Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 10

The story behind the story of Jamal Khashoggi

The disappearance and presumed murder of the Saudi exile Jamal Khashoggi has caused a crisis of relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to sign some papers relating to his marriage and never emerged again. Lurid accounts claim he was murdered in the consulate by a 15-strong team flown from Saudi Arabia the previous day in order to kill him.

This almost exclusively Turkish and Qatari narrative includes claims that a pathologist on this team dismembered Khashoggi’s body while he was still alive. For their part, the Saudis have maintained that Khashoggi left the consulate, and they had nothing to do with his disappearance.

Western mainstream media have mainly presented Khashoggi as a liberal journalist who opposed the regime of the purported Saudi modernizer, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), because he wasn’t really a modernizer at all; accordingly, MBS had Khashoggi killed.

A rival analysis has been doing the rounds that Khashoggi was actually an Islamist extremist, a former friend of Osama bin Laden and an acolyte of the Muslim Brotherhood, a hater of Israel who called on all Arabs to join the “resistance” against it and who opposed MBS not because he was undemocratic but because he wasn’t Islamic enough.

But even so, why would MBS have Khashoggi killed in this complicated, macabre and politically exposed way? Why did it need 15 men to do so? Why kill him at all if, as was also reported, Khashoggi’s criticisms of MBS had been relatively mild?

My own sources have now provided me with answers to these questions in an even more startling account.

They say Khashoggi was indeed still very much an Islamist connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Much more significant, he was intimately connected to the Saudi regime, which is bitterly opposed to the Brotherhood. He was, therefore, the ultimate insider who had gone rogue.

“He was a Saudi intelligence service asset for more than 20 years,” one of my informants told me. It was his report in 1994 that Osama bin Laden was inextricably under the influence of Egypt and the Brotherhood that convinced the Saudis bin Laden was a lost cause.

“Jamal worked very closely with the former directors of the Saudi Intelligence Agency Prince Turki al Faisal and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and most importantly, with the architect of Saudi intelligence, Brigadier-General Yousuf al Idrissi.

“These people had no problem with Jamal being out of the country. But he knew a lot of intelligence secrets, and so when he got too close to the Qataris and the Turks, who are now the arch-enemies of the Saudis, this is when Jamal really crossed the line.”

His fiancé, a Turkish diplomat, is the daughter of a former adviser to Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Khashoggi started tweeting pictures of himself with Erdoğan advisers. He was also planning to start a Turkish center, funded by the Turks and the Qataris, agitating for change in Saudi Arabia to champion dissent. But many of the dissenters he was championing were Islamists opposed to the attempts by MBS to modernize Saudi economy and society.

“This idea that he was somehow a liberal democratic warrior against a tyrannical enemy is just ludicrous. The man was part of the system. When you throw your hat into the ring in this very aggressive manner, forgetting that at one stage you were an intelligence operative and that being a journalist was just a cover, that’s when things get complicated.”

Increasingly alarmed, the MBS regime tried to bribe him. “Khashoggi was offered U.S. $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia, with a public guarantee that he would never be harmed. He refused.”

So the Saudis set out to bring Khashoggi back against his will. That’s why they sent the 15-strong squad, who had been alerted to the timing of his consular appointment. The intention was to extract him back to Riyadh, interrogate him and lock him up, probably for many years.

“If they’d wanted to kill him,” my informant said, “they could easily have paid $200,000 to the Chechen mafia in Istanbul who could have taken him out so easily and made it look like a robbery gone wrong.

“There was no kill order from Saudi Arabia. The planes that flew the squad into Turkey were owned by his friend, former Crown Prince Mohammed al Nayaf. Khashoggi would have been locked up and interrogated. They wanted to know who he had talked to and what he had revealed. They say some leaks from Qatar had his fingerprints all over them.

“So they set out to bring him back alive. The pathologist, a member of the inner circle, was there to ensure he remained sedated on the way back to Riyadh.”

But this, according to my source, was where disaster occurred. “The sedative gun malfunctioned and he suffocated from a massive overdose. He was 60 years old, he was overweight, his body couldn’t cope with it.”

What then happened to his body isn’t known.

“If I had been advising MBS.” said my informant, “I would have told him to leave Khashoggi alone. But MBS is trigger-happy. Hopefully, this will have taught him a very big lesson.”

I cannot verify this account of what happened. All I can say is that my sources are extremely well-connected and well-informed.

Whatever Khashoggi’s political views, it remains wrong to kill, muzzle or jail dissidents. Saudi Arabia remains a repressive tribal society and the original source of the Sunni Islamist extremism that now plagues the world.

For all his stated desire to modernize his country, MBS does not conform to Western ideas of human rights. He may have allowed women to drive (albeit accompanied by a man) and opened up cinemas, but he has also locked up dozens of dissenters. If my sources’ account of Khashoggi’s fate is correct, it shows MBS in a dismal light as arrogant, impetuous and deeply unwise.

