The Barbaric Americans

EDITORIAL - ESA No 39, March/April 2012

Our hearts went out to 65 year old Christopher Tappin after losing his two year battle against extradition to the United States for selling batteries to Iran.

Any trial there will prove unfair as Mr Tappin’s UK witnesses will not travel to the United States (due to the enormous travel and accommodation costs) and where video questioning is not permitted under US law. The prosecution counsel will have free reign with full government backing. This will be a political trial ... a political show trial, no less. As rigged as any Stalinist show trial of the 1930s Soviet Union.

This softly spoken gentle man has borne his predicament with dignity and charm. How will this Englishman cope in a land where good manners are unheard of and everything is determined by how many dollars you have in the bank?

Mr Tappin told the press, when leaving at Heathrow, that he felt David Cameron had let him down, which is a typical English understatement for downright betrayal, the betrayal of a mild-mannered businessman doing his job. This government betrayed us all by not keeping to a promise to review and amend the extradition arrangements with America. Mr Tappin was waiting for this patiently but nothing transpired.

The batteries were for missiles. If he had sold them to Israel, perhaps the most aggressive nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, all those respected members of the Conservative Friends of Israel would be nominating him for a position on the next Honours List. Our Foreign Secretary, William Hague, is a senior member of the Conservative Friends of Israel and it shows wherever he goes. He was there prompting and giving aid to the illegal opposition to Colonel Gaddafi and now he is clamouring for more support for the Israeli-backed opposition to President Assad of Syria. He is doing the bidding of Israel every minute of his waking life. It shows every time that flat monotone voice of his struggles to justify the position of the Foreign Office on its Middle East policy.

Now Christopher Tappin must be thrown to the wolves even though he has been caring for his wife who has Churg-Strauss Syndrome. This caring man is being torn away from a woman who is dependent on her husband. That alone should be grounds for preventing his extradition ... compassionate grounds that would otherwise enable an illegal immigrant to be granted full citizenship here with all the perks. The European Court of Human Rights would have had something to say about it all ... but this does not concern human rights at all. It concerns America’s interests and those interests alone.

A once great Britain has to bow down to the American barbarians and give up a human sacrifice on the bloody altar of America’s imperialistic war against the Muslim world. They want to show that they really do rule the world and will come down like a ton of bricks on any decent Englishman trying to earn a crust by selling a few batteries to America’s enemies.

We should end all extradition treaties with the United States followed by a disbanding of NATO. Certainly, we should cease to be part of any military coalition anywhere in the world. This country should concern itself with British and European laws, British and European economic interests and British and European global interests ... not doing the bidding of the world’s only super power in league with Israel which has nothing to do with Britain’s interests whatsoever.

You begin to wonder just how far Israel is involved in all the upheavals today, instigated by dark forces.

The United States is now saying they do not believe Iran is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. George W. Bush tried to tell us Saddam Hussein (a former US ally) had weapons of mass destruction which turned out be entirely false. They want Israel to tone down all its clamouring for war against what were once upon a time, the Persians.

Religious Jews celebrate a festival called Purim every year which involves taking enormous pleasure from the historical massacre of a very large number of Persians ... men, women and children ... in the most appalling manner.

The Iranians are latter-day Persians and their Biblical foe. Bear that in mind when you try to fathom why the Israelis go on about bombing Iran.

Zionism is an essentially secular political creed but they are not above using religious myth in pursuit of Israeli expansionism. This is the hypocrisy of Zionism ... secularism  invoking the promises of a Jewish god. Yes, a god in which they do not believe. Only a certain kind of mindset can juggle with such contradictions.

Our position on Christopher Tappin is, therefore, quite clear. There should be no extradition treaties with the United States whereby our citizens, entitled to the protection of the British government, have their lives destroyed, along with those of their immediate families, in the pursuit of American foreign policy.

There are only British interests in this country. It is the business of British government to protect those interests and to protect all our citizens here in Britain.

To paraphrase the Book of Common Prayer, “the President of the United States hath no jurisdiction in this Realm”. In the original BCP, the reference is made to the Bishop of Rome (the Pope). It is still used in our English churches today.

