Gadaffi your horse, and drink your milk

Can anyone tell me what we are still doing meddling in Libya?

Emergency, War 10!

The Tories and their stooges in the Mini-Tories have been quick to point out that the cost of the war against Libya will not come out of any existing budgets from Government departments already squeezed by the cuts, cut - in some cases - to the bone, and then beyond.

No, it will, instead, apparently, come out of a "contingency fund" in the Treasury, which is kept for emergencies and dire situations, according to Danny Alexander, on BBC's Question Time.

Now just hang on a cotton-pickin minute, thar, boy! Run that by me one more time, as Captain said to Tenniel or vice versa. The country is allegedly stony broke, on its uppers, so much so that the church mice are having a whip-round for us and yet, all the time, we're all in this together (though clearly some of us are "in it" up to our necks and sinking fast, while others haven't even had their expensive shoes splashed, yet) and all this time, the Treasury has a secret slush fund, a giant piggy bank in the underground car park, a hidden panel that, when pressed reveals a cupboard stuffed with £50 notes or something? What?!?!

Not only a secret slush fund, but one which must be fairly substantial, since it can stand funding the UK bombing the crap out of Benghazi with missiles that cost £800,000 each!

This, for me, raises a very important question. If this money is supposed to be used for emergencies, when is an "emergency" not an "emergency"? If we have got to the stage where we're shutting hospital wards, Sure Start centres and libraries, that is a bloody emergency! If we have got to the stage where we're cutting police because we can no longer afford to keep our streets safe, that is an emegency! If we've got to the stage where thousands of people are being laid off - in the construction industry for example - that is an emergency. If we've got people having their houses repossessed and being turned out onto the streets, that is an emergency.

Forget foreign adventurism and posturing on the world stage. We have little or no idea who these Libyan rebels are, or, in the long run, whether the situation there would be better or worse for our intervention. The examples of Iraq and Afghanistan don't hold out much hope.

Meanwhile, you don't need a flashing blue light and a howling siren to see that there are many more urgent "emergencies" at home, caused by the Con-Dims "bombing" their own economy, to appease the markets and bankers, that deserve much more to benefit from the judicious application of Danny Alexander's secret slush fund.

Gadaffi! Duck!

Colonel Gadaffi (is it Gadaffi or Gaddafi? It looks wrong both ways) may not be clinically insane, as some cohorts of our media wish to portray him, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at times, he didn't feel more than a tad schizophrenic, particularly on the subject of whether or not he is a legitimate target for the Western military air strikes that are currently pounding Libya. The answer seems to change day by day, and to depend on who it is you are talking to. Sometimes, it changes by the hour.

The UN resolution which is sort of "authorising" all of this activity, as I understand it, speaks merely of safeguarding innocent civilians and ensuring that the cease fire is enforced, things like that. Say what you will, but it can't be denied that, by giving air support to the anti-Gadaffi faction, the West is currently, if anything, prolonging he conflict, rather than seeking to curtail itand bring it to a swift conclusion. And presumably the argument which links regime change to the safeguarding of civilian lives rests on the rather shaky premise that, without a strong dictator at the helm, Libya won't degenerate into a completely shambolic, anarchic mess, post-conflict, with factions fighting proxy wars and Al Quaida using it as a training ground, in exactly the same way as Iraq did after the fall of Saddam Husseuin. We know very little about these people we are helping, but seeing one of them on the news miming the act of putting a pistol to Gadaffi's head doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that they will be rivalling the ancient Athenians as a paragon of democracy any time soon. In these types of circumstances, the lives of innocent civilians are probably just as much at risk, if not more, as they would be if Gadaffi stayed on. All that is different is which set of innocent civilians gets fed through the shredder.

Have we learnt absolutely nothing since 2002?

Doing a Dubya on Libya

So, we are bombing Libya. As I wake up on this cool, grey, Sunday morning in March, listening to the birds tweeting and some distant church bells pealing over rural England, British service personnel, some of whom probably have a P45 from the government waiting in the post for them at home, are putting their lives at risk once again in the cause of naked political horse-trading and the sort of selective American foreign policy we thought we’d seen the back of when Dubya finally donned his spurs and stetson and rode off into the sunset.

