An Israeli who understood the Palestinian problem

The Israeli linguist and scholar, Tanya Reinhart, has died at the age of 62. Ms Reinhart was a former professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University and wrote articles for several Israeli newspapers. She finished her distinguished career as Distinguished Global Professor at New York University.



Her Emeritus Professor when she received her Doctorate of Philosophy from the MIT in 1976 was Noam Chomsky, who remained a close friend and political ally for the rest of her life. He commented, on news of her death that "..she would be remembered not only as a resolute and honorable defender of the rights of Palestinians, but also as one of those who have struggled to defend the moral integrity of her own Israeli society, and its hope for decent survival."

Ms. Reinhart was the subject of much opprobrium in her native Israel for her continued criticism of Israel's retention of the territories occupied in the 1967 war and argued that Israel should abandon the West Bank and Gaza. She said:-

"Israel should withdraw immediately from the territories occupied in 1967. The bulk of Israeli settlers (150,000 of them) are concentrated in the big settlement blocks in the center of the West bank. These areas cannot be evacuated over night. But the rest of the land (about 90%–96% of the West bank and the whole of the Gaza strip) can be evacuated immediately. Many of the residents of the isolated Israeli settlements that are scattered in these areas are speaking openly in the Israeli media about their wish to leave. It is only necessary to offer them reasonable compensation for the property they will be leaving behind. The rest — the hard-core "land redemptions" fanatics — are a negligible minority that will have to accept the will of the majority."

She pointed out that such a settlement would still leave between 6 and 10%, plus Jerusalem, in Israeli hands and these territories should be the subject of serious negotiations.

In 2002, Tanya Reinhart was heavily criticised in Israel for signing a petition which was heavily critical of the Israeli government's Palestinian policies. In the same year she published a book Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948, in which she analyzed what she saw as the breakdown during the preceding three years of constructive engagement over the Palestinian issue and the hardening of the Israeli position.

Tanya Reinhart was only 62 and I think the world has lost an intelligent and compassionate woman, and the state of Israel (though she was resident in America), has lost a genuine patriot, a woman who was not prepared to take a myopic culturally insular view of a complex and difficult problem. She was prepared to take a lot of hostility and criticism in outlining a future in which she believed both Jewish and Palestinian peoples could live side by side within a political framework that was fair and just.

A date which will live in infamy!

Well it could be President Roosevelt declaring his judgment on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it is more immediately relevant to the actions of another US President when on, 20th March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq. Acting in concert with the snivelling, conniving British the Americans engineered a situation whereby war was inevitable regardless of the reports -subsequently proved to be correct- from the United Nations weapons inspections team that no weapons of mass destruction -the so called raison d'etre for the war - existed.

Undaunted by the intelligence reports, America simply manufactured the evidence it needed, a hapless Colin Powell having to pretend that a domestic gas manufacturing plant was a secret weapons manufacturing plant. At this point, simply because the British people wouldn't swallow it and Blair needed to keep his job, the pretence continued that the invasion was all about weapons of mass destruction. Once American troops had more or less combed every square inch of sand so that the excuse no longer stood up, the Americans smoothly changed the plot so that it was always about 'regime change'.

Had the British had that fed to them on day 1, I suspect that would have been the end of our involvement and possibly the end of Blair, had he stuck to his guns and gone ahead.

The 'war' began, you may recall with the obnoxious Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, boasting about his 'shock and awe' tactics when American bombers pounded Baghdad and other key cities causing something like 8,000 innocent civilian deaths as a result of the bombing.



But it was all worth it, said the grinning, laconic Mr.Rumsfeld, because it would bring the Iraqis to their knees in weeks and hasten the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. On May 1st of that year, President Smirking Chimp visited the USS Abraham Lincoln dressed in full combat uniform and announced 'Mission Accomplished' to the cheering hordes of sailors.



Well indeed Saddam had fled and in December of that year, one of Bush's chinless wonders, one Paul Bremer who was supposedly in charge of the provisional government, but who no one in their right mind would trust to run a whelk stall, was able to have his moment in the spotlight with his immortal 'Ladies and Gentlemen! We goddim!' His day in the sun didn't last long and he left Iraq with questions being asked about where $9 billion earmarked for Iraqi rebuilding had disappeared to. The question still hangs in the air!



Well Saddam was indeed in custody so this invasion of a sovereign nation which had constituted no threat to the US or Britain had been successful, had it?

Er..well not exactly. Whatever one might have thought of Saddam's harsh authoritarian rule, extreme Islamic factions had no part in it. Now as a result of the destabilisation and America's total ineptitude at producing a post war plan of consolidation, indigenous Shia and Sunni factions, with help from Iranian and Syrian guerrilas, swept into the vacuum and reduced Iraq to a place where no one was safe to go out on the streets.

