call me ishmael

Sunday 13 October 2024

The Sunday Ishmael: 13/10/2024: The Scottish Edition

Well, I know he was a wee fat fuck, but the way they've been going on about it is downright sizeist. "Huge figure" was quite mild compared with Joanna Cherry's "huge influence" and "he was immensely widely read", while John Swinney, for whom wee fat Alex became Public Enemy Number One, considered him to be: "an enormously significant figure", which is downright rude; going on to describe (his dinners as) "the scale of demands you have to wrestle with as First Minister."

The former Gnasher, but now Toothless, Nicola Sturgeon, described him as an "incredibly significant figure". The Business Secretary, Jonathon Reynolds, said he was "an incredibly big figure", Sir Keir said he was "a monumental figure", whereas Tony Blair didn't go for monumental, sticking with "huge".

But, mrs ishmael, you cry, you are deliberately misinterpreting the encomia heaped upon a skilful and orotund politician by his colleagues who were recognising his magnificent abilities. Oh no, I'm not, I sharply respond - you forget I have qualifications in this sort of thing. If they say 'huge', 'big', 'wide', 'monumental' etc. then that's exactly what they mean. Their subconscious minds, building upon enduring malice, are calling Salmond a fat fuck and they hate him. Why so? Surely not fattyphobia?

Never underestimate the extent to which fattyphobia is a real thing, but, hey, not just that. Salmond's political journey, they say, was from rabble rouser to First Minister. And you can't do that without incurring a lot of enmity. Particularly in his own party, the Scottish National Party. They're a nasty lot, infighting, power-hungry and incompetent. Factions and cliques. Thievery, corruption and, I did mention - incompetence. And then Salmond was a bad man. His own lawyer, Gordon Jackson, was disciplined for comments he was overheard to make about him, following Salmond's acquittal for 13 serious sexual offences, including two attempted rapes. Jackson said: "I don't know much about senior politicians but he was quite an objectionable bully to work with.....I think he was a nasty person to work for...a nightmare to work for." The recording made by an eaves-dropper was unclear, but he was then heard saying: "Inappropriate, stupid...but sexual? Unfortunately [he then names two of the women accusers] say it's sexual." His defence of Salmond during trial was along the lines of he's a bad man but not a rapist. In Jackson's remarks to the jury he admitted that Salmond had sometimes behaved badly, calling him "touchy-feely" with one staff member and said he had what Jackson called "a bit of how's your father" with another - both younger members of his staff, neither of them his wife. In his closing speech Jackson said that the former First Minister "could certainly have been a better man". There was also confirmation that Salmond could bully colleagues and staff. Witnesses called him "extraordinarily pugnacious" and "extremely demanding".

That was in 2020, and basically marked the end of his political reputation and career. Downhill all the way. Russia kindly allowed him to host a chat show on Russian state T.V, he founded his own political party Alba, which had no Members of Parliament, and he ended up in NorthMacedoniaforfuck'ssake, attending a conference at the Forum for Cultural Diplomacy, where he was addressing President Ivanov's Young Leaders Programme participants. He had a heart attack after lunch. Whatever did they give him for lunch that his heart, accustomed to delicacies such as deep-fried Mars Bars, couldn't take?

Back in December, 2012, mr ishmael considered Salmond's likely future, but, prescient as he was, here in his thought-piece he couldn't foresee the depths to which the wee fat fuck would fall:

SCOTLAND, BEST PART OF ENGLAND : ALEC SALMOND TOO FAT TO VOTE IN REFERENDUM.

Salmond is a one-trick pony, as we flounder in ruin, he wants a referendum, a referendum, of course, will divert the stooges in the press, McWhirter and Taylor and all the gabshites on Jock Newsnight, it'll divert them from the grim reality of redundancy and closure and insolvency, of blighted retirements, of futures gutshot by bankers and economists and politicians, like Salmond, and his chums. Every morning the Jock broadsheets opine about what it means to be Scottish, no, really Scottish, what does it really mean? It beats working. And it saves, or has saved, Salmond from figuring out how to re-shape an economy with a dwindling taxbase and a population drinking itself to death, driven into addiction by a national melancholy inspired, craftily, by its rulers.