My first thought, on hearing we would be sending our warplanes was “what warplanes?” We’ve got rid of the Harriers and we’ve mothballed so many Tornados, we’ve watched the Nimrods being cut up on the ground, on prime-time TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if all we had left to send was a couple of Tiger Moths, dropping hand grenades on elastic so we could get the bits back to use again! Still, at least with the RAF involved, you know that the bombs, such as they are, will hit their targets, whereas the USAF counts it a success if they can just manage to hit Libya.

Actually, before proceeding to the rights and wrongs of this situation, it shows up once again the criminal folly of the scale of the defence cuts imposed by the Tories. No aircraft carrier, no Harrier jets, no Nimrods, and now that the Tornados from Leuchars are presumably based temporarily in Malta or Cyprus or Southern France somewhere, nobody guarding the back door here, unless they’ve managed to rustle up an old Shackleton or an Avro Anson to stooge up and down along the coast off Skegness and count in the “bogeys”.

Why are we bombing Libya? If you believe the likes of David Cameron, it’s to protect the lives of innocent civilians. These would, of course, be the same innocent civilians who were being killed last week when we couldn’t give a stuff and were busy sending black helicopters in the middle of the night carrying “diplomats” to help resolve the situation.

It’s not exactly bothered us before; when Saddam Hussein was also killing his own civilians (much more terribly and efficiently that Gadaffi) using weapons which we in the west and other opportunist nations had sold him, (like we did to Gadaffi) we turned a blind eye then, because he was our ally, as Gadaffi was, briefly, in between two periods of being our enemy. And Cameron’s justification that we had to wait until it was legal rings very hollow with me, considering it didn’t bother Blair and we had no compunction in the past in acting illegally, on a lot flimsier pretext when it came to saving innocent civilians, in Iraq. If the UN hadn’t voted to allow this action, would that have stopped us, with oil at stake? And if we are that bothered about saving the lives of innocent arabs, what about Bahrain, inviting in the forces of a neighbouring dictatorship to suppress its own revolt on the streets?

No, I am afraid what is happening in Libya is that old favourite dish, Realpolitik, on the menu again, served up this time with a stinking garnish of hypocrisy. We ignored (by we, I mean Europe and Obama) the uprising in Egypt, because it became obvious that the only “freedom” the protestors in Tahrir Square were gaining was the freedom to get rid of one dictator and be ruled by the army instead. So they were unlikely to do anything to destabilise the region, because they were not exactly Jihadists to start with. Plus, Egypt has lots of sand, camels, pyramids, tourists and potatoes, but not that much oil, in comparative terms. Plus, once the army was in charge, it opened up another sales opportunity for selling them weapons! Kerching! We ignored the rising in Bahrain, because the US Fleet is quartered there, and therefore, naturally, Obama would prefer the status quo. We ignored Saudi Arabia’s rumblings for the same sorts of reasons.

What it boils down to is that if you are an innocent citizen in a country ruled by a megalomaniac with no oil and no strategic importance to the USA, bad luck, old chap.

We actually ignored the Libyan situation for long enough, because we thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the rebels would do “our” job for us and get rid of our former enemy then ally now enemy again, Colonel Gadaffi. But the rebels couldn’t cut it, and they started to lose. Realising that Gadaffi wouldn’t then be that kindly disposed in future to those who supported the uprising against him, Europe and Obama, given the crucial importance of Libyan oil, have painted themselves into a corner, and have now no option but to step in and ensure the rebellion succeeds, having realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse and it was on a one-way trip to the glue factory. Still, at least they can dress it up with high flown rhetoric, bollocks and bluster, and try and disguise what it is that British service men and women will potentially die for, when the body bags start trundling through “Royal” Wootton Bassett.

I have no brief for Gadaffi, and I never expected David Cameron to be honest about anything, not even for a nano-second. I had slightly higher expectations of Obama, but it turns out he’s just like all the others, only slightly more inept. More fool me, for harbouring a vestige of political idealism and investing it in a cracked vessel.