But if, at bottom, Khashoggi was an enemy of the West for whom Islam was a political weapon, the reaction to his murder cannot be the same as if he had been killed in the cause of tolerance and religious freedom.

In any event, this affair has once again revealed the deep hypocrisy of the West. Many regimes with which it regularly deals have a dreadful record in jailing, torturing and murdering dissidents. No one gives this a second thought. The only reason the fate of Jamal Khashoggi has caused such a furor is that he wrote for The Washington Post and was part of the liberal media circuit that tolerates Islamists and disdains their opponents.

Khashoggi seems to have embodied the contradiction so fatally misunderstood by the West over the “Arab Spring”: that opposition to Arab authoritarianism does not necessarily mean an attachment to democracy and human rights. It can mean instead the desire for the freedom to destroy freedom through radical Islam.

This is surely the reason why, despite this debacle, the United States will continue to support MBS. It’s not because Jared Kushner is his friend, or President Donald Trump loves despots, or the West has always sucked up to Saudi Arabia. It is because the West faces two giant threats in both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime. And to aid it in that great civilizational fight, the West needs Saudi Arabia.

That’s why there’s now a tacit alliance between America, Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran, Turkey and Qatar. This must not be undermined by the Khashoggi debacle. However flawed MBS may be, does the West really want the return to power of Saudi Islamists determined once again to export Wahhabism throughout the world?

Maybe it might even give the United States the leverage with which to force MBS to do what he has so far signally failed to achieve—to bring Saudi Arabia out of the darkness and end one of the most backward and repressive regimes in the world.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Liberal sore losers don’t respect democracy

Liberal sore losers don’t respect democracy

What’s so alarming is the way that political and ideological disputes are driving many into positions where minds are closed against evidence in a culture war which brooks no deviation.

Speaking from my own experience, it’s apparently not possible to want to see rapists locked up and oppose the destruction of the presumption of innocence by #MeToo; to stand up against the West’s appeasement of Islamism and criticise Tommy Robinson; to be appalled by the psychological and other flaws of President Trump and acknowledge that he has achieved some good and even admirable things for America.

If you support the second of these positions, your support of the first is deemed to be null and void. You are not allowed to subscribe to both. On many issues, people are digging ever deeper into positions that admit no complexity or nuance. This is taking a politically fundamental turn. Until now, belief in democracy has entailed understanding that sometimes you will be outvoted by those with contrary views. This is now being challenged by the belief that if the democratic system doesn’t give you what you want, you should change the system.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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As Haley’s comet passes, the UN itself must now become a fallen star

The sudden announcement of Nikki Haley’s resignation from her post as America’s ambassador to the UN at the end of the year has dismayed Israel’s supporters, and with good reason.

Her willingness to call out the despots and tyrants who have turned the UN into a theater of bigotry, injustice and hypocrisy against Israel has been an object lesson in principled and muscular diplomacy which displayed both high skill and charm.

In a universe of western appeasers, she displayed something which that world has all but lost: the moral courage to grasp that evil cannot be accommodated, but has to be confronted and defeated.

Now, though, the US needs to take its strategy of holding the UN to account onto a higher level. Haley gave the UN a regular kicking over its manifold failings. Yet the UN remains intact as a grotesque repudiation of its founding ideals.

Yes, the US quit the UN Human Rights Council. Yet that remains a travesty of its name, comprising some of the world’s major human rights violators, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Angola, Qatar and Venezuela.

The single-minded persecution of Israel by the UNHRC should have disqualified it years ago. As Anne Bayefsky of Human Rights Voices has observed, it reserves one permanent agenda item for condemning Israel alone.

The council has adopted more resolutions slamming Israel, and held more emergency special sessions on it, than any other country on earth – including Syria, where at least 500,000 have died and up to 12 million people have been displaced.

The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) vitiates its own cultural remit by attempting to write the Jews out of their own history in Jerusalem and other ancient Jewish sites.

In 2016, it adopted a resolution obliterating any Jewish historical ties to the Temple Mount and Western Wall area in Jerusalem, referring to them instead by their Arab names. This, despite the fact that Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism and predates the founding of Islam by hundreds of years.

This week, UNESCO passed resolutions sponsored by Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Sudan and Morocco stating that the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem were both “an integral part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories” – in flagrant denial of law and history, and the sacred nature of these places for Jews as the supposed burial sites of Judaism’s foundational ancestors.

Then there’s UNWRA’s unique designation of Palestinian refugee status as inheritable, a status designed to deploy these unfortunate Arabs in perpetuity as weapons of annihilation against the State of Israel. And let’s not overlook the UN’s own UNWRA schools, which provide curricula indoctrinating Arab schoolchildren into hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.

The UN’s gross failings are by no means confined to its hatred of Israel. In Turkey, a Saudi dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, has disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents relating to his marriage. According to the Turks, the Saudis murdered him, butchered his body and smuggled out the remains. What are the chances of the UNHRC investigating his fate? Zero: Saudi Arabia is a member.