That is what being British really means; protecting our civil liberties to the death. The barbaric ’Merkans have different ways which we do not like at all. Their prisons are some of the worst in the world where every kind of vice and corruption reigns. Christopher Tappin should never be in one. Instead, he deserves to be treated humanely and decently.

Stop the Badger Cull

The scapegoat

by Scott Ullah

(European Socialist Action No 38   Jan/Feb 2012)

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman wants badger culling trials to begin this year. She claims the evidence shows that the eradication of bovine TB depends on tackling the disease in badgers. “We can’t escape the fact that the evidence supports the case for the controlled reduction of the badger population in the areas affected by bovine TB”, she said.

Plans for a legal challenge have since been announced with the Mammal Society saying the government has based its culling on flawed science. Another animal welfare organisation, the Humane Society International UK, had its representative, Mark Jones, attacking the proposed culling trials by saying the scientific evidence demonstrates it will be ineffective and damaging to the local populations ... and cruel.

The Humane Society International UK also challenges the government proposals by claiming they breach an international convention on wildlife conservation.

So let us look at the scientific evidence.

The badgers are the victims in all this and not the cause of bovine TB spreading among the cattle population in Britain, scientists have confirmed.

After the savage losses of cattle to foot and mouth, farms were restocked with cattle with the old regulations relaxed; the cattle being moved around the country causing outbreaks of bovine TB where it previously did not exist.

Infection resulted from these movements and not from the badgers. It has been pointed out that cattle are free of the disease in Scotland with a healthy badger population thriving there, whereas on the Isle of Man bovine TB exists without a badger population.

In his book Badger Behaviour, Conservation and Rehabilitation: 70 Years of Getting to Know Badgers, George Pearce informs us that his family farm was bovine TB-free from 1950 to 2008 ... while enjoying the existence of badger setts on his land. He believes the current problem has more to do with cattle alone and nothing to do with the persecuted badgers.

This is what the experienced farmer, George Pearce, proposes:

Study the bloodlines of cattle and through blood tests test for susceptibility to bovine TB. The gene pool could be a contributory factor.

In the 1960s and 1970s, we were largely free of the disease but non-British breeds have been introduced that could be less resistant. Let the scientists get more involved and the politicians take a back seat.

Intensive breeding could be inducing stress, leading to increased stress-related susceptibility.

On one farm in Gloucestershire, hit by bovine TB, cattle were fed on maize, which lacks selenium, essential for maintaining a healthy immune system in cattle. Farmer, Dick Roper, then introduced selenium mineral licks for both cattle and badgers. The result? A complete cure. This successful treatment strongly suggests that outbreaks of bovine TB have a compromised immune system at the root of the problem.

There have been massive reductions in bovine TB cases in many parts of Wales due to cattle testing and movement controls without a single badger cull. But many rogue farmers are keeping infected cattle and sending healthy cattle to slaughter in their place.

David Williams of the Badger Trust says the guilty farmers are harbouring and spreading the disease, while the measures in place require effective movement control and accurate recordings. These measures have proved successful without killing a single badger.

The Independent Scientific Group monitored a pilot cull of badgers between 1997 and 2007. Inside the culling area bovine TB reduced only slightly while outside the area it increased dramatically. The conclusions of this trial were that culling can make “no meaningful contribution to the reduction of bovine TB”. The Independent Scientific Group has become involved once more in the latest government proposals. The members of the group have written a letter to The Times opposing them, including Lord Krebs, chairman of the House of Lords science and technology select committee, Professor John Bourne and Dr Chris Cheeseman, former chief scientist at DEFRA’s Gloucestershire study area. The Times letter stated there is “no empirical data  on the cost or effectiveness (or indeed humaneness or safety)  of controlling badgers by shooting, which has been illegal for decades”.

The government ignores scientific evidence. Why? Could it be they are after the farmers’ vote on this one, sacrificing our valuable wildlife in the process? If so, this is not only cruel but immoral and dishonest. To Caroline Spelman we can only echo the words of René Artois in BBC television’s ‘Allo ‘Allo! ... “You stupid woman!”                     copyright © Scott Ullah 2012