But I do want to record that this morning, as our planes are in the air, I am sad, disappointed, and just a tad furious at the way in which once again we are not being told the real reasons behind our colonial adventurism, and exactly what it is our people are, potentially, being asked to die for.

Not in my name.

Foggy Compo, Clegg.

There has been a predictable outcry by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Conrad Blackshirts about the proposal to settle claims for compensation out of court with the victims of Guantanamo Bay.

What these people fail to grasp is that if someone is wrongly imprisoned, probably illegally, and tortured to boot, and our government is responsible, then it's only right that the injustice should be compensated. It's what makes us the good guys. Still. just.

If we were really interested in being the good guys of course, instead of sinking to the same level as Al Qaida in the first place, seizing people, sandbagging them, holding them against their will and applying mental and physical pain, we wouldn't have done it, but at that time we were wedged so far up George Bush's chuff we couldn't see daylight.

I wonder if there would be as much fuss if the people illegally detained and tortured were called "George", "Henry" and "Cyril" instead of Mohammed. I suspect not. Brown people getting compensation of any kind, even compensation to which they are legally entitled and which will presumably save the taxpayer money if it is an out-of-court settlement, always gets the bigots frothing.

People who argue against this proposal often link the issue of torturing detainees with the 7/7 bombings. Errr. Am I missing something here? What does 9/11 and 7/7 have to do with Guantanamo Bay, except that we colluded with the US in a like for like response that dragged us down to the same level as the bombers?

Are they claiming that in some way 7/7 was caused by Guantanamo detainees? I thought it was three guys from Leeds and one from Reading. I am not following the process by which they are linking the two. Or are they claiming that, if only someone had turned up the current a bit on someone's ghoulies out in Guantanamo, this would somehow have magically prevented 7/7 taking place?

Sadly, it is excrescences like Guantanamo that CAUSE radical idiots to get more and more radicalised, until they start strapping bombs to themselves, and by following George Bush down the primrose path to dalliance, we played right into their hands. We're lucky that we didn't have more than one 7/7. We may well yet have further cause to regret it.

Orwell, of course, in between wishing he could fly, way up in the sky, once famously said that all that keeps us free is that rough men stand ready in the night to do harm, and this is the crux of the question. There ARE people out to destroy our way of life. I would contend, however, that helping George Bush in his ill-starred "War on Terror", with things such as Guantanamo, has ADDED to their numbers, considerably, rather than deterred them.

Also, I question the worth of any of the intelligence gathered by means of torture. If you turn the current up far enough, your victim will tell you whatever you want to hear. It would be instructive to know really how many threats have been neutralised since 2001 by this method of intelligence alone.

I suspect the answer would be very few, because the agencies concerned probably rely on a patchwork of intelligence from different sources, of which torture is only one, which again leads me to question its worth, compared to the problems it causes us by giving radical idiots something to latch onto and radicalise other idiots.

The intelligence agencies are unlikely to tell us the truth, however, because their interest is in making it seem as if there are hundreds of plots every day, which are only averted by shipping people off to CIA deniable "black" prisons. That's how they keep us cowed, and get us to accept the loss of more and more of our own civil liberties to anti-terror legislation.

By the way, just because I am opposed to us lowering ourselves to the depths of torture, doesn't mean I am automatically against the use of lethal force against (for instance) an invading force in a declared, legal war. If Al Qaida were massing at Dunkerque in their invasion barges, I would be reporting for duty on the White Cliffs of Dover, but the War on Terror is a different matter: an undeclared dirty war on a concept.

People also argue that we are now at war against the whole Third World, and this requires desperate measures.

I think that "the third world" as a whole is much more occupied with scrabbling for food in the dust and trying to prevent their children dying of malaria every 40 seconds than mounting a sustained attack on the west. What you are talking about is one convoluted strain of Islam, espoused by a radical bunch of beardyweirdies originally in Saudi Arabia, latterly living in caves in Tora Bora, that objected to the US bases in their Holy Land, and to US policy in Israel. I agree, though, that since 2001, the west in general and the US in particular, seem hell-bent on increasing the number of people who hate us as quickly as possible

And anyone who thinks torture (or collusion with torture) isn't still going on under a ConLibdimwit government is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Still Rave

I have to admit, I may have been a chump for giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. I ought to have known that history teaches us that the appearance of a charismatic, young, new broom who promises to sweep clean and transmogrify everything for the better, is inevitably followed by disappointment. God knows, if we wanted an example of the syndrome in this country in recent years, we have only to look at Blair.