He came in on a small, ambiguous wave of curiosity but mainly of fatigue with the Lib-Lab shitfest. He might have built on it, learned to do something other than soundbiting, but fat and indolent and self-satisfied, he thought the first hurdle was the last one. The sizzle has gone, now, from his haggis; his neeps and tatties are cold and lumpy and he'll go out on a tide of dissatisfaction with his nineteenth century nationalist tub-thumping and his cynical reforestations of the political landscape with Jam-Tomorrow empty promises. There is unlikely to be a huge Labour revival, nor a LibDem, McHooter-inspired surge but enough, however, are pissed with Salmond to send him to the Holyrood equivalent of the backbenches, soundbiting his fat wee head off. And serve him right.

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Only Geoff Aberdein avoided describing dead Alex in terms of his girth - he said the news that his former mentor had shuffled off his mortal coil in Macedoniaforfuck'ssake was a severe shock and a profound sadness, before succumbing to womanly tears, heaving shoulders and covering his face with his hands. On national television no less. No ullulation, thank god.

stanislav said...

From the Jocksman, one of the many British newspapers driven into the ground by MrJock Neil of the BBC:

"Scotland's McBaath party was celebrating in the streets yesterday after the beheading of it's sworn enemy, Wendy al Halibut, leader of the bin Alexander tribe; haggises were discharged into the air as grown men, sort of, wept for joy, their hands up each others' kilts, tongues down each others throats, in traditional McBaath fashion.

Vengeful, melancholy, embittered morons stormed the message boards of the Jock press, sat at home in their high-rise blocks, in the biggest council estate in England, eating lard pies, swigging Scotsmac and Irn Bru, the mad wee fantasists, probably wearing their skirts and their wee plaid socks, bless, and leapt on any who declined the poisoned Nationalist chalice.

Ranting of the coming one-party McBaath state, these poor semi-literate, peasant tribesmen, the al-See-You-Jimmies, cutting and pasting the Infidels' comments and adding: That's shite that is, you labour twat, - much too dumb to paraphrase or summarise, much less originate - gave a fair impersonation of 1930s Berlin or 1990s Baghdad, heedless that this is what poor Jock - like Fritz and Abdul - always does, follows some Messianic, jumped-up, cheesy sound-biting would-be Princeling into poverty and ignominy and while he often escapes to Europe, Jock doesn't.

Poor Jock cannae see that Kings, Princes and political careerists are just that. It is their own grandeur and conceit which concerns them, their own legacy, which, even should they raze and ruin all about, transcends.

Sitting, though, with his press secretary, Mr Ian Kneepads McWhirter of that ilk, surrounded by a crack regiment of the feared McBaath Revolutionary Guard (Grand Vizier Lady Sir Sean Connery and his Magic Sword, the hermaphrodite ginger singing duo, the al-Proclaimers and Lulu bin Botox ) and toasting events with a chilled glass of his own piss, the McBaath leader, Caliph Sheikh Ali bin Salmond, promised that he would sequester the salary and pension of the late Ms bin Halibut and add it to the three or four he currently received as leader of the Jock Caliphate, from the Infidel Englander taxpayers. As well as the five million dollars from his Local Democracy Secretary, Mr McDonald McTrump. He would do this, give this money to himself, he said, to cheers, for Scotland.

(The daft wee ginger bastards don't see that the bin-Salmond Jock Emirates will be merely a tiny dependent region of the unelected New European Order of Mandelson and Kinnock, Alec a fat, pompous satrap.)

He was now, he thought, smugly, the undisputed leader of the entire Jock Diaspora, which ran through job centres, battered wives refuges, prisons, detoxification units, STD clinics and mortuaries all across the known world. Crack open a barrel of my ain pish, the 2007 vintage, and drink ye yer fill, lads, mak' yourselves worthy of me.

Ye shall be my weapons of mass inebriation, my warriors of idleness. Awa' ye tae Coventry, Birmingham and London, knife folk in the back, head-butt the Infidel when he expects ye not. But dinnae say I told you or we're all fucked.

