Craig Murray's Blog, page 140

The Disgraceful Far Right “Journalist” Stephen Daisley

I shall blog about last night’s Panorama shortly. But first I should like to draw attention to STV’s disgraceful Stephen Daisley, who I last mentioned joining in a mainstream media Twitter hatefest against me for revealing that MI5 were targeted on the SNP.

Well Daisley has been at it again, this time with a seriously nasty tweet about the mysterious murder of Hilda Murrell. It was sent to Murdoch shill David Aaronovitch, to whom Daisley tweeted

Yep. “Hilda Murrell. How the State silences dissent one elderly rose grower at a time.”

Whatever you believe about the Murrell murder, it is not something Daisley – a broadcast journalist – should be making jokes about. It is also fascinating that both Daisley’s tweet about me and his tweet about Hilda Murrell were both in defence of the security services and both sent to David Aaronovitch.

Aaronovitch found the Murrell joke so hilarious that he retweeted it at 3am on 25 September. Which is a pity for Daisley, as he apparently woke up, remembered he was a broadcast journalist, and deleted it. At any rate the retweet is on Aaronovitch’s twitter stream but the original not on Daisley’s.

It is however instructive to look at Daisley’s twitter stream. It is amazing to me that a supposed “journalist” working for a broadcaster would be so completely open about their anti-SNP, unionist, anti-Corbyn and far right agenda. Daisley is only very small beer, a stinking, sweating foot-soldier of the forces of reaction. But if you can stand it, the way the unionist establishment interacts and thinks is revealed very clearly from a study of his twitter feed. Messages are exchanged with Aaronovitch of Murdoch, Nick Cohen of the Guardian, with John McTernan of the Blairites and with J K Rowling of the 1%, and a great many others. The SNP and Corbyn are smugly derided by all. These well-paid state supporters live in a cosy Panglossian paradise and have contempt for anyone who is not “in”.

The other thing that comes out of the feed is this peculiar obsession with Israel. Of all the media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s “anti-Semitic connections”, Daisley’s attack is the most astonishing. STV should be deeply ashamed to carry this; it breaks every rule of good journalism. It is a bizarre hotch-potch of mostly deliberate lies and misrepresentation, and crucially there has not been a single attempt to contact any of the people named to obtain their side of the story.

To tackle just two of about sixty wild inaccuracies. Daisley accused Raed Saleh of a “blood libel” which Saleh has repeatedly denounced and stated that he has never said, and which a British court found there was no evidence that Saleh has ever said. Nonetheless Daisley regurgitates this Israeli propaganda.

Daisley quotes Paul Flynn as questioning the loyalties of Matthew Gould, appointed as British Ambassador to Israel. But this is gross misrepresentation by Daisley. What Flynn queried was Gould’s avowal that he was a “committed Zionist”, not his ethnicity. Would we appoint an Ambassador to Cuba who declared himself an avowed communist?

Daisley also perniciously omits what Flynn had said at the start of his remarks which sets the entire context, which was that Gould had held eight secret meetings with Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, of which the FCO refuses to disclose the subjects discussed and who else was present. Daisley knows that, and his censorship of that context is inexcusable as it completely distorts what Flynn was saying in order to portray Flynn as an anti-Semite.

The last few paragraphs of this attack on Corbyn beggar belief in their lack of balance. There is no nod whatsoever to the plight of the Palestinians, the illegality of the Israeli settlements he names, or the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The Israeli government itself would not dare publish anything so unsubtle and totally one sided. That STV should do this, in the context of an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, is absolutely incredible.

I know Daisley is a very, very insignificant figure. But the humdrum media enforcers of the establishment are vital to their ability to keep the 99% working for the 1%. That such a hate-filled and crazed right-winger as Daisley should be employed by mainstream broadcast media says a huge amount about the society we live in.

UPDATE HOW THE UNIONIST ESTABLISHMENT WORKS

As if to confirm the thesis outlined below, at 10.57am today, Duncan Hothersall, Labour’s New Media Czar in Scotland, retweeted Stephen Daisley’s approving tweet of an extract from Tory Secretary of State David Mundell’s Tory Conference Speech:

Good Stat: More people voted No in Indyref than have ever voted for any party in any election in Scottish history.

The tweet carried the Conservative Party Conference hashtag, so there is no doubt Red Tory Hothersall knew he was spreading Blue Tory Propaganda. The seamless web of Red and Blue Tories and mainstream media functions as usual. It is delightful to be proved so completely right so quickly:

Racism Works In the Tories

In every Tory leadership election since Thatcher, the bookies’ favourite has lost. And while you cannot easily discern where the winner would come from on the economic left/right scale, the authoritarian/libertarian scale is absolutely significant. In every single case the winner has been the Tory of the most authoritarian views, and the losers – think Ted Heath, David Davies, Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo – have been on the socially liberal side of conservatism.

