Who is the British Dog?

By Gilad Atzmon
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 11:45PM Gilad Atzmon
Israeli officials and politicians sharply criticized the intention of the UK government to expel an ‘unnamed’ Israeli ‘diplomat’ in response to its passports being used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas Freedom Fighter Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

MK Aryeh Eldad (Israel National Union) doesn’t show much respect to the Brits whom he compares to dogs: "I think [the] British are behaving hypocritically and I don't want to offend dogs on this issue, since some dogs are utterly loyal," Eldad told Sky News.

MK Michael Ben-Ari took it one step further. "The British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system..”

Both Israeli Parliament members Eldad and Ben-Ari seem to agree that Britons are dogs, yet they are somehow annoyed by their dogs’ disloyalty to the Jewish state. One may wonder why do the Israelis expect their ‘British dogs’ to be loyal. The answer is simple. Because British politicians have been very ‘loyal’ and for more than a while.

For years, the Labour government was maintained financially by Zionist fundraisers led by Lord Levy. In return the Labour Government launched an illegal Israeli war (Iraq). It supported Israeli barbarism all the way through, including Tony Blair’s shameful support of Israeli crimes in Lebanon (2006). Tony Blair is "A true friend of the State of Israel," affirmed the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

But it may also be possible that Ben-Ari and Eldad do not refer to the Britons in general. They may not even refer to the Labour party. They may just refer to a very specific person, who, for some reason, failed to comply with the strict demand for obedience.

As my readers know, for a while I've insisted that some serious measures must be taken to verify and scrutinise David Miliband’s ties with Israel. Foreign Secretary Miliband is listed on an official Israeli Propaganda site as an Israeli Hasbara author. The same Miliband was until very recently investing an enormous effort into changing British Universal Jurisdiction just to make it easy for Israeli war criminals to make it to Oxford Street early on Boxing Day. Just a few weeks before the IDF launched its genocidal attempt against the people of Gaza, the same Miliband visited Sderot to ‘show solidarity’ with the Israeli people. Here is what he had to say "It's very important that countries like mine and others show their solidarity with the people of Sderot.” This idiotic statement made by a senior loyal minister was obviously interpreted by the Israelis as a green light to reduce Gaza into a pile of rubble.

David Miliband who has been very loyal to Israel may start to feel the heat. He had to drop a political trophy. In accordance with Labour spin culture he expelled an ‘unnamed’ Israeli diplomat. Miliband may have managed to fool Ben-Ari and Eldad but he wouldn’t fool me. Being a progressive interventionist, Miliband is still loyal to the darkest ideology around namely Zionism.

Britons better grasp that Israel was using no less than 15 forged British passports. The Israelis were obviously confident that they could get away with it. With a listed Hasbara author running the foreign office and half of the shadow ministers being members of the ‘Conservative Friends of Israel’, the Mossad had a good reason to believe that Britain’s politics is in its pockets.

If Miliband wants to convince us that he is loyal to this kingdom and its citizens, he may as well name the ‘unnamed’ diplomat he just decided to expel. He better also provide us with the list of Sayanim (collaborators) within British Home Office, those who made this forgery possible.

Read more at: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings

Suburbia versus evolution

Evolutionary Anthropologist Robin Dunbar is the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Faber) and he has just been interviewed by The Guardian’s Aleks Krotoski on the subject of how we came to be modern humans. His findings say a lot about why cities and villages work best at high density, and why suburbia is disastrous for humanity.

What does your work tell us about the way we interact socially?

The way in which our social world is constructed is part and parcel of our biological inheritance. Together with apes and monkeys, we’re members of the primate family - and within the primates there is a general relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit in a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within - but there is a natural grouping of 150. This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation - there’s some personal history, not just names and faces.

And this is the Dunbar number!

Yes.

You're a lucky man, with a number named after you. How did you come up with this concept?

Looking at the Machiavellian intelligence theory, I was working on the arcane question of why primates spend so much time grooming one another, and I tested another hypothesis - which says the reason why primates have big brains is because they live in complex social worlds. Because grooming is social, all these things ought to map together, so I started plotting brain size and group size and grooming time against one another. You get a nice set of relationships.

It was about 3 in the morning probably, and I thought, hmm, what happens if you plug humans into this? And you get this number of 150. This looked implausibly small, given that we all live in cities now, but it turned out that this was the size of a typical community in hunter-gatherer societies. And the average village size in the Domesday Book is 150 [people]. It’s the same when we have much better data - in the 18th century, for example, thanks to parish registers. County by county, the average size of a village is again 150.

Can we grow the Dunbar number?

We’’re caught in a bind: community sizes were designed for hunter-gatherer- type societies where people weren’t living on top of one another. Your 150 were scattered over a wide area, but everybody shared the same 150. This made for a very densely interconnected community, and this means the community polices itself. If you step out of line, somebody else will wag a finger at you, maybe granny or great-granny.

Our problem now is the sheer density of folk - our networks aren’t compact. You have clumps of friends scattered around the world who don’t know one another; now you don’t have an interwoven network. It leads to a less well-integrated society. How to re-create that old sense of community in these new circumstances? That’s an engineering problem. How do we work around it?

