The Israeli system

It isn’t Bibi - it's the system, stupid

08/18/2011 14:11   By ALON PINKAS

Misguided coalitionists hail the system as being the only one that can accommodate Israel’s diversity and heterogeneity. They fail to comprehend that it is also a breeding ground for governmental dysfunction and paralysis.

Photo by: Marc Israel Sellem

You would think that in 2000 years of forced Diaspora and life among the nations, Jews would have had ample time to invest their intellectual energies into devising the best possible political system.

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You would think that 2000 years of exposure to all conceivable political systems would prepare Jews for the day they regain independence and reclaim sovereignty.

You'd be wrong.

You might also be tempted to think that Jews had drawn lessons from life under the Catholic Church, Turkish Sultanate, England’s Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Spring of Nations, the Bolshevik Revolution, and a host of other garden-variety systems like fascism, monarchies and totalitarianism.

You would expect Jewish political thinkers, Zionist leaders and the founding fathers of the State of Israel to have come up with the Ten Commandments of a modern, functioning, governability-enabling electoral system.

That Israel is a democracy - and a vibrant one at that, is not to be taken for granted. After all, the Zionists responsible for converting the dream of Zionism into political praxis came from patently non-democratic European societies.

These zealous Zionists then set to bring home their long lost brothers and sisters from Arab countries - again, not exactly bastions of free constitutional republics. In this respect Israel is perhaps an "illiberal democracy," but a democracy nonetheless.

Yet Israel’s democratic origins were shaped by mitigating circumstances from within and without: The confluence of the pre-state Yishuv political institutions and political schisms, the impending end of the British Mandate, and the threat of war lurking ominously on the horizon. This resulted in an urgency to quickly construct a working political model.

So the inherently heterogeneous Israel of circa 1948 (exponentially more heterogeneous in 2011) gave birth to a mutant electoral system, or what political scientists fondly refer to as "proportional representation."  It is a rare, unique and peculiar system.

It is, in essence, the only functioning dysfunctional system known to mankind. At least, that is, to your average homo democraticus. It kind of works, but not really. It represents, but not exactly. It is a distortion, but at least it reflects a real mosaic. It makes governability impossible and paralyzes decision-making, but then so too—if not more so—the American system.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is Israel’s premier by virtue of 24% of the popular vote. That would be impossible in, say, Britain, Germany, Canada and other parliamentary democracies with different electoral systems. Mr. Netanyahu is where he is fair and square. Although he didn’t strictly "win" the 2009 elections, he also did not usurp power. Constitutionally he holds all the powers of a prime minister and until recently was judged by commentators to be a stable (whatever that means) leader.

Yet at the same time, he has no real mandate to do anything autonomously. What he does have—as with many of his predecessors—is a binding, paralyzing and ever-threatening coalition.

Purists in Israel are often heard making the following claim: Stop grumbling about the political system because any other would be unrepresentative and divisive. This country is essentially divided into 6 or 7 tribes with irreconcilable differences; it is heterogeneous beyond a common narrative that is above the lowest common denominator; it is sectorial and sub-sectorial in a way that defies definition. We are still nation-building. Thus, the coalition acts as an adhesive between Israel’s disparate factions and implementing electoral changes would be an exercise in futility at best. In fact, say these proponents, there is no better system that can truly prevent exclusion or resentment while capturing the country’s diversity. As such, in any other systems, the lack of representation would mean that major policies and decisions would be rendered illegitimate.

This attitude may be conducive to countries like Canada, Denmark, Uruguay, Italy, Thailand or anywhere else that doesn't require the decisions that an Israeli government needs to make.

Diversity is not a synonym for dysfunctional politics and heterogeneity should not be an excuse for governance paralysis. For these coalition-condoners, preserving the current model has become the prime objective. Yet they fail to realize that by its very nature, it is a system that nurtures inaction which in turn breeds incompetence; perpetuating politics as nothing more than a reality game of survival.

Keeping this in mind, if we steer the discourse towards the ongoing protest movement the only logical advice to the prime minister is not to change his policies. Netanyahu was not elected as a proponent of the welfare state. Neither is he a social-democrat. Rather, he is more akin to a Thatcherite/Republican conservative who believes in the infinite wisdom of the market and small government.

Netanyahu thinks that redistributive policy and government is a travesty, and that social justice can only be determined by solid economic life and not by legislation or intervention through policy. He never concealed his disdain with the idea of Palestinian statehood and neither does he truly believe in the feasibility of the two-state model.

So why are his detractors still trying to force the leopard prime minister to change his spots? Quite simply, they are in denial about Netanyahu’s real source of power: The system itself.
Consider that 76% of Israelis did not actually vote for Mr. Netanyahu in the 2009 elections! And yet despite this, the system itself—our country’s expression of its bountiful heterogeneity—catapulted him to the very top.

So stop asking Netanyahu to transmogrify into something he never was. You want to change priorities? You demand social justice? You want what you think is a peace process? Then change the system.

The writer is a diplomat who recently served as consul-general in New York.

Massacre in Norway: Israel Strikes Back

Joe Quinn  |  JoeQuinn.net
July 26, 2011

As a rule, Israel (”that shitty little country” according to a former French diplomat), only wages conventional war as a last resort, and even then, unlike the US of A, it lacks the manpower to invade and occupy foreign nations and must limit itself to blunt force bombing runs (or attacking Palestinian fishermen with gunboats). But the fact is that Israel doesn’t need to expend vast resources on conventional war, because there is another, equally (or perhaps more) effective way for such a pathologically-driven apartheid state to achieve its twisted objectives – deception.
Yep, that’s right, ‘by way of deception’, or the ‘horse’s head in your bed’ school of diplomacy. To say that the Israelis are rather adept at this particular ‘art’ form is something of an understatement. Over the last 60 years, the Israeli elite have done more than any other group to successfully portray (to white Westerners) every single Muslim as potential ’suicide bomber’. Their chosen method to achieve this screwed up state of affairs has been to manufacture ’suicide bombings’ and then conveniently allow (or help) the blame to fall on some Muslim group. Of course, they’re also experts at covert assassination of innocent people, like Iranian scientists.
Basically, while the Americans’ chosen form of coercion is bombs, the Israelis believe that inducing psychological terror is the best way to achieve an objective. Israeli efforts at manipulating public perception involve the use of violence of course, but it is violence wrapped in a lie so insidious that even the victims are hoodwinked as to the identity of their aggressors.
Which brings me to Oslo. I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that you’re not naive enough to buy the ‘lone nut’ explanation and just move on to the evidence for an Israeli signature all over the attacks a few days ago.
The bomb in Oslo targeted the Norwegian oil ministry building. Less than a year ago, the Norwegian government announced that it would no longer be using Norway’s massive oil income (the Norwegian people’s money) to invest in Israeli companies involved in building Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Coincidence?

Teenagers holding a ‘boycott Israel’ sign on Utoya Island with the Norwegian foreign minister two days before many of them were murdered.

