Congress and their eunuch stooges in the "human rights" commissions attempted to criminalize my books and columns as "hate crimes", various leftie groups – including PEN Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists – came to see the country’s censorship laws as incompatible with freedom. The only public defenders of the "human rights" commissions were, of all people, the Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith Canada and other "official Jews" (in Ezra Levant’s words) who insisted state censorship was necessary in order to cow the last three "white supremacists" in Saskatchewan into submission and prevent such horrifying crimes as scrawling swastikas at knee height in public toilets.

So the Canadian Jewish Congress made common cause with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the neo-Nazi takeover of the prairies (or, at any rate, prairie toilets) has been prevented. And now explicitly genocidal eliminationist threats against Jews are being bellowed out at public rallies. But that’s okay, because it’s not a hate crime, unlike my book. Which may explain the curious silence of the CJC and the toilet warriors.

Congratulations to the CJC on helping build a tolerant hate-free Canada. In 20 years’ time, I hope there’ll still be enough Jews in Toronto and Montreal to man the CJC offices. Or maybe by then the Canadian Jewish Congress will be operating out of a PO box in the Turks and Caicos.

 The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Deepak Chopra and others declaring that  ‘Alternative’  Medicine is Mainstream. 

In the account below of the failure of the British National Health Service, Madeleine Westrop writes that the NHS pays for ‘complementary medicine such as homeopathy and reflexology, hands on healing.’

Deepak Chopra wants this to happen in America too.

Who is Deepak Chopra? He’s into ‘self-awareness’; he’s pro-Hamas; he suffers from ‘Bush derangement syndrome’.

Will American patients be forcibly put into the hands of shamans – and shams – like this man?

In an Obama-run America, it’s more than possible, it’s very likely. 

 The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Deepak Chopra and others declaring that  ‘Alternative’  Medicine is Mainstream. 

In the account below of the failure of the British National Health Service, Madeleine Westrop writes that the NHS pays for ‘complementary medicine such as homeopathy and reflexology, hands on healing.’

Deepak Chopra wants this to happen in America too.

Who is Deepak Chopra? He’s into ‘self-awareness’; he’s pro-Hamas; he suffers from ‘Bush derangement syndrome’.

Will American patients be forcibly put into the hands of shamans – and shams – like this man?

In an Obama-run America, it’s more than possible, it’s very likely. 

 Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) has been nominated to be the new secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Heritage Foundation has published an article by Robert E Moffit asking Senator Daschle ‘key questions’ and giving the ‘right answers’. The whole thing is worth reading. 

Here is an extract, relevant to the account posted below in 3 installment, Health of the nation by Madeleine Westrop, which provides a horrifying description of a patient’s experience at the hands of the British National Health Service:

Question #4: The British Experience with NICE

On page 127 of your book, you write, "In other countries, national health boards have helped to ensure quality and rein in costs in the face of these challenges. In Great Britain, for example, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which is part of the National Health Service (NHS), is the single entity responsible for providing guidance on the use of new and existing drugs, treatments, and procedures." If that British agency determines that a treatment is cost effective, it must then be available within the NHS, but it also denies reimbursement for treatments, making them practically unavailable for patients. Based on your assessment of the record of NICE, would you like to see similar results for doctors and patients in the United States?

Answer. The right answer is that Americans should never have to endure anything remotely like the centralized, bureaucratic health care decision-making process that characterizes the British National Health Service.

Increasingly, the British media is reporting on the consequences of the role of NICE, and those results are nasty. For example, The Telegraph of London reports that NICE denied access to Velcade, a new drug for the treatment of cancer.Jacky Pickles, a 44-year-old mother with the disease, made a direct plea to Britain’s health secretary for coverage of the medication. Ms. Pickles, working in the British system as a midwife for 25 years, said, "I am going to give them the last years of my life. I’ve got to go to work in a Health Service that won’t support me when I most need it. I have given my life to the NHS, but it is a system that won’t give me something I need to save my life." Britain’s health secretary would not intervene to help Ms. Pickles, and NICE officials refused to comment, noting that while the drug for cancer treatment is "clinically effective" compared to chemotherapy, they deemed it not to be "cost effective." If members of the incoming Administration and the Congress really want such a system, they should thoroughly brief ordinary Americans what it would entail.

