Monday 24 June 2024

World’s top entrepreneur | Elon Musk

Click above for the video
Elon Musk wants humanity to become interplanetary. Inter-galactic. To keep the small flame of consciousness alive. To understand the workings of the universe. 

And in the process, has built several -- not one or two, but several -- globe-spanning, world-beating companies. Surely the entrepreneur or the last century. 

Sunday 23 June 2024

Canberrans out of step on the VOICE and NUCLEAR: should they be proud or ashamed?

"The Voice" Referendum

In The Voice referendum, all states in Australia and Australia as a whole voted 60% NO, against The Voice. 

Canberra, the nation’s capital, was the only place that voted YES. 

I came to the issue late and from Hong Kong -- an Australian living here in Hong Kong, unable to vote in the Referendum, but interested in it, because I’m an Aussie, and referenda are rare and... interesting. 

I came to the question with no preconceptions. I decided just to look into the arguments for YES and for NO. I was as ready to agree with the “YES” case as I was to agree with the “NO” case. 

In the end, I decided that the NO arguments were more powerful. The spokespeople for the NO campaign, especially Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, and Warren Mundine made the better case and won the debate hands down, I thought. Here’s a summary of the for and against cases. 

And, in the end, the NO vote won, easily, despite the early polls showing a win for the YES vote. 

Canberra -- Australia’s capital city -- stood out. As a “Capital Territory”, it’s not a State, but more like Washington D.C. Its vote only counts to the overall tally, not as an individual state. In an Australian referendum there has be be a majority of the Six states and a majority of the overall population that votes in favour. For the Voice, it was all states, (but not Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory) and 60% of the overall that voted against. That was after the early polls showed a majority in favour. That is: the NO vote case was viewed as being more persuasive. 

What do Canberrans thinks of that? I don’t know, but I suspect that they feel they were on the “right side of history” and that the rest of Australia are the rubes. That’s the impression I get from the talk-back on Canberra radio. 

Click on Voice in the Labels. And here’s a summary of the YES and NO arguments. 

Nuclear for Australia

Now the latest is on the Nuclear for Australia debate. Overall, around 55% to 70% of Australians, depending on the poll, are in favour of nuclear power for Australia. [Here is a selection of polls]. 

But in an online poll last week on ABC Radio Canberra, AM666, the poll was 80% against nuclear. How do they feel about this, I wonder? Again, I’m guessing that they feel they are in the right and that the rest of us are simply dumb. 

But... I happen to know something about this nuclear business. 

I wrote a summary of “The Case for Nuclear”, at the request of an Australian Greenie friend of mine. Who then said she couldn’t or wouldn't read it, because...  well, I never did find out because why... Because it would perhaps have changed her mind on something so deep in her psyche. And she didn’t want to risk that level of cognitive dissonance.

Most of the comments I heard on ABC Radio Canberra last week that were against nuclear, ware ignorant. Like “WASTE”, which is a resolved problem. Like “PROLIFERATION”, which is an old and nonsense concern. Like “COST”, which is an overblown concern, and in any case ought not to be the primary concern, when we’re looking at a “climate emergency” according to these same folks. Like “IT’LL TAKE TOO LONG’, again an overblown concern, but again not something that ought not be a primary concern, when a single nuclear power station will last up to a century and we're looking at an issue with climate that goes beyond the next five or ten years. 

In all, I heard nothing new, and certainly nothing that should rule out nuclear for Australia. Some of the comments just out-and-out scaremongering. 

We here in Hong Kong live right near a Nuclear Power Station, around 30km away, the Da Ya Bay power station. I’ve visited it, and sailed past it many times. It’s a fine facility that’s been delivering a third of our power, safely, cleanly and cheaply for thirty years. To those NIMBY folks, I say YIMBY: “YES, in my backyard”. 

The extent of Labor Party hysteria over the plans by the Opposition Coalition to put nuclear power stations in soon-to-be decommissioned coal fired stations, is something to behold. Childish hardly mocks it enough. But the Canberra elites are right on side with the silly anti-nuclear memes and scare tactics. Shame on them all. 

================

So, how do they feel, these Canberra folks? Out of sync with the rest of Australia on two really major issues in the last half year. 

They ought to do some self-reflection, at the very least. They ought to wonder, why are we the odd ones out? Why are we so different? Are we in a bubble perhaps? 

