Short on global warming alarmism? Make some up!

The BBC has long been famous for passing off global warming fiction as news. And with dearth of fresh alarmist news to report, they've apparently decided that putting global warming propaganda into their fictional output is a more effective means of propagandising – they've resorted to making stuff up about people making stuff up. I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on Burn Up, the atrocious global warming drama that the Beeb screened last week. You can read it here.

Red Cross spokeswoman equates Nato with the Taliban over civilian casualties

The BBC has been making hay with the news that a US airstrike in Afghanistan last week apparently killed around 50 civilians, sending its reporters hiking through the mountains to collect first-hand accounts of the tragedy, and generally giving the incident the sort of coverage that it wouldn't give to a story about 50 civilians being killed by the Taliban.

It's no more than we've come to expect from the BBC, and the Western news media in general. But grudging credit where it's due: when Peter Allen of the Beeb's Radio Five Live interviewed Carla Haddad, a spokeswoman from the International Committee of the Red Cross, about the incident he at least attempted to make a distinction between civilians being accidentally killed by Nato forces, and the Taliban's deliberate targeting of civilians.

Haddad was having none of it. Despite being invited to do so by Allen, she refuses to accept that there's any difference between Nato's actions and those of the Taliban, instead falling back on platitudes about appealing to 'all parties' in the conflict, and generally doing a passable imitation of a greased weasel playing Twister.

Here's the interview (I hope – this is my first attempt at recording and embedding audio. Web 2.0? Here at Monkey Tennis Centre we're still at Web 0.05). Allen first talks to a guy from international development think-tank The Senlis Council, who, while not being overly critical of Nato, says it should put more boots on the ground and rely less on airstrikes. He starts talking to Haddad at about 1:45.



In case the clip malfunctions, or disappears, here are the key exchanges:

Peter Allen: When you say you’ve appealed to all parties does that mean you actually talk to the Taliban and say ‘The suicide bombing must stop.’

Carla Haddad: The ICRC is in regular contact with all parties to the conflict, be it Nato/ISAF forces, US-led coalition forces, the Afghan Government or the armed opposition, which includes the Taliban. So the ICRC has contacts with everyone on a regular basis, and tries to remind them regularly of their obligations under international humanitarian law, or what is also called laws of war, which explains that they should distinguish between military objects and civilians.

PA: It’s probably worth pointing out, that of course, that when you get a suicide bomber, quite deliberately they walk into a crowded place and take out a lot of civilians, and do it deliberately, and that, at the least, the allied forces do intend to hit only combatants; they don’t aim for civilians but sometimes they strike them. So there is a difference…

CH: We’re not speculating on… what we’re deploring is the casualties; and many casualties are civilians. Each force has to take into account international humanitarian law and to respect it. We will not speculate we do not know the details of what happened in every single incident. All we can say is that casualties are civilian they are either injured or killed and all parties to the conflict should spare them and should make sure they’re distinguishing between military objects and civilian objects.

As an afterthought, she adds that the ICRC 'deplores' the Taliban's suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul last week. Perhaps she was worried about leaving listeners with the impression that the Red Cross supported it.

There's such a thing as not taking sides in a conflict, but this is ridiculous. The moral equivalence on display is nauseating. Haddad, and her colleagues at the Red Cross, clearly see Nato as no better than the Taliban, and the Taliban as no worse than Nato.

This is the sort of no-fault leftist claptrap that blights the work of not just the ICRC, but the UN and other transnational NGOs. There are no good guys or bad guys, just victims and oppressors, and Nato and the Taliban are equally guilty of oppressing the Afghan people.

Of course it may be that Haddad is personally sympathetic to the Taliban's aims, and just wishes it was a little more discerning in its target selection – you've got to love her characterisation of mass-murdering religious fanatics as 'the armed opposition'.

The line about 'not knowing the details' of various incidents is a transparent cop-out. And does she honestly believe that Nato and US forces need 'reminding' of their obligations under international law?

Like Allen, I'd dearly love to know what form the ICRC's 'regular contact' with the Taliban takes. Does someone from the Red Cross really call up the Taliban to complain about civilian casualties? If so what does the Taliban tell them? "Sorry, that was another software glitch"? or "Our boy mistook that busload of schoolchildren for a Humvee"?

Either Haddad is lying, which is perfectly plausible, or the Taliban is playing the Red Cross for the well-intentioned dupes that they are. Either way, by refusing to concede that the Taliban are the real enemies of the Afghan people, the ICRC is undermining the effort to defeat them, and ensuring that it'll be needed in Afghanistan for a very long time to come.