 Continued from below.

Many NHS workers see the NHS as something holy and private medicine as wicked. I do not believe, having watched your elections in the US, you have any idea of the class war going on here.  Yet. 

When, this year, some dying cancer patients bought their own drugs because the Government committee, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Ecellence – “NICE” – would not approve the drugs for the NHS, the patients were then told that, once they had paid for something, they could have none of their care on the NHS and must pay for every blood test and bandage.  It was said that any favours to those who could pay were a fraud on everyone else and all must be equal in the NHS.  Patients “cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the N.H.S. and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs,” the Health Secretary (and  Marxist and militant Trades Unionist,) Alan Johnson, told Parliament.“That way lies the end of the founding principles of the N.H.S..”

This is not true. The 1942 Beveridge report, which was the basis for the NHS, said: The state " should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family".  We all know that the bought cancer drugs were available in some areas and not others on the NHS anyway; that NHS patients have always paid towards some treatments.  In fact, the country could not afford the NHS if top up payments were banned. The doctrinaire Health Minister however, did not know this (but as he left school with no qualifications at all, I am not terribly surprised).  What is more, none of the people concerned, who bought their own cancer drugs, was rich but simply ready to sell their homes or use up all their saving in their desperation to get the drug concerned.   

You may be thinking that your system will be different and will embrace private insurance more and a dual system can operate.  Indeed that is what the Obama/Biden plan says. But, I have just pointed out that this was the stated original point of the NHS.  Give the state (and overpaid doctors) power, and they will want more and more control over your lives. 

Back to our nightmare-day.  My husband was trying to get us admitted to the private hospital without the referral; but the private hospital would not do this.  That’s the thing.  The NHS was designed to keep doctors and the state in charge.  There is a protocol between doctors and it has to be observed.  The state controls access to public healthcare, but in a way it also controls thereby access to private healthcare. The Obama/Biden plan seems to say that the state will now be interfering in private insurance arrangements.  If it was just a question of making it more competitive or of taking anti-trust precautions, I would think this fair enough. But the plan is to offer what Obama calls a National Health Insurance Exchange which will oversee the private insurance companies.  It is nuts. Do not do it or you will compromise the part of your system that works.

When my son was eventually seen, in an even dirtier room that was itself a corridor to a staff room with a constant flow of people in and out, we had to have a long chat with the doctor where she made very pleasant conversation and enquiry, little of it relevant to our plight. The NHS trains  our new doctors here in  England: this encourages allegiance to the NHS. This doctor  did not diagnose anything but did want to know all about us – what my son was studying. We also filled out a form which asked us our race and background.  A consultant finally appeared. He wore a suit. He was hard to talk to. He simply looked in my son’s throat, sprayed anaesthetic and stuck a scalpel into a huge ulcer on his tonsils, whereupon an effluvium of blood and puss was collected and it tasted so vile that my son, usually stalwart, said ‘Dear God’ and started to shake.

The consultant, I would say on oath, never washed his hands. He did diagnose Quinsy and he did do something.  But the thing is that everyone I know, at work or socially, knows someone who has had infections of  MRSA or C difficile, contracted in a sic NHS hospital.  My own mother has said she would rather face death than go to an NHS hospital, and nearly proved her point recently, saved by  finding a private hospital that would take her on a referral from a doctor friend.  Generally, death certificates do not always say if the patients are infected so the figures are unreliable.  The MRSA Action Group say that “the number of MRSA bacteraemia’s for 2007/08 is 4438” and there were “55,393 cases of Clostridium difficile”.  “MRSA Action UK … has come to the conclusion that we can no longer believe anything this Government says in respect to Healthcare Infections and that going into hospital is now a lottery for patients.”  Mr Brown the Prime Minister recently ordered a one-off deep clean of all wards. One off? Lister is spinning in his grave.