By every possible standard, the UN has conspicuously failed to live up to its own objectives of maintaining global peace and security. It has failed to keep peace in the world, failed to stop global conflicts, failed to halt the carnage in Syria. It has done nothing to prevent Islamic jihadi aggression, nothing to halt the horrific mass murder of Christians in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, nothing to stop the murder of opposition politicians and extinction of human rights in country after country.

Instead, the overtly anti-American and anti-Israel UN provides a rhetorical shield and effective justification and incitement for terrorism, tyranny and oppression.

The problem lies in the very idea of the UN itself. When it was founded, it was a very different animal in a very different world. In 1945, some 51 countries signed its charter. Now there are 193 member states.

Everything changed with the arrival of the non-aligned nations. This bloc of countries, mainly from Asia and Africa, felt the west had dominated the UN for too long. Their numbers enabled them to dominate it instead and suffuse it with a poisonous, racist ideology equating their oppression under colonialism, imperialism and neo-colonialism with the west.

Their arrival turned the UN into an intrinsically anti-western body. Yet, the pathologically guilt-ridden west persists in regarding it as a dispassionate and moral arbiter of global peace and security whose decisions have the authority of holy writ.

The Trump administration has broken with all that. The US has withdrawn from UNESCO and the UNHRC; Israel is set to withdraw from UNESCO at the end of this year.

This is not enough. The UN itself has to be effectively neutralized, deprived of its power to hurt America and Israel and promote evil in the world.

On the American Thinker website an anonymous army officer outlined how this might be done. The US should steadily withdraw its funding from the UN. It should demand changes to the permanent membership of the Security Council – for example, by getting rid of France, no longer a world power, and bringing in India instead.

In addition, he suggested, the US should clog the schedules of all UN bodies on which it sits with resolutions that would not only divide the membership, but also force them to address awkward questions. For example, resolutions condemning Israeli settlements should be followed up by resolutions on New Zealand’s historically genocidal policies towards the Maoris, Russia’s military adventures in Ukraine and Georgia, Britain’s colonial history, Venezuela’s economic policies and China’s occupation of Tibet.

You get the general idea. Impossible, you think, since the UN is an essential part of the world order? But that world order is bust; and the UN has helped bring it to this pass.

And as for impossible, did anyone ever imagine in their wildest dreams that the president of the United States would be one Donald J. Trump? Desperate times sometimes require desperate measures.

Jerusalem Post

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My speaking engagements in Britain and America

Here for your diaries are my main speaking engagements over the next few weeks.

LONDON

On Sunday October 14 I shall be taking part in two sessions at the Battle of Ideas conference at the Barbican centre in London. The first, at 1030, is a discussion on “Understanding Antisemitism Today” with Richard Angell, Stephen Law, Brendan O’Neill and Julian Petley. You can read about it here.

The second, at 1200, is a discussion on “How Free is the Media?” with Mick Hume, Elizabeth Pears, Emily Sheffield and Andrew Wilson. you can read about that here.

I shall also be signing my most recent books at this event.

For tickets and other general information about the conference, please click here.

*****

NEW YORK

On Sunday October 28, I shall be speaking at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York on “Jews and Conservatism”. I shall be in conversation at 1130 with the founding editor of Standpoint magazine, Daniel Johnson, on “Jews, Muslims and the Crisis of Europe”.

You can read more about the conference here.

*****

LOS ANGELES

On Sunday November 11 I shall be speaking at a CAMERA “champagne brunch” in Los Angeles on “Time to Leave? Jews in Britain and Europe”. Contact Tracey Miller by November 5: Tracey@CAMERA.org or at +1 617 377 6898 for further information and to reserve a seat.

My schedule may allow time to fit in further engagements on November 13 and 14. If your organisation would like to explore this possibility, please contact me at melanie@dirahassociates.com.

*****

FLORIDA

On November 15-17 I shall be in Palm Beach, Florida attending the David Horowitz Centre’s Renaissance weekend where I shall be speaking.

On Sunday November 18, I shall be speaking in Florida at two further events.

The first, for the Gross Family Centre for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust, will be at the Mandel JCC, Palm Beach at 1100 on the topic “Time to Leave? Jews in Britain and Europe”. For further details, click here.

That afternoon at 1400, I am due to give another talk to the Florida Society for Middle East Studies in Boca Raton on “A World in Turmoil: Britain, Europe and the Middle East”. For details, please contact fsmes.org.

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Gay cake crumbles in rare win for real liberal values

I have often criticised Britain’s senior judges in general, and the president of the Supreme Court Lady Hale in particular, for “liberal” partisanship and allowing ideology to influence their rulings.