Then again, maybe they just want to ensure that they're never out of work.

Thanks to Rusty for the link.

BBC plays 'Guess the Victims' over Jerusalem attack

I also have a piece up at Pajamas Media, on the - probably unintentional - symbolism of a Palestinian using a Caterpillar machine to murder Israelis. You can read it here.

The US media has long enjoyed playing the game of ‘Guess the Party’, wherein the affiliation of Republican politicians accused or convicted of wrongdoing is prominently featured in news reports, while that of misbehaving Democrats is buried in the depths of the story, if it’s mentioned at all.

The BBC appears to have developed a couple of variants on the game – Guess the Nationality of the Victim/Aggressor and Guess the Sex of the Victim – to be played when reporting on deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This morning the Beeb headlined its report on yesterday’s murders of three Israelis by Palestinian Hussam Dwayat ‘Jerusalem attacker acted alone’. The report began:

A Palestinian who went on a bulldozing rampage in west Jerusalem on Wednesday apparently acted alone, Israeli police say, despite claims by militant groups.

Hussam Dwayat was at work on a building site when he drove his front-loader vehicle into the street and started mowing down cars and ramming buses.

He killed three people and wounded dozens more before security personnel climbed on the vehicle and killed him.

The fact that people died doesn’t make it into the headline or the first two paragraphs. And you have to get all the way to paragraph 12 – after the BBC presents a couple of theories for Dwayat’s actions, which, while not exactly excusing the attacks, suggest that the behaviour of Israelis may have driven him to his wits’ end – to find out that two of the dead were women, and beyond that to realise how close Dwayat came to murdering two babies as well.

The BBC also doesn’t mention that the male victim was 68, and soon to be a grandfather. In fact its reporters fail to get so much of what’s relevant into the crucial opening lines of the story that if this was a test-piece in an exam for entry to journalism school they would probably have flunked it – and this despite the fact that BBC reporter Tim Franks watched the whole thing unfold.

Update: The BBC updated the story while I was writing this post, and the details of the victims have been pushed even farther down the report.

Contrast the story with the BBC’s reporting of incidents in which Palestinians are killed by Israeli troops or airstrikes. A quick search of the BBC’s site reveals a steady stream of headlines such as 'Four children die in Gaza strike', 'Palestinian children die in blast', 'Family killed during raid in Gaza' and 'Outrage over killing of Gaza boys'.

If children aren’t mentioned in the headline, they’re invariably mentioned in the first line of the report, and the facts that they were Palestinians, or lived in Gaza, and were killed by Israelis, are also prominent.

Again, contrast that with a February BBC story headlined ‘Gaza rockets injure two Israelis’, in which you have to get to paragraph five to learn that one of the victims was aged eight.

In the case of yesterday’s story the BBC appears more concerned with reassuring readers that Dwayat was some kind of unhinged loner, and not a terrorist. In the process of doing so they’ve essentially relegated the killings to the status of an industrial accident.

Readers’ perceptions are often framed by a quick glance at the headline, or the first paragraph of a story. Casual readers of the BBC’s website must get the impression that the Israelis deliberately target children and other Palestinian civilians on an almost daily basis, while Israelis are occasionally the victim of some mishap or criminal act.

Clearly the BBC doesn’t want its readers to know that Palestinians kill women and children. After all this would undermine the image, so carefully cultivated by the BBC and other media outlets, of Palestinian terrorists as ‘militants’ engaged in a war against an occupying army – or ‘urban guerrillas’, in the words of BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, the first kidnap victim to develop Stockholm syndrome before being seized.

The tactic is subtle, but very effective, and it stinks to high heaven. But as we’ve seen, if enough people complain, they’ve been known to withdraw lies and misleading reports. You can complain here.

HonestReporting.com has a rather more scientific analysis of bias in BBC headlines and reports.

Desmond Tutu, Neocon

It took a few years, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu is finally coming around to the idea of using military force to topple dictators and liberate their subjects.

In an interview with the BBC, Archbishop Tutu urged the international community to intervene in Zimbabwe, and said he would support the deployment of a UN force to restore order in the country.

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme, the former anti-apartheid leader said: "I think that a very good argument can be made for having an international force to restore peace."

This is a welcome development. And if the Archbishop’s going to be consistent, then we can shortly expect him to revisit his opposition to the Iraq war, and perhaps even confer retrospective approval on the Bush administration.

Tutu was an outspoken opponent of the invasion. Like many others he was critical of the flawed intelligence that was used to justify the war. However, he also contemptuously dismissed the secondary justification for the invasion – regime change.

This is what he said in a speech in London in February 2004.

