In America they haven't used it for years

Still, Bonni has her uses. In an earlier post she links to this hilarious video, which follows up its informative bits on how to pronounce Arabic-derived words with an awesome punchline (which even if you don't totally agree with its politics is very funny indeed).



Bonni describes the guy as a "grammar Nazi", which tells us that as well as not knowing the difference between Spain and Italy she doesn't know the difference between grammar and phonetics. Maybe while she's back at school learning that the Holocaust really happened, she can take a break to watch My Fair Lady.

BareNakedIslam throws truth to the lions and denies the Holocaust

Oh God, this is so funny.

To be fair, Bonni at BareNakedIslam has simply taken her "facts" from the title of the video (from Christian Broadcasting Network, so what do you expect?) But children, what is wrong with this headline?

SPAIN UNDER SEIGE: The second Islamic conquest of Spain is underway.

Muslims want to turn the most famous arena, the Coliseum, into a giant mosque. In fact, some cities in Spain now look more like the Middle East. Muslims, who once ruled most of nation, are returning in large numbers.

Hand up there at the back?.... No, Rebecca, I didn't mean the fact that she can't spell "siege", but well spotted. Yes Kelly?...... That's right, the Coliseum is in Rome. And where is Rome, anybody? .... That's right, in Italy. Yes, darling, the lady is silly to mix up Spain and Italy, even though they are both in Europe and full of funny people who smell of garlic and don't speak English very well.

What's that, Megan? You think funny old Ms Intall smells of garlic and doesn't speak English very well either? Well, you could be right.

Incidentally, any Muslim intending to convert the Coliseum into a mosque would be well advised to install modern amenities such as, well, floors.



MORE:

A couple of posts further down, Bonni links to this hilarious chart supposedly comparing totalitarian ideologies.



Let's pretend for a moment that Islam is a totalitarian ideology and that the boxes purporting to describe it are not wholly fictitious. (The one on dietary restrictions is right, though it that's a sign of totalitarianism then all those folk who describe Israel as a totalitarian state are onto something.) Let's look at how Bonni - and remember she pretends to be a Jew - thinks of Nazism. Apparently under the Nazis you could marry whoever you wanted (only true if neither of you was a Jew, a Slav, disabled or otherwise imperfect). You could wear whatever you liked, so all those Jews with the big yellow stars saying "Jude" were just making fashion statements, like the ones in the stylish striped pyjamas (and I guess the latter might feel that their freedom to eat and drink what they liked was curtailed somewhat as well). And the Nazis tolerated sexual freedom: who knew? Certainly not the thousands of gays who died in the camps, or the thousands more who were castrated.

In Berlin, across the road from the big Holocaust memorial, is a smaller one to all the gays and lesbians murdered by the Nazis.



The person in the picture is looking in at the video screen, which shows a continuous loop of two men kissing.



Yes, children, I think this Holocaust-denying American "Jew" needs to go back to school and learn some European history as well as geography.

Well this is different

Also batshit crazy and totally amazing.

It's only a race if that helps me stir up gatred against it

Private Eye used to lampoon the frequent U-turns in the opinions proferred by gutter press columnists looking for the next easy target: they did so via their own spoof columnist Glenda Slagg, whose columns typically juxtaposed fawning praise for, and vile criticism of, the same people in adjacent paragraphs.

Here is Bonni, our favourite nigger-bashing, anti-semitic loony, first of all telling us that Islam isn't a race: "Tell me again, what ‘race’ is Islam?". Then only a few weeks later, Muslims are an "ethnic group": "It isn’t the Star’s fault that Muslims are engaged in more anti-British behavior than any other ethnic group".

So bring your witness, love

This story reminded me of those cases the Muslim-haters love to cite, where women in Muslim countries complain to the authorities that they've been raped and wind up on trial themselves. You know, this sort of thing. (How convenient that JihadWatch have to provide their own translation. And illicit intercourse does indeed require four witnesses, so how can the rape victim, who lacked such witnesses, have been convicted of it? Don't the professional liars at Jihadwatch read their own copy?)

For what it's worth, allegations of rape in Islamic law, unlike those of fornication, have NO witness requirement: the latter provision being precisely to prevent spurious allegations of fornication against women. Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani military dictator, did however specify such a requirement when he seized power (murdering Benazir Bhutto's dad in the process) , in which case the introduction of Sharia law into Pakistan would ironically bring a considerable improvement to its treatment of women. And that isn't something you'll ever hear from the Islamophobes, for whom military dictators are always preferable to political Islam. (Well, except in Iraq.)