Over the past few years, the ruling Norwegian Labour party has been taking an increasingly vocal stand against Israeli aggression against Palestinians. For example, as far back as 2006 the then Norwegian finance minister was backing a planned consumer boycott of Israeli goods. Which provoked Condi Rice to threaten Norway with “serious political consequences”.
The teenagers who were camping on Utoya island were members of the AUF (Norwegian Labour party’s youth movement). Two days before Anders Behring Breivik would run amok and kill many of the teenagers in cold blood, they met with Foreign Minister Gahr Stoere and demanded he recognise Palestine. On the same day the AUF’s leader Eskil Pedersen gave an interview to the Dagbladet, Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper. The newspaper described the AUF in this way:

“The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel, but the decision at the last congress, demands that Norway imposes a unilateral economic embargo on the country and it must be stricter than before.”

The AUF leader is quoted as saying:

“The [Middle East] peace process goes nowhere, and though the whole world expects Israel to comply, they do not. We in Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side. I acknowledge that this is a drastic measure, but I think it gives a clear indication that we are tired of Israel’s behaviour, quite simply”.

Norway is not alone in toying with the idea of a consumer boycott of Israel, nor is it alone in its support of Palestinian statehood (several other Nordic nations have followed suit in recent months) but Norway does stand alone (in the Western world) in the fact that it has vast oil reserves and appears to have been toying with the much more threatening (to Israel) idea of what amounts to an oil boycott of Israel.

The second alleged gunman being arrested and then ‘disappeared’.

As for the mass murderer Breivik, all the evidence suggests that he is indeed a ‘crazy person’, but that in no way explains how he could have pulled off these highly coordinated attacks alone. What it does suggest is that he fits the profile of a ‘mind programmed patsy’ who had lots of help from people with a lot of resources and a thinly veiled agenda to send a strong (if covert) message to the Norwegian government and people.
The judge hearing the case against Breivik said that Breivik wanted to create “the greatest loss possible to Norway’s governing Labour Party”, which he accused of failing the country on immigration and opening the door to the “Muslim colonization” of Norway and all of Europe. We’ve already established that Israel has a serious beef with Norway’s governing Labour party, and who, pray tell, has been at the forefront of, and has most to gain from, the claims of an Islamic take-over of Europe? Who has the most to gain from the demonization of Muslims? Who has the most to gain from delivering an extremely traumatic message to the Norwegian Labour party and the Norwegian people, both of whom were growing increasingly anti-Israel?
There is also the interesting fact that initial reports claimed there were at least two shooters and that one of them had been arrested. All such reports have since disappeared from the mainstream media. Breivik was also wearing police uniform. Where did he get it? And why has no one linked the shooting two days later of a 27 year old man in his home in Sandnes, Norway by two masked men in military uniform?
I could go on about how, immediately after the attacks, the mainstream media zombie pundits blathered on about ‘al-Qaeda’ being the culprits, or how some Mossad agent accepted responsibility for the attacks in the name of ‘Helpers of the global jihad’, but I trust you all already know that the ‘al-qaeda’ business is just so much bullshit.
BUT! In case that isn’t enough circumstantial evidence to convict, here’s another (admittedly more tenuous) piece of data. The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island came 65 years, to the day, after the original Zionist terror group Irgun, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. While all the other details strongly suggest an Israeli hand behind this particular act of inhumanity, perhaps the timing is the real Israeli ’signature’. The bombing of the Kind David hotel was an attempt by Zionist terrorists to prevent foreign intervention in their plans for covert global domination. The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island fit the same profile.
So yeah, enough said. In fact, I’ve probably said too much, and could have just summed it all up by borrowing the words of a friend who opined on the topic:

“Something about this whole thing doesn’t make sense.

Let me put it like this: you are a citizen of country A and you deeply hate and resent the citizens of countries B, C and D for ‘destroying’ your country. Your whole political discourse is based around defending Country A from B, C and D. So in what universe does it making ANY sense to go on a shooting spree against the citizens of country A??

This is like a white supremacist going off his rocker and then shooting white people. Or a Jew who hates Palestinians going postal in a Synagogue!

You may say ‘the guy was mad, he didn’t know what he was doing, don’t look for sense in this’ but such politically motivated fanatical madmen have at least one basic and obvious method to their madness: they attack the object of their hate and not everything else apart from the object of hate…

It sounds to me like Breivik was most probably a ‘patient’ of ‘Dr. Greenbaum’ but one that ‘went off’ at the wrong time or in the wrong way to such an extent that the ‘excuses’ the PTB are coming up with don’t even make basic sense.”

http://www.wariscrime.com/2011/07/27/news/massacre-in-norway-israel-strikes-back/

London riots-Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

Seven out of ten Britons are against immigration

The vast majority of Britons think there are too many immigrants in the UK, that immigrants place too much pressure on public services and that high immigration affects job prospects, an IPSOS Mori poll has revealed.
Seventy-one percent of respondents said there are ‘too many immigrants in this country’. The poll surveyed citizens of 23 countries around the world, and only Russia (77 percent) and Belgium (72 percent) were more concerned about immigration.

Seventy-six percent stated immigration places too much pressure on public services, such as health, transport and education – the highest percentage of all countries asked – and 62 percent said immigration has made it more difficult for them to find employment.
Just 27 percent believed immigration is good for the economy, and only 33 percent thought immigrants ‘make Britain a more interesting place to live in’ – proving public opinion flies in the face of those oft-repeated racist lies of the left.
All questionnaires were purposefully ‘weighted’ to ensure demographics were ‘balanced’ and that ‘the sample’s composition reflects that of the adult population according to the most recent country Census data’, suggesting the actual amount of indigenous Britons against immigration is far higher.
The results of this latest poll represent a continuation of the high level of opposition to immigration in Britain and across the West.

In December 2010, 73 percent of those surveyed said they would be ‘unhappy’ if Britain were to become a majority-non-white nation, proving public antipathy towards immigration is not just a matter of numbers, but of race.

In January 2011, 78 percent said they want immigration cut back, and in May this year, up to 92 percent of respondents said they wanted immigration levels drastically slashed.

Nick Griffin-How we’d restore order

 Nick Griffin

How we’d restore order

Nick Griffin warns of the dangers of government and police weakness and spells out how the British National Party would bring peace back to our streets.

“Bring in the Army now to save lives.” That’s one of five core demands put forward by British National Party leader Nick Griffin in response to the wave of black mob violence sweeping England.

The party’s North West of England MEP has also called for the use of water cannons and plastic baton rounds, the setting up of emergency courts to hand down immediate five-year prison sentences to rioters and looters, and the subsequent expulsion of immigrant rioters and their dependants from Britain.


“The authorities have only hours, or at most a couple of days, to get the mayhem under control, or it is liable to spill out into inter-community violence on a truly devastating scale,” Mr. Griffin has told our News Team.

“The media are doing their best to cover up the extent to which innocent white and Asian people are being targeted simply because they are not black. Most strikingly, the Daily Mail censored its own website once a higher-level editor spotted the power of the picture they were running of a white woman who had been forced to strip naked by rioters in an act of calculated racist humiliation.

“From grass-roots reports we’re getting from all over London and from Birmingham, the few photos and passing mentions of the issue that have been carried by the media are only the tip of an iceberg. The truth appears to be that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people have been brutally mugged, or had their bikes, cars, shops and even homes attacked because they are ethnically British, East European or Asian.

“This is why, unless the authorities stop this now, it is inevitable that the self-defence organisation already seen in the Turkish community will spread, turning what is still at present primarily a giant exercise in shopping with violence into a far more ugly set of racial clashes and full-scale conflict between different ethnic and religious groups.”