‘But if now the reason being trumpeted for the war is regime change, why there and not for example, Burma? Or North Korea? And who makes the decision about which regimes should be changed? And what authority do they have to do whatever they think, may think is right? Or is it a matter of might is right, and to hell with the rule of international law?’

Leaving aside the silly and disingenuous argument that ‘if we can’t intervene everywhere we shouldn’t intervene anywhere’, and that the coalition had a sound legal basis on which to take action against Iraq, Apparently Tutu has apparently now conferred on himself the authority to decide which regimes should be changed.

Doubtless the Archbishop would protest that Zimbabwe is a different situation from Iraq. He might claim that his international force won’t be going in to effect regime change, but simply to restore order and safeguard the distribution of aid. Any intervention would, of course, spell the end of Mugabe’s rule.

Some might howl at this blatant double standard, accusing the Archbishop of deciding that intervention is okay, just as long as it's not America doing the intervening. And they might point out that if past experience with African 'peace-keeping' forces is anything to go by, the women and children of Zimbabwe are likely to be in as much danger from their liberators as they are from Mugabe's gangs.

But I prefer to celebrate the news that Archbishop Tutu has finally accepted the reality that sometimes, regrettably, it’s necessary to take military action against bad people in order to save innocent lives and establish democracy, up to and including killing anyone who gets in the way (His Grace hasn’t as yet gone into specifics as to the rules of engagement under which his ‘international force’ will operate, but I’m assuming that if they come under fire from Mugabe’s thugs, he’ll allow them to defend themselves).

This is quite an about-turn for the veteran human rights campaigner. In addition to opposing the Iraq war, Archbishop Tutu has been a vocal critic of Guantanamo and the military tribunals system. He’s also attacked Israel, going so far as to compare Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with apartheid. However, he’s been such a powerful force for good in Africa, standing up to dictators of every political stripe, whether black or white, with equal forcefulness, that we can perhaps forgive him the occasional anti-American or anti-Israel outburst.

His Grace, like many soft-left types, appears to be motivated by a frustration with injustice, both real and imagined, and by the notion that if we just show kindness to evil people, then they’ll stop being evil. Despite the fact that they share a fondness for the Israel/apartheid analogy, I would certainly set him apart from bitter, hate-filled leftists like Jimmy Carter (who, lest we forget, played a key role in bringing Mugabe to power).

And anyway, it appears that His Grace’s anti-intervention days are now behind him. Many prominent neocons started out as lefties, and Archbishop Tutu appears to be the latest to see the light. Now I'm looking forward to his 'Why we can't let Iran get the bomb' speech.

Afghan biofuels: a magic bullet for energy security?

Two of my pet subjects are the war on terror and global warming, and they overlap in the area of energy independence. While I'm a global warming skeptic, I do think that for security reasons the West needs to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil by developing alternative energy sources.

Reading about the struggle to discourage Afghan farmers from growing poppies for the heroin trade, I've wondered for a while whether it would be feasible to get them to grow biofuel crops instead, which would have the multiple benefits of reducing the supply of heroin, cutting off funding for terrorists, helping the Afghan economy and producing energy without diverting farmland from food production.

It turns out that people a lot smarter than me have been thinking the same thing, and I have a piece on the subject up at Pajamas Media, which you can read here.

Obama is now the only obstacle to victory

Matthew Continetti has a piece up at The Weekly Standard on the clear signs of progress being made in the War on Terror, and he rightly gives much of the credit to the policies of President Bush. And it's not just the jihadists that are being defeated – it's also those who opposed the President for political expediency. Continetti writes:

The left's analysis of jihadism has been proved incorrect at every turn. It argued military power would be ineffective against the terrorists. Wrong. It argued that intervention in Iraq would energize bin Laden's movement. That movement is in shambles. The left argued Iraq was a lost cause. It isn't. The left argues that a "war on terrorism" is futile, that defeat is inevitable, because terrorism is a "tactic," not an enemy. Nonsense. President Bush has demonstrated through perseverance and (more often than not) sound policy that the war on terror can be won. And right now we're winning it.

A Barack Obama presidency, however, could still enable the jihadists to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and would also encourage Iran to step up its efforts to cause mayhem in Iraq. Lebanon and elsewhere. With the help of his supporters in the media, Obama is already attempting to airbrush his record of defeatism and misjudgment over both Iraq and Iran (see this piece, by Danielle Pletka, also at The Weekly Standard, for an account of Obama's evolving Iran position).