For sure you are. You’re in a lovely, homely, middle-class, comfortable, white-privileged bubble.  

Maybe it’s asking a bit too much of you, to feel “ashamed”. But surely it’s not too much to ask to be reflective?  Is it? To reflect that perhaps you might be getting things wrong? That there are other views which might just be valid? That the rest of Australians might be the ones getting it right?

perfect

 

From here, where comments.

Saturday 22 June 2024

"Fareed Zakaria on revolutions, tribalism and the demise of the West" | Freddy Gray

Click above for the video
Fareed Zakaria, a senior host on CNN, talks to Freddy Gray. 

Interesting talk. Especially about the French Revolution. Which was a failure by all criteria. 

No mention of Islam and the Islamisation of the West, especially in the United Kingdom and in Europe. What’s going on there? Was that a taboo subject? 

Fareed is an independent thinker, who was brave enough to say, on CNN, that the trials against Trump seemed to be “Lawfare”, that is the law used to pursue political aims. 

Friday 21 June 2024

Palestinian meets Palestinian diaspora

Fifteen years ago I said this about Hamas and Jerusalem. I stand by it

Original Post on July 27, 2009, Titled Jerusalem United:

Apparently a UK Foreign Office Committee has recommended that Britain talk to "moderate" Hamas.  Rather like talking to "moderate" Nazis went one comment...

Led me to an article on East Jerusalem, which says it has never been Arab Jerusalem, save for a short period, 1948-67, when it was occupied by Jordan (and Jews expelled, synagogues burned).  The view -- eg within the BBC --  that Israel is "illegally" occupying East Jerusalem is simply not true.  The US Congress made this clear in 1995.

As Steve Lieblich, says 
The great obstacle to Middle East peace is not that Jews insist on living among Arabs. It is that Arabs insist that Jews not live among them.

======================

ADDED (19 June 2024): Israel's western allies are still trying to create this mythical beast, the “moderate” Hamas unicorn That’s the main line of the Biden Administration, as it pushes Israel to surrender (aka, “Ceasefire for a durable peace”) to a Hamas that is going to be a partner in creating a Secular, Democratic State. Or something. 

"You are being conned" nuclear DOES lower power bills | Dr Adi Paterson

Click above for the video
Dr Adi Paterson is the past chairman of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney Australia, which produces nuclear medicines, and has been doing so cleanly and successfully since 1958. It’s not correct to say that Australia has no nuclear; it’s just that it has no nuclear that produces electricity. 

The ABC Radio had a talkback on Nuclear for Australia, given the announcement of an Opposition (Liberal-National Party) policy to encourage the building of nuclear power stations in Australia. 

Australia is the only developed nation in the world that has a Federal level BAN on the building of nuclear  power stations. It was done in the deep of night, when they had to get a Bill through the next day’s parliament, and slipped in the ban on nuclear pretty much without anyone noticing. But it’s there, and is now used by the anti-nuclear folks to say that’s one of the reasons Australia can’t have nuclear. 

But now, at least, it’s the opposition policy. 

And so, the debate on ABC radio yesterday. Where they ran an online poll, by Text, which had 80% of Canberra’s saying NO to nuclear. That’s against the numbers in other polls showing 55% to 70% supporting development of nuclear power. Here

I sent a text, which they read out in its entirety: 

I live in Hong Kong and we have nuclear on our doorstep - Daya Bay c. 30 km as the crow flies. I've visited the station and sailed past it many times. Google it: it's good looking ! And caused zero angst here in Hong Kong while we get about a third of our electricity from it. 

I've no idea why the U.K nuclear station is going to cost so much but certainly across Asia they're nowhere near that cost. Nor in Canada or France. 

32 countries are planning nuclear plants. 400+ plants already in operation. Very safely and cleanly. 

It's beyond me why Australia should not able to have nuclear. 

Given we're a major uranium exporter. And have already one in operation at Lucas 

Peter Forsythe

Hong Kong.

Points from Adi Paterson

  • Nuclear is cheap to the consumer, once you have it operational
  • Wind and Solar need the creation of twice the amount of the current grid. This is hugely expensive and hugely complex. But is not taken into account in the costing of Renewable Energies. 
  • There is no major developed economy that is powered only by Renewables. 
  • Nuclear is the best option for reliable, sustained, clean and safe base power. 
  • Waste from nuclear power stations is easily handled and is being handled by the current fleet of 400+ nuclear power stations in the world. 

