Facts on bombing Syria: David Cameron is now a threat to our national security

So you've decided to bomb Syria

The UK has aimed its sights at what 'intelligence' says is ISIS / Daesh HQ in Raqqa, a Syrian town of 150k. This is despite every Paris attacker being an EU national based in France/Belgium - and not immigrants as many media outlets propagated. This raises the first suspicions that the decision is poll boosting economic imperialism rather than any long-term strategy for peace. Even David Cameron's tories admit these airstrikes will not defeat ISIS, especially as they are decentralised global entity using social media to interact and organise.

ISIS/Daesh need to be wiped-out but instead of empty war grandstanding for  furthering western interests, the solution should target the economic roots. A multilateral approach should stop their oil being exported through Turkey. This gets sold to the usual array of mercenaries and opportunists as well those resisting the cult who have no choice. All this enabled by the money transfer system of global finance which has only been addressed recently. Follow the money. These internal financial and external smuggling networks maintain the ISIS infrastructure. It is rarely understood that the proposed caliphate has fostered welfare and school systems, this doesn't happen without the involvement of western finance. So ISIS spawned from the Iraq blundering of neo-cons, is now exploited by their neo-liberal accomplices.

Selling arms to unstable regions or regions that trade arms to them is all part of the short-term profit making for the complicit west. Cash from chaos. Meanwhile Labour's Jeremy Corbyn highlighted these issues and how they could be alternatives in the fight.

What are the UK providing?

Since French and US allies have been bombing Syria precipitating the Paris attacks, not much is being offered. The UK is already bombing ISIS in Iraq but with permission. Of course we can't get it from Syrian despot Assad, who met the Queen once - see below.

A meagre force of 10-14 Tornado jets equipped with Brimstone missiles. Again war hawks confess there will still be civilian casualties with this latest technology because nothing that powerful can be 100% accurate 100% of the time - also if intelligence is flawed (hello WMDs) the missile is irrelevant. And Raqqa is densely populated and doesn't contain 150k of mostly innocents Syrians. There will be horrific collateral damage just as there has been with 28 Mosul school children killed and the Afghan Doctors Without Borders hospital deaths

What is the effect of civilian casualties?

General stoking up of the false clash of civilsations narrative between the imperialist  west and fascist pretend-muslims with their Wahhabi brainwashed followers. Ideology is how militarism is sold on both sides. The Nazis used the Reich propaganda of the master race. We let Saudis spread extremism because they have oil and it makes powerful western lobbyists money in the military-industrial complex.

Potential allies on the ground?

Obviously we can't bomb democracy into people so we need to influence those on the ground.
This chart is complicated enough to digest let alone work with in the chaos of war.
And factor in that they are unlikely to be "moderates" or sympathetic of the west.

Is there an exit plan?

Errr see above?

The complexities are obvious to anyone enquiring mind but government warmongers and their media enablers deceive for their usual purposes. Here is an example. 

David Cameron and the Queen are now a threat to our national security.


Despite the propaganda BBC Newsnight ran a debate broadcasting free un-spun opinions from both sides and several walks of life concluding in undecideds choosing not to bomb. Some polls back this up.

Does anyone without a vested interest in bombing for peace believe this will make the world a safer place?

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Paris attacks reaction, the clash of civilisations narrative and the war machine

This blog is named in reference to the tragic Charlie Hebdo events and the aftermath. You can read the background here. 10 months later and Paris suffered a different kind of attack, targeting random individuals in what these psychopaths identified as typical representations of western liberalism. They are psychopaths because they have no real ideology because what ideology calls for the random killing of fellow followers of that ideology. Many muslims were killed that night yet still we hear how this is a clash of civilisations between two opposing ideologies. The same night "Muslims" trended on twitter bringing about predictable bigotry and hate speak. And there is Ahmed Merabat, the French police officer who was coldly executed defending the satirical magazine that mocked his religion #JeSuisAhmed

Post Paris the agenda of elites consists of divide and conquer, propagating the clash of civilisations myth as an advertisement for war. This is a fake construct because firstly ISIS/DAESH are not muslim and secondly, divisive narratives are short-termist. The lack of hope in mainstream rhetoric is telling. They would prefer a hysterical and fearful public ready to accept blind militarism regardless of the viability. Goebbels used such tactics to great effect  during the Nazi regime.

Here are some revealing reactions from establishment commentators, some while people were being murdered outside Stade de France stadium.

It was also interesting to see bigotry and hate speak from Facebook profiles featuring Tricolour flags under many news articles. Opportunists who on another day are happy bashing the French or whoever else is different. This echoes those who say we should take care of the our own citizens instead of immigrants - while abusing single mothers and benefit claimants because the tabloids tell them to.