Act now to save lives

“The ConDem government are literally playing with fire in believing that the police can get a grip on the situation without the help of proper anti-riot equipment and the army,” warns Mr. Griffin. The liberal Tories now running the country believe that it’s too Politically Incorrect to treat black rioters with the same tough measures as are routinely used against young Republican and Loyalist rioters in Northern Ireland.

But this pathetic squeamishness could all too easily lead to people being killed.
“I urge the government and police to stop pussyfooting around and get tough. I urge members of our community, and the significant number of decent and settled members of ethnic minorities who recognise that we speak for the Silent Majority, to stay calm and to stay off the streets unless failure by the authorities leaves them absolutely no choice but to take action to defend their homes, families and neighbours.

“And I urge British National Party activists and new supporters to download, print and distribute the leaflets that we will be putting on this site as events unfold. People out there are angry and frightened. They want and deserve answers and hope. It is clear that they will find neither from the political elite or the sensationalist but Politically Correct mass media. They will find both in the British National Party.”

London Burning after three days of race riots

London Burning after three days of race riots

 Adam Walker

The weekend’s devastating riots in Tottenham have shocked many. However, the crimes are just the latest in a series of tragic events that would never have happened if the left had not decided to subject the people of this country to ‘multiculturalism’.

Saturday night’s violence saw 26 police officers injured – with eight admitted to hospital – when 300 people attacked police in north London on Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday.

Shops were looted, police cars and a double-decker bus set alight, and petrol bombs thrown at officers.

Although the news channels are hard at work portraying the perpetrators of these crimes as the victims, wheeling out black ‘community representatives’ who blame the ‘racist’ white police for black violence, the truth is that this is just the latest battle in the immigrant-on-indigenous war forced upon this country by those who aid and abet mass immigration.
The area that witnessed last night’s horrific scenes was very close to that of one of Britain’s most notorious riots, just over 25 years ago. In 1985, PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death by men with knives and machetes on a rundown housing estate in Tottenham when around 500 mainly black youths rampaged through the streets, attacking police, looting and setting fires.
Both Tottenham riots are just two in a series of such events in Britain over the last 30 years.

Thirty years of hate: Britain's worst race riots

1981: More than 300 people are injured, including 279 police officers, as black men hurl petrol bombs in Brixton, south London. The two-day clash causes £6.5m damage. Later in the year there is another riot in Brixton, as well as riots in Manchester, Southall and Toxteth, Liverpool, where a man is killed.
1985: Trouble flares up again in Handsworth, Birmingham. Black rioting leaves two people dead and dozens of buildings gutted by firebombs. More than 50 cars are set alight and two shops gutted.
1985: Broadwater Farm. White PC Keith Blakelock is hacked to death in a racist murder by men with knives and machetes.
1995: A policeman is almost kicked to death after being pulled off his motorcycle during a second immigrant riot in Brixton.
1995: Three nights of fighting causes more than £1m worth of damage after gangs of Asian youths run wild in Manningham, Bradford.
1998: A group of 100 youths throw bottles, cans and stones at police as the five suspects of the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence arrive at the inquiry.
2001: Bradford, Oldham, Leeds, Burnley. Muslim Asian youths fight on the streets of northern towns, hurling petrol bombs and stones. Eighty police officers are injured in Bradford alone.
2005: ‘Black British’ and ‘black Asians’ riot for two consecutive nights, with both groups committing a string of violent crimes against each other, including two murders.
2011: The race war has entered its most dangerous phase yet with gangs attacking hospitals and looting in broad daylight in scenes that look more like a US disaster zone every day.

 

 

Police attacked as rioting spreads

As fire hoses continue pumping water onto smouldering buildings in Tottenham, emergency services have been dealing with disturbances across London after fresh bouts of rioting and looting broke out.
Police officers were being deployed to respond to "copycat criminal activity" across the city.
Disturbances erupted on Sunday in several boroughs in north, south and east London, with reports of trouble in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Islington.
Three officers were taken to hospital after being hit by a fast-moving vehicle at 12.45 a.m. on Monday, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said. The officers had been in the process of making arrests in Chingford Mount, Waltham Forest, after a shop was looted by youths.
Meanwhile, a fight broke out when rival gangs attended King's College Hospital after two victims of minor stabbings were admitted, police said. The hospital has brought in extra security for the rest of the night, and officers remain on scene dealing with the initial stabbings.
Six fire engines were dispatched to deal with a blaze at a Foot Locker shop in Brixton, south London, and witnesses saw riot police clash with looters at a Currys store nearby. A photographer on the scene said:
"A couple of hundred youths were rioting and looting. Riot police went in to get them out and there was a big fight in the street. Youths were throwing rocks and bottles and there was a bin on fire. They used a fire extinguisher to push the police back so they could get back into Currys and continue taking things out."

Elsewhere, more than 30 youths, many in masks, vandalised and looted shops in Walthamstow Central, including BHS. "Officers attended the area, and the situation is currently under control. Groups of youths are continuing to target shops in Waltham Forest, and officers are on scene," a spokesman commented.
Police Commander Christine Jones said: "Officers responding to sporadic disorder in a number of boroughs made more than 100 arrests throughout last night and early this morning. This is in addition to the 61 arrests made on Saturday night and Sunday morning."
She went on: "Officers are shocked at the outrageous level of violence directed against them. At least nine officers were injured overnight in addition to the 26 injured on Saturday night. We will not tolerate this disgraceful violence. The investigation continues to bring these criminals to justice.

Steve Squire at the scene in Enfield said: “You get what you vote for! It’s time the people of London woke up to the reality of living in this tinderbox. We have a serious situation building here, and our only hope is to stop this madness politically – and time is fast running out, as scenes this week have shown us.”

London riots-The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The black ‘community leader’ interview that went wrong

The BBC was forced to cut short an interview about the UK riots with former black panther member and convicted criminal Darcus Howe on Tuesday morning when he viciously turned on the interviewer.


Trinidad and Tobago-born Howe said the wanton destruction of Britain witnessed in the last two days was not a riot but an ‘insurrection’.
Howe is just one of many ‘black representatives’ who has been wheeled out by the anti-white mass media since the riots began in order to disseminate platitudes about ‘police racism’ and to play down the blatantly obvious fact that the vast majority of the rioters are black. But unfortunately for the BBC, this propaganda exercise did not go to plan.
Howe said: ‘They have been stopping and searching young blacks for no reason at all. I have a grandson; he’s an angel.’
When the interviewer put it to Mr Howe that any alleged actions by the police were not justification for mass rioting, he replied, ‘Where were you in 1981 in Brixton?
‘I don’t call it rioting. I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it has happening in Liverpool, it is happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad.’
He then angrily told the interviewer to ‘have some respect for an old West Indian negro’ and to stop accusing him of being a rioter. He uttered an unintelligible insult, and the interview was promptly cut short, to much embarrassment in the pro-multicultural newsroom.
In the 1970s, Howe was a member of the British Black Panther Movement. He was arrested for riot, affray and assault and imprisoned for three months for assaulting a police officer, yet he has been rewarded by British TV stations with a lucrative career in broadcasting.