Sheikh Ali, a pretend economist and a short, balding, oily little chap in built-up shoes had even more reason than usual to be pleased with himself. His octogenarian pretend wife was in a tent at the far side of the camp, tending the camels, McWhirter of The Herald was pleasuring him and he had adoring ginger men in skirts and shiny shoes all around, joyfully complicit in their own great Caravan to Doom.

Alec Akhbar !Alec Akhbar! Alec is Great, went up the cry around the camp as Jock Suicide Drinkers assembled, anxious to enter MacParadise and claim their free seventy-two beating-wives.

Far away, in London, Ali bin Salmond's other sworn enemy, el Sultan al presbyterian Gordon bin Brown was in a most mighty, tumultuous strop, biting other people's fingernails, hurling telephones at his secretaries, dashing every few minutes into the toilet for a fierce bout of dry masturbation, cursing Donald bin Skinflint Dewar and Tony el Miranda Blair with equal venom.

They fucking bastards up there, they'll fucking do for us, they will, give 'em their own fucking bastards' parliament and look how the fucking bastards fucking well behave.

Regime change. That's the fucking answer. Send for the fucking army. Whaddayamean the army's no' fucking here, its stuck up some fucking wog mountainside in the arse-fucking-hole of fucking bastard fucking nowhere, where nobody, nobody, not even the whole bastard Red Fucking Army has ever beaten these beardy fucking wog arse bandits. What's it fucking doing there? What? John fucking Reid sent it there? For a nice, wee rest? The fucking useless, smelly little Weegie gangster, I knew he'd be in on it.

At the Zimbabwe Independent, Yasmin Alibhai Moslem and Jojo Lardboy Hari were quite lost for words. Yabbo hoped that, as Ali bin Salmond's co-religionist, she would be able to make-up some Speaking-as-a-Moslem-woman rubbish in advance of the next Question Time; JoJo took some more drugs, inhaling, he hoped, inspiration and not cancer.

Mr stanislav, the former artisan and now prime ministerial spokesplumber reflected ruefully that, having mentioned brother Mugabe's similarities to Mr Brown, the prime minister, at some length yesterday, he seemed to be getting somewhat out of sync with what passes in Britain for fucking reality and had better have a quick kip in the back of the van before he warped into another dimension, entirely.

June 30, 2008

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For our overseas readers - and, to be frank, everywhere is overseas to me, as I sit at my word processor on an island off the north coast of Scotland - Orkney is the archipelago at the top. Shetland is too far north to include on the map.

To continue - for our overseas readers and those who haven't being paying much attention, and who, indeed can blame you, a short contextual note. Queen Elizabeth I of England died in 1603 and was succeeded by her cousin, King James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth and Mary were both granddaughters of Henry VII of England. Elizabeth arranged for the judicial execution of Mary, fearing Mary had a better claim to the throne than she did. James inherited the thrones of Scotland through his mum and England as Elizabeth's heir. The two countries remained politically separate for a hundred years, until Scotland, in debt after trying to establish a colonial empire in the Americas, sought the assistance of Britain, as a greater marine power, to assist in establishing markets overseas. England agreed to pay Scotland's debts, thus establishing a precedent that persists to the present day and will stretch into the future, providing an annual block grant that has allowed Scotland to be "a socially progressive" country - the Scots don't pay for prescriptions, nor University tuition fees, unlike the English, for example. In 1707 England and Scotland united as “Great Britain” under Queen Anne and both countries’ parliaments passed the Acts of Union to become one nation. This worked quite well for sensible people for a long time, although there was always an independence movement amongst the tartan romantics, a movement that led to a majority of Scots voting for devolution in a referendum in 1997. The UK Parliament passed the Scotland Act in 1998 which established the Scottish Parliament which opened in 1999. This was accomplished under former Prime Minister Tony (a Scottish lad) Blair's Labour government. A Downing Street source once said: "The PM has always supported devolution, but Tony Blair failed to foresee the rise of separatists in Scotland." Labour thought that devolution would "kill nationalism stone dead". The fact that it didn't was largely down to the efforts of wee fat Alex, who persuaded the Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, to agree to a legally binding referendum on whether Scotland should be an independent country. Cameron thought the result would be a resounding No - but, in this as in so much else, he was disastrously wrong, confusing his own thoughts, feelings and class interests with the majority view of the population. The 2012 referendum very nearly ended the Union, again down to wee fat Alex' efforts - the referendum resulted in a 55% vote to stay in the Union, versus 45% to leave. A very close call - but Alex took it as a personal failure, resigning the next day, in favour of his appointed successor, the former Gnasher, now Toothless, Sturgeon. He shouldna ha'e done it, as Sturgeon, her husband Peter Merrill, and current First Minister, John Swinney, made damn sure that Alex's political career in the SNP was a thing of the past. Merrill is still on bail in connection with criminal charges regarding a large sum of money missing from SNP funds and the purchase of a luxury motor home. Apparently, further charges are under Police Scotland's investigation.