In the midst of this there were some other more informed reactions from ordinary decent people that were cause for optimism:

The war machine is grinding into gear with the establishment media doing free marketing for the military-industrial complex delivering profits for the arms industry and its war lords.

It's telling to go from that morally and physically courageous survivor, to the political machinations of war-mongering. #Newsnight

— Sally Lewis (@Sallyapiacere) November 16, 2015

For a great ideas-based documentary about the geo-political charade and fog of war, please watch Adam Curtis' Bitter Lake - summarised by himself below:

Fear and mistrust are so often engineered by those with the means to do so. We must not let insidious power agendas on any side create a climate that prevents solutions.

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Tory tactics on voter registration are eroding democracy

Firstly, please register to vote here if you haven't done so. It's as important as it's ever been:

In 2009 the tories changed the way voters are registered so it is up to the individual rather than the head of a household. It was done under the pretence of stopping electoral fraud despite hardly any cases of this. This means that millions will drop off the register. Millions who wouldn't vote tory.

Electoral Reform Society campaign

For such an important democratic change there has been no TV campaign. A recent pension campaign saw Iain Duncan Smith spend £8.5 million of tax-payers money advertising it. 

As a student I was not informed enough to know about the voting process - a complete failure of the school system in a supposedly proud democracy. Being only just past 18 I had never voted before. Luckily universities would register students on mass. Under these rules there is a huge risk that many will be too busy to remember while studying, worrying about finances and generally being students. Those who move house or don't have mortgages with the insecurity of private rented accommodation are also at massive risk. The trend is that it's poorer people who are disproportionately affected. Facts reveal the tories' ulterior motive to gerrymander elections

Voters must be registered by December 1st 2015. The original date for registration was December 2016 but opportunistic self-serving tories rushed the date forward in the summer to deny a voice to those they care little about. Even the independent Electoral Commission has attacked these government manoeuvrings.

The conservatives want to rig their chances at elections next year by introducing the new system when there was no great call for it. This means registered voters will have to re-register if they want to choose the new London Mayor and Scottish & Welsh parliament next year. Why the haste? Of potentially even greater concern are boundary changes, rejected under the coalition (missing the Lib Dems yet?) but since a tory majority they are to become law in 2018 for the following election. These will be based on the electoral register of next month and therefore favour Cameron & co. if non-tories have dropped off the list. These changes are to make each constituency equal size yet shockingly they disregard non-registered voters.

Now to counter blatant tory manipulation the race is on register as many as possible before the coming in a matter of weeks. Labour are leading the charge here. With our antiquated broken voting system it is more important than ever to get involved in the democratic process while vested interests try and engineer a monopoly of power.

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Media reporting of the Swedish neo-Nazi killer and other white extremists

Appropriately grisly subject matter for Halloween. I have written before about how the media reports of racially motivated murders when the assailant is white. Here are some more case studies:

A week ago (23rd Oct 2015) a Swedish terrorist stabbed a teacher and pupil to death while 2 others are in hospital recovering from wounds. It was deemed a neo-Nazi hate crime by the police and given little coverage by the mainstream. It has sharply fallen off the agenda since. This happened in a town where mosques were burnt down in the 90s. Imagine it was white majority churches.

How many would remember the attacker's name or even the incident itself?
How much profile does the media give acts of extremism when the perpetrator is white? Researching this article has proved a lot harder than you'd think for a story about a Nazi violence only a week old.

Some analysis of the narrative:

The terrorist motives are clearly being softened. They emphasise the killer's mask being like Star Wars character Darth Vader which is firstly inaccurate and secondly not as attention-worthy as the true intention behind the crime. This trivalises a terrible act. The mask actually represents his own perverse tribute to the Nazi storm-troopers. They also did not specify which ethnicity he targeted. Minority lives don't matter in their agenda.

 Dog-whistle site for sinister bigots, Breitbart implied the school of mainly migrants deserved attacking with this divide and conquer headline:

There is a similar narrative from Daily Beast. Another terrorist Dylann Roof, murdered 9 black people at a Charleston, SC church in another racially motivated act of terror. DB acknowledge he was a white supremacist contradicting their initial defence of him based on superficial Facebook journalism.

In the aftermath there was extensive burning of black churches which you would think would be major news. The UK TV outlets that covered the killing did not broadcast any of this. Too much truth for Middle England let alone Middle America.

