Iraq – Delingpole World

We Need to Drain the Swamp That Spawns Scumbags Like Lawyer Phil Shiner

We don’t have capital punishment in Britain anymore but if we did, the disgraced “human rights” lawyer Phil Shiner would make a prime candidate for the drop.

Not only has this streak of slime betrayed his country for money but he has exposed the lives of everyone in it to needlessly increased danger. In my view, this makes him a traitor.

Shiner – to recap – is the self-proclaimed crusading “socialist” lawyer whose now-happily-defunct firm Public Interest Lawyers made millions of pounds pursuing largely vexatious cases against blameless members of the British armed forces for imaginary war crimes they had supposedly committed in Iraq. He has just, rightly, been struck off the solicitors’ register.

He brought needless misery to the lives of hundreds of servicemen whose reward for risking their lives for their country was to have their names dragged through the mud by this grasping charlatan.

He squandered many millions of pounds of taxpayer money, enriching himself at public expense – yet affecting to own the moral high ground.

Perhaps worst of all, he has imperilled the lives of everyone in Britain – both civilian and military – by promulgating a myth which will have been seized with rapture as both propaganda coup and casus belli by our many enemies in the Muslim world: that the British army behaved like barbarians during the Iraq war.

In February 2008, Shiner enjoyed what he probably thought at the time was his finest hour, when he held a press conference to accuse the British military of war crimes in Iraq, during which it had allegedly killed and mutilated innocent civilians during the 2004 Battle of Danny Boy. These claims were repeated by the BBC on a Panorama investigation.

But these claims, a subsequent inquiry established – at a cost to the UK taxpayer of £30 million – were utter rubbish.

What had actually happened was that British units had been ambushed by fanatical Shiite Iraqi insurgents from the Mahdi army and fought back so heroically – one soldier was awarded an MC – and effectively, often at bayonet point, that 28 Iraqis were killed with no British lives lost.

That’s when the vultures moved in, in the form of Phil Shiner’s grotesquely misnamed Public Interest Lawyers. They sent out scouts to Iraq looking for victims who wanted to claim compensation for the suffering they had experienced at the hands of the British. To no one’s astonishment, lots of Iraqis were prepared to swear in the infidel court – in return for the prospect of wheelbarrows of free money – that they had indeed been horribly abused.

Even at the time it was obvious to half of Britain that Phil Shiner was a grasping, sanctimonious, treacherous scumbag of the lowest order.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Gaia Beats Mars: How Our Military Are Being Turned into Green Eco-Wussies

Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Islamic State earns about $500 million a year from its oil revenues. But according to former CIA director Mike Morrell, US fighter aircraft have been ordered not to bomb their oil wells in case they cause “environmental damage.”

Yes. That makes sense. Clearly one of the main priorities in any war of attrition should be to do everything possible to protect your enemies’ lives, wellbeing and resources.

Some might argue that a merciless death cult which now controls swathes of Iraq and Syria and a population of around 10 million, which makes $2 billion a year from oil and extortion, which rapes and enslaves girls as young as eight, tortures and kills prisoners, chucks gay men off buildings, and is committed to the destruction of Western civilisation, ought not to be treated with kid gloves.

But wiser souls in the Obama administration and at higher levels of the US military have clearly taken a more enlightened, eco-sensitive position: yes, Islamic State may behave inappropriately on occasion, but that is definitely no excuse to engage in tactical bombing operations which may cause serious damage to infrastructure, make the sand in the area all oily and black and sticky for miles around, and release into the atmosphere particles which not only could give nearby jihadis asthma attacks but could also drastically increase the Syria region’s carbon footprint, possibly causing global warming to increase by 0.0000000000000000000000001 degree c by the end of the century.

If only the Allies had applied a similarly enlightened policy in World War II we’d all be in a much better place I’m sure.

It would have meant, for example, that there would have been no environmentally insensitive bombing of oil refineries like the ones in Romania. Some Germans – including fighter ace Adolf Galland; head of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring; and armaments minister Albert Speer – believed that without the Oil Campaign Hitler might have won.