Our political “journalists” only think left/right. So Cameron’s victory was a Tory move to the “left”. In fact it was not about that at all. David Davies, the favourite defeated by Cameron, has described the new Tory anti-trade union bill as “Francoist”. He opposed control orders, stop and search, detention without trial and the banning of protest from around Westminster. That is why he lost – the Tories have a dog whistle reaction to follow authoritarian figures. Cameron’s Old Etonian patrician authoritarianism is what they wanted.

That is why Theresa May is going today to give a bloodcurdling speech attempting to stir up racism against immigrants by saying they are making us poor and making our society less cohesive. She will even pander to the ludicrous notion that an economy is of a fixed size no matter how many people are in it, with a fixed number of jobs, so “they” are taking “our” jobs. Doubtless she will also outline yet more definitions of thought crime and new reasons to lock up young Muslims.

She may be vicious and dangerous to our society, but she is not stupid. It is the way to become Tory leader.

Nobody ever lost money overestimating the viciousness of the Tories. In fact the arms and security industries and the bankers, the private health companies, the hedge funds and the private agencies enforcing government policy make fortunes out of it every day.

Death Race 2015

Just between 2003-5, US forces killed 15 journalists in Iraq, the majority either Westerners or working for Western news agencies. The figure is from the mainstream American Journalism Review. 94 aid workers died in the Iraq conflict, according to Reuters. I don’t have a figure for how many of those were killed by the US forces, but many. Journalists and aid workers have been among the 2,540 people killed in “collateral damage” of drone strikes since Obama became President. Now the US has just killed medical staff and aid workers in Kunduz.

I do not want to downplay the horror and cold-heartedness of the grisly ISIL executions. But the United States military has killed more journalists and NGO employees than ISIL ever will. An inconvenient fact you will never see reported in the mainstream media.

Some of those US killings of journalists were not deliberate targeting. That is of little comfort to the dead people and their loved ones. Some were not accidental.

Off to Caird Square

I am off to speak at the Independence rally in Caird Square, Dundee this afternoon. (Actually I am assuming it’s Caird Square, but doubtless I’ll find it when I get there). It is vital that, amid the demands and distractions of humdrum everyday politics, we keep the goal of Independence to the fore in the minds of the people. I was disappointed the SNP MPs and MSPs all boycotted the recent Hope Over Fear rally in George Square, and hope that they will have some presence today in Dundee.

I am always willing to speak at Independence meetings and events throughout Scotland. You can contact me through the button at the top of the page.

Lesson From Kunduz

The destruction by US bombs of the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz – killing doctors, nurses and patients – comes as a stinging corrective to the media pretence that Russian bombs are somehow uniquely evil and destructive. The West has inflicted far more damage in recent years. But the Russians also showed just how ruthless they can be in their brutal suppression of the legitimate desire for national independence of the Chechen people. It is the Americans who today expose most starkly the evils of attempting to solve complex political questions by bombs.

Kunduz is ethnically Uzbek. I have written of it as the place where Alexander Burnes met the fierce Uzbek chief Murad Beg. Burnes was disguised as an Armenian, and would very probably had been killed if his disguise had been penetrated. Today it is very much the territory of an equally fierce Uzbek warlord, General Dostum, the narcotics kingpin, murderer and serial war criminal who has for decades been a key CIA asset and is now Vice President of Afghanistan. That Dostum can lose Kunduz to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, even temporarily, shows how weak the central authority still is. The decade long official western occupation has brought no significant progress, at a cost of billions in money and the waste of many young lives: except progress in achieving a 1200% increase in heroin production.

British State Viciously Abuses Child Fantasist

The sentencing of a 15 year old Blackburn boy – 14 at the time he committed his thought crimes – to life imprisonment is grossly inhuman. It is not quite as evil as the decision of the appalling Saudi regime to crucify and behead a child dissident, but it is recognisably a product of the same world view. History books will look back on this era as one of astonishing state cruelty.

As I have posted repeatedly, Islamic terrorism in the UK is virtually non-existent. It has killed precisely one person in the last decade. As a massive security industry employing many, many thousands depends for its very existence on this tiny threat, the work of the government, media and security services in exaggerating the “danger” is unceasing and increasingly desperate. It is based on an endless series of stories of thwarted terrorist plots.