How are the mighty fallen - from very almost nearly negotiating the end of Great Britain to dying of a heart attack in an obscure Balkan country after lunch.

Defence News

I previously reported that the British Royal Navy was coming to our rescue in Orkney - there was another localised broadband outage last week - but, hey - even better news -we're getting NATO! From tomorrow 35 aircraft, 2000 armed forces personnel and 13 vessels, including frigates, destroyers, tankers and submarines, led by HMS Prince of Wales, will be deploying around Orkney and through the Pentland Firth. I'll try and get you some photos.

Film Review

Staying with Scottish stuff, The Outrun is showing in cinemas. The title refers to a very local usage: the outrun is a stretch of coastland at the top of the protagonist's family farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by the wind and sea spray year-round. I read the book when it was popular a few years back - just because it was set in Orkney. It's a memoir, introspective, rambling and self-indulgent, with some interesting bits about Orkney folk-lore, wild life and wild swimming. I wondered how it could possibly be made into a film - just a lot of staring moodily out to sea with a voice over? It was made into a film by leaving out all the interesting bits, inserting a soundtrack of incredibly loud, incredibly nasty, music and lots and lots of bad weather, doubtless a metaphor for the protagonist's emotional climate.

The review website, Rotten Tomatoes summarises: "Benefiting from Saoirse Ronan's deeply committed performance in the central role, The Outrun proves a moving portrait of addiction in spite of its somewhat shapeless narrative". I was hugely disappointed by The Outrun - it not only made Orkney look bleak and poor, but the message was bleak. The friend I saw it with thought that there was a hopeful ending – but I just saw Rona becoming her mentally ill father, welcoming and conducting the storm and gale force waves, during a brief period of sobriety. All the things that made the book charming – the bits of myth and folklore, the descriptions of wild swimming and the countryside, were downplayed and the film focused on Rona's alcoholism, self-destruction and tentative recovery journey through Alcoholics Anonymous. It played to packed houses in Kirkwall – but that was because audiences wanted to see scenes of Orkney and recognise friends who were extras. I wouldn't recommend it, but make your own mind up. It won't do Orkney's tourist industry any favours.

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If the essays by mr ishmael and stanislav included in today's post have reminded you how great a writer and satirist mr ishmael was, there are four splendid anthologies of his writings compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.
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And before you go, you should check this out:

SpaceX's Starship has completed its fifth test flight, as Elon Musk pursues his plan to take astronauts to the Moon – maybe even to Mars. During this flight, when the booster returned to the Indian Ocean, it slowed itself down and was gently received on its launchpad by a pair of giant mechanical arms – in the "chopsticks manoeuvre".

It is a truly amazing, hair-raising moment. Thanks to editor mr verge for sourcing it.

Sunday 6 October 2024

The Sunday Ishmael: 06/10/2024

Oh joy, oh bliss - an excuse to run Boris and Laura on a bench again. Although Boris should be haranguing Laura, as the silly girl copied him into the list of questions she was going to ask him in an interview scheduled for Thursday, so the programme was pulled and he missed the opportunity of plugging his new book:

So it is left to Amber Rudd, former Home Secretary, to do it for him. Rudd, famous for saying that Boris was the life and soul of parties, but not safe in taxis, said his new book is more like the Beano comic than a serious book (good to know that Conservative Home Secretaries read The Beano). Writing in The Independent, she also

said that the book is the product of his "split personality" and reads like "Billy Bunter let loose in Westminster with its endless whooses and biffs and sockeroos."