But in environmental terms, perhaps a Nazi victory would have been for the best. Apart from modern day California, Nazi Germany was almost certainly the most eco-friendly state on earth: the first to ban smoking on public transport; the first to take animal rights seriously (Göring once threatened to send people found guilty of animal experimentation to the death camps); the first to pass national environmental laws; the first to champion organic food and vegetarianism.

Nazi Germans also put a great deal of thought about what to do with the population problem – and, at Wannsee, how to solve it. They really cared about open spaces and overcrowding (Lebensraum).

And they weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouth was, either: if the Germans had won the war, you can bet your bottom Reichsmark that there would be no pussy-footing around at next week’s Paris eco-summit. It would be a case of reduce your carbon emissions, schnell – or off to the death camps.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Dear Philip Hammond, What Exactly Is a ‘Moderate Jihadist’?

What exactly is a “moderate jihadist”?

Is it someone who tweets photographs of severed heads but fights shy of getting his hands bloody? Someone who inclines towards enslaving captured women and children rather than burying them alive? One who only executes Yazidis but not Christians?

Whatever, we can probably agree that UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond made a serious error when applying that unfortunate phrase on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning to members of the organisation – Islamic State – which had just murdered, in cold blood, an American journalist.

Yes it was probably a misspeak. But it’s not the kind of mistake you can ever imagine being made by a more competent, higher-calibre, more quick-witted MP, like, say, the man who would have made an infinitely superior Foreign Secretary but who is currently languishing as Chief Whip – Michael Gove.

How did it happen? Well I’m guessing that David Cameron’s MPs have had it drummed into them till their ears bleed that they are always and forever and at every possible opportunity to stress the vast gulf that exists between “moderate” Islam and “extremist” Islam.

Moderate Islam, as we know, having been repeatedly told so by the likes of the Prince of Wales, the BBC, the Guardian and most MPs, is an adorable heartwarming thing with the most marvellous tradition of hospitality, and a very real sense of the numinous, and an admirable dedication to charity, exquisitely woven carpets, sweet hot tea poured with great dexterity from a high-up tea pot into a tiny glass, and a religion of peace which has always afforded great hospitality to Christians and Jews, why just look at Granada, and you do realise that it was those splendid Muslim scholars, don’t you, who kept the intellectual traditions of classicism alive through the Dark Ages, etc.

Extremist Islam, meanwhile, is horrid, just horrid. But it’s all right because it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Religion of Peace (TM) in its pure and original Koranic form, and all true Muslims shun and revile it because they recognise it as a perversion of their kindly, gentle faith.

That’ll be why, whenever a new atrocity is committed in the name of the Religion of Peace, the moderate Muslim communities of Bradford, Luton, and Birmingham always rise as one to condemn it in the strongest possible terms. No, wait…

An optimistic analysis of current events in Northern Iraq would be that the horror of what the (not actually moderate) jihadists of the Islamic State are doing will finally be enough to concentrate the minds of our complacent political class and force them to confront both the enemy without and the enemy within.
Read the rest at Breitbart London

Never Mind Gaza: What about the Yezidis?

There was one part of Baroness Warsi’s resignation letter I admired: that was when, just after she’d condemned the Coalition’s inaction over Gaza, she brought the full weight of her righteous indignation to bear on Britain’s abject failure to stop the Yezidis being massacred in Iraq.

No not really. a) the Yezidis aren’t being killed by Jews, but rather by Muslims, which I guess doesn’t make it such a big deal and b) I doubt Baroness Warsi has even heard of the Yezidis.

But then, to be fair, few people had until their bodies started being posted up in pictures on Twitter, often minus their heads, and with grinning ISIS jihadis posing behind them.

If you want to know more about the Yezidis (or Yazidis, as they are also spelt), then this excellent piece by Sean Thomas is a good place to start.

Read the full article at Breitbart London

Tag: Iraq