But I didn’t expect him to go quite so wrong, quite so early. I refer of course to the totally hypocritical hissy-fit which the US administration has thrown over the release of the Lockerbie suspect.

Personally, I think it’s very decent of the Libyans to let us have an innocent guy to lock up and save people having to ask awkward questions about who really dunnit, but then no doubt all sorts of side deals went down at the time and they were richly recompensed, one way or another.

Anyway, Obama knows much better than I do, because presumably he can toddle along to the CIA and look at the files any time it takes his fancy to do so, that Al-Megrahi is innocent. Just for the avoidance of any doubt though, here’s an interesting point from a chap called Robbie the Pict, from the Lockerbie justice group based on the Isle of Skye, examining the key point on which the Crown’s case against Megrahi rests.

A Sensible Person’s Guide to Semtex
(and why it was not present on Pan Am 103) Semtex is the trade name of a composite high explosive which combines two chemical substances, PETN (Pentaerythritol tetranitrate) and RDX (Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine). The American and English equivalents are ‘C4’ and ‘PE-4’ respectively.High Explosive is a substance which explodes at more than 1000 meters per second (mps). Semtex explodes at about 8000 mps, over 5 miles per second.Heat of Explosion is the amount of chemical explosive energy contained within the explosive mixture, measured in joules per gram(J/g).

The term is more from chemistry than physics.Temperature of Explosion is the maximum temperature possible if no heat is lost to the surroundings. It can be thought of as the starting temperature on detonation. The exploding temperature of Semtex is given by the manufacturer as 3,800 degrees Centigrade. This is physics.Detonation is a chemical process involving spontaneous decomposition of explosives molecules, the breaking and forming of trillions of bonds. It is supersonic combustion in which a shockwave through the explosive material compresses, heats and ignites it.

The ignited material further propagates the shock.Deflagration is subsonic combustion (i.e. burning) that propagates through the explosive material by thermal conduction. Semtex burns at approximately 3,800 degrees centigrade or 6,832 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the estimated temperature of a sunspot. Carbon itself melts at 3,720 degrees Centigrade. This is roughly ten times the auto-ignition or self-kindling point of paper. Plastics, solder, shellac (circuit board material) and cloth shirts have auto-ignition points much closer to paper than to carbon.

All these items would be rendered into white hot gas at 3,800 degrees C.Zone of Uniform Velocity is the distance in all directions not obstructed through which the blast from an explosion continues without losing speed. This factor has been determined in laboratory conditions as being as high as a 4/25 ratio where 4 represents the diameter of the charge (explosive) and 25 the distance the blast reaches without losing momentum.

However, explosive engineers prefer the 2/5 ratio as a practical guide. Explosive Effect is therefore that a charge of Semtex the size of a pound packet of butter will render everything in a sphere the size of a basket-ball an invisible, white-hot gas measuring 6,800 degrees F expanding at over 5 miles per second in all available directions. That calculation is based upon approximately 300 grams, the figure first announced by ‘investigators’.Since then commentators with dubious agendas have more than doubled that figure to as much as 650 grams.

That would mean a charge the size of two and a half pounds of butter and, using only the 2/5 ratio, would result in a sphere of combustion the size of a child’s Space Hopper, expanding at about 20,000 miles per hour in all directions at the temperature of a sunspot, 6,800 degrees F.The Crown conspiracy theory asks the public to join the Judges in believing that a page from a Toshiba instruction manual made of paper, a shellac circuit board, soldering, a piece of shirt cloth and some other combustibles survived the explosion experience. Very funny, — and very stupid.