Today, however, Lady Hale and her Supreme Court colleagues have bravely gone against fashionable ideology in a ruling which actually upholds liberalism, rationality and law. The judges have ruled unanimously that the Christian owners of Ashers bakery in Belfast did not act in a discriminatory manner when they refused to bake a cake iced with the message “Support Gay Marriage”.

The case against the bakers was brought by gay rights activist Gareth Lee, who in 2014 ordered the cake for a private function marking International Day Against Homophobia. His order was accepted and he paid in full but, two days later, the company called to say it could not proceed due to the message requested for the cake.

Lee won his case in the Northern Ireland courts. Today the Supreme Court reversed those rulings. Said Lady Hale:

“As to Mr Lee’s claim based on sexual orientation discrimination, the bakers did not refuse to fulfil his order because of his sexual orientation. They would have refused to make such a cake for any customer, irrespective of their sexual orientation. Their objection was to the message on the cake, not to the personal characteristics of Mr Lee or of anyone else with whom he was associated.”

For as she pointed out, the bakers also had rights – the freedom which is protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights not to express an opinion one does not hold. “This court has held that ‘nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe’.

“…The bakers could not refuse to supply their goods to Mr Lee because he was a gay man or supported gay marriage, but that is quite different from obliging them to supply a cake iced with a message with which they profoundly disagreed.

“…This conclusion is not in any way to diminish the need to protect gay people and people who support gay marriage from discrimination. It is deeply humiliating, and an affront to human dignity, to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion or belief. But that is not what happened in this case.”

Lee has now protested that the Supreme Court ruling has made him and other gay people feel they are second-class citizens. Nonsense. As Lady Hale observed, the bakers’ objection was “to the message and not to the man”. This was not about attitudes to gay people. It was about the freedom not to be made to express a particular point of view.

No-one should be forced to produce a political or ideological message with which they profoundly disagree. To do so is deeply illiberal and oppressive. Yet that oppressive illiberalism was fundamental to the case against Ashers bakery, and is fundamental to the gay rights movement in general.

Today, the Supreme Court struck a rare blow for true liberal tolerance against the frightening eclipse of freedom that masquerades so sinisterly as a progressive value in our deeply confused society.

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Feminists want to blame men for everything

Feminists want to blame men for everything

Women are often levered into top posts, sometimes above their level of competence, not through some infernal male plot but to fill an ideological quota in response to feminist pressure for equal representation in public life.

Yet success still isn’t enough. Dame Inga Beale, the first woman to run Lloyd’s of London, says all female chief executives accept that their successors will be men determined to take power back.

So let’s get this right. If women get to the top, it’s a conspiracy against them by men; if they don’t, it’s a conspiracy against them by men. It’s an all-purpose, all-weather, all-exits-closed theory of female victimhood.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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The Democrats’ proposed banana republic

I wrote here that the American Democratic party had become the party of hate. Subsequent events have not only amply confirmed that view but further suggest that the Democrats now pose a real threat to America, in terms of both physical violence and a threat to due process and the US constitution.

Two days after the Senate confirmed Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told a press conference that GOP senators were “literally under assault” during the confirmation process.

“These demonstrators, I’m sure some of them were well-meaning citizens. But many of them were obviously trying to get in our faces, to go to our homes. Basically almost attack us in the halls of the capitol. There was a full-scale effort to intimidate.”

Senator Rand Paul reportedly suffered severe injuries and was hospitalised after being attacked by a Democrat while mowing his own lawn. His wife wrote to Democrat senator Cory Booker demanding that he take back his comment encouraging activists to “get up in the face of some Congresspeople”.

“Preventing someone from moving forward, thrusting your middle finger in their face, screaming vitriol — is this the way to express concern or enact change?” she wrote. “Or does it only incite unstable people to violence, making them feel that assaulting a person is somehow politically justifiable?”

“I would call on you to retract your statement,” Paul said in the letter. “I would call on you to condemn violence, the leaking of elected officials’ personal addresses (our address was leaked from a Senate directory given only to senators), and the intimidation and threats that are being hurled at them and their families.”

She and her family, she said, had “experienced violence and threats of violence at a horrifying level” over the past 18 months.“I now keep a loaded gun by my bed. Our security systems have had to be expanded. I have never felt this way in my life.”

It should be noted that this uproar appears to be driven, at least in part, by a network funded by the billionaire financier George Soros. In the Wall Street Journal, Asra Q Nomani reported on the spreadsheet she had assembled from “following the money” behind the anti-Trump so-called“resistance”:

At least 50 of the largest organizations that participated as “partners” in the Jan. 21, 2017, Women’s March had received grants from Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations or similar funds in the “House of Soros,” as his philanthropic empire was once called internally. The number of Soros-backed partners has grown to at least 80. At least 20 of the largest groups that led the Saturday anti-Kavanaugh protests have been Open Society grantees.