Michael McCarthy-No shame, no limits

No shame, no limits: Has the behaviour of the mob destroyed the idea of British civility for ever?

On Monday night rioters across the capital showed that authority held no sway over them. The Independent’s commentators discuss the riots that have shaken a nation.

By Michael McCarthy

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

The battle for Britain: rioters in Hackney, east London on Monday

Twitter is a remarkable medium through which to follow a major event like violent disorder, especially when the micro-blogging service has been embraced by thousands of people. It makes possible a panoramic view of events and an equally wide view of people's reactions at the same time. I spent until the early hours of yesterday morning observing the rioting in London via thousands of tweets, from the comfort and safety of my desk, while my younger colleagues were out risking their necks to report it.

But the advantage of being an armchair observer via Twitter is that you not only get news of events long before the news agencies have broadcast them, you get a very real sense of the public mood and its shifts. And late on Monday evening, as the violence spread across London, the mood of the citizenry noticeably changed, shifting from anger and outrage to fear.

What began to terrify people, especially in areas where the police were absent, was the seemingly limitless nature of what the rioters would do. It had gone far beyond a barney with the coppers and the looting, in particular, it went past all previous bounds; the rioters would loot everything, everywhere; they would attack and rob anyone they came across; they began to break into private houses.

I think people were so frightened because something had been loosed and was on display, which was new to many people – and that was the sight of very large numbers of people, mainly young men, who were no longer constrained by our culture. The role of culture in making British society what it is, and in giving it its remarkable strengths, is not often remarked upon, but it is enormous. We are, or we have been, a culture-bound society: we have been governed largely by informal constraints on our behaviour.

This is in sharp contrast to a society like that of the United States, for example, which is largely a rule-bound society. To give just a single instance: drinking alcohol in the street used to be rare in Britain, because it was frowned upon – but in the US there are local laws specifically forbidding it. The rule-bound society, which is the reason for the vast proliferation of lawyers in the US, arose in America because the founding fathers created a new nation from scratch, starting with a written Constitution that set out the first principles and then writing down and proscribing everything else about people's behaviour.

Britain, whose governing process evolved slowly and organically, does not even have a written constitution, merely a set of understandings about how things ought to be done.

But these understandings have, in the past, been widespread and very powerful. The bus queue and the idea of queuing generally is an example that persists; I remember my shock and spluttering resentment when I first went skiing, years ago, and stood patiently with the other Brits in the queue for the chairlift and watched as the little French and Italian kids skied to the front and forced their way in. (An example that has fallen by the wayside is giving up your seat to a woman on public transport. When I was a boy, no woman on a bus or a train would be standing if a man had a seat to offer her; now the man who gets up is the exception.)

These may seem like relatively trivial instances, but cultural norms exercise much deeper and more important influences. I once sat down to try to work out what was the single most valuable thing about British society and I concluded that it was our relatively incorrupt civil service. In the past, if you wanted a new driving licence, say, you filled in the application form and posted it to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea (now you do it online), and back your licence came. You did not include a £20 note in the envelope; you did not ring up the guy in the department who was your wife's second cousin and ask him to speed it up. Yet in many parts of the world, that is how things are routinely done.

The reason people in Britain behaved differently was the culture, the culture of shame, if you like; it would be shameful to do otherwise. We can probably locate the origins of this in two factors: mid-Victorian religious morality and the nature of the British national psyche. Victorian morality spanned society, with Methodism and the other free churches strongly influencing the working class and the upper classes in their Anglican public schools being animated by Dr Thomas Arnold's ideal of the education of a Christian gentleman. The two streams came together in a general national understanding, across the classes, that behaviour should be civilised. It is one of the reasons why revolutionary Marxism never took root here and the Labour Party embraced parliamentary democracy instead.

The British psyche was the fertile soil in which this understanding flowered: we are not an aggressive or violent people. The idea of the British bulldog is a myth and never more clearly shown than by the tribulations of the citizen army that landed in France on D-Day in 1944. Max Hastings' gripping account of the subsequent Normandy campaign, Overlord, makes very uncomfortable reading, for it demonstrates in detail how the British Army was outfought by the Germans until overwhelming firepower eventually beat the Nazi war machine down. When the odds were equal, Hastings said, the Germans always prevailed. This is not to minimise by one jot the courage and self-sacrifice of the British forces, it is simply that we were not naturally good at fighting. We were brave and stoical but not imaginatively aggressive, which is a different thing – and what the Germans were.

This combination of a peaceful national character and an accepted moral outlook on how we ought to behave produced (especially after the Second World War, when people had got used to being told what to do) a society of social cohesion and stability: the low point for crime in British history was 1953. This is the society into which, as a baby boomer, I was born. And it was one of the many dazzling advantages we enjoyed, along with plenty to eat, free health, free education, freedom of speech and ever-rising expectations.

As the Fifties became the Sixties, society became liberated and far less docile and there were rumbles, there was industrial unrest: Mods and Rockers fought on the beach at Brighton; students demonstrated against the Vietnam war. But somehow, although it provoked indignation from retired colonels, none of this really stepped outside the bounds of the culture.

I can remember when I first saw the cultural norms transgressed; it was on a Sunday evening in August 1976, at the end of the Notting Hill Carnival, which I had been covering as a young reporter for the Daily Mirror. The event ended in rioting. I had covered riots before, in Northern Ireland, but that evening I saw something new. It wasn't just people throwing rocks at the police. There were groups of young men on the street, openly brandishing knives and openly looking to rob. It was chilling. It took me some time to work out why it was different, but eventually I realised that it was the openness of their behaviour which was so startling. To anyone of my generation, it was unthinkable that you would behave so shamelessly, that you might strut about in the street with a knife. And it was clear that those people rioting had been socialised in a different way, so that the informal constraints on behaviour which had been such a key part of our culture had no effect on them whatsoever.

So with the looting on Monday night. This was a multi-racial phenomenon. There were plenty of black rioters and plenty of white rioters, too. But what united them was the abandonment of all restraint and that the cultural norms which had once been so powerful in British society were irrelevant to them, with perhaps the most egregious example of all being the young man who was robbed even while he was injured. People were still stunned yesterday by what had they had witnessed; here's a tweet from anIndependent contributor, picked from many similar ones: "Am still thinking about what I saw last night. It was like watching packs of wild dogs bring down antelopes."

We have plenty of rules and plenty of laws like every other nation, but what has held British society together, given its relative stability and unique values, has been culture. It is clear that there is a growing section of young men and women who have been so socialised that this culture means nothing to them and this will have to be recognised. This is probably not something that policy can deal with; it cannot be ameliorated, it can only be confronted.

It does not mean that we cannot have civil governance, but it will increasingly have to be based on rules which are enforced, rather than on universally accepted norms of behaviour. Those norms were the best thing about British society and long after the burnt-out streets of Hackney and Croydon and Ealing have been rebuilt, their loss will be resonating with us still.

Damian Thompson-London riots: This is what happens when multiculturalists turn a blind eye to gang culture

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke.