So four years on President Chimp chooses to 'celebrate' the war. One might think he would don a niqab and burkha himself and try to slip away anonymously, so crass, evil and inept has been his foreign policy but apparently not.

So far, after four years of dedication in producing chaos out of order, the cost of so doing is approximately as follows:-

The medical journal 'The Lancet' estimates the total number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000

The number of American dead is in excess of 3,000

Contractors and other US Allies dead; over 1000

Journalists and other media: 201.

It would be hard to argue that this carnage had been justified even if Iraq was now a model of western democracy. But its not. In fact its a living nightmare. Bombs are exploding daily. 30 or 40 people a day on average are being murdered. The insurgents are now flooding the country. The newly elected government is riddled with corruption in its army and police....

...and Smirking Chimp is still celebrating the war. Oh admittedly, his jaunty cockiness has gone and American objectives have come down faster than a runaway elevator, but Bush is still trying to sell some kind of success story, rather than the heinous international crime it actually was and for which he and Blair should be facing a War Crimes Tribunal.

Now readers of this blog may think this article is not constructed in the measured, rational and objective prose with which you have become familiar. Well you're goddam right it isn't!

Because this invasion changed my whole perspective on my own national leader, Tony Blair, of the lick spittle wimps who backed him and who prompted me to leave politics altogether. Because British participation in this crime made me sick to my stomach. Bitterly, furiously angry because this is the most heinous foreign expedition the British have been involved in during my long life time. For the rest of my life I will be ashamed, bitterly ashamed, of the British participation in this and, if there is a God, I ask Him to forgive all of us who couldn't do, or didn't do, enough to stop it.

The Witch of World War II

One of those true stories re surfaced today which is in the 'too bizarre even for fiction' bracket as a result of a renewed campaign to pardon a convicted criminal - nay worse - a convicted witch!

Was this back in the days of Cromwell or earlier one might ask? No it was 1944, towards the end of World War II when Helen Duncan became the last person in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft.

Born in Scotland in 1897, Helen Duncan made a part time living as a medium. She earned a reputation of sorts for summoning the spirits of the dead by emitting 'ectoplasm' from her mouth. She had been arrested a number of times for suspected fraud but her fame ( or notoriety) stemmed from one seance she gave in Portsmouth in 1941.





Just prior to the seance, the British battleship H.M.S. Barham had been sunk by German torpedoes with the loss of two thirds of the crew, nearly 900 sailors. The Admiralty realised from intercepting German radio that the enemy did not know they had sunk the ship. So they went to great and elaborate lengths to hide the news of the sinking from everyone, even going to the lengths of sending greeting cards from the dead crew to their wives and families.

Some days later, Helen Duncan gave her seance at which she announced that H.M.S. Barham had been sunk and that she was contacting the spirit of one of the dead sailors. No one knows to this day how Mrs. Duncan obtained this knowledge that the Admiralty had gone to such lengths to keep secret.

She was not arrested immediately but, though its hard to believe, some British intelligence officers believed that Helen Duncan was possessed of some extraordinary power and, when the D-Day landings were planned, British Intelligence remembered the uncanny message 'from beyond the grave' some three years before and had Helen Duncan arrested.

Any charge they could reasonably throw at her would have resulted in a fine and freedom but they were terrified that her 'power' might put the D-Day landings in jeopardy, so they dug out the British Witchcraft Act of 1735 and charged her with sorcery under that Act. Unbelievably ( though probably with connivance) she was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison - thus off the streets of Britain during the lead up to the invasion.

Now her relatives are petitioning Tony Blair in order to get her pardoned and this smear as a witch removed from her record. By all logic and reason it should of course succeed but who knows with this government.

I feel a little better now, knowing that our Intelligence Services were running around only 50 years ago prosecuting witches, for the ritual I always undertake when visiting my Manx homeland. Just outside Douglas, on the way to Castletown, is a little hump backed bridge and when your bus or car goes over it, you have to say 'Good Day to You, Fairies' for if you don't, the Little People will visit you in the night and do you grave harm. Do I repeat this mantra? Well of course I do! No of course I don't believe a word of it but, like the brains of British Intelligence in 1944, better safe than sorry, eh?

The tragic consequences of 'expert' opinion

Sally Clark, the Cheshire solicitor, who was wrongly jailed for life in 1999 for murdering her two children, has died in her sleep at the age of 42. Although there has, as yet, been no coroners inquest, family members have said that, while Mrs. Clark was not known to be suffering from a specific illness, her health was in ruins as a result of the conviction and the traumatic experience she underwent at the hands of British 'justice'.