Which isn't to say that everything is rosy for sexually abused women in Islam, oh dear no. Nor for women in general. But let's keep it real, let's not pretend that laws and practices which explicitly contradict Islamic law are the fault of Islam, and let's not imagine that everything is rosy in the UK or USA either.

Oppression of women and its justification by the lack of witnesses is certainly something that's been part of our culture for a long time:

When the facts contradict the Islamophobic lies, print the Islamophobic lies

In Islamophobic circles, fake atrocities never go out of fashion. Take this story. I read it and thought, surely Bonni and BareNakedEndTimes wouldn't have passed up that opportunity to stir up hatred with a little hoodwinking? And of course, she had it last year. To judge fron the comments under her post, some poor idiots are still falling for it.

It's hardly an isolated instance, though. Take the wholly fictitious "celebrations" in Gaza when the family of Israeli settlers was murdered in Itamar. Or this one, still being linked to by BareNakedIslam and still wholly imaginary.

When you run out of fake atrocities, make up fake crime statistics instead. For example, you can claim that all rapes in Norway are committed by Muslim immigrants. (Ignoring the vast majority committed, according to the police, by Norwegian and other European whites.) It's always easy to find things like this, because the government-sponsored Israeli media pump such lies out by the ton. And there you were thinking that Israel didn't innovate and export. Who knows, soon they may be world leaders in hate videos.

Oh, talking of hate videos, I was interested to find, when reading up on our home-grown neo-Nnazi hatemonger Pat Condell, that Richard Dawkins is a big fan. Indeed, the people at his website seem to have been instrumental in actively promoting Condell's hate speech. Any remaining respect I had for Dawkins (I really liked his early books when he wrote about genetics rather than railing against religion) just evaporated.

Whodunnit?

And thanks to Persephone for this, which is interesting albeit in a rather nerdy way.

The Bartender Hates You

Thanks to Joe for alerting me to this fun series of short videos:

No shit, Sherlock

A recent study suggests that not only are right-wing political affilations correlated with prejudiced atttitude, but so is low intelligence.

Personal observation bears out the correlation. The only question left is the direction of causality. is it ignorance that makes people become Republicans/Conservatives/Blairites/swivel-eyed Islamophobes, or is it immersion in one of those cults which stunts the intelligence by systematically replacing facts with dogmas and truth with invention?

Well, duh

Good news from the University of East Anglia.

"We will look at how the media talk about 'honour'-based violence, for example. If it's a Middle Eastern woman who happens also to be a Muslim woman it's called an 'honour crime'. But if it's a British woman who was killed because her husband was jealous because she was having an affair with another man, it's called murder."

Well, duh. But some people clearly need the lesson.

I call him Tiny, because he is my newt

Here, if one was needed, is sufficient reason for preventing Newt Gingrich from ever entering the White House in any capacity other than as a paying tourist.



And here are a couple of Doonesbury cartoons listing more reasons why that is a probable outcome.

The only Newts I want to see anywhere near powerful elected politicians are Ken Livingstone's pets when he gets elected as London's Mayor.

A mystery wrapped inside a fake wrapped inside a ZioBlairite....

Let's return to Jules et Jim, aka BlairSupporter and "Julie". You will remember fom my recent post that they had both been receiving threats, in Julie's case pretty serious ones, from a Twitter-using nutter called Shereef Abdallah. You may also recall that Julie described herself as Julie Anna: her Facebook ID is julieanna87. Hold that thought (noting only that the 87 is consistent with her being a 24-year-old student).

Now, if you Google that Facebook ID her blog comes up, showing that we have the right Julie Anna. Also this interesting page. So Julie Anna lives in Puyallup, in Washington state, USA. Well, that explains her closeness to Jimmy: but supposedly Crazy Abdallah turned up at her university. So is she an American studying over here? her profile suggests otherwise, but maybe it's just incomplete. Perhaps that's how Jimmy gets his news from the UK.

Another point of interest: why has Julie's blog vanished from Jimmy blogroll? It used to be there. And why is KTBFPM not on Julie's? After all, they're clearly friends and fellow Blairites, as well as fellow Americans.