Well, Robbie the Pict puts it a lot better than I could. But given that Megrahi was almost certainly innocent, and given that all sorts of deals have probaly gone down once again, this time over his release, in a grotesque mirror image of those which went down over his conviction, it ill behoves the White House to be lecturing us on justice, and it ill behoves the American public to be boycotting Scotland, when the US is determined to exercise its rights under the criminally one-sided extradition treaty between the US and the USA, and prosecute Gary McKinnon in the US courts.

Gary McKinnon is the archetypal nerd. In fact, he is the nerd’s nerd. He hacked the computer system at the Pentagon, looking for evidence of UFOs. I don’t know if he found any, but he certainly pissed off the pointyheads who are in charge of security over there. Instead of congratulating him for showing up the loopholes in their pathetic firewall and offering him a job, they want to extradite him to the US and prosecute him to make an example of him. Sadly, our government doesn’t seem to have the balls to tell them that – since he committed the crime on UK soil – Gary McKinnon should stand trial in the UK. And they should go suck a zube.

It’s all part of a depressing pattern, which follows on from the previous instance of the US forces refusing to allow the evidence of their gun cameras to be played to the jury in the inquest on the sad death of Corporal of Horse Matty Hull, in a friendly fire incident. But then, the Americans probably think that Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Oxford is an extra in a chorus by Gilbert and Sullivan.

I didn’t expect much of George W Bush, a man whose concepts of justice probably involved nooses, white hoods and fiery crosses. But I did expect much, much better of Barack Obama.

Afghan Wounds

The latest spike in the casualty figures from the dismal conflict in Afghanistan has provoked a flurry of comment and criticism from all sides. At one end of the spectrum you have the armchair warriors who say we must never surrender to the Taliban and who will willingly fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. And on the other end, the troops-out peaceniks of the Stop the War Coalition and similar organisations.

What is the ordinary person to make of it? By persuasion, by calling, I am of the peacenik party. I was against the Iraq War. I called it the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons. I had my reservations about going into Afghanistan. Picking a fight with the Taliban because they refused to surrender Bin Laden was a big ask. Did they even have the power to surrender him in the first place? Did George Bush even care, as long as the TV audiences at home could see US bombs falling somewhere, on someone vaguely Muslim, in retaliation for the lamentable failure of US foreign policy that was 9/11?

The reasons for being in Afghanistan today are a lot different from those advanced in 2001. The original reason, to flush out Bin Laden, has been unsuccessful largely owing to the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the lack of sufficient resource to do the job, and the fact that the mission got deflected, along the way, into a larger mission to win over the hearts and minds of the population. Quite how you win over the hearts and minds of the population by invading and bombing them has become an increasingly problematic question, and one to which there is no answer. In using violence to try and change the culture of radical Islam and in attempting to use it to weld together an uneasy amalgam of warlords to a government that many feels lacks legitimacy, the UK/US forces in Afghanistan have probably radicalised more than they have converted. We’ve created an unholy alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda where none existed before. In short, we have incited every hothead east of the Euphrates with access to an AK47 or a grenade-launcher to take a pot at us.

It is often advanced by the Prime Minister that our military presence in the area is somehow making us safer from terrorism. The problem I have with this approach is that the people who perpetrated the worst atrocity on British soil since the dark days of the IRA were actually from Leeds and Reading. They were moved to carry out their actions by our presence in Iraq and, er, Afghanistan. So far from being a preventative measure in the circumstances, I feel that our presence there is exacerbating the situation.

The Orphans' Picnic

When I was little, we used to have a joke in our family about "Mummy, can I shoot you so that I can go to the orphans' picnic?"

It seems that the Israeli Defence Force has a similar disconnected approach to morality. Just let me get this right. They are going to stop bombing people in Gaza for three hours a day so that they can distribute aid and medical supplies, then three hours later they are going to start bombing again?

What fucking planet are these people on?

Also I would like to know what the rules of engagement are for the IDF when it comes to shooting at schools. It's a fairly devastating question, because either way, if they have been given the coordinates of the school and told NOT to fire at it, then they are in breach of their own rules of engagement, and if their rules of engagement allow them to shoot at schools, then presumably that implies the deliberate disregard of civilians and - is that not against the Geneva convention?

