Harry's Place

Readers following news of the Viva Palestina convoy via its official website must wish they’d volunteered for the trip themselves so positive has the reporting of the progress been. Enthusiastic official welcomes at every town they pass through, ‘good standard’ hotels to stay in and ‘tasty’ food to enjoy have been staples of the journey so far [...]

This is a guest post by habibi
The Charity Commission has finally published the results of its investigation into Interpal’s alleged links with Hamas.
Those links have already prompted Australia, Canada and the US to ban the charity. We should be so lucky. Instead, the Commission offered this gift to Interpal:
The Inquiry could not verify [...]

Michael Totten was with Christopher Hitchens when he was beaten up by thugs of the fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party for defacing one of their neo-swastika posters in Beirut, and he has an account on his website.
“I think a swastika poster is partly fair game and partly an obligation,” Hitchens later told Totten. “You [...]

I’m confused. It seems likely that the next government will be a conservative one. The economy is a disaster area, city centres are shutting down like they are preparing for a zombie holocaust with shambling hordes wandering the aisles of pound shops, and Brown’s Labour government are going to get the blame. They are [...]

The UK Foreign Office has finally got around to suspending Rowan Laxton, the South Asia specialist who was arrested last month for allegedly shouting “f*****g Israelis” and “f*****g Jews” while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza in the gym.
(Hat tip: David All)

Haaretz reports:
The United States will not attend a United Nations conference on racism that critics say will be a forum to criticize Israel, and will no longer participate in planning sessions for it, a senior UN source told Haaretz on Friday.
The conference is a follow-up to the contentious 2001 conference in the South African city [...]

Jack Straw has written about the Labour Party’s excellent civil liberties record since 1997.
Those who cast myself and my colleagues as Orwellian drones engaged in some awful conspiracy planned in Whitehall basements not only overlook all this government’s achievements, they cheapen the important debate about getting the balance right so that a very important freedom, [...]

This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z Word
Yet more evidence of the overlap, when it comes to Israel, between the unreconstructed left and America-first realists comes in the shape of this piece by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation.
Dreyfuss is overjoyed by the appointment of Chas Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence [...]

Guest post by Judeosphere
In October 2004, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a “personal view” by Derek Summerfield, in which he expressed his concern at what he saw as systematic violations of the fourth Geneva Convention by the IDF in Gaza. Summerfield generated considerable controversy when he (falsely) declared: “The Israeli army, with utter impunity, [...]

The Evening Standard has splashed with the story Sir Alan Sugar has been approached by senior members of the Labour Party and asked to run for mayor as a stop Ken Livingstone candidate.
The paper says that the former Amstrad boss and star of the BBC reality TV hit ‘The Apprentice’ has spoken to Ken Clark, [...]