The most famous was the liquid bomb plot which in fact had no bombs and no air tickets, and where the traces of “suspicious chemical” found in baby feeding bottles was Milton baby bottle sterilising solution. Then there was the ricin plot with no ricin, and the Manchester “Easter bomb plot” where the “bomb ingredient” found in a kitchen was an ordinary bag of sugar.

In the event of the absence of any terrorism, the focus has shifted to thinking about terrorism, and the result has been the conviction of a series of fantasists who can be held to “prove” the terrorist threat. Of these the very saddest is the State’s crushing of this young child. He had no bombs, owned no weapons, harmed nobody. He was however the “mastermind” behind the dreaded “Anzac Day Beheading Plot” where jihadists in Australia did… nothing whatsoever. Nobody attacked anybody. Some people texted about it.

Aha! But don’t we realise that, but for the tens of billions we lavish on the security services, somebody in Australia definitely would have got beheaded by someone? It was only the arrest of a schoolboy in Blackburn that prevented beheadings in Australia, just as it was only the execution by drone of two men in a car in Syria that prevented something absolutely awful from happening in the UK, somewhere by someone, somehow. “What they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

I don’t understand how stupid you have to be to buy into this stuff. But then I don’t understand what a vicious callous bastard of a judge you have to be to sentence a child to life imprisonment. He is doubtless a very disturbed child and probably very unpleasant to deal with. But he did not harm anyone; pretending he could have is part of the charade of the security state.

I also do not understand why the child’s beheading fantasies get him locked away for life, yet it is apparently OK for the Saudis to behead and crucify anyone they like, and still be grovelled to by the entire British establishment, up to and including the monarch. So far as can be ascertained, the Saudis behead more people than ISIL and for identical reasons, yet I see no Conservative demands to bomb them. One interesting result of the Russian bombings in Syria is that the media are for the first time openly publishing that the CIA and Saudis are funding and arming some of the most dubious combatant groups in Syria.

The power players in all of this, on all sides, are cruel men. Justice Saunders in a British court has just proven that includes the British establishment.

T Without Clumpas

UPDATE

Someone has today amended the Wikipedia entry for T in the Park to reinstate Stuart Clumpas as co-founder with Ellis. That is still not quite true – Clumpas was the founder and Ellis worked for him – but it is certainly much better.

I appreciate this post is of limited interest to most people, but it is curious to me. There is currently a row about a decision to give 150,000 of Creative Scotland’s money to the highly commercial and profitable T in the Park festival. My take on that is that it was a bad decision within Creative Scotland.

The founder of T in the Park was an old university friend of mine, Stuart Clumpas. Stuart ran – with breathtaking brilliance – the entertainments at Dundee University students union while I was President. It seems incredible now, but we had the biggest bands in the country on a regular basis, including the world premier of a Mike Oldfield album, and the Pretenders while Brass in Pocket was number 1, Dexy’s Midnight Runners just as they hit, and much else. Stuart was truly amazing. With his collaborator John Reid he went on to establish an entertainments company – I used to hear these two students cooking up their plans over pints. Within six months they had the biggest nightclub in Dundee (Fat Sam’s), within a couple more the biggest in Glasgow (King Tut’s). Stuart went on to found both T in the Park and the V Festivals. I haven’t seen him since about 1984, rather to my regret. Last I heard, third hand, he sold his festival interests and retired down under.

Anyway, the point of that trip down memory lane is that the current controversy over T in the Park led me to look it up on Wikipedia. I found that, extraordinarily, the T in the Park page makes no mention whatsoever of Stuart Clumpas, and attempts to create the impression that it was founded by its current director Geoff Ellis, who it says “was involved from the start” and “organised the first T in the Park festival”. Well, he did some of the organisation, but only as an employee of Stuart Clumpas, who has been airbrushed from the T in the Park Wikipedia page as though he were a former Soviet leader taken out of the photo.

This is an interesting comment on the integrity of Wikipedia. But it is also an interesting comment on the integrity of Mr Ellis. That Wikipedia page had the unmistakeable feel of a promotional page which has been heavily written and edited either by Mr Ellis or by someone working on behalf of Mr Ellis. And if Geoff Ellis is the kind of shyster who would falsely claim to have founded T in the Park and edit out the real founder, does that cast a light on the morality of the rather dubious 150,000 payment?

Corbyn’s Scottish Dilemma

Jeremy Corbyn held his meeting with Scottish MSP’s, quite literally next door to where I live. I considered wandering down to see, but decided the rugby was more interesting.

