Tagged with Iran

Why this demonising and continuing provocation of Iran?

Another Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated yesterday by a magnetic bomb placed on his car, the fifth such incident in the last 2 years. This part of a covert war with Iran now under way including:

(1) cyber warfare (the Stuxnet virus that shut down a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges);
(2) the killing of the pioneer of the Iranian missile programme in an explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base near Teheran 2 months ago; and
(3) the promise of more ‘unnatural events’ 2 days ago from the Israeli IDF chief of staff. Continue reading →

The rights and wrongs of Jewish ambassadors and Paul Flynn

John Mann, chair of the All-party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, has said that Paul Flynn MP should “start preparing for his retirement” for, allegedly, suggesting that Matthew Gould is an inappropriate British ambassador to Israel because he is Jewish. If Paul Flynn did say that, which we doubt, it would indeed be a serious matter. It would be absolutely wrong to suggest that a Jew (or indeed anyone else) should be barred from any post because of their religion or ethnicity. The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia “working definition of antisemitism” (which is widely used though by no means universally accepted) is right to argue that “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations” is an example of antisemitism.

However, as well as verifying whether Paul Flynn did in fact say what is alleged, it is also worth noting that a conference on the “delegitimization of Israel” in Manchester last Sunday, “the Big Tent for Israel“, did include a workshop at which former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimons spoke, which, in its title, asserted that “every Jew is an Ambassador for Israel“. Continue reading →

Who believes what Ministers and spooks say about Nuclear Iran?

Here we go again. We’re being told yet again – as well as several times over the last few years – that Iran is about to produce a nuclear weapon and must be stopped at all costs by bombing their nuclear facilities. What is asserted to be new this time is that, firstly, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has allegedly found new evidence of a possible nuclear weapons programme in Iran, secondly that Iran has allegedly been behind some recent assassination attempts abroad against Saudi officials, and thirdly that Iran has allegedly installed a set of centrifuges to a heavily fortified site dug beneath a mountain at Fordow near Qom which may be impregnable to a missile strike. There are good reasons for doubting each of these claims; and after we were given absolute assurances that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be non-existent, justified a war in Iraq, we should now treat these latest allegations about Iran with extreme scepticism. Continue reading →

Now Iran is in his sights. Why does anyone still take Tony Blair seriously?

It simply beggars belief that there are some in the British media who still take Tony Blair even vaguely seriously. On Friday, we were treated to two ‘exclusives’ featuring Blair on the front pages of The Times and the the Daily Mirror. All this in the same week that we learned that Blair had agreed to become a ‘godfather’ to a child of the Murdoch Empire’s own ‘Godfather’, Rupert Murdoch, and that he had helped the murderous Saif al Islam with his exam revision. Quite how both newspaper managed to keep proverbial straight faces while printing homilies from the man who took Britain into an illegal and bloody war, is anyone’s guess. Nonetheless they managed to do so, because this is Britain, a parochial and increasingly backward country. Continue reading →