West turns blind eye to civilians killed by Ukraine

First there was the Ukrainian mob in Odessa that trapped hundreds of ethnic Russians in an old building on fire where the Russians burned to death while the local Ukrainian police stood by and did nothing.

Embarrassing for the western backers of Ukraine? Not at all. there wasn't a peep of protest from the great western guardians of human rights.  After all just a few nasty Russians being killed by our local Ukrainian fascists (bit like 1942 again).

Recently we had the western powers denouncing the rebels for not securing the Malaysian plane crash site. Since then the Ukrainian forces have launched an offensive in the area, threatening to damage the site and making it dangerous for investigators.  Do we hear a peep of protest from the West? Not a bit, not even a criticism from the Dutch despite all the public tears the week before.

Finally we have the latest Ukrainian offensive using massed artillery bombardments on civilian areas (aka Israel in Gaza). Once more ... not a peep from the hypocrits in the West.

Ireland vote on Gaza inquiry

You have to hand it to the Irish representative to the UN Human Rights Committee and her EU colleagues for abstaining en masse in the recent vote for a inquiry in Gaza. Not because I agree with her or her colleagues but because it absolutely confirms general suspicions about the EU and its role in the world.

By this vote the EU has confirmed two things. First it intends to continue its traditional role in the Middle east of hand-wringing combined with no action; intentionally leaving the field clear for the US and Israel to continue their campaign of war and general mayhem, but leaving the EU 'unstained' on the side. Second it confirms once more how out of touch the EU is with its own citizens. In a week when there very many large protests which were almost universally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause we see the EU elite effectively supporting the Israeli position.

The real casualty rates in the Israeli-Gaza conflict

Over the past week or so the media keep repeating these generic casualty figures such as X number of Palestinians and Y number of Israelis. Like most stories in our syncophantic media it's not the real story. But usually even the rubbish that passes for journalism tends to include useful titbits of fact among the spin and opinion. The last figures I saw included an interesting split between civilians and combatants.

At that point the Israelis had killed 5 Palestinian combatants for every IDF soldier lost. Meanwhile they had killed 300 Palestinian civilians for every Israeli civilian killed.  Two conclusions can be made from that. First if you are 60 times more effective at killing civilians than at killing soldiers (300 divided by 5) then any claims to be trying to avoid civilian casualties are hogwash. Second, and I think more important to Israelis in the long run, if the IDF can only kill Hamas militants at a 5:1 ratio in a battle-zone which is surrounded by the Israelis, then the hitherto unbeatable reputation of the mighty IDF is looking very shaky.  And that would worry the Israeli establishment much more than any hand-wringing about dead Arab civilians.

Ireland's culture of corruption and official syncophancy continues

It's the biggest story in Ireland: the Garth Brooks concerts in Dublin have been cancelled.  The overwhelming response from the Irish media is that it is the fault of the Dublin city council authorities. They should have "fixed" the problem of providing an extra two days by bending the rules: the classic Irish solution.  This Mirror story is a pretty accurate summary of the general consensus. And this attitude appears to have widespread popular support.

Let me see if I get this right ... Ireland has just gone through the worst recession in its history caused by the biggest property collapse in European history.  We all agree a main cause of this was inadequate regulation, with authorities (including Dublin city council) bending the rules in favour of rich people, for example giving an extra two days license to a concert promoter _after_ he had sold the tickets to the unlicensed days!

It is official: we have learned nothing and this country really is a banana republic.

Surprise, surprise, one more "analysis" of Israeli-Palestinaian conflict written by member of the Jewish establishment

I just read a commentary piece on the current Israeli bombardment of Gaza on the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) website here.
It struck me as the usual "expert analysis" cynical non-story, kind of like a classic football commentary.  You'd never know from reading this commentary that as opposed to two sides in a football game this is a real war with political decisions made, international laws broken, including war crimes and acts of genocide. I can easily picture a similar coverage of the Nazi invasion of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944(?) in which the 'analyst' (obviously not a Levy in that case!) describes in casual analyst language ("bet on this outcome", or "bedding down ...") the difficulties faced by the Nazi side who would clearly prefer to use their superior airpower rather than lose valuable German soldiers, while the Jewish resistance, as Levy so flippantly puts it, "has no winning card to play".
But what is the position of the author, Daniel Levy, in all this?  I'll probably be accused of anti-semitism but I did notice the Jewish name on a byline analysing a conflict in which the Jewish state is deeply involved so I had a look on the web.  My suspicions were confirmed: a man deeply anchored in the Jewish state establishment: army service, government advisor, leader of International Jewish organisation.  All perfectly honourable activities. However, it beggars belief that the ECFR would consider such a person a credibly impartial analyst of the savage conflict in which Jewish Israel is the main player.  Never mind the many real anti-semites who would dismiss any of Mr Levy's analysis; what about the millions of educated progressive Europeans who think that Mr Levy's position is simply not credible?  Impartiality in political analysis should be like justice: not just done, but seen to be done. I suspect if the ecfr would let itself be completely compromised by a powerful interest group in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is probably similarly compromised in many other similarly fractious issues and thus is without credibility.

Better off with your Daily Mail, your Torygraph or your Irish Times.  They may be massively biased in one direction but the editorial bias is at least transparent. 

p.s. I note the Irish directors of ecfr: a bunch of right-wing politicians, an academic who made her name trashing anti-EU referendum campaigns and a career bureaucrat. How statist can you get?

BBC pro-Israel bias

Just read BBC Gaza story about ' social media war'. The journalist, Sarah Fowler, writes that Hamas "dominates" Gaza.  That is emotive and dishonest language.  Hamas rules Gaza after winning free elections outright. Which is more than can be said of the British Conservative party, or Netanyahu's party in Israel. This patronising and racist language about Arabs does not constitute public service broadcasting.

I am not alone in this opinion of BBC bias: take a look at this informative Open Letter to the BBC.

Is Ukraine the new Egypt?

Am I the only one who notices a weird similarity between events in Ukraine and earlier events in Egypt? In both cases a president is accused of being authoritarian and draconian. In both cases large public protests lead to the overthrew of the government.  In both cases the government just thrown out by protest was the elected government. Most importantly in both cases the successful overthrow of an elected government is met with general applause from the leaders of the West and from the established media. And the reasons are similar too.

The president of Ukraine had to go for the same reason the Egyptian president had to go.  They did not represent Western interests. Morsi in Egypt was an Islamist and worse still had got to power peacefully; that was an example to the Middle east that could not be allowed to survive.  Yanukovych was too close to Putin; blocking the EU's eastern expansion was the nail in his coffin.

It will be interesting to see if Ukraine continues to follow the path taken after the Egyptian coup. Egypt is now almost completely dysfunctional, split between a westernised urban elite that support the new regime and the poor and rural supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is on the verge of civil war.  In Ukraine the western media have carefully avoided the E word (ethnic).  The protestors and their leaders are carefully described as "pro-western" or from "western ukraine".  The actual fact is that ethnic Ukrainians support the protests while ethnic Russians within Ukraine support the government.  Will Ukraine follow Egypt into a quiet civil war? How quiet would it be with Putin on one side and the Ukrainian neo-nazi parties like Svoboda on the other?