Back briefly to the issue of proportionality.

What is Israel hoping to achieve? Unless they occupy every square foot of Gaza, which they just don't have the military wherewithal to do, there will always be some neglected back lot somewhere where the jihadists will appear as if by magic, set up their rockets, and then shoot and scoot. There's also the issue of the relative totals of casualty figures. I know that war is not a game of cricket, and that in a sense, the five Israeli dead are just as 100% dead as each of the supposed 500 Palestinians is.

But these rocket attacks that are being advanced as the primary casus belli in this case. According to figures published by its own central bureau of statistics, road accident deaths in Israel 2000-2006 averaged at 7.1 people per 100,000. Given a population of 7.73 million, I make that 523 people. Just over 87 per year. According to stats published by The Israel Project, in the period June 2004 to December 2008, 17 Israeli citizens were killed by Qassam Rockets and Mortars fired into Israel by Hamas from Gaza.

Now, like I said, I freely accept that every one of those 17 innocent people is 100% dead and probably leaves grieving families. None of them deserved to die, probably, but the thing is, one of the things governments should do is look at the bigger picture. If Israel is concerned about the threat of the deaths of its citizens, on the face of it, they should be bombing their own ministry of transport this morning.

Which is what leads me to conclude that Israel knows as well as I do that there is no military solution to prevent the rocketing from Gaza, and no justification for the massively disproportionate response apart from to make certain members of the Israeli cabinet look good at election time. Plus, they are handing a massive propaganda victory to Hamas and their cohorts.

To the outside world, it looks like "collective punishment" rather than a military campaign. And every shot they fire, every Palestinian they kill, is creating another vendetta, another family who will be exploited by the loopy fundamentalist twisters of Islam, another kid who will end up wearing a suicide bomber's vest.

I do know, also, that there are decent, humane people in Israel who want the peaceful, two-state solution that seems to me to offer the only glimmer of hope in the whole sorry mess, and I do acknowledge that their voices get drowned out in the brash pronouncements of the likes of the IDF.

I don't deny Israel's right to exist, you can't wind time back to 1948, you have to start from where you are now. Which implies a two-state solution.

A small note on the principle of proportionality

I despair of the situation in Gaza.

The more I see of Tzipi (Zippy) Livni, the more I wish she had stayed on "Rainbow". And the more I see of Mark Regev, the more I wonder how he sleeps at night.

The problem with Israel and Gaza is that both sides are past masters of "whataboutery". "Whataboutery" is a concept invented (I think) by the blogger Slugger O'Toole. Basically, what happens is that one side says "What about these bombs you are dropping on us" and the other side says "Yeah, well what about all these rockets" and the first side says "Yeah, well what about all these settlers" and the other side says "Yeah, well what about all these suicide attacks" and so it goes, leapfrogging over each other til you get back to Biblical times and the Hittites smiting the Shemites.

Neither Hamas nor Israel is capable of understanding that two wrongs do not make a right. It would be easy to say that they are both equally to blame for the current situation in Gaza, except for one thing. Disproportionality.

To understand what I am getting at, consider the example of Northern Ireland. For twenty five years, until John Major of all people finally saw sense and opened up a dialogue that led eventually to a fragile peace, we here in England suffered in an undeclared war with the IRA. Now there were, undoubtedly, English atrocities during that time, or at least, if not atrocities, let's say dirty tricks, collusion, turning a blind eye, the occasional shoot to kill instead of due process of law, that sort of thing.

But never once, while the IRA was blowing up our pubs, our railway stations and our town centres, did we retaliate by sending in the RAF to strafe Belfast indiscriminately, and then when the world howled in protest, say "well, it's their own fault, there are terrorists all mixed up with civilians and I'm damned if we can tell them apart".