The consultant seemed a bit cross with us.  He said to us that my son had a life-threatening condition and should be in hospital on IV antibiotics. I think he wanted us to apologise for hanging around in his dirty waiting room all that time. Instead, I said that we wanted a transfer to the private hospital and he said that he would do this but we would still be under his care. I said I didn’t mind about that, but I did want to move. The thing was that the invasive procedure was done and I was desperate to go somewhere clean.

The first thing I noticed at the small Priory hospital was that it was easy and free to park and easy to drop off my son at the door so he could get in from the cold. The next thing I noticed was that there was a lady on the stairwell dusting under the brackets of the banister and another in the corridor dusting the skirting. I said to them with some emotion, “I’m really pleased you are doing that.” Everything was clean and linen was laundered.  A mouth rinse was provided straight away, we were shown to a clean private room with its own bathroom. Nurses and doctors fussed over drips and pain-killers.  My son, as all NHS transferees are, was put in isolation and swabbed for MRSA and C difficile. The nurses wore aprons and gloves and regarded him as a source of infection.  Somehow, they each had the ability to think and act whereas the NHS hospital staff had all been in a kind of professional coma. When I went to the nurses station to ask something, I found three staff members discussing my son and his blood sugar level, instead of their boyfriends or celebrity favourites. When I asked, I was given helpful and polite answers. It wasn’t just that we were paying, it was that the whole culture  and professional focus was utterly different from the NHS.

But, you may cry, not everyone can afford private health insurance. We need a public health service for the poor or the uninsurable. Sure. But be very afraid. We pay three times over for health care in my family.  We have insurance through my husband’s employers, worth about £5,000 for each of us but costing the company a bit less but costing  us tax;  extra civil service insurance (because it is a great deal and we are entitled because of a previous job) costing about £500 a year and on top of this we pay about 11% of our salary (with a further contribution from our employer) for National Insurance. Taken all together, this comes to just under 1/5 of our income.

In effect, we subsidise the poorer people and unemployed people who are ironically known as  “deprived” as if we were taking things away from them.  But I don’t believe it does actually help anyone to make us pay so much.  The sic NHS is just too big and it doesn’t work.  If the public service de-centralised, scaled down and copied the private sector a bit more, it would work better.  Who would pay for the indigent pensioner’s hip?  I just don’t know.  I would like her to get a hip and I feel that people who have paid National Insurance all these years cannot now be defrauded of their dues.  But the sic NHS will have more and more patients in an ageing population and fewer funds to pay for anything.  

Unaware of any constraints,  under this Government the NHS has had not just huge budgets and plans but vaulting ambitions. This particularly applies to screening and preventative “education”. I notice the Obama/Biden plan includes promotion of public health and preventative screenings. Here, in some places the NHS also pays for IVF, counselling, complementary medicine such as homeopathy and reflexology, hands on healing (although you cannot find out how much is spent on this in the sic NHS),  fresh fruit vouchers for low income families, £200 shopping vouchers for drug addicts who keep up treatment (under the guidance of Dawn Primarolo, our “Red Dawn” of the Labour Party – I know this last incentive has been tried in the US too).  Somehow, drug addicts, who cannot be bothered to work, must be given money by people who do work. There is a dependent class in Britain, paid to be idle, living unhappy lives and messing up. The Left only has eyes for them and ambitious unrestrained plans for providing things for them.

The NHS must treat illness not bad behaviour, encourage top up private payments, allow opt outs, forget the ambitious screening, education, IT plans and forget quackery. We must be encouraged and incentivised to help ourselves without the nanny state. A recent study showed that when we were taxed less we gave far more  to charity. Our Mediaeval oldest and best hospitals were all endowed by charities. Something less on the scale of the Chinese army would be more efficient and cost less. After all, there was a considerable and very successful cheaper health insurance option for the poor, before the NHS was dreamt up by our socialist post war Government. 

Sir William Beveridge, author of the famous 1942 report which laid the foundation for the NHS, wanted to fight the five ‘Giant Evils’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. But at the QE I believe we met those five Enemies at close quarters despite our funds and best efforts to avoid them. Will you also be meeting Disease and Squalor sometime soon, too? 