Corbyn faces an unwinnable dilemma in Scotland. Kezia Dugdale is a standard issue Blairite, though thankfully too absolutely stupid to be dangerous. The advice Corbyn has been getting from Scottish Labour is to concentrate on attacking the SNP, and that is what he has been doing. On Andrew Marr on Sunday he really raised the anti-SNP rhetoric and hasn’t calmed down since. The idea of any kind of anti-austerity co-operation in opposition to the Tories has been drowned in an outbreak of high octane tribalism.

As Scottish Labour’s dwindling professional cadre has no thought but trying desperately to hang on to the jobs they have left, in coming Holyrood and Council elections (where they face massacre), it is unsurprising their line is so shrill. But Corbyn adopting it is going to alienate a lot of people, including me, who wish him well.

But Corbyn is stuck with the need to parrot the tired Scottish Labour lines that did for Lamont and Murphy. If Corbyn tries to impose a more thoughtful and more left wing agenda on Dugdale, and to tone down opposition to Independence, then Corbyn will stand accused of continuing to treat Scottish Labour as a branch office and of imposing Islington’s will upon them. Just as with his shadow cabinet, his problems with Scottish Labour will only be solved when the membership get rid of the Blairite troughers, and that isn’t happening any time soon. On top of which the Corbyn rising Labour membership effect is much more muted in Scotland, because the Left has already joined the Independence movement.

There is of course a parallel dilemma which I and others face. I want to see Corbyn do very well in countering the neo-con consensus in Westminster. But I don’t want him to be another block on Independence. I genuinely hope that England will recover from its domination by Tory politics. I want to see England, Wales and Northern Ireland as progressive neighbours and decent societies.

The most amusing effect of the establishment’s efforts to deal with Corbyn is that he is ridiculed and demonised in England while precisely the same media organisations in Scotland try to promote him as an antidote to the SNP. But Jeremy should realise that if he is getting the backing of the right wing media in Scotland, it means he is getting his line on Independence wrong. It is very disappointing that he did not use his visit to Scotland today to signal that an attitude to Independence other than outright hostility is possible for members of the Labour Party.

In short, no matter how much I may like Jeremy I can see absolutely no reason to vote for Scottish Labour.

Bombs Kill Shock

After UK and US bombs have been devastating the Middle East for over a decade, killing certainly tens and probably hundreds of thousands of people, including many thousands of children, the media have suddenly noticed this morning that bombs kill an awful lot of civilians. But only Russian bombs, of course. British bombs are cheerful, happy and their shrapnel and blast are brilliantly engineered only to go in the direction of bad guys.

The UK/US bombing of Sirte was approximately 500 times more devastating than the Russian bombings yesterday. Yet strangely there was not one single BBC report on the thousands of civilian casualties they caused in just one of many towns they bombed in Libya.

It is worth pointing out that whether yesterday’s bombing by the Russians was against ISIL or against a different bunch of crazed Islamist rebels, one still supported by the CIA and Saudi Arabia, makes no difference whatsoever to the legal position. It was at the request of the Government of Syria and thus legal. That is not to say I support it. I do not. Bombing kills civilians and just causes more hate.

I have the confidence in my fellow human beings to believe that a substantial number will see through the propaganda and realise British bombs do that too.

My optimism extends to the quite astonishing media attack on Jeremy Corbyn. The scorn and bias of the media in dealing with him has awoken many to the fact that we do not in reality live in a democratic society. People are not free to present alternative ideas to the electorate and obtain a fair hearing for them.

But still I think there will be some effect. For an entire generation, broadcast media and print newspapers had never given the slightest indication that there might be a moral dilemma involved in pushing a button to kill a billion people directly, and set off a chain of events that will destroy all human life. The spluttering fury by the establishment at the revelation that there are in existence the kind of people who would not do that, is a wonder to behold.

But all that rage is revealing the existence of the moral dilemma to people from whom it has been effectively hidden as a topic of legitimate and serious debate. People will start to think. That is why Corbyn is so dangerous to the establishment. He has opened a Pandora’s box of ideas.

Grand Designs

I just watched an episode of Grand Designs, about a man with MS converting a cave home, which was the most uplifting piece of television I have seen for a long time – and thus naturally not on the BBC. I was particularly pleased as recent episodes had concentrated on rather unpleasant stinking rich people building luxury palaces, to the extent I was thinking of giving up on the series.

The connection is a stretch, but on the subject of homes, I am not surprised by the media witch-hunt against Michelle Thomson, an extremely effective new MP. The Police have confirmed that Michelle herself is not under investigation. As always, those who challenge the British establishment will come under every angle of attack that can be contrived. Michelle should resist the pressure being placed upon her by hypocritical unionist politicians and media, and everyone should calm down while the police inquiry into the other people involved is concluded.