Yet this is exactly what Israel is getting away with in Gaza. True, Hamas probably do exploit the situation, because they know that every time the Israelis cock up and hit a school instead of a rocket launcher, it's another notch on the propaganda ratchet. In that respect, Hamas are guilty of using the people who elected (yes, elected, remember) them into government, as pawns in a cynical propaganda campaign. But Israel's response is so disproportionate as to be breathtaking in its arrogance. The other night on the news, Tzipi Livni was saying that Hamas hide their rockets in amongst civilians because "they don't care if they use their own people as human shields" - she omitted the crucial four words "and neither do we".

Israel justifies its actions because of a supposed threat to its existence, from a few zealots with clapped out rockets made from old gas pipes and shit like that, in a state where Israel has created, in effect the world's biggest concentration camp, and can turn off the taps of aid, food and trade, whenever it likes. A state whose inhabitants ride about on donkeys while Israel has tanks and (probably) nuclear weapons.

No, Israel is doing this just because it can. They will never achieve a "military" solution, because even if they destroy Hamas they will have created a whole new generation of potential jihad martyrs in doing so, and if Hamas goes, something even worse will take its place. Israel knows this, they are not stupid. It's all to do with posturing and seeming "strong", after the drubbing they got in Lebanon the other year.

So, if a single rocket falls on Israeli soil, then revenge is visited tenfold on the Palestinians, or even an hundredfold. Is this ever going to break the cycle of whataboutery? What do you think.

And of course, if you dare to criticise them, they play their trump card. Any criticism of Israel is presented as being anti semitic, and before you know where you are, you are a holocaust denier! The irony that they are now doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to six million European Jews in 1941-45 is completely lost on them.

And we are going to pick up the bill, apparently. When the IDF eventually deign to let the aid in, it will be the British taxpayer, yes the same British taxpayers who are losing their jobs in droves and shouldering the burden of rescuing the failed and profligate banks, who will be paying seven million pounds to fund this.

Bollocks! Israel is a rich country and the least, the very least, that we should demand is that they should pay to clear up their own mess. So I look forward to hearing that Broon has frozen all Israeli assets in the UK and deducted seven million pounds from them.

RIP Rachel Correy, by the way. I know her name gets up the noses of Zionists, so it will do them no harm to know she is remembered.

I come from Old Obama, with a banjo on my knee

Well, I am still gathering together the Bolshy Manifesto, so in the meantime, a quick welcome to Barack Obama. (I keep wanting to type Burt Bacharach Obama, but that is probably a different guy).

Welcome ba(ra)ck, America. We've missed you. We didn't like you much in those years when you traded the fiddle for the drum. You look a bit more like your old self this week.

Now get it sorted, and keep away from grassy knolls and school book depositories for the next four years.

One of the funniest things (apart from Paxo interviewing Dizzee Rascal - "Mr Rascal, do you consider yourself to be British?") this week has been the reaction of our home-grown politicians to the American presidential election. Forgetting that "this is no time for a novice!" Broon immediately welcomed Obama.

As for Cameron, you could almost see the little light bulb come on over his head. It can only be a matter of time before he starts wearing bling and rapping at Prime Ministers' Question Time. I am sure he's already sent Osborne round to the shops for a tin of Cherry Blossom, a stripey blazer, and banjo.

Much has been written in a short time about Obama's race. I think I stand with Martin Luther King on this, and that equality will only truly have been achieved when the colour of the President's skin is just not an issue.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"

Well - Personally, I hope he is everything they say and more, but it's early days yet, and fine words butter no parsnips. I see Hazel Blears has been bleating on about political blogging making everyone cynical and apathetic about politicians. I am actually quite sick of being labelled cynical and apathetic by the very politicians who made me cynical and apathetic.Show me a cause and I'll be there with you at the barricades. Self serving perpetuation or crass opportunism (the two options available to us in the UK at the moment) are not causes as I understand the word.

But yes, let's hope when Obama's finished handing out puppies, he gets the job done. Should be an interesting meeting when the people who funded his campaign attempt to cash in their chips and he says no. I'd love to be a fly on the wall*




*figuratively, obv. If I was a /real/ fly on the wall, I'd have six hairy legs and have to vomit on my food before hoovering it up my nose. But on the upside, I would be able to do a flick roll and land upside down on the ceiling, something I can only perform at present while listening to Question Time...