Thursday 20 June 2024

“It shouldn’t be surprising that a Muslim son of immigrants is funding Reform” | Ross Clark

It shouldn’t be surprising that a Muslim son of immigrants is funding Reform”. Ross Clark, The Spectator

That is funding REFORM, the most anti-illegal immigration party in the current British elections. 

The key word here being “illegal”. Many folks are pro-immigration, but not pro people gaming the system. And the system is being gamed. In Europe, in the UK, in the US. People coming in claiming “refugee” status when they are not refugees, but know the right words to say. 

The refugee convention was set up to handle genuine refugees from political persecution. Like Rudolph Nureyev, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Not 5,000 single men in a day, in rubber dinghies or across the southern america border, saying “I claim asylum, because I fear for my life in my country”, a form of words they’ve learned on their iPhones. 

People who have done things by the rules, hate it when others break the rules. Hence Zia Yusuf

Below from Ross Clark:

Should it really be a surprise that Zia Yusuf, a Muslim entrepreneur who made his fortune setting up a company that runs an app providing concierge services for posh blocks of flats, has chosen to support Reform?

It is clear that Mr Yusuf has not thrown his lot in with Reform in spite of its policies on migration, but because of them. Britain, he says, has ‘lost control of its borders’, adding, ‘my parents came here legally. When I talk to my friends they are as affronted by illegal Channel crossings, which are an affront to all hard-working British people but not least the migrants who played by the rules and came legally.’ It shouldn’t really shock anyone, any more than it shocks us to find out that people who pay their taxes are not terribly keen on people who evade them, or that people who took great trouble to stick to the rules during lockdowns tended to be the most upset when it emerged that Downing Street staff treated them with a more cavalier attitude. It is simply human nature: most people who stick carefully to the rules tend to feel affronted when others have cheated.

Yet it seems to confuse many people who, over again, get confused by the fact that so many of the politicians who have been toughest on illegal migration have been themselves migrants or the children of migrants. Priti Patel, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, and before them Michael Portillo, for instance. Why are these people taking it out on migrants, their left-wing critics ask when they have benefited from migration themselves? For many progressives, someone like Braverman is a traitor to her own kind; they have to imagine deep insecurities which have led her to this dark place.

Progressives struggle with the likes of Braverman because they see people less as individuals than as members of class, racial, and ethnic identities. If you happen to be a British Asian, then you should share the values of all British Asians. Moreover, you should conform to the opinions which grievance politics has assigned to you – which in the case of ethnic minorities is that Britain is a structurally racist country whose white majority population is out to oppress you whether it means to or not.

But that is clearly not how Zia Yusuf, Suella Braverman, and others think. To them, they are not betraying their own people by opposing illegal migration – or even in wanting to slow down the legal variety. Rather, they are thinking back to the efforts their parents put into coming to Britain – which might have required many years of study, filling in forms, paying for visas, etc. – and they feel offended when they see young men (and they mainly are young men) who are exploiting the asylum process by pretending to be gay, Christian, or telling whatever other tall stories help them to play the system.

It all comes down to a basic sense of fairness. This doesn’t mean to say that a party that focuses on migration doesn’t also risk attracting people who are racists – like Ukip before it, Reform UK will face a constant battle to keep out such people, as we have found with its vetting issues this week. But no one should be surprised if other children of migrants are drawn to a party which is serious about wanting to tackle the problem. Reform UK’s opponents will have to find a more intelligent way of opposing it than simply trying to denounce it as racist.

China’s Taiwan Strategy

Click above for the video
Cindy Yu and Rana Mitter discuss the China-Taiwan situation. 

What do I think of their take? I don’t know. How can I? I’m not a member of the Chinese Politburo. Then again, neither are they. It’s all guess work. 

Still, it makes some sense. That China would not want an outright sea assault. Like on D-day. Which the invaders happened to win, but could easily have lost. 

The question then is: if China goes for the softer approach, like, to Taiwan: “joining with us is better for you”, what’s in it for Taiwan? A a genuine question. Especially if they look at the ruins of the “One China Two Systems”. I mean, can we really say that Hong Kong is better, 27 years after we “reunited with the motherland”? 回归祖国. Hui Gui Zuguo.