Honestly, these Tories, what are they like? She's definitely sold me on the book, though I'll have to wait until the library gets it in, on account of times are hard, what with no Winter Fuel Allowance.

Talking of Laura Kuenssberg, who fronts the BBC's Sunday morning anti-Israeli show; she was in prime snarling mode today, interrogating the Israeli Ambassador to Britain.

Tzipi Hotovely, the Ambassador, was clearly astonished by the savagery with which Laura interrupted her, refusing to let her set out Israel's case for defending itself against its enemies. She expected better from a Western ally on the anniversary of the atrocity of October 7th 2023. The terrorist organisation Hamas, ably supported by the "innocent" civilian population of Gaza, some on foot, some on motorbikes, invaded Israel in an unprovoked attack, torturing, mutilating, raping and murdering Israeli men, women, children and babies, before abducting 170 citizens to hold as hostages (not sausages, Sir Keir) in the tunnels underneath Gaza; that is to be forgotten, now that a year has passed, and Israeli's retaliation and attempts to free the hostages and reduce Hamas' weaponry, soldiery and command structure to render Hamas incapable of further atrocities is now to be regarded as genocidal war crimes. Really? Really?

And the terrorist organisation Hezbollah joining in, supporting Hamas, firing rockets into Israel from Lebanon daily, from the 8th October 2023, that's a year ago, is to be seen as a legitimate resistance movement - you know, like the French Resistance against Nazi Occupation of France; and Israel's defence against the barrage (and the fun with the pagers and walkie talkies, the assassination of Hezbollah leaders and the blowing up of weapons dumps cached in schools and hospitals) is to be seen as disproportionate. Really? Really?

Laura's panel comprised Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, who has been to Gaza and was upset by the disproportionately ruined buildings, Zarah Sultana, an MP currently suspended from the Labour Party for her disproportionately appalling pro-Palestinian views, and Malcolm Rifkind, a former foreign secretary. There was also a brief guest appearance by Masoumeh Ebtekar, former Vice President in the Iranian Cabinet.

Jolly-looking Masoumeh turned out to be so controversial she was cut off just before she began slavering at the mouth. She'd just got done telling us that the Middle East was a place of Peace and Plenty until 1948 when billions of thousands of Palestinians were displaced to make room for .... when the BBC lost the line.

Says something about that line-up that Shouty Rifkind sounded like the voice of measured civilisation amidst the rabble. Remember Shouty, he of the Deep Brown Voice? He used to be a Conservative politician. Scottish chap. Foreign Secretary under John Major. Fancied himself as a bit of a Middle East expert. He committed the British Government, for the first time, to a Palestinian State on the West Bank and in Gaza and called for a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to enable dialogue to take place, at the regional level between Israel and its Arab neighbours as well as between Iran and the Arab world. That didn't turn out too well. He was turfed out of his Scottish seat - like the other Scottish Tories by the SNP, but secured the continuation of his Parliamentary career in the 2005 election when he was returned as the MP for Kensington and Chelsea, down London. He even fancied himself as leader of the Conservative Party, but then, don't they all?

He ended his career as Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2015, following a cash for access stunt set up by Channel 4 Dispatches and Daily Telegraph journalists. He made some rather elitist tone-deaf comments, arousing the ire of not just the nation, but his own Tory colleagues, who fumed over his remarks that as an MP he had plenty of free time and that he was “entitled” to earn more than £67,000. Then there were the run of the mill expenses scandals. mr ishmael had a few remarks about that:

Malcolm Shouty, too, he and his wife's misuse of MPs' expenses should have seen him thrown-out on his arse and kicked up and down the Mall

Taxi? To the corner shop?
Yes, dear, the voters'll pay,
'swhat they're for

but no, to compensate him for his embarrassment, they put a crook, a noisy, bullying blackguard, in charge of overseeing national security matters, so that he might sell them on to the highest bidders.