On Saturday I also studied the fine print on the signs as protesters waved them defiantly at the Capitol and the high court. They came from a familiar list of Democratic interest groups that have received millions from Mr. Soros: the American Civil Liberties Union, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Center for Popular Democracy, Human Rights Campaign and on and on. MoveOn.org, a Democratic organizing and lobbying group founded with Soros money, sent its army of partisan followers regular missives that led them to a Google form to ask for train tickets and places to stay.

Under a ginkgo tree on the East Lawn of the Capitol, Center for Popular Democracy field marshals put protesters through a “training” Saturday morning. “Are you ready to be arrested?” she asks. “Yes!” the crowd shouts, although one woman asks quietly: “For what?”

Nor was Kavanaugh’s confirmation the end of that particular matter. Not content with having undermined America’s judicial appointments procedure by a vicious onslaught on due process and the presumption of innocence, the Democrats have now started to attack the US constitution itself. Because it has not delivered the political result they want, it is now in their sights as apparently not fit for purpose.

Having failed in her disgraceful attempt to destroy Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court candidacy, reputation and professional life through an appalling smear campaign, Senator Dianne Feinstein has now decided that the Supreme Court itself is illegitimate.

“Confirming Brett Kavanaugh in the face of credible allegations of sexual assault that were not thoroughly investigated, and his belligerent, partisan performance in last Thursday’s hearing undermines the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,” she tweeted.

And so, after failing to frustrate an inbuilt conservative majority on the court, Democrats are now planning a brazen new tactic to force it to do their ideological bidding. A campaign has sprung up to change the court’s historic composition in order to pack it with Democrat supporters.

In Vice, Harry Cheadle explained that, even though the court’s previous “swing voter”, the former Justice Anthony Kennedy whose seat Kavanaugh now occupies, occasionally sided with the liberals on the bench, the court had “found room in its judicial philosophy for every right-wing cause under the sun.”

He wrote: “Chatter of impeaching Kavanaugh was floating around, and some have taken to imagining a scenario where the Democrats retake Congress and the White House in 2020 but have their progressive legislation blocked by the Supreme Court. The only way forward then, the argument goes, would be appointing extra justices to ‘pack’ the court—a scheme proposed by Franklin Roosevelt in response to a similarly right-wing Supreme Court in the 30s (FDR’s plan was rejected by Congress, but the court became friendlier to his policies anyway)”.

This is not some one-off, far-left, kooky suggestion. “Pack the court!” is becoming the latest Democrat war-cry. Political scientist David Faris says in a recently published book that Democrats should pack the Supreme Court with as many liberal judges as they can, a tactic he brands the “neutron option for the Supreme Court.”

Indiana Law professor Ian Samuel has tweeted: “‘Pack the courts’ should be a phrase on par with ‘abolish ICE.’” In Huffington Post Zach Carter wrote an article headed “Hey, Democrats: Pack The Court; ‘Eleven Justices’ is the next ‘Abolish ICE’”.

And of course, an electoral college which can deliver a president like Donald J Trump has to be illegitimate, doesn’t it – because it enabled him to become president. And so Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a far-left Democrat hoping to represent New York’s 14th congressional District, has declared that the electoral college is a racist American relic that must be abolished.

“It is well past time we eliminate the Electoral College, a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic,” the 28-year-old Boston University graduate tweeted to her 881,000 followers Saturday afternoon. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was commenting on a tweet by GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe, who complained that the Electoral College has helped conservatives get elected.

This is behaviour more fitting for a banana republic.

The Democratic party has allowed itself to be taken over by people who are turning it into a force for violence, disorder and subversion. It is becoming an agency for leftwing totalitarianism, displaying contempt for the rule of law and emerging as an enemy of the US constitution. As it stands, no decent person should vote for it.

Behind it, however, stands the ultra-left in the universities, where education has been hijacked by propaganda and which have been turned from temples of enlightenment into crucibles of hate. And in front of it stands the mainstream media, the Democrats’ brazenly unprincipled weapon of ideological war.

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings were not just an appalling travesty of justice and decency. They were a key front in America’s increasingly savage and desperately important culture war, whose battle lines are now apparent for all to see.

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BBC censorship and the man-made global warming scam

This evening, an important lecture is being delivered in London on the subject of man-made or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory.

If you follow BBC news programmes, you are extremely unlikely to hear anything about this important lecture.

That is because the scientist delivering it is saying that man-made global warming theory is a scam.

BBC policy is to report no challenge to AGW theory at all. The explicit statement of this policy was set out in a four-page memo by Fran Unsworth, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs, which was leaked to Carbon Brief last month.

This memo maintained that man-made climate change “exists” and no-one proposing the contrary view – offensively termed a “denier” – was needed to balance the debate. “To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.”

In true Soviet fashion, the BBC will now indoctrinate its journalists into misreporting the issue. It will be “offering all editorial staff new training for reporting on climate change. The one hour course covers the latest science, policy, research, and misconceptions to challenge, giving you confidence to cover the topic accurately and knowledgeably”.