London riots: This is what happens when multiculturalists turn a blind eye to gang culture

The roots of these appalling events are many and tangled, but for the moment let’s just focus on one: the way Britain’s educational establishment has cringed helplessly in the face of a gang culture that rejects every tenet of liberal society. It’s violent, it’s sexist, it’s homophobic and it’s racist. But it is broadly tolerated by many people in the black community, which has lost control of its teenage youths. Those youths scare the wits out of teachers and social workers – and some police officers, too. The threat of physical violence is ever present in many schools, and one can hardly blame individual teachers for recoiling from it. But we should and must blame those schools and education authorities that have made extra space for gang culture in children’s lives because they believe it is an authentic expression of Afro-Caribbean and Asian identity. We are seeing a lot of black faces on our screens tonight; it’s a shame that the spotlight can’t also fall on those white multiculturalists who made this outrage possible.

David Green-London riots

London riots: why did the police lose control?

The police have become so sensitive to the issue of race that it is impairing their ability to do the job.

Riot police stand in line as fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London Photo: PA

By David Green

8:42PM BST 08 Aug 2011

What caused these riots and why did the police lose control? Some commentators think the disorder was understandable and justified; some say the police “had it coming”; others that the violence was only to be expected given the unemployment and poverty in the area.

Some local people told journalists of their resentment towards the police. One student said: “The police never talk to us, they ignore us, they don’t think we’re human in this area.” A youth worker claimed: “The way the police treat black people is like we’re nothing.” And a retired accountant who has lived locally for 30 years reported that some of the police “behave in an arrogant manner that puts people’s backs up”.

Other residents who witnessed people carrying off carpets, trainers and watches noticed that they included individuals of all “colours and creeds”, suggesting an outburst of sheer lawlessness rather than righteous retaliation for past racial slights.

Did the police inflame the initially peaceful crowd protesting about the shooting last Thursday of Mark Duggan? It will be impossible to answer that question until the independent inquiry is complete. But what should we make of another theory, that the police handled the rioters with kid gloves because they were paralysed by fear of being called racist?

Anyone in touch with police leaders will know that most are fully signed-up supporters of the doctrine that the police should use force only as a last resort. As one of the famous “nine principles of policing”, published in 1829 at the very founding of the Metropolitan Police, puts it, the police should “use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient… and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion”.

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This was the policy of the Met during the recent protests against student fees. It had worked well enough a few days earlier when the trade unions held a march against the cuts, but the student protests turned violent. Reluctance to use force is right and we should be reluctant to reproach the police for it. However, a second attitude was at work in Tottenham. Since the Macpherson report of 1999 the police have been hyper-sensitive about race. This attitude has now become so paradoxical that they find themselves standing aside when members of ethnic minorities are being harmed. The people who ran shops, or who lived in the flats above, were not given the protection they deserved.
The police have been made to feel that they are the “white police”, and that they lack legitimacy in “black areas”. This unfortunate attitude began with the report by Lord Scarman on the Brixton riots of 1981. He said: “There is widespread agreement that the composition of our police forces must reflect the make-up of the society they serve.” He found that ethnic minorities were significantly under-represented. Soon after the Macpherson report made a similar observation in 1999, the Government set a recruitment target for ethnic minorities of 8 per cent.
Scarman’s remark that the police should reflect the make-up of society is profoundly wrong. The police have never been representative of the social or ethnic breakdown of society. Police officers are people who have been chosen because they deserve to wear the uniform, not because of their ethnic status. They are individuals who deserve to be part of a profession that upholds the law without favour or affection, malice or ill-will. So long as that remains true, then every officer is entitled to respect, whether black or white, male or female. The legitimacy of the police has nothing to do with the racial composition of the force. It has to do with impartial enforcement of the law.
Instead of upholding strict impartiality, in 2002 police leaders published a “hate-crime manual” via the Association of Chief Police Officers. It was a defining moment that undermined the highest traditions of policing. The ideal of impartial justice was dismissed with particular scorn. “Colour blind” (in quotation marks to signify its implausibility) policing was defined as “policing that purports to treat everyone in the same way. Such an approach is flawed and unjust. It fails to take account of the fact that different people have different reactions and different needs. Failure to recognise and understand these means failure to deliver services appropriate to needs and an inability to protect people irrespective of their background.” Impartial justice was now “unjust” and it’s not surprising that many rank and file officers have had difficulty accepting the new approach. But their concerns have been given short shrift. They were to be “retrained” or disciplined. And yet it was not easy for officers to be sure how they could stay out of trouble. In another section of the manual they were told: “Anyone who is unable to behave in a non-discriminatory and unprejudiced manner must expect disciplinary action. There is no place in the police service for those who will not uphold and protect the human rights of others.”
In this kind of atmosphere, it’s not surprising that officers in charge of a riot think it safer to wait for orders from the top rather than use their discretion to protect the public without fear or favour.
Another element of police practice contributed to their failure. The police do not have deep roots in most localities and especially areas such as Tottenham. Few, if any, officers live locally. In earlier times, policing was seen as primary prevention, based on a visible uniformed presence. Gradually, under pressure to appear more “efficient”, policing became more a matter of reaction and detection. Officers waited for calls and responded as fast as possible, while teams of investigators tried to solve past crimes. Only in the past couple of years has it begun to be accepted that primary prevention has its merits, and the Government is supposed to be moving towards neighbourhood policing with named officers covering particular areas and charged with getting to know everyone. An officer who knows the law-abiding locals as well as the miscreants is in a much stronger position when things go wrong than the officer whose “response unit” has been called in to deal with some trouble every now and then.
Coalition cutbacks in the number of police officers have also been blamed for the riots. It goes too far to blame the Government, when the immediate perpetrators were unequivocally at fault, but cutting police numbers doesn’t help. The Coalition plans to cut spending on the police by 20 per cent. In the 12 months to the end of March 2011, the number of officers fell by 4,625 to 139,110. The number of community support officers also fell by 1,098 to 15,820. At the same time the number of police volunteers, or special constables, increased by 2,916.
So much for the underlying factors, but even after they have been taken into account, there has been an inexcusable failure of police leadership in the first few days of these riots. CCTV pictures of looting are now available and it seems likely that the police would have been watching from their control rooms. If they could see the window of a carpet shop or a jewellers being smashed and looters taking their pick of the goods, why didn’t they immediately dispatch a dozen officers to arrest every culprit? There are always people who are willing to become criminals for a day if they calculate that there is little chance of being caught. It seems likely that televising the fact that the police would just stand there while mass looting took place led to its spread to other localities the next night.
Being reluctant to use force can be admirable. But when events have got out of control, the fullest use of police powers is justified. The present generation of police leaders gained promotion by mastering the art of talking about “issues around” racism or bearing down on hate crime “going forward”. Learning the management buzz words of the last few years has not produced leaders able to command men in a riot. The injuries sustained by officers show that we have plenty of men and women prepared to be brave when needed, but they are lions led by donkeys who listened a bit too intently to the sociology lectures about “hate crime” at Bramshill police college.
David Green is Director of Civitas

Philip Johnston-London riots

London and UK riots: The long retreat of order

To understand the cause of these riots, we need to accept that the police ceded control of the streets to the criminals decades ago.

A rioter in London poses in front of a burning van Photo: GETTY

By Philip Johnston

8:47PM BST 09 Aug 2011

When rioters rampaged through the suburbs of Paris six years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s interior minister, called them racaille. While this can mean “rabble” or “riff-raff”, it also translates as “scum”.