"Conservative Malcolm Rifkind got 3,066 pounds ($4,800) last year for flights to his home in Scotland -- though he represents a district three subway stops from the Parliament in London.
“It’s amazing some of the things they’ve given themselves over the years,” said Andrew Rawnsley, author of “Servants of the People,” a history of Tony Blair’s government. “Why on earth would you need to visit Scotland in order to represent people in London? It’s all within the rules, but it all repels voters.”
"Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Tory Cabinet minister, raised eyebrows by claiming £499 for three trips by his wife. His constituency is Kensington and Chelsea, three miles from London”

from The Motley Fool blog

Old ShoutyGob Rifkind, briefly foreign seckatry, enjoys, too, in these troubled times, a rebirthing, shouting about Iran, Syria, China and of course Europe. A CallHimDave loyalist, maybe hoping for office, hoping for an Indian Summer of bullying and fiddling and all the vices his skill set lends him to, the horrible fucking bent Anglo-Jock bastard hedges his bets on Europe, Well, I'm not persuaded of this and I'm not persuaded of that, he shouts to a dwindling Newsnight audience and to the bombastic Jocky Neil on his many platforms.

But he must be rehabilitated now, as he was wheeled in as the Middle East expert on the Sunday Laura show today. And he does seem to have dialled down the Shoutiness - and actually seemed to have a grasp on the Iran problem.

Anyway, we'll find out over the next week or so if we're in for a nuclear war.

Orkney News

To matters more local - well, local to me, anyway. The University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute has reported on its study of anonymised genetic information from more than 44,000 people across 20 regions in Britain, based on data from the UK BioBank and Viking Genes studies. The most genetically distinct populations were found in Shetland and Orkney, where some disease-causing variants were over 100 times more common than elsewhere in Britain. A pocket of genetic susceptibility in Orkney and Shetland, in consequence of an isolated population and limited gene pool, has caused the population to be at six times the risk of Bardet-Biedl syndrome. This can cause obesity, vision loss and the growth of additional fingers and toes. That explains a lot. Remember mr ishmael's description of nurses, big, like elephants, thundering through the wards?

The charity, Wild Fish, has published a report stating that Orkney salmon farmers pose a major risk to wild fish in Scottish waters. A model of tides was used to simulate dispersion of sea lice. The press release stated: "The findings of this report underline the need for fishery boards to apply real pressure on the salmon farming industry in the Northern Isles, Orkney in particular, to maintain on-farm sea lice within strict minimal limits. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency(should) expand its sea lice regulatory framework to farms in the Northern Isles which are currently exempt from the regulation in order to protect both salmon and sea trout.

I've warned you before about lice-ridden farmed salmon and the over-crowded conditions. Don't believe any of the marketing hype about cold crystal clear waters, strong tides and lean, healthy salmon. Shortly after we came to Orkney, there was a warning on Radio Orkney, following a storm that had breached the sea pens and released salmon. Not fit for human consumption, the warning said. Just leave them where they've washed up on the shore.

So what was the response of the Orkney salmon farming industry? A spokesman said: "we strongly question the credibility of any reports commissioned and paid for by the charity Wild Fish."

To end on a happier note -here's some photos of autumnal Orkney:

Anagram Corner, answer - Kemi Badenoch

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Sunday 29 September 2024

The Sunday Ishmael: 29/09/2024: The Middle East Edition

Here, at Ishmael House, the giggling couldn't be suppressed when Radio 4 announced, with lugubrious solemnity, that the pagers belonging to the leaders of a terrorist organisation had exploded simultaneously. This was up there with Castro's poisoned beard or exploding cigar, definitely a product of the Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And how perfect a strategy - Israel couldn't be accused of targeting innocent civilian populations or infrastructure, as only declared enemy personnel had their heads or hands blown off by their pagers, or, better still, testicles, if the pagers were carried in pockets. Result! No more fathering of 40 sons apiece. Hezbollah had only resorted to the old fashioned pager method of communication as they feared mobile phones were susceptible to interception and were a location device. I mean, they doubtless muttered to each other, in a beardy sort of way, pagers! What could possibly go wrong?

What a master stroke! The planning it took to put an exploding pager into the hands of enemy terrorist commanders! Synchronised pager explosions! And Hezbollah paid for them! But the cream of the jest was that when they switched to walkie talkies to communicate their war strategies, they exploded, too! What next? Ah, effendi, I will just write down the battle plan - then, whoops! Synchronised Exploding Fountain Pens. Actually, no, they haven't done that. Yet.

