Archive for July, 2006
All Our Yesterdays … and Their Todays
Posted by David Conway in Foreign Affairs on 26/07/2006
One picture is said to be worth a thousand words. So, the images shown by clicking on the first link below, first shown by a German television station last Sunday, do much to augment the information provided by clicking on the second link, to explain why Israel is so determined to do all in its power to defeat Hezbollah, and why, despite the tragic scale of the consequent collateral damage from its current assault against Hezbollah, analogies currently being drawn between Israel and the Nazis for having made it are so badly and obscenely misplaced.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=d51poygEXYU&search=mufti%20hitler
http://www.nationalreview.com/nr_comment/nr_comment071802a.asp
Germaine Greer: This Country’s Number One Bastard Champion
Posted by David Conway in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 24/07/2006
Last Friday, the government was widely reported to have recently requested local councils and primary health trusts specially to target black and mixed race Caribbean youngsters in an attempt to reduce their comparatively high rates of teen-age pregnancy which do so much to make Britain top of the European league-tables for teenage-conception and teenage-motherhood.
In a letter to council and primary health trusts making the request, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes stated as the government’s reason for making it the fact that:
‘Teenage pregnancy is strongly associated with poor outcomes for both young parents and their children. It contributes to the transmission of poverty, inequality and low aspirations between generations’.
David Cameron’s New Felicific Calculus: Do his Sums Add Up?
Posted by David Conway in Politics on 21/07/2006
David Cameron made a speech yesterday in which he unveiled the main new policies that he intends to implement if his party wins the next election.
He will, he said, provide voters with more leisure rather than tax cuts, as well as opportunity to use that increased leisure in ways he claimed are more life-enhancing and fulilling than those leisure opportunities they currently enjoy.
Is it a Just War or Just a War that Israel is Currently Waging?
Posted by David Conway in Foreign Affairs on 20/07/2006
A curious case of combined myopia and amnesia seems to have afflicted those western commentators who currently accuse Israel of being engaged at present in unjust, because disproportionate, military activity in Lebanon and Gaza.
According to those afflcited by this malady, while Israel might well have every right to the world’s sympathy as well as to undertake limited reprisals for having suffered the recent kidnapping of three of its soldiers, the scale of death and destruction she has inflicted in response to these kidnappings, especially on the civilian population of Lebanon, is out of all proportion to the enormity of these kidnappings, and can only serve to worsen its long-term security by radicalising still more of those who have been at the receiving end of her response.
Big Brother: Live Eviction – If Only Our Government Could Show Equal Resolve
Posted by David Conway in Multiculturalism on 14/07/2006
Every night at this time of year, Channel Four broadcasts an episode of its seemingly interminable and tedious Big Brother programme. Friday night episodes reveal the identity of whichever housemate viewers have voted to be evicted that week from the house in which they are incarcerated together for the duration of the series.
At 7.30pm tonight, an hour before the screening of that weekly episode, Channel Four is due to broadcast a current affairs programme that promises to be of far greater public interest and importance.
Paradoxically, and regrettably, rather than about an eviction carried out by an authority resembling far more closely than Channel Four’s reality-tv series that for which George Orwell famously coined that programme’s title, tonight’s Channel Four current affairs programme, which goes out as part of its 30 Minutes series of documentaries, tells of the failure of our own government to act against a clear and present threat to the safety of the realm.
How Hard Will Be the Rain That’s Surely A-Gonna Fall?
Posted by David Conway in Foreign Affairs on 13/07/2006
According to a report in today’s Times, the weekend before last a two-day conference took place at Istanbul’s Ceylan Intercontinental Hotel on the challenges and opportunities facing the Muslims of Europe.
Judged by the £500 per night prices that hotel charges, the fact the £300,000 conference bill was met entirely by the British tax-payer clearly suggests it was more the opportunities facing Europe’s Muslims than their challenges that the conference was designed to highlight.
Moreover, given that the organisers saw fit to invite to it the Qatar-based cleric Sheikh Yusif at-Qaradawi and his wife, with their travel and subsistence expenses being met in full by the British tax-payer and all apparently with the full knowledge and blessing of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, it seems it has been the opportunities of not only Muslims of Europe that the conference has been intent on showcasing.