Yours sincerely, 

a wicked pro-capitalist,

M Westrop.

PS. My son is fine now, thanks to the excellent treatment he was given in the private hospital.

 

 Joe Kaufman writes in Front Page Magazine:

While many understand the Israeli need to protect its villagers from constant rocket and mortar attacks originating from Hamas-controlled Gaza, there are some who seek to castigate Israel, the victim, instead of their perpetrator. On December 29, 2008, CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] and a cadre of other radical Islamic organizations held a press conference to “demand” that the U.S. government “take immediate steps to end the immoral and illegal Israeli bombardment of Gaza and its population.” A copy of CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad’s speech, from which these words were taken, is located on CAIR’s YouTube page. What went unreported is the fact that CAIR maintains close ties to Hamas.

CAIR was established in June 1994 by three leaders of the now-defunct American propaganda wing of Hamas, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). CAIR was created as being a part of the American Palestine Committee, which at the time was headed by the global leader of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Some 14 years later, CAIR has not managed to shake its ties to Hamas, as it was named a party by the U.S. Justice Department to a federal trial dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. All of the defendants were found guilty on all charges. Indeed, currently on the YouTube page where Nihad Awad’s speech is found, in CAIR’s “Subscribers” section, logos are discovered for Hamas and Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, as well as Hezbollah. Furthermore, Awad has declared his support for Hamas.

Pro-Hamas sentiment is not just limited to CAIR’s national office. CAIR also has a number of local chapters around the U.S. that support Hamas. One of its more outspoken is in Los Angeles, sometimes called CAIR-California. The Executive Director of CAIR-California is Hussam Ayloush. Ayloush has held his position, dating back to at least 2001. In December 2001, the CAIR-California website donned a smiling photo of him posing with suicide bombing advocate and spiritual leader of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.In the past, Ayloush has praised Hamas-related cleric Wagdy Ghoneim, calling him a “highly regarded religious scholar.” He has referred to the creation of Israel as the “nakba” or “catastrophe.” He has labeled Israelis “Zionazis.” And he has stated that the intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising against Israel, really means “standing up against injustice.” Today, Ayloush’s blog, which he calls his “official website,” is covered with virulently anti-Israeli rhetoric.

CAIR-California’s Civil Rights Coordinator, Affad Shaikh, too suffers from an anti-Israel obsession. After Israel declared war on Hamas, Shaikh posted to different blogs a photo of an individual holding a sign with the words, “DEATH TO ALL JUICE.” Of course, by “Juice” he meant “Jews.” He added that Muslim groups should end their full participation in interfaith gatherings with Jews, calling such gatherings a “facade.”Shaikh, in May 2007, issued a warning to the United States stating, “If we in the West continue to feed into this idea and support a state that is not truly in line with Democratic principles then we are fooling ourselves and setting up for a catastrophe of great magnitude.”

Affad Shaikh’s “Nakba” for America will become real, if people don’t wake up and realize that Hamas is not just in Gaza: its supporters live here at home. Israel’s battle in Gaza today could very well be a battle fought within the United States in the near future. In fact, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zaharsaid as much, when he stated this week that Jews “have legitimized the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.” 

All over the world could once again include Manhattan.

 

 Continued from below.

The socialist Government here has spent excessively on grandiose building schemes in the last 10 years. Queen Elizabeth Hospital – meant to cost £291 million and £560 million is the official figure now, with the Taxpayers Alliance figure running at £627 million, the extra costs hidden in many disparate small reports. It is half rebuilt in the shape of three bigger-than-enormous tubes on top of a hill.  Everything about them is so huge that the human being is a mere streptococcus next to three giant macaroni. The tubes are entirely empty except for builders. 