And as Hezbollah continued to rain down fairly ineffectual rockets upon Israeli territory, they found that their own weapons caches they'd carefully hidden in schools and hospitals were also blown up in frighteningly accurate strikes. Of course they complained to the media and anyone else who would listen that Israel was targeting schools and hospitals to kill innocent civilians (are there any? Aren't they all complicit, just as the German population knew damn fine what the Holocaust was up to?), but the clue was in the series of secondary explosions after the bombs fell, as the cached weapons all went off. Saw it on the telly.

And then, the coup de grâce - or should it be coup de guerre? On Friday, as Benjamin Netanyahu told it as it is to the United Nations,

spitting his defiance and confounding the appeasers, Israeli fighter jets struck the underground base of that dreadful old man, Hassan Nasrallah, who has been the leader of the terrorist organisation for more than 30 years. Nasrallah is now a supreme, sacred and dearest martyr, along with most of Hezbollah's senior commanders - all martyrs, the lot of them. Straight to Paradise.

Nasrallah referred to Israel as "the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs – the Zionist Jews" and condemned them as "the murderers of the prophets." He called the attacks of Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, a heroic operation, and justified Hezbollah's missile and drone attacks against northern Israel, which began immediately after October 7, as being carried out in solidarity with the Palestinians. You can't keep insulting people and attempting to bomb them off the face of the earth without expecting them to retaliate.

Netanyahu has a different view of this "heroic operation". As he told the United Nations on Friday: "October 7th. Thousands of Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists from Gaza burst into Israel in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, and they committed unimaginable atrocities. They savagely murdered 1,200 people. They raped and mutilated women. They beheaded men. They burned babies alive. They burned entire families alive—babies, children, parents, grandparents, in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust." Oh yes - that would be the Nazi Holocaust that Nasrallah says either didn't happen or was wildly exaggerated by Jews.

Seems fairly clear-cut to me - terrorist organisations backed by foreign states invade your country, murdering, raping, abducting etc, so you fight back, to prevent said terrorist organisations doing it again. If it is Ukraine invaded by Russia, the Western World goes boo, boo, have some weapons, we'll train your soldiers, sanction the invader, engage in secretive supportive ops. If it is Israel, subject to a long war since the end of the Second World War, a war designed to eradicate Israel, then the Western World is strangely ambivalent. Says its complicated.

Thank god for Kemi Badenoch. I'm a convert. If she gets the Tory Party's Leadership gig, then I might just think about voting Conservative. Might. After all, Sir Keir and his crew of "lads", however nicely dressed they are, really are just beyond, beyond. Like Rosie Duffield said, as she flounced out of the Party, sleaze, corruption, freebies and being nasty to pensioners are the New Normal.

Here's Rosie. The little guy in the corner is Pat Bosco McFadden - he's not aged well - only 59 and he looks like a judgemental old tortoise who has smelt something nasty. On the Laura Kuenssberg show today, he was forced to listen in trap-jawed disbelief while Rosie slagged off his boss. McFadden is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an archaic, anachronistic role - the Chancellor is the highest ranking minister in the Cabinet, next to Keir. Basically it is a sinecure, the appointee being a creation of the Prime Minister, creating an additional minister without portfolio. His unenviable job this morning was to respond to Rosie's accusations of the rot within the highest echelons of the Party and that Sir Keir has surrounded himself with a group of lads - sounds fairly menacing - do they have motorbikes and leather jackets? Pat Bosco said, entirely convincingly, that he is too old to be one of the lads, and less convincingly, that Sir Keir shouldn't have to buy his own clothes during an election campaign as he has to look his best. Or some such bollocks. The David Lammy line. Representing Britain. Don't want him to turn up to international events looking like Jeremy Corbyn.

Back to my new hero, Kemi Badenoch. Asked on Sky News' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips what she would be saying to Israel if she were Tory leader, Ms Badenoch said: 'I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary. Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah as they did will create more peace in the Middle East.'