In itself, this is absolutely astounding. In the BBC’s mindset, propaganda is fact and scientific facts are propaganda. Censoring information like this goes against the most fundamental BBC rules of fairness. It goes against the most fundamental rules of journalistic objectivity. And it goes against science itself. The widespread claim that “the science is settled” on AGW is scientifically illiterate. Science is never settled but is always subject to fresh discovery, analysis and challenge.

The BBC subscribes to the claim that some 97 per cent of the world’s scientists agree man-made global warming is an established fact, and that it is “denied” by only a few cranks or propagandists on the fringes of academic respectability. This is also totally untrue. I refer to many such sceptical scientists in my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power. These include some of the most distinguished in their field who were used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as expert reviewers of the evidence – but resigned when they realised that the IPCC, a political/ideological rather than scientific body, was grossly misrepresenting their research to support an AGW thesis that didn’t stack up.

The man delivering tonight’s lecture is one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world. He is Richard Lindzen, who until his retirement in 2013 was Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has consistently drawn attention to the fact that AGW theory is a sham and a scam.

In tonight’s lecture, he ridicules the core premises of AGW theory that the climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarised in just one variable – the globally averaged temperature change – and that it is primarily controlled by the 1-2 per cent perturbation in the single variable of carbon dioxide. This, he says, is “an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking.”

That’s because it is dictated not by science but by politics and ideology. “A few years ago Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that mankind was, for the first time in history, setting itself the task of intentionally changing the economic system”.

On the evidence itself, Prof Lindzen simply shreds AGW “magical thinking” as not just irredeemably stupid but as not even saying what its hysterical exponents in the media and elsewhere say it says.

“Turning to the issue of temperature extremes, is there any data to even support concern? As to these extremes, the data shows no trend and the IPCC agrees.

“… At the heart of this nonsense is the failure to distinguish weather from climate. Thus, global warming refers to the welcome increase in temperature of about 1◦C since the end of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. On the other hand, weather extremes involve temperature changes of the order of 20◦C. Such large changes have a profoundly different origin from global warming.

“This has also been the case with sea-level rise. Sea level has been increasing by about 8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it. In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked. As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated with both tectonics and land use. Moreover, the small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have predicted. Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem”.

That hasn’t stopped nonsensical hypotheses being fed into computers – whose modelling function is in any event wholly inadequate to deal with the extreme complexities of climate even if accurate data were being fed into them.

The whole thing is absurd beyond belief. Yet that hasn’t stopped the shameless production of ever more ludicrous inconsistencies, contradictions and lacunae. Today the IPCC has issued yet another prediction of climate apocalypse, giving us 12 years to limit the catastrophe of climate change.

Really?

In 2006 Al Gore said the planet had 10 years to avert climate change apocalypse. in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the IPPC chief, declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

Do click here to marvel at the way the tipping point for the apocalypse has itself been tipping throughout the years.

The original IPCC report predicted that a 2℃ increase in global warming would produce planetary catastrophe. In today’s report, the IPCC claims that even half a degree of extra warming will “affect hundreds of millions of people, decimate corals and intensify heat extremes”.

Limiting global warming to 1.5℃, as it recommends, would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” – ie, reducing carbon emissions to zero and thus plunging the world back into the pre-industrial dark ages.

And yet: global temperatures have been falling sharply since 2016 while the 21st century warming trend is half of what most climate models predicted;

Arctic sea ice is no longer decreasing but expanding and thickening;

Polar bears are not dying out but their numbers are stable or even expanding.

And so on.

As Prof Lindzen says: “Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking, or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence… An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization”.

The man-made global warming scam is the defining motif of the west’s own cultural death warrant. And that’s because it is the signature issue illustrating the western world’s repudiation of modernity, science and reason itself.

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The full-scale unravelling of Western cultural norms

The Kavanaugh confirmation circus is not just a jaw-dropping and unedifying spectacle. It is a paradigm event in the unraveling of American and Western cultural norms.

The allegations of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have crumbled away under their own multiple contradictions, absence of corroboration and unsubstantiated claims.

So have all those who instantly proclaimed Kavanaugh guilty as charged expressed contrition for this character assassination? On the contrary: They have merely shifted the goalposts to yet more spurious accusations.

These include his alleged teenage drinking, lying and pedophilia, along with the apparently supreme disqualification for judicial high office of having displayed anger and upset at having his hitherto stellar reputation tarnished forever through such smears.

Worse still, though the eyes of this frenzied mob, Kavanaugh himself stands proxy for every social evil or injustice.

So faced with vicious character assassination on the basis of demonstrably absurd accusations, it is the victim who finds himself dehumanized, demonized and delegitimized. Moreover, the very suggestion that he is indeed the victim is itself treated as a further outrage.

Sound familiar? It should. For this is exactly the same treatment meted out to the State of Israel and those Jews who support it.