And no, sorry, I can't resist. If Julie Anna lives in Puyanna, WA, does she have a "garlic aroma that could level Tacoma?"

And I am Marie of Roumania

Apparently the police don't think this was a hate crime.

Uh-HUH. What if it had been a synagogue which had had its windows systematically smashed?

Move along people, nothing to see here, don't you folks have other mosques to vandalise?

Perhaps every word of the Bible is God-breathed: but did he inhale?

Next time I hear some numpty mouthing off about how gay marriage is contrary to God's law, or how we should all go back to Bible-based sexual morality, I must pull this chart out and ask which of these Bible-endorsed marital practices the speaker supports.

Oh, this is so true

Inventing the inventors

The story begins: the Natural History Museum on South Kensington entered into a partnership with Ahava, a cosmetics company based in an illegal West Bank Settlement.A collection of scientists and film-makers wrote a letter to The Independent in protest, leading to a report.

The story was picked up by the Israeli media, who naturally put their own spin on it. They included a story from South Africa of another protest at the sale of Ahava products (which are no more popular on the rest of the world than they are here). They quote at length the response of the CEO of Dis-Chem, the SA pharmacy chain which was selling Ahava products. Which is kind of them, because it's hilarious: clearly South African Israel-Firsters are no less risible than their American buddies. His name, incidentally, is Ivan Saltzman.

"If it is your intention to boycott Israeli products, you need to be consistent if your gesture is to have any meaning. I hope you don’t use an Intel chip in your computer with which you probably wrote your e-mail because it was invented in Israel."

Well, Intel certainly has a design facility in Israel, Also one in Malaysia, one in India, one in Austin, Texas and probably others. I'm sure we'd all do just fine without the Israsli one. But "it was invented in Israel": LOL. Some aspects of the design of some chips were done in Israel. Does this dolt really imagine that Israel invented the chip? (That would be Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments: both American as apple pie.)

“I hope that you stay in good health because if you need preventative surgery against a heart attack, you will have to boycott the procedure because guess what? The stent was invented in Israel!"

What, the stent invented by Dr Julio Palmaz of the University of Texas in San Antonio?

“Likewise, I hope you are never prescribed any patch for diabetes, to deliver medication and other drugs."

Not even the patch for delivery of insulin, which was invented in Britain?

"If you are an asthmatic you may have to use a new type of inhaler (Spin) invented in Israel. So please check!"

I can't work out which of the literally dozens of types of inhaler he is referring to, but none of the main ones seem to have been developed in Israel.

“Israel has given the world the system of drip irrigation which is being widely adopted in SA with water shortages like many countries. Should you boycott all fruit and vegetables grown by this method?"

Well, we would certainly boycott the ones grown on stolen Palestinian land. In any case, modern drip irrigation was invented in Afghanistan (hah!) in the 19th century; developed further in the University of Colorado; refined in Germany, then in Australia. Finally a little extra tweak was given by two Israelis. So far from Israel giving drip irrigation to the world, the world gave it to Israel. Indeed, while I can't find out when exactly Hannis Thill made the Australian advance, but the three earlier stages of development were complete before Israel even existed!

But the really funny thing is that in his spittle-drenched blurtings of how Israel invented everything of value in the world, he totally fails to notice that the customer was not complaining that he was selling Israeli products. On the contrary, she was complaining that he was selling illegally-produced settlement products: though these may perhaps have been passed off as Israeli (a criminal offense in Europe where we "anti-semites" give Israeli imports reduced tax rates, but perhaps not in South Africa). Maybe he should take another shot at this trick hasbara business. OK, so all his "Israeli inventions" were totally, er, invented, so his credibility is pretty low, but I'm sure we'd all enjoy watching him claim that everything from the wheel to powdered milk was invented in the Occupied West Bank by "Israeli scientists". (Who of course are great at some kinds of invention: computer viruses and machines for murdering people are the main ones that spring to mind.)

Dutch Resistance 1: Nazis 0

At last: a police chief with the spine to stand up to the Euronazis.