Her first child, Christopher, was found dead in his cot aged 11 weeks by his mother in 1996 and she discovered her second child, Harry, aged 6 weeks, to be dead in his cot two years later. The second child was found to have a brain inflammation consistent with, paediatricians claimed, severe shaking.

What was NOT said at Mrs. Clark's trial was that there were other circumstances which could have led to the brain deformities and, in fact, Home Office pathologists had found lethal doses of a meningo-coccal type bacteria in the child's system about which the defence team was not informed.

The final nail in Sally Clark's coffin was the testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow who claimed, testifying for the Crown, that the chances of two siblings dying of 'cot death syndrome' were 1 in 73 million. He appears to have plucked that figure out of the air and, given his paediatric stature, the jury believed him. It was the death knell for any chance Sally Clark had of being found innocent.

Later the Royal Statistical Society wrote to the Lord Chancellor asking for any evidence to back Sir Roy's estimate and of course there was none. The figures were off the top of his head.

Poor Sally Clark was jailed for life and I can still recall the face of her husband after the trial was over, a man in shock convinced that the truth would have come out before the jury reached a verdict.

Well th truth DID out, but not before Mrs. Clark had spent three years in prison, abused as a child killer by fellow inmates, having already suffered the tragedy of losing her two children. Sir Roy Meadow was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the medical register but both decisions were overturned on appeal and he is free to continue exercising his 'expert' opinion.

Sally Clark was released from prison in 2003 after all this deception and hypothesis came to light. I remember seeing her standing on the steps of the appeal court with her husband, a young woman of 38 whose hair was prematurely grey, her eyes were sunken and she looked many years older than her age. She was free but her life had been ruined both by tragic personal circumstances and by the British legal system.



Now, four years later, Sally Clark is dead, maybe the last act in a tragedy that should never have happened on such slender circumstantial evidence. I believe the real villain here is the adversarial system of justice which places more emphasis on the prosecution and the defence outwitting one another than it does in getting to the truth of the matter. It is always hoped, in our system of justice, that this adversarial conflict gets to the right result in the end. I have long had my doubts about the wisdom of this assumption and, particularly in child death cases where so much weight is placed on expert testimony and medical probability, it is clearly gravely flawed.

Sally Clark is not the only young woman to have been convicted - and then cleared - of murdering her children based solely on expert evidence which has subsequently proved to be unreliable, but she is perhaps the first to have so clearly and so tragically suffered the ultimate consequences of stress, depression and ill-treatment that such a miscarriage of justice can engender.

Let us hope that this is a wake up call to the legal system and a motivator to ensure that considerable changes are implemented in child death cases before a mother can be sent away for life on the supposition of a so called expert and the vagaries of believing medical probabilities.

A tyrant who continues to sneer at his critics

In 1979, on recognising that white rule in British colonial Africa was doomed to defeat, Britain forced the white ruler of what was then Southern Rhodesia, Ian Smith, to the negotiating table through sanctions and other pressures to concede power to African leaders. Three men, Abel Muzorewa, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were key figures in the power struggle eventually won by Mugabe and his Zanu-PF Party.



In the first free elections in the new country, now called Zimbabwe, Mugabe won by a landslide and was hailed as the new reforming force in the African continent. That day, as the song goes, was the day the music died. Using primarily North Korean Communist troops Mugabe, a member of the Shona tribe, spent the first decade of his heinous rule silencing any opposition from the rival Ndebele people killing an estimated 20,000 of them in that period.

Mugabe has regularly ethnically cleansed his country and accusations of genocide have been rife. One of the fundamental platforms of his policy has to been to remove land ownership from white farmers compulsorily and redistribute it to the Africans, which he has done on the basis of preference for his own supporters. Without any programme of education or gradual assimilation of farming knowledge, the once prosperous farm land of Zimbabwe has become barren , factories have closed down and the country now has the world record level of inflation, running at nearly 2,000% per annum.

Although Zimbabwe has preserved the illusion of a supreme court which makes independent decisions,and has indeed bravely ruled that Mugabe's land grabs are illegal, the Government rides roughshod over these rulings and does what it likes. In 2005, Mugabe instituted a programme of urban clearance, purportedly to drive out drug dealers and illegal markets, but which left thousands of urban poor homeless.

Demonstrations have been staged against the regime but all end in violence, the Government run police cracking down hard on demonstrators. The west has frequently 'expressed its displeasure' at Mugabe's illiberal regime but, as recently as yesterday, the ageing dictator announced that his western critics could 'go hang'.