The alternative solution, of course, is that we could evolve bigger brains. But they’d have to be much bigger, and it takes a long time.

To see this interview in full, visit www.guardian.co.uk/video

And keep it dense! Dr Dunbar's studies certainly point to the advantages of avoiding overcrowding, but equally they highlight the necessity for communities to be physically interconnected.

Gaza Beneath the Bombs

Sharyn Lock with Sarah Irving

Sharyn Lock first visited Palestine, with the International Solidarity Movement, in 2002. Having heard about the then newly formed ISM from a friend, she thought, '...created by Israelis and Palestinians to invite internationals to support Palestinians in nonviolent struggle against Israeli occupation. It sounded creative, flexible and accessible, and I decided to go and learn what I could.'

Having been on the original seaward aid flotillas, and been arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli authorities, she returned by fishing boat in time to volunteer help with the over-worked ambulance brigade, as it fought to cope with the Israeli assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. This book is built out of the blog she managed to maintain while dealing with the unending trauma of the bombing, mining, bulldozing and sniping orgy that followed; in danger of losing her own life of course, as bullets zipped past her face. It reads like life in The Inferno. Page after page lists the gore, the tragedy, the despair. And the (understandably) dark humour. For all its unrelenting horror it’s thoroughly gripping, and I for one found it difficult to put it down until the finish.

More than a mere transcript of a blog , this well-written, lively account also contains a very useful index. One for the reference bookshelf, after your first read-through. If you think you know what happened in Gaza, try this and think again.

Gaza Beneath the Bombs
published byPlutoPress http://www.plutobooks.com/

America's Nation-Destroying Mission

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, America’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible — making the situation in Afghanistan even worse. The worst aspect of events post-2001 is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the world now sees the U.S. as the leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth. Since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, not counting those who died after the impact of an explosive. To understand the enormity of America’s invasion, it is vital to know something of Afghanistan’s recent history, for which we must thank James Lucas:

America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan

by James Lucas, March 06, 2010

Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons, and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deteriorated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

Read this in its entirety at:

http://original.antiwar.com/james-lucas/2010/03/05/americas-nation-destroying-mission-in-afghanistan/

Merseyside Police forced to drop their drones

Since 2007, Liverpool has been experimenting with airborne surveillance. Any fears, however, that this could upgrade to armed drones, as used against Palestinians and manufactured by the same Israeli company that produced the flying cameras until now in use by the banks of the Mersey could now be put to one side, as this article in the Daily Mail suggests: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251422/Police-ground-40-000-drone-amid-claims-used-illegally.html

Cornflakes Illegal for 'wrong thinkers'

Leading defence lawyer Gareth Peirce is as well-placed as anyone to sum up the State of the Nation; which she has, in The London Review of Books. New Labour has (literally) domesticated the policies of a totalitarian state, while most of us are still fretting about the growing threat of them in our streets. And remember how we laughed at the Maoist Chinese 'crime' of Wrong Thinking? It has been effectively introduced in the UK. Not only through traceable computer hard-drives, but on our book-shelves. Read all about it!

"Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence. A few weeks ago in the House of Lords, Lord Hoffman expressed horror at ‘the meanness and squalor’ of a regime ‘that monitored who had what for breakfast’. The number of such cases now multiplies daily. They have nothing at all to do with national security, they only succeed, as they are intended to, in sapping morale; they have everything to do with reinforcing the growing belief of the suspect community that it is expected to eradicate its opinions, its identity and many of the core precepts of its religion.

In December 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals who paid the price for Blair’s wish to show solidarity with the US; and their predicament has never been widely known or understood beyond the Muslim community. But joining them in prison today are more and more young British men, and occasionally women. Many have little or no idea why they are there, although even more disturbingly, the majority were tried by the courts in conventional trials before conventional juries. Why is it, therefore, that the accused do not seem to comprehend why they are there when the prosecution has in any trial to serve all of its evidence in the form of statements, in order to inform the defendant of the case against him? The answer is that the vice underlying the internment/deportation cases is now being perpetrated in conventional trials. The accusations are similarly inchoate: defendants are said to be ‘linked to terrorism’ or ‘linked to extremism and/or radical ideology’. In these cases, the evidence before the court has time and again been found after a search on a defendant’s computer or in a notebook; the defendant is charged with possession of a certain item or this item is held to demonstrate the defendant’s desire to incite, encourage or glorify terrorism.

...Young Muslims search the internet in their tens of thousands, as do non-Muslims. Any internet search, however, leaves an ineradicable trace which can and does provide material that puts its searcher now at risk of prosecution for possession of information that might be ‘of use to terrorists’. They even risk arrest for writing anything that could be said to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’ ‘terrorism’.

This is the context of many current prosecutions. The fruits of a police search are uncovered, prosecutions mounted for the ‘possession’ of literature, films and pamphlets bought or viewed on websites, even if that viewing was swift and the item discarded or even deleted."

Read the whole article at:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/gareth-peirce/was-it-like-this-for-the-irish