New York Times aids terrorism.

The Washington Times has an article detailing the disgraceful behaviour of the New York Times in repeatedly revealing sensitive security information, including: wire taps on al Qaeda; a Treasury programme to trace terrorist financing; and selectively negative excerpts from a National Intelligence Estimate. In short, they are willing to risk lives just to mount a political attack on President Bush and the Republicans. To such depths has the left sunk.

The fact that the article was written by a senior Republican does not invalidate the criticism.

Tags: New York Times, Washington Times, USA

Bush planning the end of the world.

Or so the UK television station, Channel 4, would have us believe. Tonight, the channel is broadcasting The Doomsday Code, a programme which is anti-American even by their standards.

Tony Robinson, the diminutive republican (as in Robespierre, not George Bush) is presenting what purports to be a serious examination of the influence of the Book of Revelation on American politics.

The chain of logic is crude: Revelation is a "weird" book so those Christians who take it literally are weird. These weird Christians are "End Timers" who believe that end of the world is nigh and some of them visit the White House.

No one knows if George W Bush is an End Timer himself, but his policies are at one with those of the evangelical Right and his language is often apocalyptic, such as when he describes the 'war on terror' as 'the epic struggle of good and evil'.

So Bush and the evangelical right are ascribed beliefs according to the programme's agenda, rather than any evidence of what either might, or might not, believe.

It gets eerier:

There are End Timers in the White House, manipulating US policy in the Middle East: Before the war in Iraq, the USA supported a negotiated settlement in which Israel would return the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians. By 2004, after a torrent of criticism of the Roadmap to Peace, Bush's position had changed and now there is no call for a large-scale withdrawal from the West Bank.

No mention that the rise of Hamas and Hezballah has led to the painful realisation by all concerned, including the Israeli Prime Minister, that the Roadmap seriously undermined Israel's security.

For good measure, the End Timers are also blamed for the AIDS crisis in Africa and are accused of regarding the UN as the Anti-Christ. According to the Radio Times preview (not on line) the End Timers are actively undermining belief in global warming.

I think I'll record the programme and report back later in the week.

(update 17.9.06)
I've watched the programme and there is nothing to add to the above. It was sadly typical of what passes for factual documentary television in the UK: tenuous connections and similarities presented as fact.

Bush Derangement Syndrome

Tony Blair's attitude towards American foreign policy after 9/11 seems to have caused Bush Derangement Syndrome to mutate into an anti-Blair strain.

On Tuesday, I identified the anti-Bush flavour of the Conservative Party leader's foreign policy speech.

Dhimmi Carter, this week, told the BBC ,

I have been really disappointed in the apparent subservience of the British government's policies related to many of the serious mistakes that have been originated in Washington....

...No matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy without exerting its influence.

Also this week, in the Independent, Clare Short - she of the I will/might/won't/maybe/won't/will/won't resign over Iraq fame - wrote,

..I have reached a stage where I am profoundly ashamed of the Government. Blair's craven support for the extremism of US neoconservative foreign policy has exacerbated the danger of terrorism and the instability and suffering of the Middle East.

Today, even the Daily Telegraph submitted to the plague. In a leader criticising Short, the DT opined that Blair's

unquestioning adherence to George Bush's foreign policy has not always been in the best interests of this country.

One striking thing this wide range of opinions have in common is that they all state a view but offer no argument to back it up, rather, we are meant to take it as a given that Tony Blair is an unthinking ally of George Bush. Evidence please.

9/11 was an attack not just on America but on all the western democracies. As such it required a unified response by the West. Blair was one of a only a few western leaders to grasp this, as he seems to have grasped that, as the most powerful nation in the free world and as the immediate target of the terrorist atrocities of that day, it was natural that America should play the leading role.

Blair seems to have realised immediately it was in the UK's policy interests to support Operation Enduring Freedom because specifically striking back at the perpetrators of 9/11 and, more generally, weakening the capacity of terrorists to strike at the west, was in the UK's policy interest. It would make the UK a safer (but, of course, not entirely safe) place.