You cannot imagine a British politician using that term to describe the youths who have turned London into a war zone. Yet it is the word that will have been on the lips of all decent people as they watched – appalled, shocked and ashamed – while the capital and, later, other cities were trashed by elements of their criminally inclined underclass. Epithets like “rabble” or “riff-raff” are too mild for the lawless, feckless, mindless and amoral thugs who forced passers-by to strip naked while they stole their clothes; or who torched a furniture warehouse that had withstood the Blitz; or who ransacked shops across London. What else do you call them?

If ever we wanted proof that Britain has been divided into two nations, then here it was. But hasn’t it always been? You did not need to look far beneath the surface at any time over the past 200 years or more to find people ready to loot and rob and steal. After all, the London mob is hardly a new phenomenon. The word itself was coined in the late 17th century as the city’s population grew and aggressive crowds, fuelled by alcohol and perceived grievance, took to the streets with alarming regularity.

Although there were law enforcement officers – salaried watchmen – to patrol the streets, they were too few to make a difference, or influence bad behaviour decisively. So, in order to counter the mob, the Metropolitan Police was established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, and gradually the disorder subsided. While sporadic crowd violence broke out on occasion, it was not until the late 1950s and the Notting Hill race riots that further widespread trouble occurred. Since then, there have been disturbances linked to protests over the poll tax, policing in Brixton, and, most recently, student fees.

Yet the riots we are seeing now are fundamentally different from those that have gone before. They might, ostensibly, have been triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a notorious gangster, in north London; but they are fuelled by pure greed, by a belief that something can be had for nothing. The usual brakes on such behaviour – either an appreciation that it is wrong, or by the prospect that the culprit will be caught and punished – are largely absent.

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For this, we have to thank four decades of politically correct policing, and a gradual breakdown of the informal network of authority figures that once provided an additional element of control over the bad behaviour of young people. Adults are now reluctant, or too scared, to step in and stop things getting out of hand, or to impose a wider moral code – and in any case, they are no longer listened to. Deference to age and authority has been eroded by years of genuflection to the twin gods of multiculturalism and community cohesion.

The police, bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots 30 years ago and the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994, have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order. And the places that have really suffered as a result are the most deprived: they have to bear the brunt of the criminality and the fear, squalor and alienation that accompanies it.
In recent years, a myth has been allowed to grow up – motivated in part by the approach of the Olympic Games – that London is one of the world’s safest big cities. In terms of its murder rate, that may be true. But no one living in the capital is unaware of the existence of a minority ready to descend into lawlessness at the drop of a hat.
There has long been a disconnection between this reality and the self-congratulation of police and politicians inspired by dodgy crime statistics and phoney targets: the truth is the capital has far more crime than 40 years ago, and parts of the city are no-go areas for the police.
Part of the problem is that the breakdown of the family (or an unwillingness to form one) has left a generation of feral adolescents without fathers or any adult males to act as role models. Parents rarely know what their children are doing, and exercise little power or authority over them. Instead, their loyalty is to the gang and to its codes, rather than to the prevailing moral orthodoxies of the majority of the population. Low-level criminality is a way of life – as, for some, are drugs, robbery and routine armed violence.
These young people know that if they are caught committing an offence, they are unlikely to be punished, or certainly not as severely as was once the case. If Britain today jailed the same ratio of people relative to the number of the most serious offences – burglary, robbery and violence – as it did in 1954, there would not be 80,000 behind bars, but 300,000. It may well be true, as penal reformers maintain, that there are some people in jail who ought not to be; but by the same token, there are an awful lot who should be who aren’t.

Another big change is the official attitude to crimes against property: they are no longer considered important. Burglaries have a pitifully low clear-up rate. Under the fixed-penalty notice system for shoplifting introduced by the last government, the police are expected to levy a fine of £80 if the items stolen cost less than £200. There was a time when theft was regarded as a serious crime, and it still carries a maximum jail term of seven years on indictment. Yet thieves are now being treated in the same way as motorists whose cars have remained too long in a parking space. To the exasperation of retailers, the deterrents to shoplifting have virtually disappeared over the years. The industrial-scale looting and recreational rioting that have taken place around London are the ultimate expression of this lax attitude.
To find out what has gone wrong, we do not need to delve too deeply into the specific causes of the appalling events of the past few days, or establish commissions and inquiries. We know what has gone wrong. The police lost control of the streets not in Tottenham, last weekend, but many years ago. Arguably, their failure to intervene robustly on Saturday and to let the looters carry on unmolested for hours owed much to the non-confrontational nostrums that have guided the policing of ethnically diverse areas, with disastrous consequences. On this occasion, they let the impression develop that here was a chance to plunder with impunity. Once that had taken a grip across the capital, and elsewhere, it became far more difficult – if not impossible – for the police to regain control.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
Mercifully, some of these issues are being addressed by the Government – though not without sustained opposition from those who helped to created the mess in the first place. David Cameron was commendably tough in his rhetoric yesterday, after cutting short his holiday to return to London. The Prime Minister has promised a robust police response and condign punishment for all those involved in the rioting. This is what all decent people wish to see – but it will mean reversing a culture that is now deeply rooted in our national life.
Mr Cameron’s first duty is to keep order and protect property. That is the contract the people have with the state, which prevents us from taking the law into our own hands. That is what policing by consent means. The dreadful events of the past few days have shown how far that contract has broken down.

Andrew Gilligan-London riots

London riots: 'Bleeding, I called 999. A tired man told me to go home'

Andrew Gilligan reports on his own experiences of the lawlessness that swept across much of London and elsewhere.

A car is set on fire in Hackney Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Andrew Gilligan

7:30AM BST 10 Aug 2011

It was one of those microseconds when you know exactly what is about to happen, without the slightest chance of stopping it.

The big black boy rode his bike straight at me, crashing me off my own and leaving us both tangled up on the ground. Then four more of them were racing towards me, clawing at my legs to get them off my bike, kicking me in the head as I tried to hold on. Two minutes later, it was all over. Ten minutes later, no doubt, it was being used to loot a newsagent’s.

Bleeding a little, I thought I might as well call 999. It was a recorded message. After four and a half minutes, a tired man answered. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “You know what’s going on. We have to give priority to saving people’s lives. I suggest you just go home.”

He was right, of course. I was in Hackney - which, that evening at least, was a law-free zone. That’s the worst thing about riots. Across much of London on Monday night, if someone had decided to break down your door and rape your daughter, there would have been nothing to stop them. There would have been no one to call.

When I was mugged, I was on my way home from a day in Tottenham, listening to the stories of the people who had lost far more and been at far greater risk than me, burned out of their homes at 30 seconds’ notice.