Amsterdam police chief Bernard Welten has said that his police force will not be arresting women who wear burqas in defiance of the soon-to-be introduced ban demanded by Geert Wilders' Nazi "Freedom" Party as part of a coalition deal (and you think WE have coalition problems....) I suppose partly it's that he has to police a city full of violent drug smugglers and other international criminals, so wasting time on Wilders' Islamophobic obsessions and making women's live miserable because their skin is the wrong colour probably seem counter-productive. But he has described his decision as "a form of civil disobedience", so it's clearly more than that. As the Dutch As-Soenna group said on its website Al-yaqeen.com, “Evidently the Netherlands still has people in prominent positions whom it can be proud of.” As can we all.

Jules et Jim

I have been interested in the relationship between Uncle Jimmy's blog and that of his long-time fan Julie ever since this post appeared. Jimmy links to a similar post on Julie's blog, which is fair enough. The strange thing is that when the post first appeared they were totally identical (word for word). After a lengthy period when both blogs were (with a strange simultaneity) hidden behind password-protected firewalls, one or both has been edited so that there are now differences, but at the time I wondered whether Julie was simply an alias of Jimmy.

Despite their both receiving threats of violence from a nutter on Twitter, I no longer think they're one and the same: in the press coverage of Julie's troubles she is described as a 24-year-old student, which hardly fits Jimmy's "ageing American racist" profile. Also here she gives her name as Julie Anna and provides a different, if not much more flattering, picture than the one on her blog (in this one she looks a little weird, but not like a transvestite at least). She attends a university: I very much doubt Jimmy's ability to get into a British university, what with his insistence that all leftists are homosexuals and that Tony Blair's initials are written in the stars. Not even with Michael Gove as Education Secretary (though he might well agree with both propositions).

TB or not TB?

Fried Mahooga recently reminded me that Uncle Jimmy is still posting rot over on his blog. The post that caught her attention was the one where Jimmy seems to imagine that the heavens are telling, not the glory of God but that of Toe-Nibbler, insofar as he sees the letter "T" in Canis Major and the letter "B" in Orion.

Tony Blair in Canis Major? No, Tony, you can NOT be Sirius.

(Gets coat....)

Maybe you could make this up: I couldn't

I wonder whether all those Americans who fantasize that wicked foreigners wish to impose Sharia law on the USA are equally concerned by Congressman Larry Pittman (R) of North Carolina, who wants to see public hangings brought back for such offenses agains public morals as carrying out abortions.

Expect stoning for adultery to be next on his shopping list: I mean, that's in the Bible so must be good. And if witchcraft trials are good enough for the Israeli government they must be good enough for North Carolina. Why should those Massachusetts liberals get all the fun?

Variations on a Misery Tune

From BRICUP:

German conductor Christoph von Dohnányi recently attracted much attention and praise for cancelling his planned appearances with the Hungarian State Opera, saying he did not want to appear in a city ‘whose mayor entrusted the direction of a theatre to two known anti-Semites of the extreme right’.

However von Dohnányi, who is the nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (also grandson of the composer Ernő Dohnányi, hence my post's title), has accepted an invitation to conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in April. BRICUP is appealing to him to match his welcome opposition to anti-Semitism with equal opposition to Israel's oppression of Palestinians.

BRICUP's brilliant letter to von Dohnányi is well worth repeating here.


25 January 2012

AN OPEN LETTER TO CHRISTOPH VON DOHNÁNYI

Dear Christoph von Dohnányi,

We were impressed to read that last October you cancelled several
appearances as conductor with the Hungarian State Opera, in protest at
appointments made by the mayor to the New Theatre in Budapest. You
were quoted as saying that you did not want to appear in a city ‘whose
mayor entrusted the direction of a theatre to two known anti-Semites of the
extreme right’.

We share your alarm at the growing power of racist and authoritarian
parties in the Hungarian state, and we salute you for the stand you have
taken. But we‘re also interested to see that you actively support the
withdrawal of cultural engagement as a means of expressing political and
moral outrage. Please allow us to suggest that moral and political
considerations might therefore argue against your appearances this coming
April as guest conductor with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Leave aside for the time being the painful fact that between 1947 and 1949
more than half the Palestinian population was driven out of what became
Israel, and has never been allowed to return (many historians, including
Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, have documented this; and then there is this
old man, Amnon Neumann, describing on film exactly how his Palmach
unit got Palestinians to leave).

Leave aside for the moment the illegal military occupation of remaining
Palestinian land since 1967, even though every day, dunum by dunum, it
removes Palestinians from their land and abuses their rights (for example,
the Guardian newspaper has just reported the systematic mistreatment of
Palestinian children in Israeli prisons).