In sum, it’s been: Better than the pessimists feared. Worse than the optimists hoped. 

We’re still pretty free. In many ways more than some other democracies (eg, on the Woke issues, we have more freedom to speak without fear of “cancellation”). But also less free than we used to be, in terms of freedom of speech and assembly. Many will cheer than. I don’t. But then I’m just me. And I’m still blogging this. 

Wednesday 19 June 2024

“Tesla shareholders will have no one to blame if things go south” | FT Headline

Click above for video
My Letter to sujeet.indap@ft.com of the Financial Time

RE:    “Tesla shareholders will have no one to blame if things go south” | FT Headline 

You say: “Musk is being treated better than any CEO in history”. I respond that’s because he’s better than any CEO in history. IMO the most consequential entrepreneur of the last century+.

Your hit-piece makes:
  1. No mention of the fact that Musk’s 2018 compensation package included very tough-to meet-hurdles on EBITDA and Sales growth. Which at the time people said he would never meet — in which case he would have got nothing. Zero. But he did meet them. As probably no other CEO could have done. And which enriched everyone. What’s the matter? Should success be punished now? 
  2. No mention of the fact that the case was brought by a single shareholder with only five shares. Suspicious, much?
  3. No mention that the lawyers for the plaintiffs are claiming fees of $Billions in TSLA shares, which only hurts TSLA and its shareholders. This, despite the shareholders rejecting the case brought by the plaintiffs via that legal firm. How can this be right?
  4. No mention that TSLA shares have solidly outperformed all major indexes and other majors companies since 2018 (and more so since inception). You only mention that share price has dropped this year (as has every other car company becoz overall market softness).
My points above are an indictment of your poor, sloppy and clearly-biased piece of so-called “journalism”, in a paper we’re supposed to treat with respect.

Well, no, I do not treat you or your paper with respect. I give Financial Times zero respect for this piece of blatant propaganda masquerading as journalism. 

Yours, etc... PF

Tuesday 18 June 2024

Happy Orchids, Flame Trees, Rain Singers

Happy Orchids in backyard 
Flame Tree, aka Phoenix Tree, aka Poinciana 
Goeppertia singing in the rain

Jonathan Netanyahu in “Bibi, My Story”: the death of his elder brother,

From “Bibi; My Story” by Benjamin Netayahu, about the death of his elder brother Jonathan (Yoni) int the battle against] Jihadi terrorists who hijacked a plane in Uganda's Entebbe airport in 1976:

Yoni expressed his soul in his letters and described his life and thoughts with the terse prose of a natural and powerful writer, at times rising to the poetic. Given that many of these letters were written by candlelight in pup tents or in the field after a grueling day, this was all the more remarkable. 

The book was published in English under the title Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu. The New York Times wrote that the book was “a convincing portrayal of a talented, sensitive man who knew that good is no match for evil without the power to physically defend itself.”

The Boston Globe wrote that “Yoni’s unpretentious accounts of his accomplishments, simply written and thus more grand, make him the convincing hero he was and make us wish that more like him were among us.” 

Military Review said it was “a magnificent testament to the hero of Entebbe, containing a leadership credo of unmatchable quality.” 

I relate this not only to encourage others to read Yoni’s letters and discover for themselves who Yoni was; I bring this up because in many ways these letters saved me.

-- Bibi: My Story by Benjamin Netanyahu, Kindle edition, p.132, 18% 

Bibi Netanyahu fought in two of Israel’s wars -- the 6-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur war -- against Jihadist genocidists. 

Bibi's brother Yoni gave his life defending fellow citizens against the Jihadi crazies. 

Words like that -- Jihadis as “genociders” and “crazies” -- clearly makes me an Israel supporter. A Zionist. A hater on Palestinian rights, if you will. 

I have no problem with raising my hand and saying “yes” I support the independence of Israel, the existence of Israel, the right of Israel to defend itself, even in the surrounding sea of Islam and even at the cost of “innocent civilians”. 

As the New York Times said in 1976: “...good is no match for evil without the power to physically defend itself.