It does put into perspective though the altruistic claims by western leaders that they have a humanitarian incentive to further 'regime change'. Now there is a regime crying out to be changed if humanitarian considerations were paramount. However its in the heart of Africa, not seen as an area of strategic interest - and of course it has no oil! So sorry Zimbabwe, you'll have to get rid of this obnoxious man all on your own!

Sandbagged by the Olympians!

Damn it, I should have guessed that all this apparent shock and misery in Paris when they 'lost' the 2012 Olympics to London was all a sham. I bet the French paid the judges to award the vote to us. Who on earth would really want to host this giant monkey on the back of every taxpayer, in the face of which governments appear to be hypnotised by the glitz and the glamour so that all common sense accounting flies out of the window?

A mere eighteen months ago we were all told that the cost of the London Olympics was going to be £2.35 BILLION...a mere drop in the ocean if you say it quickly enough..but all justified for the prestige and pride it would bring to England.

Well I had my doubts even then but now Tessa Jowell, our red-hot ace on-the-ball Culture Secretary announced, with some embarrassment, in the House of Commons that the bill was now estimated at nearly £10 BILLION!! A four fold increase in eighteen months? That is ineptitude bordering on the criminal. We are now told that the cost of constructing buildings alone is around £3.5 BILLION - 50% more than the ENTIRE project was costed back in late 2005!! How can this be?



They have now added £2.7 billion in contingency costs - no contingency being included in the original estimate! Why not? Oh and another laughable element omitted from the previous account - £840 million in taxation! Well you'd think the Government would have remembered that of all things!!

Miss Jowell has stated that the Games will 'bring huge financial benefit to the whole country'. I can't see the evidence for that and on the basis of past Games, the host cities have struggled to avoid something close to bankruptcy.

But the prime issue here is the degree of cost escalation. Either the Government lied to everyone about the cost in order to secure the Games or it is financially incapable of running a whelk stall. Either I can believe.

The awful worry of course is that cost estimates have quadrupled in eighteen months when hardly a brick has been laid in preparation. The London Games are 5 years away. What the bloody hell will the cost be by then? I believe the inept and insipid Ms. Jowell should hand the entire financial management of the Olympics to a team of battle hardened financial consultants who have the power to crack the whip and make some hard choices.

And finally if it's seen that the costs are going higher and higher, as I suspect the ceiling has not yet been reached, someone who is tough enough to pull the plug on the whole damn fiasco. There are much better things we could spend ten billion pounds on!

Why keep taking this humiliation?

When I was a young boy at Grammar School, they employed the 'fagging' principle, (No this is nothing to do with homosexuality - at least not overtly) where a first year boy was required to run errands for an older sixth former or prefect. Some perverse British idea about 'character building' and a willingness to recognise one's betters. If you failed in a chore you might be summoned to the prefect's common room, ordered to bend over and be given a boot up the backside for your failure. A humiliating reminder of your humble place in the scheme of things.

Such must be the state of mind in which Tony Blair finds himself at present - and for the forseeable future as long as he remains Prime Minister. Despite - or sadly for him, because of - putting his personal stamp on the programme to replace the Trident nuclear missile, so many of his own M.P.s rebelled against the decision yesterday that the vote was carried only with the support of the Conservative Party. What an abject humiliation for a sitting Prime Minister to rely on the opposition to carry his policies!

Blair must feel he is subject to the metaphorical boot up the arse every time he commits himself to a policy initiative. Everything he does is now openly questioned, frequently condemned and openly derided. The man has lost every ounce of credibility and the sad decline from the hero of Dianagate and 911 is almost pathetic to watch. Why does he continue to do it? His stubborn refusal to resign is handicapping not only the work of government but the future of Labour in power.

Frankly, Blair has asked for every brickbat he has got but my fear is for what remains of the Labour Party. I don't have a lot of time for Gordon Brown but as a politician he is streets ahead of the anaemic Cameron - the souffle in a suit. My fear is that Britain will get a Conservative government at the next election simply because Labour will still be trying to overcome the Blair handicap. Gordon Brown, if he is to be Labour's choice, needs some time to 'bed down' and create his own leadership image before a General Election arrives too late to set his own agenda.

If someone as respected as the much loved former Speaker of the House, Baroness Betty Boothroyd, is prepared to come out publicly and say that Blair's authority is completely shot then, Dear God, surely the man can read the signs himself? He is neck deep in the 'cash for honours' issue, he has been lambasted over the state pension failures, he is deeply wounded by Iraq - Britain's worst foreign policy decision for over 50 years - and much of his Party hates him with a loathing which is visceral.

It is surely time for the Whips to exercise their authority, demand a meeting with Blair and , almost to the sentence, echo Oliver Cromwell's words to Parliament in 1653:-

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"