Israel is falsely accused of crimes such as murderous aggression, colonialism and occupation of which it is not only innocent, but is in fact the victim or target. Those who call out such lies are themselves denounced as being beyond the pale for doing so.

In Britain, people are reeling from the antisemitism scandal in the Labour Party. They just can’t understand how such monstrous remarks about Jews can possibly have gained such traction. In the United States, people are similarly clutching their heads at the Kavanaugh debacle and wondering aloud how on earth America could have come to this.

Why such surprise? Anti-Israel discourse rooted in obsessive falsehoods, distortions, blood libels and conspiracy theory — the hallmarks of classical antisemitism through the centuries — has been endemic in “progressive” British circles for many years.

These transatlantic convulsions over Kavanaugh or Israel haven’t come from nowhere. They are intimately connected to far wider social and cultural trends.

Quite simply, Western civilization has become unmoored from its core principles rooted in its foundational text of biblical morality.

The rise of secularism, which gave the world tolerance and political freedom, also launched it on a trajectory that led to communism and fascism. Those have mutated in turn into a form of cultural totalitarianism based on the tyranny of the individual, the eclipse of objective truth by subjective feelings and the destruction of attachments to a particular culture by the doctrine of universal values.

This has caused the breakdown of the building blocks of Western civilization: the traditional nuclear family, the notion of education as the transmission of the culture down through the generations and the very idea of the Western nation itself.

In their place have come multiculturalism, the sexual and gender free-for-all and the modern form of tribal warfare known as identity politics. These are all based on ideology, the drive for power and above all, rage — rage at being abandoned by parents, rage at an unfulfillable sense of entitlement, rage at being cast adrift in the world with no coherent identity.

We are now living through both a revolutionary and counter-revolutionary moment. Revolutionary through Occupy, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. These are movements that all aim to seize power through force: physical violence or bullying, intimidation, character assassination and so on.

What’s been unleashed is beyond reason: a pathological, inexplicable, violent hatred. On Twitter, Carol Christine Fair, a Georgetown University political scientist, raged over Kavanaugh against “entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlements. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

A Republican senator was hounded out of a restaurant; others have had to be escorted through the Capitol’s offices to protect them from protesters; personal details such as senators’ home addresses and cell-phone numbers have been posted online.

Truth is no longer recognized, nor the difference between assertion and proof. In The Forward, Jane Eisner wrote: “Christine Blasey Ford [Kavanaugh’s principal accuser] is every woman. This happens when you push us too far.”

For Eisner, it seems, a subjective, uncorroborated and dubious claim is axiomatically true if it is being made by a woman against a man. Eisner doesn’t just know for a fact that Kavanaugh’s assault on Ford happened, doesn’t just know for a fact why this woman kept the memory at bay for 36 years, but also knows for a fact that “so many of us [women] strive to assist the power structure rather than storm it.”

All this venomous nonsense is wrapped up with the onslaught by our progressive classes on the Western nation as the fount of all ills.

Dismissed by this arrogant establishment, however, the anger of ordinary people has grown and grown. Anger at being deprived of their own culture. Anger at being deprived of the ability to express that culture through democratic self-government. Anger at the bullying and intimidation and defamation and spite directed at them for wanting these things at all.

That public anger translated itself into a counter-revolution: the twin phenomena of the Brexit vote in Britain and the Trump ascendancy in America.

So now, we are at a critical inflexion point. The old world order is giving way to new alliances. Israel, Saudi Arabia and Trump versus Iran, the European Union and the American Democratic party. The British public against the European Union, and the British political and media establishment. Western Europe against eastern Europeans who know what it is to lose freedom and who will not go gently into that darkness again.

Now some European parties standing up for their nation and culture are being vilified as racists or fascists. Some of them are indeed authoritarian and illiberal.

But the choice before us — and it is a momentous one—is not binary. It is not a choice between liberal democracy and its antithesis. And that’s because the boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism have become blurred.

Western societies, where the presumption of innocence or freedom to dissent has been eroded, are no longer liberal; they have become deeply illiberal. At the same time, previously totalitarian societies such as Russia may now boast the trappings of democracy but in reality electoral choice there is an illusion.

Where the line will now be drawn between political freedom and authoritarianism is one of the great questions of our time.

And meanwhile there is Israel, the original, ancient nation state, founded upon the moral, social and rational principles that sit at the very foundation of Western civilization.

Who can be surprised, therefore that Israel is the target of Western “progressive” venom? But for the same reason, Israel stands at the very center of the great struggle now under way to rescue western civilization.

It’s time for Israel itself, and the Jewish people worldwide, to recognize and act upon this latest manifestation of Jewish destiny.

Jewish News Syndicate

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America’s revolutionary moment

Finally – finally! – a Republican has expressed appropriate fury, disgust and contempt for the way in which the Democratic Party turned Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court into a political lynching.