I don’tget the hate on Bibi. Some allege that he’s only prosecuting the current Gaza war to keep himself in power, to avoid prosecution on charges pending. I don’t buy that. Can I prove that he’s not? No I cannot. I just doesn’t add up, for me, when looking at his life. Fighting a war to “avoid prosecution” would be the move of what the Chinese call a 小人, a Xiao Ren  a “small person”. And Bibi, by all measures that I’ve seen is a 君人 a Jun Ren a Great Man. A “monarch, a lord, a gentleman, a ruler” amongst men.

That’s my Bibi, and I’ll not buy the hate on him. The hate which comes from both Left and Right. The Left thinks he’s too Patton; the Right thinks he’s too Chamberlain. 

What a world. What a war. 

Which you can’t fight as you’d like to; you can’t fight as you should. Because you’ve got to watch over your shoulder for what the United States, your main ally, thinks. And what their know-nothing campus-children think. And what the United Nations, and its International Court of Justice thinks, driven as it is by a cabal of jew-hating countries. 

That. 

Monday 17 June 2024

“Ok Doomer: Albo’s anti-nuke scare makes no sense” | Will Shackel

The Australian Labor Party -- our Prime Minister Antony Albanese -- is engaging in outright FearMongering! Putting out pix of the Sydney Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, famous Beaches, with Nuclear Mushroom clouds. 

This is extraordinary. It’s wrong. It’s immoral. It’s lies. 

North Plaza, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, April 2020

From “MooFish” restaurant, to White Chapel, to S. China Sea

Sunday 16 June 2024

“Unmasked: inside Antifa” | Andy Ngo

Click above for the video 
I read Andy Ngo’s book when it came out. “Unmasked: Inside ANTIFA’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy”. 

It covers the craziness of the 2020 riots across America. Just after we’d had a year of rioting here in Hong Kong. Andy does an excellent job of exposing what’s going on with these radicals. 

Dr Phil is a good interviewer. He comments that perhaps 70% of the American people have no idea of what’s been going on. Because it can be going on in the next block from you, but you don’t know unless you go there. And won’t know if the mainstream media doesn’t tell you. As they don’t and haven’t with the Antifa riots.

The “Theory of Public Pressure" | Ze’ev Jabotinsky

 From “Bibi: My Story” by Benjamin Netanyahu 

Jabotinsky had developed the “Theory of Public Pressure” in an article he wrote in the spring of 1929.

He posited that the most potent influence on democratic governments is the pressure of public opinion. It matters not, he argued, if a government is headed by the friendliest of leaders. 

If your opponents apply sufficient pressure on that government, it will eventually tilt against you. To balance this, you must sway public opinion to your side by an unceasing public campaign “like the constant drizzle on a green English lawn,” he said. 

-- “Bibi: My Story”, p.112 Kindle edition, 15%  

I'd thought Zeev Jaobtinsky was perhaps the earliest proponent of the “Theory of Public Pressure”, but it turns out that it was much earlier, going back to Hellenic times. 

But still.... He was the one that made it a central pillar of Israeli influence in the United States. 

Which led to the Israeli public relations machine centred on “J Street” in Washington. Which has been so successful that people make a big issue out of it: “The Jewish lobby”, the “perfidious influence of Jewish public lobbying on American politics”, and all the rest of it. 

Once again, Israel, Jews, are so successful that they cop a malign backlash. 

Even from other Jews. I don’t forget John Mearsheimer's book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, which I read when it came out -- and agreed with the “1-star” reviewers, that it was a vicious anti-Jewish tract, not mitigated by Mearsheimer's own Jewishness. 

(At other times, I’ve rather liked Mearsheimer’s views on geo-politics. Just that when it comes to Israel, as with so many Jews and goyim alike, he’s blinded. Yes, “blinded” I say. Like the horrid Jew-hating Jew, “professor” Norman Finklestein, he who said of the October 7th Palestinian massacre of Jews, the worst since the Holocaust: “It warms my heart”, he exulted, while hiding under the mantle of “my family were Holocaust victims”. Yes, Norman, and they’d be turning in their ovens at your treachery).

To this day, we have dark warnings of the influence of the “Jewish Lobby” in America. Forgetting always that every other country in the world, every other ethnicity in the world, every other entity in the world, has some form of lobbying in the United States, for it is the biggest country, economy-wise, and the biggest country, military-wise and the biggest country, foreign aid-wise. 

And so of course you want to be there, in the fray, trying to get your own interests heard. 

But again, it’s only Israel, that horrid Jewish "ethno-state", which is singled out for opprobrium, for having the temerity to develop the best of the lobbying groups. 