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They called 999 too, frantically, desperately, as the riot moved closer. There were 100 police just up the road. The emergency operator could do nothing but listen to their terror.
I finished my journey in a cab. Three or four times, we had to stop and skirt round hooded boys spilling into the road, our windows closed and the door lock on. If they had fancied my taxi, there would have been nothing I or the driver could have done about that, either.
Even on Monday, the victims of Tottenham, black and white, were already tired of outsiders blaming racism, police brutality, or cuts. (What were they rioting about in prosperous, suburban Enfield – rising season-ticket prices?) The real reason for the rioters’ behaviour is much simpler: because they can.
Forget BlackBerry Messenger. After seeing — on television — how much leeway the looters of Tottenham were allowed, every criminal and every excitement-seeking child in London took note.
By the next day, critical mass had been achieved. Disorder had erupted on a scale much more difficult to suppress than the original outbreak.
There are, and always have been, plenty of people keen to break the law. On my taxi ride, I saw many other youngsters in twos and threes, hoods up, looking for the next crowd to join.
These are sights, with variations, that I have seen in foreign conflict zones: the loss of state authority and the loss of individual inhibition from being in a big group. But in London, the geography of fear is particularly potent.
Unlike Los Angeles or Paris, the riots are not happening in ghettos where nobody goes. They are happening amid the organic gastropubs and latte bars. Alongside poverty, inner London is full of the sort of middle-class progressives who agree with Ken Livingstone that the rioters “feel no one at the top of society, in government or City Hall, cares about them or speaks for them”.
I predict a lot of those people, as they cower behind their sash windows, are revising their views tonight. The hardening of liberal opinion in London is palpable, and is taking even the likes of Boris Johnson by surprise.
In my neighbourhood, Greenwich, they boarded up the shops at noon. God knows how much damage this is doing to the economy. It’s a beautiful, sunny evening. But our area is empty, like so much of inner London, as we wait in our homes with the TVs on to discover if they will be coming for us tonight.

Gilad Atzmon: The Landlord Wannabe Protest

Gilad Atzmon: The Landlord Wannabe Protest

Sunday, August 7, 2011 at 10:32AM Gilad Atzmon

It is almost amusing to find out that some of the most clichéd Marxists around are so taken by the current Israeli popular protest, which they foolishly interpret as a manifestation of the ‘Israeli revolutionary spirit’. They are convinced that now that the Israeli ‘working class’ are rising, peace will necessarily prevail.
Yet in fact, what we are really seeing unfold in Israel (at least for the time being) is the total opposite of a ‘working class’ re-awakening. Indeed, some in Israel  are calling it the ‘Real Estate Protest,’ because basically, those protesting want assets: they all wish to have property, a house of their own. They want to be landlords. They want the key, and they want it now. What we see in Tel Aviv has no similarity whatsoever to the struggles taking place in al-Tahrir or in Athens. At the most, the Israeli demonstrations mimic some manifestations of a struggle for justice or Socialist protest.
But that is where the similarities end.
Motti Ashkenazi (a legendary Israeli anti establishment figure)  wrote in ynet yesterday that “another Left is needed (in Israel), a Left that is primarily concerned with the poor of its country rather than with the plight of our neighbours.” In clear terms that cannot be interpreted otherwise: Motti Ashkenazi is exploring what he considers to be a necessary shift in Israeli ‘progressive’ thought, and what he appears to conclude is, forget about Palestine; let’s once and for all concentrate on  ‘us,’ the Jews.  Ashkenazi continues,  “we need another Left, a modest one. Instead of a vision for the entire Middle East, it had better present a vision of the State of Israel.”
Professor Nissim Calderon (a  lecturer in Hebrew literature ) also presented a similar line:  “We have erected a Left that has been focusing on the fight for peace, and peace only.   But there is a huge hole in our struggle- we failed to  struggle for social justice.”  Again  ‘Lefty’ Calderon refers to the social struggle within the Israeli Jewish population.
The mass protest in Israel is, in fact, the complete opposite of a genuine social revolution: whilst it may present itself as a popular protest, in practice, it is a 'populist festival'. According to reports from Israel, the leaders of the emerging protest are even reluctant to call for Netanyahu’s resignation.  The same applies to security matters, the occupation the defence budget- the organizers wouldn’t touch these subjects in order not to split their rapidly growing support.
What we see in Israel is neither a socialist revolution; nor is it a struggle for justice. It is actually a ‘bourgeoisie wannabe revolution’, and the Israelis took to the street because each of them wants to be a landlord, to own a property. They do not care much about politics, ethics, or social awareness, and neither do they seem to care much about the war crimes they are collectively complicit in.  Malnutrition in Gaza is really not their concern either. They seem to not care about anything much at all, except themselves becoming property owners.
But why do they want to own a property? Because they cannot really rent one. And why can’t they rent? It is obviously far too expensive.  But why is it too expensive? Because Israel is the ultimate  embodiment of a corrupted, hard speculative, capitalist society.  And I guess that this is the real untold story here. If Zionism was an attempt to solve ‘the Jewish Question’ , as the author Shahid Alam so insightfully explores, it has clearly failed since it has only managed to relocate 'the Jewish Question' to a new place, i.e. Palestine.
Zionism promised to bring about a new productive and ethical Jew as opposed to what it defined as the ‘Jewish Diaspora speculative capitalist’(1). It clearly failed, and the truth of the matter is, that in the Jewish State, Israeli Jews are now being  subjected to the symptoms of their own very problematic culture.(2)
Israel, that was supposed to be the state of the Jewish people, has become a  haven  for  the richest  and most corrupted Jews from around the world: according to The Guardian, “out  of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia’s economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish.”  During the last two decades, many Russian  oligarchs  have acquired  Israeli citizenship. They also secured their dirty money by investing in the Blue & White financial haven.  Wiki leaks has revealed lately that “sources in the (Israeli) police estimate that Russian organised crime (Russian Mafia) has laundered as much as US $10 billion through Israeli holdings." (3) Mega-swindlers such as Bernie Madoff  have been channeling their money via Zionists and Israeli institutions for decades. Israel is also a leading trader in blood  diamonds. Far from being surprising, Israel is also the fourth biggest weapon dealer on the planet. Clearly, blood diamonds and guns are proving to be a great match. And it doesn’t stop there -- every so often, Israel is caught engaging in organ trafficking and organ harvesting.
Increasingly, Israel seems to be nothing more than a vast  money-laundering  haven for Jewish oligarchs, swindlers, weapons dealers, organ traffickers, organised crime, and blood-diamond traders. But on top of that, rich Jews buy their holiday homes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: there are reports that in Tel Aviv alone, thousands of holiday properties are empty, all year round, while native Israelis cannot find a roof.
The Israeli people are yet to understand their role within this horror show: the Israeli people are yet to grasp that they are nothing but the foot soldiers in this increasingly horrendous scenario. They do not even gather that their  state maintains  one of the world’s strongest armies, to defend the assets of just a few of the wealthiest and most immoral  Jews around.
I actually wonder whether Israelis can grasp it all. Yet the truth of the matter is, that the leaders of the present Israeli ‘real estate revolution’ want to maintain the struggle as a material seeking adventure, and they are clearly avoiding politics: the driving sentiment and motivation here is, obviously, ‘give us the keys to our new homes and we clear the square.’
I guess that it is not surprising that within such an inherently greedy and racially oriented society, the dissent that manifests will inevitably, also be reduced to sheer banal materialism.
It seems the Israelis cannot rescue themselves from their own doomed fate, , because  they are blindly  hijacked by their own destructive culture.  As myself and a few others have been predicting for a decade or more, Israeli  society is about to implode. It is really just a question of time.
Gilad Atzmon's latest book is The Wandering Who.

1. Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov (1881-1917) argued that the class structure of European Jewry resembled an inverted 'class-pyramid', a structure in which a relatively small number of Jews occupied roles within the ‘productive layers’ of society as workers, whilst a significant number were settled in capitalist and speculative trades such as banking.
2. In Haaretz today Beni Ziper wrote, “I saw on television people shouting against the rich, or tycoons who control the country. Seemingly everyone thinks it's exciting and daring and nobody reflects on  the chilling historical  equivalence with the Depression in Germany at the time of  Weimar Republic, when the ‘rich Jews who control us’ were targeted by everyone.”  Ziper is clever enough to notice a close and disturbing repetition in Jewish history. However, Ziper is also very critical of his countrymen.  “So I'm all for protests against the state, but in no way against people or groups of people, be they ‘rich’ or ‘ (Jewish) Orthodox’ or even ‘settlers’.  Whoever gives privileges to the settlers in this country and it's not that the settlers come and rob the cashier at gunpoint.” Whether we agree with Ziper or not, it is clear that he also admits that there is a similarity between the arguments voiced in Israel against the rich, and the German right wing's anti Semitic attitude towards Jews in the 1920’s-30’s
3. For more information about global organised crime connections with Likud or other major Israeli political parties, follow this link http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/topic.php?tid=147

A Secret War in 120 Countries-The Pentagon’s New Power Elite

A Secret War in 120 Countries
The Pentagon’s New Power Elite

By Nick Turse

Tomdispatch, August 4, 2011

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.
After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.
Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.  By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120.  "We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq," he said recently.  This global presence -- in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military

Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight U.S. service members died, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was established in 1987.  Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander as their advocate.  Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of startling proportions.  Made up of units from all the service branches, including the Army’s "Green Berets" and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most specialized and secret missions.  These include assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.
One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists.  Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens.  It has been operating an extra-legal "kill/capture" campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."
This assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.  In addition, the command operates a network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets. 

Growth Industry

From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command.  Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM’s baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion.  If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8 billion in these years.  Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold.  Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon.
Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command -- the last of the service branches to be incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 -- indicated, for instance, that he foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600.  "I see them as a force someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000," he said at a June breakfast with defense reporters in Washington.  Long-term plans already call for the force to increase by 1,000.     
During his recent Senate confirmation hearings, Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven, the incoming SOCOM chief and outgoing head of JSOC (which he commanded during the bin Laden raid) endorsed a steady manpower growth rate of 3% to 5% a year, while also making a pitch for even more resources, including additional drones and the construction of new special operations facilities.
A former SEAL who still sometimes accompanies troops into the field, McRaven expressed a belief that, as conventional forces are drawn down in Afghanistan, special ops troops will take on an ever greater role.  Iraq, he added, would benefit if elite U.S forces continued to conduct missions there past the December 2011 deadline for a total American troop withdrawal.  He also assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that "as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia."
During a speech at the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Special Operations and Low-intensity Conflict Symposium earlier this year, Navy Admiral Eric Olson, the outgoing chief of Special Operations Command, pointed to a composite satellite image of the world at night.  Before September 11, 2001, the lit portions of the planet -- mostly the industrialized nations of the global north -- were considered the key areas. "But the world changed over the last decade," he said.  "Our strategic focus has shifted largely to the south... certainly within the special operations community, as we deal with the emerging threats from the places where the lights aren't." 
To that end, Olson launched "Project Lawrence," an effort to increase cultural proficiencies -- like advanced language training and better knowledge of local history and customs -- for overseas operations.  The program is, of course, named after the British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in the Middle East during World War I.  Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of Wherever."
While Olson made reference to only 51 countries of top concern to SOCOM, Col. Nye told me that on any given day, Special Operations forces are deployed in approximately 70 nations around the world.  All of them, he hastened to add, at the request of the host government.  According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.  The others are scattered across the globe from South America to Southeast Asia, some in small numbers, others as larger contingents. 
Special Operations Command won’t disclose exactly which countries its forces operate in.  "We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not advantageous for us to list where we’re at," says Nye.  "Not all host nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have -- it may be internal, it may be regional." 
But it’s no secret (or at least a poorly kept one) that so-called black special operations troops, like the SEALs and Delta Force, are conducting kill/capture missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, while "white" forces like the Green Berets and Rangers are training indigenous partners as part of a worldwide secret war against al-Qaeda and other militant groups. In the Philippines, for instance, the U.S. spends $50 million a year on a 600-person contingent of Army Special Operations forces, Navy Seals, Air Force special operators, and others that carries out counterterrorist operations with Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf.
Last year, as an analysis of SOCOM documents, open-source Pentagon information, and a database of Special Operations missions compiled by investigative journalist Tara McKelvey (for the Medill School of Journalism’s National Security Journalism Initiative) reveals, America’s most elite troops carried out joint-training exercises in Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Germany, Indonesia, Mali, Norway, Panama, and Poland.  So far in 2011, similar training missions have been conducted in the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Romania, Senegal, South Korea, and Thailand, among other nations.  In reality, Nye told me, training actually went on in almost every nation where Special Operations forces are deployed.  "Of the 120 countries we visit by the end of the year, I would say the vast majority are training exercises in one fashion or another.  They would be classified as training exercises."

The Pentagon’s Power Elite

Once the neglected stepchildren of the military establishment, Special Operations forces have been growing exponentially not just in size and budget, but also in power and influence.  Since 2002, SOCOM has been authorized to create its own Joint Task Forces -- like Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines -- a prerogative normally limited to larger combatant commands like CENTCOM.  This year, without much fanfare, SOCOM also established its own Joint Acquisition Task Force, a cadre of equipment designers and acquisition specialists. 
With control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon.  With real clout, it can win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops.  Since 2001, SOCOM’s prime contracts awarded to small businesses -- those that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons -- have jumped six-fold.
Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, but operating out of theater commands spread out around the globe, including Hawaii, Germany, and South Korea, and active in the majority of countries on the planet, Special Operations Command is now a force unto itself.  As outgoing SOCOM chief Olson put it earlier this year, SOCOM "is a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies." 
Tasked to coordinate all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something new in the military.  Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach. 
In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans.  Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows.  Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: "I am convinced that the forces… are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."
Recently at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum, Olson offered up similarly gilded comments and some misleading information, too, claiming that U.S. Special Operations forces were operating in just 65 countries and engaged in combat in only two of them.  When asked about drone strikes in Pakistan, he reportedly replied, "Are you talking about unattributed explosions?" 
What he did let slip, however, was telling.  He noted, for instance, that black operations like the bin Laden mission, with commandos conducting heliborne night raids, were now exceptionally common.  A dozen or so are conducted every night, he said.  Perhaps most illuminating, however, was an offhand remark about the size of SOCOM.  Right now, he emphasized, U.S. Special Operations forces were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military.  In fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s only set to grow larger. 
Americans have yet to grapple with what it means to have a "special" force this large, this active, and this secret -- and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more information is available.  It just won’t be coming from Olson or his troops.  "Our access [to foreign countries] depends on our ability to not talk about it," he said in response to questions about SOCOM’s secrecy.  When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said, the elite troops object.  The military’s secret military, said Olson, wants "to get back into the shadows and do what they came in to do."
Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a new senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). This article is a collaboration between Alternet.org and TomDispatch.com.
Copyright 2011 Nick Turse