Michael Brown, the black teenage police victim in the incident which sparked the Ferguson riots was even compared unfavourably to white serial killer Ted Bundy by the relatively liberal New York Times. The lengths the media go to provide this good/evil judgements contributes to a racial landscape that sees significant funds raised for the killer policeman and rallies in support of him.

The black shooter in Virginia never received such a defence from the same publication:

It seems the media pick and choose who they apologise for. How can the killer have played the 'race card' when his former employers settled out-of-court on his lawsuit, effectively acknowledgement of  his claim of discrimination.

Based on such evidence, it is hard to defend Daily Beast against accusations of racism in the reporting of killers. There is growing evidence that this exists at multiple media organisations, including unsurprisingly Fox News but even the liberal news outlets mentioned. Tim McVeigh was afforded this measured humanising piece from the Washington Post in 1995. How many of us even know who Tim McVeigh was? The only terrorist who saw proper US judicial process after killing 168 people including 19 children.

Even the justice system seems to have a problem. This is the shocking case of a US cop who executed a black man and was given immunity.

The Huffington Post do a brilliant synopsis of the whole issue:

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The establishment groupthink at the heart of the BBC

Print journalism was famously called 'the Fourth Estate', a remark attributed to MP Edmund Burke at the 1787 introduction of press reporting in parliament. He was emphasising the importance of holding government to account with complete independence - unlike the 3 other estates of the time (the Commons and two Lords).

The following highlights the conflict of interests within the supposedly culturally diverse BBC undermining Edmund' Burke's tenet of democracy in the contemporary media landscape. 

James Harding, Head of BBC News

• Went to same independent school as George Osborne.
• Went to Cambridge.
• Worked as a financial journalist.
• Worked at The Times owned by Rupert Murdoch.
• During his time at the paper he had to apologise for withholding information to the High Court during the Leveson inquiry.

Laura Kuenssberg BBC political editor

• From a well-connected family. Relatives include the last Governor-General of colonial Nigeria, a High Court Judge and the founder/president of the Royal College of GPs.
• Worked at ITV

James Landale, BBC News Deputy Political Editor

James Landale in David Cameron's kitchen

• Went to Eton with David Cameron.
• Worked at The Times.

Andrew Neil, presenter on the BBC Daily Politics

 Andrew Neil with David Cameron, Grant Shapps and Spectator editor Fraser Nelson

• Tutored by Vince Cable during his University of Glasgow days, who he would later interview many times.
• During university was a member of the Conservative Club.
• Worked for Rupert Murdoch as Sky's chief mover in the early days.
• Worked at the right-wing free market Economist and right-wing Sunday Times.

Andrew Marr BBC Marr Show presenter and ex-Political Editor

• Married to Jackie Ashley from another mostly establishment media org The Guardian and daughter of a Labour life peer. Life peers are a thing that exists in 21st century Britain
• Made use of a High Court super-injunction to prevent the media reporting the truth, nevertheless he continues to be regarded highly as a journalist in mainstream circles.
• In April 2003 made the report below celebrating  Blair's illegal Iraq invasion.

Allegra Stratton, BBC Newsnight reporter

• Cambridge alumnus
• Married to James Forsyth political editor of the right-wing The Spectator magazine owned by tax exiles the Barclays Brothers, who also own the right-wing Daily Telegraph

Nick Robinson ex-Political Editor 2005-2015, now at BBC Radio 4 Today show

• Founder member of Macclesfield Young Conservatives
• ex-Cheshire Young Conservative Chairman
• Former Young Conservative National Advisory Committee member
• As a student he was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association

The BBC Board of Trustees

Rona Fairhead, Chairman of Trust

Rona Fairhead being questioned about financial irregularities

• Cambridge alumnus
• Also works for HSBC and PepsiCo
• Declines to answer questions about Swiss banking irregularities.
• Admitted failings when her bank received a fine for money-laundering 
• Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for 'services to industry'

Roger Carr, Vice Chair

• Worked in the City
• Business background at Thames Water, arms company BAE systems & energy giant Centrica
• Knighted

What does this mean for any public interest issue that challenges the weaknesses in their inevitable consensus. It doesn't have to be conspiracy for decision-making to be influenced by mostly privileged backgrounds. All homogeneity by definition has blind-spots.

Would James Harding ever take aim at his powerful old boss about his bigotry or non-dom status?
Would Allegra Stratton ever scrutinise on the financial matters of the Barclays Brothers?

Would Rona Fairhead ever green-light an investigative series on the workings of HSBC, a bank that has already proven to be corrupt and a major part of our economy?

The names are inter-changeable, the outcomes similar.

Below is some background to journalists at The Times I published previously here

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