How dare they? Those perfidious Jews. 

Saturday 15 June 2024

Palestinian leadership "Ali Baba and the forty thieves” | UAE Foreign Minister

UAE foreign minister called the Palestinian leadership "Ali Baba and the forty thieves" and claimed senior officials in the Palestinian Authority are "useless" and therefore "replacing them with one another will only lead to the same result.”

Click above, also here.

A conversation with a Palestinian apologist | a.k.a. Destroying the narrative

 “The Israeli occupation is the problem and the core of the conflict. That’s why Palestinians attack Jews.”

“Got it. So before the ‘occupation’, by that logic, there should have been no Palestinians murdering Jews, right?” “Exactly”. “Cool, cool, so why were hundreds of Jews killed by Palestinians between 1949 and 1956? How does that work?” “Well, because there was the Nakba in 1948 where Israelis kicked Palestinians out of their home!” “Got it. So before the ‘Nakba’, by that logic, there should have been no Jews killed by Palestinians?” “Exactly.” “Cool, cool, so why did Arabs massacre Jews in Hebron in 1929? No occupation, no oppression, no Nakba back then. There wasn’t even a state of Israel then, so what were they resisting then?” “Well, they already knew that the Jewish people intended on taking their land so they wanted to prevent it.” “Got it. So there should not have been any Arab violence against Jews outside of Israel, which was then called Palestine.” “Exactly.” “Cool, cool. So, why did Arabs massacre Jews outside of Israel? Ever hear of Farhud where Iraqi Jews were slaughtered for no reason other than them having the audacity of existing?” Arab/Muslim hatred of Jews has nothing to do with some fabricated occupation or some fairy tale event called the Nakba, which was really just an event in which the Arab countries attacked Israel and lost. Arab hatred of Jews dates back to the Quran. 

-- Hillel Fuld on X

Elon talks to Tesla troops

“We’re not just opening a new chapter. We’re starting a new BOOK"

Elon Musk at the Tesla Shareholder meeting, Texas, June 13, 2024. 

His compensation package had just been approved by the shareholders. After it had originally been approved in 2018, but invalidated by a Biden-appointed judge in Delaware. And is now reisntitued, with the only gainers being the lawyers not just for Elon, but also for the other side (which lost). How can that be fair? 

And we’re talking Billions here in legal fees. For a nuisance law suit. Brought about because Joe Biden doesn’t like Musk. Because Musk bought Twitter, renamed it “X” and made it a Free Speech platform that didn’t hew to Democrat talking points. 

Life in modern America. 

Summary of where money is coming from for Tesla in coming decades:

  • Electric Vehicles. Manufacturer of the most popular car in the world
  • Full Self Driving: and Robotaxis. A $5 Trillion opportunity 
  • Humanoid Robots: a $25 Trillion opportunity 
  • AI: Trillions 
  • Other: Battery Storage and Solar

Overall, predicted share value: 10 x over next five years. See Cathy Wood at ArkInvest. 

Something we CAN do something about: Nuclear for Australia

Click above for the video 
The great Dick Smith. Aussie environmentalist, adventurer, entrepreneur, businessman, Australian of the Year (1986).

Now a powerful advocate for Nuclear in Australia.

You can go sign the Petition to legalise peaceful, clean, reliable, safe Nuclear Power for Australia. By the young and wonderful Will Shackel.

The late, great, Labor Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke was a strong advocate for nuclear in Australia. He’d be shocked that we actually passed a law banning it. Insanity. 

ADDED: My “Case for Nuclear in Australia”.

Friday 14 June 2024

“No Blood, No News”: Hamas’ “Dead Baby Strategy”. Courtesy Yahya Sinwar

Murderer-in-chief, Gaza Division, Yahya Sinwar

“No Blood, No News”

So says the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. His version of “if it bleeds, it leads”. 

But also a summary of what they are about in Gaza: getting their own citizens killed. And then promoting the footage of them being killed. And counting on the West finding this horrid and “genocide”. And bringing pressure on Israel to stop the war. 

The Dead Baby Strategy”. (Talked about as early as 2009)

One which I am not making up -- Hamas and Palestinians quite openly brag about it: “We love death more than you love life”, they say, ad nauseam. “We will happily send our children to be killed, to be ‘martyred’, for the sake of Allah”. 