Blair could have followed many other European governments and declined to take part in the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, that is what the left (and some on right) really mean when they criticise Blair for his supposed subservience to President Bush. After examining in some detail the case for and against invasion, many of us on the right who are Blair's bitter opponents on domestic policy, were totally convinced by the evidence, particularly of Saddam's Weapons Of Mass Destruction programme, and concluded that Blair was making the right policy decision, a decision in the UK's national interest. This blog has noted previously the influence Blair exercised over Bush by persuading him to go the UN route, mainly so he could drag a recalcitrant Labour Party with him by appealing to their obsessive internationalism and infatuation with the UN (there is a syndrome surely worthy of psychiatric attention).

It is the left which, in failing to support steps necessary to defend the security of the UK, has acted against the policy interests of this country through their subservience to a vague internationalism. They should not be allowed to transfer their failings to other politicians who have made the defence of the realm a priority and acted accordingly. Domestically, Tony Blair may arguably have been the most incompetent and dishonest prime minister in British history but, in foreign policy, his record has been one of remarkable success. That is why the left hate him as much as they seem to hate themselves and their country.

Children of 9/11

Five years on and there is little, if anything, new to say about the events of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission has reported and millions of other words have been expended by various analyses, all of which can be reduced to the same basic fact: on 11 September, 2001, Islamic terrorists struck at the USA homeland in a series of co-ordinated attacks, killing and maiming thousands of innocents.

Today should be for remembering those innocent victims who lost their lives and the untold numbers of survivors, families and friends who will be affected for the remainder of their lives by the events of that day, in particular the thousands of children.

Some of those affected had not even been born on 9/11.

There are dozens of children like Gabi Jacobs, born to Sept. 11 widows in the months after the attacks. Five years later, as they approach kindergarten, they are just starting to grasp the stories of their fathers and of the day that changed their lives forever.

The first baby arrived just hours after the disaster and the last nine months later. Some mothers only discovered they were pregnant after the dads were gone -- including Rudolph Giuliani's longtime aide, who was married to fire Capt. Terence Hatton. The firefighter's daughter was born the next spring, and her mother named her Terri.

Their fathers were rescue workers, cops, restaurant waiters and stockbrokers. Their mothers, pregnant and alone when the dust of the towers settled, worried about the stress on their unborn children from the agony and shock. Some miscarried. One went into labor during her husband's memorial service.

Instead of normal happy childhoods, many children's experiences have been dominated by psychological trauma, an issue examined in detail by the New York Times.

Some of the most moving post-9/11 images are children's drawings. The full version of the picture of an aeroplane crashing into the Twin Towers, at the top of this post, appeared in a Chicago Sun Times special on the 1st anniversary of 9/11. It was drawn by a 6 year old whose father had just moved away from New York prior to the atrocity. Is it not sad that a child's imagination should encompass such images.

9/11: Fruit and nut cases.

With the 5th anniversary of 9/11 looming, the lunatic fringe has been busy. Scholars for 9/11 Truth are in the van. The links on their website lead to enough fruit and nut cases to package Brazil's entire agricultural output for a decade.

In addition to the usual pseudo-academic "it didn't happen and here is the scientific and technical evidence which proves the Pentagon warmongers did it" nonsense are an 87 year old Nureremberg Prosecutor calling for George Bush to be prosecuted as a war criminal and, for older viewers, a nostalgic walk down memory lane as the traitor Daniel Ellsberg and the wimp John Dean share their thoughts about Watergate.

In fact the site is not really about 9/11 at all. It is a convention for self-hating radical nut-cases with a wide array of axes to grind about Western civilisation in general and American society in particular. Neither is much scholarship in evidence.

The serious question this blog wants to highlight is: why have Western higher educational institutions produced so many prize moonbats and so little learning and scholarship?