Christine Blasey Ford had accused Kavanaugh of having sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers in high school. She had taken her allegation, made for the first time after 36 years, to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Feinstein sat on it for six weeks until virtually the last moment in the Senate’s consideration of Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Having heard both Ford’s accusation and Kavanaugh’s emotional and angry response at yesterday’s hearing, a scarcely less emotional and angry Senator Lyndsey Graham could contain himself no longer and denounced the whole circus as “the most unethical sham” during his entire time in politics (view this here).

He accused the Democrats of having boasted they would destroy Kavanaugh’s life in order to hold his Supreme Court seat open in the hope they would win the presidency in 2020.

“If you really wanted to know the truth”, he erupted at the Democrats, “you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy. Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. That you knew about it and you held it! You had no intention of protecting Dr Ford! None! She’s as much of a victim as you are [pointing at Kavanaugh]. God I hate to say it ’cause these have been my friends. But let me tell you, when it comes to this: you’re looking for fair process? You came to the wrong town at the wrong time, my friend… Would you say you’ve been through hell?”

KAVANAUGH: “I’ve been through hell and then some”.

GRAHAM:”This is not a job interview. This is hell.”

To this travesty of justice and decency must also be added a travesty of journalism. The New Yorker decided to say #MeToo to this lynching. Its reporters, Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer, suddenly produced one Deborah Ramirez, who claimed Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a drunken party in their freshman year at Yale. Kavanaugh says forcefully that this didn’t happen and that the claim is a smear.

In their own story, Farrow and Meyer wrote:

“In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, Deborah Ramirez was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty”, not least because “her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking”. But then: “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections…”

The reporters further admitted they contacted “several dozens of classmates of Ramirez and Kavanaugh” and yet had “not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.” All they obtained was a classmate of Ramirez who “declined to be identified,” and who said that “another student told him about the incident either on the night of the party or in the next day or two.”

Oh dear. And Farrow and Meyer thought this somehow held their story up?

Even the New York Times, which has itself systematically junked journalistic norms in the Democratic cause, balked at endorsing this patent insult to the intelligence. As it told us, it wasn’t for want of trying. “The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”

Farrow, whose story said that the allegation by Ramirez “was conveyed to Democratic senators by a civil-rights lawyer”, told “Good Morning America” that Ramirez had come forward “because Senate Democrats came looking for this claim. She did not flag this.”

A responsible editor – no, more than that, an editor with even a vestigial understanding of the distinction between journalism and propaganda – would have told Farrow and Meyer to junk the story as ancient, unproveable and utterly suspect. But the New Yorker editor, David Remnick – whose publication’s on-line ad boasts that it is “Fighting fake stories with real ones” – ran it.

This is the same Remnick who, under pressure from the same kind of people who believe that rabid hatred of Donald J Trump is the non-negotiable condition for freedom of expression, censored his own festival event when its glittering participants threatened to boycott it if he went ahead with his planned interview of Trump’s erstwhile eminence grise, Steve Bannon.

Despite (or because of) all this, Democrats and their partisans knew for a fact that Kavanaugh was guilty as charged. At Yale, some 31 law classes were reportedly cancelled due to protests against Kavanaugh’s nomination. These law students just knew he was guilty – because he was accused of sexual assault by a woman, and as the #MeToo movement has schooled us, any man thus accused is axiomatically guilty as charged.

So we can now see how these future lawyers will treat the the presumption of innocence, the core premise of the justice system in a free society. They will stamp all over it. And we can now also see, if the Democrats regain power in the mid-term elections or in 2020, how they will treat their constitutional duty to uphold the presumption of innocence. They will stamp all over it, along with the sterling reputations they will grind to dust under their heels.

This is nothing less than the substitution of justice by the abuse of power, the hallmark of the former Soviet Union and now adopted in all its brain-frying, fact-twisting, totalitarian cynicism by America’s Democratic party.

All this is taking place against the backdrop of the rolling coup against President Trump, with elements of America’s justice department and others in the administration collaborating with the Democratic party and their partisan panders in the media to bring Trump down and impeach him for the high crime and misdemeanour of having been elected President of the United States.

And that, in turn, represents America’s current revolutionary moment: its toleration and even endorsement of thuggery first with the Occupy anti-capitalist movement and then Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the #MeToo war against men; the onslaught against the traditional family and the willed production of children made feral through mass fatherlessness; the systemic hijack of schooling by anti-western propaganda; the stamping out of dissent on a myriad topics, and the transformation of the university from the crucible of enlightenment into the funeral pyre of reason itself.

And along with the media, which has betrayed its own historic role as the ultimate guarantor of liberty by promulgating falsehoods, suppressing factual evidence and conducting witch-hunts against dissenters, the worst thing of all about them is this: that those committing these gross abuses of power actually believe their own lies.

More is at at stake than the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a justice of the Supreme Court. More is at stake than the political survival of Donald J Trump.

What’s at stake is the survival of justice and freedom against tyranny and chaos. What’s at stake is the very soul of America itself.

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