Here’s the head of the Hamas in Gaza, the above mentioned Yahya Sinwar, in 2016: 

During an organized 2016 uprising at the Gaza border, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted the group “decided to turn that which is most dear to us — the bodies of our women and children — into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.” [Reference]

There’s plenty more quotes along the same lines. 

Point I’m making here is that this is not my fervid imaginings. It’s the actual policy and strategy of Hamas. 

Which goes back to the earliest strategy of Islam in the days of Muhammad and the likes of early Muslim convert, the commander Khalid ibn-al-Walid

It is today the fundamental strategy of all Jihadis, of which Hamas is merely that latest offshoot. And hence we have suicide bombers. And putting their children in the line of fire. Which today we call The “Dead baby strategy”.  No matter how uncomfortable and ugly the term is. It’s not our strategy. It’s the avowed, specific, actual, strategy of Hamas and all Jihadis. 

Let that sink in. 

“UK judge says he did not quit top Hong Kong court sooner as he wanted ‘to see how things develop’ post-security law” | HKFP

 
Lord Sumption 
"I think all the judges on the court feel concerned about this, but they differ on the degree of optimism they have about the way the presence of foreign judges on the court might moderate the persecutory zeal of the authorities," Lord Sumption said.
Lord Sumption above, talking of the Hong Kong judicial system, which has some independent overseas judges on its highest court. Reflecting on his recent retirement from the court. Which our fearless leader, John Lee, criticised.

I got to know Lord Sumption for his understanding of what Covid was about and his willingness to go against the tide, to tell it how it is (and was). Critical of the non-science of lockdowns and “distancing” measures.

A sound, honest man.

Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, looking over South China Sea

Thursday 13 June 2024

Hillel Neuer testifies before U.S. Congress on UNRWA

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, has been irredeemably corrupt for decades. Possibly from when it was established nearly 75 years ago. 

There is only one group of displaced people who have their own Agency: the Palestinians. There is only one Agency that looks after only one group of peoples: UNRWA.

UNRWA runs all the schools in GAZA. There is plenty of evidence out there of just how jew-hating these schools are. Children are taught to hate and want to kill Jews from when they can stand up. 

They steal the food aid. We know that from countless whistleblower testimony. The heads of HAMAS have been enriched by money funnelled via UNRWA.

And yet, and yet... we do nothing. We the west, continue to pump money into this rotten, corrupt outfit. 

Hillel Neuer speaks well on this. He’s been doing it for a long while. More power to him. As the message -- clear and unequivocal -- has been systematically ignored. 

“The United Nations does more harm than good” | Alan Dershowitz

Click above for the video 
“The United Nations does more harm than good”  says Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz.

Sad, but true.

Founded immediately post-war, in 1945, to keep peace amongst nations, the UN has, since the 1960s — about the time my father was sent to the UN New York, as the representative for Australia — been taken over by anti-western, anti-democratic, pro-Islamist forces. The Organisation for the Islamic Conference is the largest single block in the United Nations. 

The nations of the Global South, largely anti-western and anti-democratic, and including most of the OIC, are a huge chunk of the General Assembly. The only bulwark against complete domination by those forces is the Security Council, but that’s under sustained attack for its elitism and dominance by the United States, so there’s no long term guarantee there. 

Think of UN “Peacekeeping” forces. Sent to trouble spots unarmed, and with no mandate to engage with any trouble makers. Their “peacekeeping” at the Rwandan massacres only made the massacres worse. UN troops stood by as machete-wielding tribes slaughtered each other.

Israel has more UN resolutions targeting it than all the rest of the nations combined. In what world, and whatever your views on Israel, can that be right?

Wednesday 12 June 2024

How the Paris of the East became the Gaza of the East

I remember going to Lebanon, to Beirut, in the 1970s. It was lovely. 

It became less lovely soon after I left. In around the mid 1970s. What changed it from the lovely to the horrid was:  

1. Muslim birth rates that were higher than Christian birth rates. From a slightly Christian majority nation to at Muslim majority nation, was the downfall of modern, multicultural, vibrant, Lebanon. Brigitte Gabriel speaks about this, in the vid above, and X-post below. The civil war. The killing of Christians by Muslims. The killing of non-Muslims by Muslims. 