Please look at one event that has occurred since the start of this year.

On 11 January 2012 the Israeli Supreme Court decided that marriage to an
Israeli citizen does not give Palestinians from the Occupied Territories or
elsewhere the right to reside with their spouses inside Israel. These
people, and their children, are now liable to be expelled. Articulating the court’s majority opinion, Justice Asher Grunis said, ‘Human rights are not
a prescription for national suicide’. Presumably István Csurka, whose role
in the New Theatre in Budapest you understandably object to, might voice
similar ethno-nationalist sentiments in relation to the presence of Jews and
Roma in Hungary (and according to the Anti-Defamation League, he has
done so, many times).

Our argument is that racism is indivisible. If one is outraged by the
presence in power of racists in one place, one has to be outraged by their
exercise of power elsewhere too. Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor says the Israeli
Supreme Court decision is motivated by the desire to ‘maintain a Jewish
majority…The looming expulsion of thousands will be carried out with the
silent agreement of enlightened members of society [for whom]
maintaining a Jewish majority is an ideological common denominator’.

Some of those ‘enlightened’ members of society will be sitting in your
concerts, Christoph von Dohnányi, enjoying your interpretation of
Schumann and Mendelssohn. Meanwhile, says Laor, ‘the expulsion of
women and children from their homes will be carried out by a state that
has never held Arabs to be equal before the law’.

We could suggest further reading – this account of the harassment and
dispossession of the Bedouin in the Negev – Israeli citizens, but not Jews.
This interview with Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli
Knesset, who says: ‘Jewishness here means Zionism, not Judaism. It is
misleading to talk about a Jewish and democratic state; it is a Zionist
state…To choose Zionism at the expense of democracy is now legitimate;
you are defending the Jewish state’.

We applaud the good example you have set by withdrawing from your
concerts at the Hungarian State Opera. We respectfully suggest that
consistency should lead you to do the same with regard to the IPO. Please
don’t let those ‘enlightened’ members of Israeli society continue to believe
that their racism is tolerable and excusable because it’s directed at
Palestinians. Please don’t go.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Haim Bresheeth
Mike Cushman
Professor Adah Kay
Professor David Pegg
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead

London

This one goes down to zero

Here is the piece my string quartet is working on at present.





A reminder that Schoenberg not only could write good tunes: when he was young he did. I especially like the variation in the third movement that begins at 3:56, but it's all good.

Michael Gove plays the Holocaust card

This story tells how Michael Gove, Education Secretary, awarded millions of pounds from public funds he controlled to an organisation which paid him as a consultant. And what is the response of this principled servant of the public to having his peculation exposed?

On Friday a spokesman for Gove said: "It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary and frankly offensive to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day."

That's right. It's unbelievable to attack a boondoggle such as providing security guards for Jewish schools (while other schools have to take their chances with crazies). And it's even more extraordinary and offensive for Michael Gove to hide behind six million dead Jews in an attempt to intimidate the media into ignoring it. Especially on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The man has no shame.

Because Wondermark is just as awesome as xkcd

Here.

And here.

Also here, because sometimes surrealism is the only answer.

It's Etymology Man!

Courtesy of xkcd.

Empty bookshelves, empty minds

The banning of books has been in the news recently, with the enforced cancellation of Salman Rushdie's video address to the Jaipur Literary Festival (The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, and Rushdie evidently touches nerves there, perhaps because he is an Indian himself).

Anyway, this story reminds us that the banning of books is not confined to India, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. I gather that Arizona bans more books than any other state on the USA. I bet they don't put that in their blurbs for tourists.

The picture above, incidentally, is of the "Empty Library", a memorial in Berlin to an infamous book-burning by the Nazis. the memorial is an underground chamber with a small window in its ceiling) full of bookshelves, but empty of books. Ingenious and thought-provoking, if surprisingly easy to overlook as a tourist.

All feedback gratefully received

I just received a lovely email:

Hello Rob,

I'm from Austin, Texas USA, and my students performed After Juliet at the 2010 Fringe. One of my students' parents recently reminded me of your review of our first performance. I just wanted to thank you for the kind words. Our students were so excited to see the review when we returned from Scotland. It meant a lot to them. I was going to email you way back then, but the school year had already started when we returned, and we were off and running with rehearsals for the next show! I forgot, and time got away from me.