He may not be allowed to get away with it. As Jennifer Rubin, discussing Obama's U-turn on Iran at Commentary magazine's Contentions blog writes:

In short, the road back to the middle of the road will be treacherous for Obama. As he tries to moderate his views, on Iran most clearly, he will, it seems, face frequent reminders from the McCain camp that the new positions seem adopted especially for the general election. In a world of YouTube and Google, not to mention campaign websites, the job of the McCain camp is made much easier.

The left, unfortunately, will likely prove more resolute than the jihadists. While Islamic extremists can be killed, their bases destroyed and their ideology discredited in the Muslim world, the left will simply fine-tune its tactics in its relentless war on America and the West. And seizing the White House would be the first step on the road to victory.

Hugh Hewitt on Obama's rhetorical style

Hugh Hewitt recently did a wonderful takedown of Obama's rhetorical style which you really ought to listen to. It's funny, but also extremely incisive. Bottom line: most of the time Obama has no idea what he's talking about.

Go here. The clip you want is number 29, hour 2 of the May 20 show (clip number 28, which is hour 3, is titled 'Obama audio' but it's clip 29, 'Dean Barnett', that you want).

The essence of Hugh's analysis starts at around 7 minutes and lasts about 3 minutes, but you should listen from the start to get the context, and listen to the rest of the hour, and hour 3, if you have the time.

Someone with more time and expertise than me needs to put this on YouTube, with a slideshow of shots from Obama rallies.

Muslim gangs threaten UK prisons; government responds with 'diversity events'

I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on the British government's typically insipid, politically-correct response to the news that Muslim gangs are threatening to take over a high security prison:

Faced with the threat of violence from gangs — Muslim or otherwise — prison officers at Whitemoor would probably prefer Tasers and pepper spray to development days, focus groups, and diversity events, but the official response is entirely in keeping with the muddled thinking that pervades Gordon Brown’s government when it comes to dealing with Islamic extremism. Ministers appear torn between trying to reassure the public that they’re being tough on terror on the one hand, and avoiding causing offense to “moderate” Muslims on the other — notwithstanding the fact that genuinely moderate Muslims shouldn’t be offended by reasonable measures taken to protect British citizens from terror attacks.

You can read the article here.

Remote Amazonian tribes for Obama

Talk about getting your message across…

These guys have had no contact with civilisation, they've never heard of electricity or television, and they certainly can't speak English.

Yet somehow, they just know…






Things were going great until the plane made a low pass, and the locals spotted the 'Hillary '08' sticker on the cockpit…


Update: Thanks to Ace for linking. Also Jim, who has a fine take of his own on the story. Those poor hicks, clinging bitterly to bows and arrows and human sacrifice…

Also Rob at Say Anything (don't worry Rob, only liberals could possibly find a race angle in this, and we're long past caring what they think).

Jules Crittenden looks at the eco-angle…

I don’t know how big a carbon footprint these guys have, but the message here is pretty clear. If you want to save the planet and you aren’t living in a grass hut in Amazonia shooting arrows at passing airplanes, then you’re a chickengreenie.

Defending Beckham

Yesterday Allahpundit posted a video that's apparently a huge hit on YouTube, of David Beckham scoring from around 60 yards for LA Galaxy against Kansas City Wizards. Beckham hit the ball into an empty net, on the bounce, after the Wizards' goalkeeper had pushed upfield for what I assume was a late corner kick.

For the benefit of American readers wondering what the hell the Wizards' keeper was doing at the other end of the pitch, keepers will often do this if their team is trailing by an odd goal late in a game, reasoning that leaving their net undefended is a gamble worth taking in an attempt to grab an equaliser – after all, if you're losing anyway it hardly matters whether it's by one goal or two.

Allah sniffed that he couldn't see what all the fuss over Beckham's strike was about, pointing out that any professional soccer player should be able to hit a 24-foot-wide target from 60 yards, and he was absolutely right.

In Beckham's defence, however, I sent Allah the video of Beckham scoring from the half-way line for Manchester United against Wimbledon in 1996, having spotted Neil Sullivan off his line. Allah was gracious enough to post the video, and concede that the goal was rather more impressive.

A heated debate has inevitably been raging at Hot Air on the merits of soccer vis-à-vis American football, which I don't intend to restart here. Two very different games requiring different sets of skills.

One observation though. Of the excitement over Beckham's latest effort, Allah asked 'Is this just a by-product of the collective European mancrush on Beckham?' I would suggest no – it's more likely the by-product of Americans new to soccer who don't understand how easy it was for Beckham to hit the target; of generally stupid people who have a low novelty threshold, and of hysterical Beckham worshipers, who tend for some reason to reside in Asia.