War on Terrorism (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

The bit I don't understand about the Houthi attacks is why they aren't actually targeting Israeli ships. Although they go through the motions of saying this one is heading for Israel and that one is owned by Israelis or whatever, it is clear they are just intent on creating general mayhem. This has proved a spectacular success and drawn the Big and Little Satans into outraging the whole of the Arab 'street' but did the Houthis really plot this all out in advance?

On the matter of the Anglo-American response there were some wise words from an Oxford academic. The Houthis have suffered nine years and fifty thousand aerial attacks from the Saudis et al without turning a hair so I shouldn't think four Tornados from Cyprus are going to make a lot of difference. Though four Houthis bombs coming our way will turn the entire nation into jelly. Or words to that effect.

[Mick Harper]

A nice example of 'the bogus list' yesterday on Al-Jazeera. The piece was about the worldwide mass protests triggered by recent events in Gaza. After the predictable Houthi mass demo in Yemen and the weekly one in London, the news crew clearly needed another one to round out the story. So we were whisked off to Kuala Lumpur, capital of a Muslim country with a very pro-Palestine government

[Mick Harper]

Did you spot the most remarkable part of this weekend's elections in Taiwan? It was Beijing praying for a Kuomintang victory. Mao must be spinning in his grave.

PS The Taiwanese didn't oblige and voted back the present stridently anti-Chinese administration.

[Mick Harper]

I have two reservations about this case in the International Court of Justice involving charges of genocide being levelled at Israel.

1. It is being brought by the government of South Africa (the court only hears government-to-government cases). I would rather the party of the first part was not one of the most corrupt and inefficient governments on earth.
2. Nobody ever takes any notice of rulings by the International Court of Justice. It is a talking shop.

[Mick Harper]

Do you know what the chief method of political discourse is among the Houthis? It's poetry. I wandered lonely as an oil tanker...

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

I didn't say it was good poetry. I am much taken by the military gentleman who delivers Houthi communiques from a podium. He doesn't remind me one little bit of Ian McDonald, our late lamented spokesperson during the Falklands War. When the Argies were doing to us what the Houthis are doing to everyone else. Nor is there anyone next to the podium, signing the uniformed cove's words for the benefit of deaf shipowners. They just don't have a clue when it comes to the desiderata of modern communications.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Is Rishi Sunak a Houthi? If he is a Yemeni plant he is certainly doing a brilliant job. Though the Houthi intelligence services can be justly criticised for providing him with a less than believable legend:

[Mick Harper]

Al-Jazeera has really gone mental. It's fair enough, as an Arab news outfit, to give prominence to Gaza but it is a news service so it has to pay some attention to news values. To spend most of the nightly bulletin on reporting nothing very much happening in Gaza (or rather, the usual happening in Gaza) and leave the Russian plane shoot-down until forty minutes in, is quite deplorable. I was taking a special interest because of this, composed for Medium when all that was known was that a Russian plane had crashed with Ukrainian PoW's aboard.

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New Hampshire, the British Army and a Russian Air Disaster

Tuning in to hear the New Hampshire result this morning, I am greeted with two pieces of news, both of which had me goggling. Not, as is usual at this quiet time of day, googling. Both stories concerned Ukraine. The first only indirectly:

[Wile E. Coyote]

Or possibly there were no Ukranian POWs on board.

Russia has just used this as an excuse for cancelling a proposed agreed prisoner exchange in retaliation for one of its military planes carrying missiles being shot down.

[Mick Harper]

I thought of this. A complicating factor is that an eyewitness filmed the crash on his I-phone and broadcast it to the world before the Kremlin had any opportunity to massage anything. Remember, I was watching on SkyNews within (what?) an hour of the event and all the Russians had put out was that one of their transport planes had crashed (which they had to say because of the film) with 65 Ukrainian PoW's, six crew and three servicemen aboard (which they didn't have to say but had far too short an opportunity to concoct). I thought at the time that cannot be correct. There is no way sixty-five enemy combatants would be accompanied by just three Russia guards.

It does now seem certain that it was three Ukrainian missiles that did the deed. Or as the Russian mouthpiece put it 'US, British and French missiles'. But that raises two more questions:
1. Who fires three different types of missiles at a target?
2. I thought NATO had made a general decision not to provide the Ukrainians with weapons that could operate inside Russia for obvious reasons.

To my mind, the Great Big Hole in the story is the chances of Ukraine downing a plane carrying their own people. There weren't many planes that answered to that description and the Ukrainians haven't shot down many Russian aircraft. AE says this is not possible. But this one will run and run.

[Mick Harper]

The International Court of Justice's ruling to the effect that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza is a total absurdity. It shows that 'victim culture' has got to the very top.

It wasn't so long ago that 'genocide' was formulated to cover the very worst crime that could be committed -- short of blowing up the world in a nuclear firestorm -- the deliberate killing of huge numbers of people of a particular ethnic group by a state, presumably of a different ethnic group. Since this didn't apply to Croats butchering hundreds of thousands of Serbs during WW2., nor Muslims and Hindus in ex-British India doing likewise to each other, the geno- part was quickly adjusted to mean any identifiable characteristic.

What the Israelis are doing to the Gazans certainly qualifies on the ethnic and identifiable side but fails on two other essential aspects. Is 25,000 and climbing enough to qualify? No, it is not. This is more like the Soviets killing tens of thousands of Polish officers in WW2. It is a war crime but it is not genocide.

Is it deliberate? No. These deaths are collateral damage in the war against Hamas. Now it is true the Israelis are killing Gazan civilians with sufficient disregard to prompt more than a suspicion that 'a message is being sent' but,-however reprehensible, that is a legitimate act of war/foreign policy. It is part and parcel of any sustained bombing campaign and has been indulged in by so many western governments so often that, however much it may be regretted later, it was not and is not genocide.

Where genocide might come into play is if Israel is killing Gazans on a scale that can be interpreted as being intended to send the message 'Gazans should quit Gaza'. By modern constructions-- dubious though they may be-- this may rise to the level of genocide, since it would be a case of ending the existence of 'the Gazan people' even if it did not mean the physical destruction of their lives.

However that has not been proved to be Israel's intention. It is not enough to stand up in court quoting bloodcurdling statements by Israeli politicians. Even Israeli cabinet ministers. That has to be proved in court and it wasn't.

[Mick Harper]

Have you noticed the Russian aircrash has disappeared from all the bulletins? I cannot be sure but my guess is that (a) it will stay disappeared and (b) the world will be left with the general impression that Ukraine shot down a plane filled with its own prisoners-of-war.

The only place it is still being discussed is in partisan Ukrainian circles from one of which I have learned that the Russians have produced a manifest of who was on board and submitted it to the Ukrainians who have pointed out that they have never heard of some of the names and others are of prisoners already swapped. In other words the Russians are going to take refuge in the old "Sorry, our paperwork is in a terrible state, there's nothing much more we can do" excuse.

This is always effective because people accept anything that shows the Russians in a poor light even though the one thing they are very, very good at is paperwork.

[Grant]

Of course it's not really genocide, but it's super fun to accuse the Jews of it.