The trip to Edinburgh was truly amazing! From the friendly people to the gorgeous city (make that gorgeous Scotland), to the history and culture, we all just fell in love with your city and country. It is my hope that I will return some day.

Anyway, while I was thinking of it, I wanted to write this long overdue email to say thanks for attending our performance and for making a group of Austin teenagers feel appreciated.

Patty MacMullen

It was Don Marquis, of Archy and Mehitabel fame (and if you're not familiar with those books, I recommend you give them a shot) who likened authors who waited eagerly for reaction from their readers to someone dropping a pebble into the Grand Canyon and listening for an echo. The same is largely true of blogging, especially when writing reviews, so a reminder that one's work is both read and valued is especially welcome.

It may even inspire me (or shame me enough) to complete my reviews of the 2011 Edinburgh Festivals.

Cromarty - more than just a bit of the Shipping Forecast

I liked this article on the BBC website.

Hilary and I visited Cromarty last year: it contains, among other attractions, a delightful restored church.





...which contains some wonderful old box pews



with marvellous decoration



A hidden gem. Hidden in plain sight, but in a place people tend to zoom past on their way to other places.

Israeli "Democracy" hard at work threatening and intimidating any hint of opposition to the regime

Ah, democracy. In a country that never fails to remind the world that it's a democracy, even though it's clearly nothing of the kind.

BareNakedEndTimes loves it, of course.

"What did Israel think would happen when they allowed Muslims to serve in the Knesset?" I imagine they thought they might fool people into mistaking Israel for a modern democracy rather than the bolthole of a backward bunch of theocratic racists.

It didn't work, though.

Glorious

You know what? I'm a trade unionist too. Deal with it.

Also my thoughts exactly: though of course in Britain "Liberal" refers to the old Liberal party, now the Liberal Democrats, the heartily-despised junior partner in the ConDem coalition government. So while in US terms I consider "Liberal" a badge of honour, I would find the term more alarming here. Though in the days before mergers and coalitions I regularly voted Liberal as a student - and I had plenty of opportunities to do so, as in the days of snap elections my first year of enfranchisement contained two general elections. Since the coalition sellout, though, when the LibDems moved from the upper to the lower half of the poster, I have happily done whatever it takes to hasten the permanent demise of the Liberal Democrats. (In Scotland it's pretty much a done deal already.)

My thoughts exactly

Pa-ru-pa-pum-pum

My very first thought on reading this story was of the episode "In Excelsis Deo" from Series One of The West Wing, where a homeless Korean war veteran dies and Toby Ziegler is contacted because the guy is wearing a coat Toby had given to a charity shop which had one of his business cards in it. Toby arranges a military funeral.

President Bartlett: Toby, if we start pulling strings like this don't you think every homeless veteran is going to come out of the woodwork?

Toby Ziegler: I can only hope, Sir.

Where Toby could only hope, some organisations are making it happen.

ButtNakedIntall - no atrocity too vile to be applauded

We've all seen Bonni Intall, aka BareNakedEndTimes, calling on her site for the beheading of leftists and the genital mutilation of female political opponents. We've seen her describing the murder of a Muslim baby as a "public service". She celebrates when 270 Muslim refugees drown, and cries "Hallelujah" when a further 600 die. Well, this week she cheers at the torture and disfigurement of a Canadian Muslim prisoner by a psycho. "Who cares?" that he has 50-70% burns over his body. And the comments from her bottom-feeding chums are for once even worse.

Oh, and one commenter accuses Saddam of having boiled opponents alive. Although this nbever happened, she knows it's true - presumably she can't tell the difference between Saddam and islam Karimov, Uzbek dictator and America's regional pal, who very definitely DID boil folk alive. All Bonni, credulous and ignorant as well as eager to watch anything showing Muslims being murdered, wants to know is where she can get hold of the videos.

How The West Was Ridiculed - and hilarious lies from an Israel-First nutjob

This is a fantastic piece on Allen West, or as we prefer to call him here, "unindicted war criminal Allen West".

The comments are also great, though the last one, from Robert Kunst, brought me to an abrupt halt. I'd read almost all of it before I realised it wasn't a Daily Onion-style parody but a genuine example of utter gibberish from an Israel-firster.