2.  Making it worse: the influx of Palestinian refugees, that had fled from Jordan, kicked out by King Hussein, even while he admitted that Jordan was a “Palestinian State”. But he couldn’t put up with their constant war-mongering. So they pitched up in Lebanon, and worsened things there. 

I have a report somewhere, done by the Australian parliament, of conditions of the Lebanese diaspora in Australia. There are lots of Lebanese migrants in Australia, split more or less 50/50 between Muslim Lebanese and Christian Lebanese. The report found: Christian Lebanese had about the same level of employment as the rest of the Australian population. The Muslim Lebanese have an unemployment rate of five times the national average, at 20%. These are people from the same country, the same ethnicity, all things the same, except for their religion. But the Muslim Lebanese, unlike the Christian Lebanese, took advantage of our generous welfare benefits, paid for by the Australian taxpayer. Polled about it, they openly said that “the kuffar” (that is, we infidels) “owed it” to them. As Muslims. 

There are figures in other places, like the UK, that show the same. Muslim immigrants much more taking advantage of the welfare benefits than other immigrants and than the host population. 

This is one of the reasons that the Europeans are voting to the Right. Because the Left has ignored their concerns about unrestricted illegal immigration, and in particular immigrants with an ideology hostile to that of the host countries. The Left, however, seems determined not to learn any lessons from this, but simply to label it all “Far Right” and horrid xenophobes. 

David Atherton, on X

This is American @ACTBrigitte talking about her Lebanon homeland.

"It was the only majority Christian country in the Middle East" who prided itself on multiculturalism."

It was prosperous & liberal. As muslims entered with their high birthrate they became the majority.

They started "massacring the Christians" in 1974.

She relates that at Christmas her family did not go to Beirut. There were Muslims checkpoints & the Christians were shot dead on the spot.

The starting point of the civil war in 1975 was when Muslims when into a church & murdered the congregation.

"Once they became the majority, they were no longer tolerant of the people that took them in."

They did not see themselves as Lebanese but as part of the Islamic Ummah, an Arabic word meaning Islamic "nation".

The problem was exacerbated by taking in Palestinians from Jordan, who who started a war there in 1970.

Not in the video but Brigitte in 1984 & her family were refugees 3 miles from Israeli border. A Lebanese Christian soldier told them to expect a Palestinian assault & not expect to live.

Her father read from the Bible in anticipation of going to Heaven. Brigitte aged 13 put on her Sunday Best dress as she "wanted to die pretty."

They did escape to Israel & lived in a refugee camp until given asylum in America.

Today the Lebanese Muslims, who are really Palestinians send missiles & drones into Israel.

They are the Hezbollah terrorists.

"What we’re looking at is Islamic imperialism” | Amy Alkon

Amy Alkon, on X:

It’s not about Jews or land—that’s just propaganda for you gullible, anti-Semitic, campus-stomping “useful idiot” westerners, poisoned by the toxic racist ideology of intersectionality and CRT and turned into robots of hate.

What we’re looking at is Islamic imperialism—the demand in Islamic texts that Muslims violently impose Islam on all of us around the globe: aka “The New Caliphate.”

“The Quran not only calls Muslims to submit to Allah, it also orders them to  subdue people of other religions until they are in a full state of submission to Islamic rule.  This has inspired the aggressive history of Islam and its military and demographic success in conquering other cultures.” [Reference]
 
The best was when the evil head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar thanked American college students for (throwing away their education and) screaming for the extermination of Jews. Didn’t that turn on any lightbulbs? Not a one?!
We know: You’re ultimately just a bunch of Jew haters, desperate to have plausible deniability for vocally and publicly expressing your antisemitism. (You don’t care in the slightest about the Palestinians!)

Tough words from Amy. Pretty much spot on, but.... Islam is a Jew-hating ideology, first and foremost. No matter the amount of land that Israel might give (has given) to Palestinians, it will never solve the issue, which is the simple, visceral, hatred of Jews, any Jews, living in the Levant.

I just re-read and re-noticed the first sentence above saying “It’s not about Jews and land...”. Well sure, it’s not about land. And it most certainly is about Islamic imperialism, as it’s been for 14 centuries. But it’s also most assuredly about Jews. They’ve been hated by Muslims everywhere, since Muhammad in the 7th century. They can’t abide them anywhere in the Middle East.

Byron and friend