She was similarly forthright on the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg vehicle. But Laura was determined to drive her into admissions that Kemi was equally determined not to make. The BBC political line might have something to do with the new chair, Dr Samir Shah, who replaced the allegedly disgraced former chair, Richard Sharp, over some allegedly sharp practice relating to an £800,000 loan to the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Dr. Shah is a race relations expert, born in India, a former adherent of Jainism and a convert to Islam. Just saying.

Kemi was grilled about an article she wrote for the Sunday Telegraph, in which she said that: " not all cultures in the UK are “equally valid”. When asked What Cultures, she responded those cultures that endorse child marriage, where when you knock on the door the wife says she can't talk to you, she'll have to get her husband. Kemi doesn't like migrant groups importing their disputes from their countries of origin and playing them out on the streets of Britain. She said:
“One of the things that I found most upsetting after October 7 was watching people ripping down posters of missing kidnapped children from walls and lampposts in London. We’ve never seen that here before. I think that that is beyond the pale.”

She explained the difference between multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, a concept that Laura found tricky until Kemi explained that Britain is multi-ethnic - she's black, Laura is white, but that there should be one culture, that migrants should come to Britain because they want to live here and share the culture of Britain. We're really not good at that - in fact the liberal left actively opposed assimilation into a host culture, preferring to embrace and give validity to all cultures - even when they are rubbish, cruel, and violent cultures. They promoted multi-culturism because, I think, they are ashamed of our own culture and history. By contrast, the US, which has at least as much to be ashamed of in its own history, is really good at forging a national identity amongst its immigrants and children - from sea to shining sea.
“I know what you’re trying to do, Laura. You want me to say Muslims when it isn’t all Muslims, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play this game. I should be able to say that I have made an observation without you trying to portray it as me attacking a particular group.”

Kuenssberg then hit back: “Kemi Badenoch, I am not trying to portray it in any way. I am asking you on what evidence do you base this claim. Who are you talking about?”

“I have answered the question multiple times, but I know what you are trying to get me to say, and I’m challenging you that we need to be able to have these conversations without being scared, without running away.”

So - my new hero. Kemi Badenoch for Conservative Party Leader. Straight talking. Willing to offend the Liberal Left and the Race Relations industry. Hell - Kemi Badenoch for god. That'll do.

In other news........

Michael Spit Gove has been appointed Editor of the Spectator, a role he has coveted since a wee boy of 7 in an Aberdeen school.

Private Eye broke the news of Mohammed Fayed treating Harrod's as his personal brothel back in issue 951, 29th May 1998. That's 26 years ago. This stuff has been known about for 26 years - but its only after the long reach of his wealth, power and position has been shortened by death that mainstream media are reporting it and it is being investigated. Maybe he can't be touched - well, he can't, but his employees who enabled him and pimped for him certainly can be. The Justice for Harrods Survivors group said they have reported Dr Ann Coxon, the doctor who conducted invasive sexual health checks on Fayed's young female employees, who still has a licence to practice and operates out of her Harley Street clinic, to the General Medical Council (GMC).

And what about all those security staff who procured for Fayed? Any still around? I was just carrying out orders?

Here's some of the Private Eye article from 26 years ago:

"In October 1993 he (Fayed) took four of them (secretaries) to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's villa, gave them £100 each and demanded 'who is going to sleep with me tonight?'........Many other young women - all young and attractive, most of them blonde - have been 'received for interview' at Park Lane. The visitors usually remain closeted away with Fayed for about two hours, after which, if the pharaoh is in a generous mood, security staff are instructed to hand them bundles of money."

There's a thing called a liquid Brazilian Butt Lift. Honest, Not Invent.
Alice Webb was taken to Gloucestershire Royal hospital on Monday (23 September) after becoming unwell; she died the following morning. According to the Gloucestershire police, she had undergone a “suspected cosmetic procedure” before becoming ill. A quickly deleted fundraising campaign to raise money for Webb’s family stated that she had undergone a non-surgical BBL, which sees fat or dermal filler injected into the buttocks with the aim of adding volume and creating a lifted effect.

Anagram Corner, curtesy of editor mr. verge:-

Bi-dame? Heck, no!