In fact everything is huge in the NHS.  It costs about 100 billion pounds a year to run [for a population about one-sixth that of the USA].  I note that your US plan is not just National but indeed Universal. The thing is already bloated in name.  Here, Mr Brown, our Prime Minister, ‘invests’ ever larger funds in it.  It is the third or fifth biggest employer in the world (depending on what source you read) after the Indian railways and the Chinese army. The NHS employs 1.3 million people. Our socialist government says that it was elected because people want it to ‘invest’ in the NHS and the people were prepared to be taxed more to do this. Budgets do indeed go up every year, much being spent on doctors’ salaries. This is in keeping with the original deal to make doctors join in. Bevan, the Labour Minister for Health in 1948, said he had to ‘stuff their mouths with gold’ to secure the consultants’ support for the NHS. Brown has continued the alliance between the state and the medical profession and doctors can be well paid. But I have doubts about the wisdom of concentrating such power and privilege in any hands. Milton Friedman wrote that any concentration of power was a threat to freedom, even when done for the best of reasons. It would be better for democracy if the doctors were a bit hostile to the establishment and therefore had an incentive to criticise the Government policy on health. 

Anyway, somewhere around this Brave New Building, the QE, are the buildings belonging to the old QE. The new QE is not in use yet but we had to use the new QE’s car park.  After the parking hurdle (£3.30), we slithered past endless excavations and piles of building materials, through ice and snow, and eventually found the main entrance to the old hospital by sneaking round some iron railings, parked cars and bins, into a side alley, tripping across tarmac spotted with chewing gum, past the smoker-bevy at the door and through apologetic glass doors set round a corner within the tiny corner of the alley. Human beings are not important in the scheme and must sneak into hospital. In our fascist-socialist society, the architectural arrangements are bound to make ordinary individuals feel small and displaced. Once in, we walked for miles along dirty lino floors and up five double flights of stairs and eventually found ourselves in E5.

All along the way, the corridors were decorated with very elderly ladies on gurneys and wheelchairs in thin hospital gowns and without their teeth. They were like statues set at intervals to decorate the way, except that one expects regular statues to be Romans, or great men looking up at the horizon as if thinking about what humanity could achieve. Instead, these old ladies were parked, forgotten, and looking only forlornly down.

That brings another point to mind.  The Labour Government loves management-speak and targets.  You go to Emergency hospitals and they clock you in, for example, and then put you in a consulting room as quickly as possible so that, officially, you only waited a short time. Then you usually wait for ages in the consulting room, instead of the waiting room.  You may get the offer of an operation on the day you said you were going on holiday so that, when you turn down the appointment, you are a statistic offered treatment within the target time. The Labour Party introduced the fiendishly complicated ‘Performance Indicator Framework’ and these targets and measurements are universally loathed throughout the country and distort management of treatment. According to our populist papers, patients are often parked for days in corridors.  I note that your Obama/Biden plan requires “hospitals to collect and report health care cost and quality data”.  The devil will be in the detail.

Of course, as you will have already guessed, there were no doctors available at E5 and the nurses room was full of nurses and clerks but they were unable to help because we were not ‘admitted’ until the doctor had seen us. The waiting room was so grubby that the thick dust under the chairs was a greyer echo of the snow outside. 

However, I think the old hospital had once looked rather better. In fact, lino is made of linseed and is naturally antiseptic and, in my childhood, hospital corridors were always burnished by a wandering lino-polisher and the linoleum gleamed and smelt of cleaning chemical. The old QE also had those funny bits of thick brass door furniture on heavy wooden doors that, if maintained, shout out that they are solidly engineered British Empire door knobs. But that was then. Here we were in the dirt. The radio blared out rap until my son testily pulled the plug out. A little lady was brought in to add statuary interest and another on a trolley parked outside in the corridor.  And my son paced up and down clutching his head in pain. When we asked whether a doctor were coming or if we could have a pain-killer, we were told that the doctors were all at the side of someone who was bleeding. Of course, this made us feel guilty for asking. We are all guilty in socialism, even if we suffer, because we cannot compete with the abject misery of everyone else.  When I asked one of the doctors, who eventually called in for a moment, if she would just refer us to the private hospital, she said she had never done such a thing and would not be prepared to. (From his office, my husband telephoned the private hospital for us but they insisted that a doctor must refer us: Catch 22.)

[To be continued]