Zionist plotting?

Unfortunately I have been told the comments section of my last post (Israel/Lebanon) doesn't work. Please feel free to post comments here instead.

Lebanon -now what?

I am scheduled to make a fact-finding trip to Israel in November to see for myself the situation in the Middle East.

I am not currently a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel group who are organising the trip but I am generally sympathetic to Israels plight and believe that they have a right to defend themselves from attack.

However the recent Lebanon war in my view exceeds what is a fair and rightful response to the attack from Hezbollah. The best analogy I can think of is that if you had neighbours whose kids were throwing stones at your cat, would you be entitled to break into their house, trash their furniture and beat up the parents?

How would the world have reacted if, during the 1970's IRA attacks in London, the RAF had bombed bridges and power stations in Dublin?

In the modern age of 24 hour tv news overwhelming brute force is often less useful than winning the war of hearts and minds. Unfortunately Hezbollah have come out of this as the underdog heroes and are now stronger and more powerful than ever, in my view.

The shame of it is that the Israeli's, like the Americans after 9/11, have over-reacted exactly as the Arab extremists intended making the terrorists much stronger and free democracies weaker.

Perhaps the fact that the Israeli's appear to have lost this war might in the long run serve a useful purpose. The realisation that having the strongest army in the region is not enough to beat a determined unsurgency might persuade the Israelis that they have to consider occasionally turning the other cheek when provoked by their enemies.

I will know more when I return.

We spent the afternoon with friends and all the children watching the Red Arrows perform over Torquay Harbour this afternoon.

I am fortunate enough to have a house that has a terraced Garden that looks out across the Bay from directly above the harbour and we had a superb viewing spot.

There is no doubt that the British Armed Services are the most proficient in the world.

Seeing the planes in action reminded me how stretched our armed services are at the moment, when - since 1947- have we had soldiers fighting for their lives in so many places at once?

Why is it that we seem to have been dragged into so many conflicts?

Could it be because the 'war' on terror is a nice little distraction from the less pleasant realities of the way the country is (or isn't) being run - or is that being just too cynical?

There is a very good satirical movie (can't remember the name) in which Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood film director called in to stage a fake war to ensure the US President gets re-elected on a wave of patriotic euphoria.

Fiction, or course.

MY HOLIDAY

Many thanks for all the comments (and complaints) that the site has been stagnant for a fortnight; I forgot to update it before I went on holiday.

Well, I am back and there will be an update before the weekend.

My apologies to any posts that have not appeared - I wasn't able to moderate them from the beach, unfortunately!

It stinks.

We learn nothing from history do we? After a couple of decades of hard lessons about nationalisation and 'central economic planning' we learned by 1979 that the last people who should make business decisions are politicians, especially Labour politicians.

The whole sorry tale of New Labours attempt to introduce a more relaxed gaming and gambling regime is rapidly looking like a return to the bad old days of Governments interfering in business - with similarlily disasterous results.

On the one hand the one remaining 'supercasino' that is going to be allowed is looking more and more like a pre-scripted stitch up rather than an open merit based contest. When the idea was first mooted for a supercasino the prime candidate was Blackpool, which would have been the perfect place; now it looks like it will be a white elephant at the wrong end of London.

Meanwhile we read that places like Luton and Canturbury are more likely to be 'selected' by the Government for the next generation of casino's than Torbay.

What in the name of all that is useful have the Government got to do with it? Why should some Whitehall quango know better than the Casino operators and local planners what is best for us?

Emerging news on the Lord Levy arrest....

Stories are slowly emerging in the press that contrary to earlier speculation and his own press statements Lord Levy is refusing to co-operate with the police investigation into cash-for-peerages.

I am hearing that during interviews Lord Levy has insisted on reading out a pre-prepared statement and refusing to answer questions.

There is growing recognition (and frustration) that Levy is blocking the investigation progressing any further up the chain (i.e. to No 10) by saying nothing more than he has to unless he is actually charged.

There is a downside, which is that if he is charged his uncooperative behaviour will look very damaging in court.

I conclude one of two things - 1) He is confident that there is not enough evidence to charge anyone, including himself or 2) He is acting as a 'body shield' to protect Tony Blair for as long as he remains in office.

Could this ' pretty straight kind of guy' be the first Prime Minister in living memory to be arrested?
I have been musing on the prospects of the police interviewing Tony Blair under caution at 10 Downing Street ever since Lord Levy was interviewed.

the Independent reports this morning that “..There is a shiver going down the spine of No 10,” one insider said yesterday. “The paper trail is proving stronger than the police expected. They are pretty good at persuading people it is in their best interests to talk.”

I asked a friend who is a senior police officer what he thought and his view is that even a face-to-face interview with the PM is highly unlikely, and an arrest is unthinkable. The Prime Minister would be assumed to be cooperating fully and there would be no precedent to interview him under caution.
They may submit questions to him but they would probably just ask for a written statement in reply.

In fact senior officers say that arresting very high profile 'suspects' is often done merely to knock the stuffing out of them first so that officers can 'cut them down to size' and interview them as equals.

It seems to me highly unlikely that any charges will ever be brought but just the prospect of the Prime Minister having become embroiled in a scandal leading right to his door must be hugely damaging.

At the very least it suggests massive poor judgement to have allowed things to get this far, at worst it could be that there really is some truth in the allegations.