I especially like Mr Kunst's claim to have visited 31 of the Nazi death camps. That would be the 6 real death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor) and 25 imaginary ones (staffed perhaps by Barack Obama and George Soros?) Doesn't this moron realise that it is exactly this kind of witless exaggeration - terming any kind of prison camp a "death camp" - that fuels Holocaust denial? I have personally visited one Nazi concentration camp, the one at Dachau near Munich. God knows it is a grim place redolent of suffering, and people certainly died there, but that isn't what it was built for. Dachau was fitted with a gas chamber near the end of the war but fortunately the opportunity for its use was denied by the Allied invasion. (It was apparently tested, and I'm not naive enough to imagine the Nazis would test it on canaries or mice: but the gas chamber in any California prison will have killed hundreds of times more people, and we don't refer to the California State Penitentiaries as "death camps". FWIW, standing in even that relatively pristine room is as creepy as fuck, and reduced my wife to tears.)

But where to begin with his comment? The Palestinians in the Intifadas were "aligned with Hitler"? (Who died half a century earlier.) Arabs deny the Holocaust existed: well, apart from the inconvenient fact that many thousands of them died in it. The "holyland" is 5000 years old, apparently. I'm not sure whether this is a Young Earth Creationist's idea of the region's geology: it can hardly be anything to do with the state of Israel, which will soon celebrate its 64th birthday. Clearly, as with "death camps", counting isn't Mr Kunst's strong point. (From his comment, neither is English, but then he IS a Floridian.) "Obama wants the Jewish holy sights (sic) to be under the control of the U.N." Actually, when Israel was founded it was stipulated in the text that Jerusalem would be a U.N. protectorate. That lasted precisely as long as it took for the Israelis to grab it, of course: so strictly speaking it isn't only East Jerusalem which is illegally occupied, but the whole city. A little less whingeing about a place to which you have no right whatsoever might be in order, but then the President of Shalom International is hardly going to cease whining as long as breath remains in his body.

"Those Jews who sold out their fellow Jews then were called 'Judenrats'." Er, no, actually that isn't what "Judenrat" means at all. Wow, such a Holocaust expert: understands no German and scarcely any English, denies the deaths of non-Jews in the Holocaust, claims to have visited camps that never existed. All he knows is that Israel had a right to the whole Middle East thousands of years before it was even invented, and that HIS President Barack Obama is a Muslim. Really, if creeps like this hate America so much and love Israel so much more, who the hell is detaining them? I'm sure there are flights from Orlando to Tel Aviv. Perhaps in November when Allen West loses his seat (as he is expected to do) and Pres. Obama is re-elected, Kunst will do the decent thing and head off to where his religious fascism will be better received.

A little night music

A few tracks which I've either been playing in the car or which have come to mind for some reason.

First of all, a wonderful song from the 1970s, from Mr Fox. Bob and Carole Pegg had a stormy relationship but artistically a very productive one while it lasted. I don't know how much of this was Bob and how much Carole, but both music and lyrics hold up very well forty-odd years on. The final verse always brings a lump to my throat: less really is more.



Richard Digance was a folk club stalwart who briefly hit the limelight on radio and TV in the mid 1970s. This song is extraordinary to listen to nowadays: while not remotely earnest or po-faced, for its time it was a remarkably sympathetic portrayal of transvestism. OK, it sounds a bit cliched now, and the ending is a cop-out, but apart from the Kinks' "Lola" it stood alone: and pretty much still does.



I tried to find a clip of Phil Harris doing "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens", but failed. So here are a couple of other favourites:



and I owned this very 78 as a teenager - the band are just awesome:



And I haven't heard this one for years, but loved it when it was briefly a minor hit in Scotland:



I first encountered the sadly under-rated Peter Nardini via this gem, which really is a dig-out-of-the-archives job:



And this one I have just found for the first time. Clearly Mr N is quietly going from strength to strength, though sadly his subject did not:



Let's end with something more upbeat - good for sitting in traffic queues with:

A long line of Farquhars.....

In view of Joe's trouble with the Doric in my previous post, I thought this (found in the Youtube sidebar) might help to ease him into it. As you can tell from the audience reaction, a Scottish audience knows instantly how the various names are spelled so are always a step ahead. There are various ways the chap could have spelled his first name: the spelling in the sketch as the same as that of my son. And I've been to Finzean....