Central image on breast star of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

The Guardian finds the image of St. Michael defeating Satan to be racist and offensive.

Campaigners are calling for the redesign of one of Britain’s highest honours personally bestowed by the Queen because they say its badge resembles a depiction of a white angel standing on the neck of a chained black man.

The Order of St Michael and St George is traditionally awarded to ambassadors and diplomats and senior Foreign Office officials who have served abroad. It has three ranks, the highest of which is Knight Grand Cross (GCMG), followed by Knight Commander (KCMG) and Companion (CMG).

The imagery on the award’s badge portrays St Michael trampling on Satan, but campaigners say the image is reminiscent of the killing of George Floyd by white police officers in the US that led to worldwide protests.

A petition calling for the medal to be redesigned has attracted more than 2,000 signatures on change.org. The petition, started by Tracy Reeve, says: “This is a highly offensive image, it is also reminiscent of the recent murder of George Floyd by the white policeman in the same manner presented here in this medal. We the undersigned are calling for this medal to completely redesigned in a more appropriate way and for an official apology to be given for the offence it has given.”

Bumi Thomas, a Nigerian British singer, activist and specialist in visual communications, said the imagery on the badge was clear. “It is not a demon; it is a black man in chains with a white, blue-eyed figure standing on his neck. It is literally what happened to George Floyd and what has been happening to black people for centuries under the guise of diplomatic missions: active, subliminal messaging that reinforces the conquest, subjugation and dehumanisation of people of colour.

“It is a depiction on a supposed honour of the subjugation of the black and brown people of the world and the superiority of the white, a construct born in the 16th century. It is the definition of institutional racism that this image is not only permitted but celebrated on one of the country’s highest honours. Whilst statues are being pulled down and relocated, emblems and symbols of this nature also need to be redesigned to reflect a more progressive, holistic relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth nations.”

Sir Simon Woolley, the director and one of the founders of Operation Black Vote, which campaigns for greater representation of ethnic minorities in politics and public life, said he was appalled by the badge.

“The original image may have been of St Michael slaying Satan, but the figure has no horns or tail and is clearly a black man. It is a shocking depiction, and it is even more shocking that that image could be presented to ambassadors representing this country abroad,” he said.

“This is the past that informs the present, and that’s why it symbolises everything that Black Lives Matter are campaigning for. It provides a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to acknowledge it and own it, but the opportunity is to put it right. It is easy to get rid of an image, but I would like root-and-branch restructuring, because most of the institutions created by the empire are still there.

“For most black and brown people, there is nothing good about the empire. Most people will see this as an image of George Floyd on a global scale and a symbol of white supremacy.”

RTWT

Richard J. Evans, in The Guardian, really unloaded on the conservative historian Norman Stone in an obituary.

was character assassination. As a judge of the Fraenkel prize in contemporary history some years ago, he told the astonished members of the jury that they should not award the prize to a historian of Germany whose politics he disliked because she was an East German agent – an allegation that was enough to rule her out of contention even though it was absolutely baseless and undoubtedly defamatory.

Shortly after the death in 1982 of his patron and mentor in Cambridge, EH Carr, the author of a multivolume History of Soviet Russia and influential works on historiography and international relations, Stone published a lengthy assault on his reputation, which included lurid details of his three marriages. When a colleague criticised this “outrageous” diatribe to his face, telling him that Carr “always said you were amoral”, Stone responded: “And he always said you were a bore” (probably an invention, though one cannot know for sure).

At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancid”), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beens”), students (“smelly and inattentive”), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodies”), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced coward”) and many more.

Stone was undoubtedly clever. He could write entertainingly and could summarise complex historical circumstances in a few pregnant sentences, gifts which brought him a flourishing career as a journalist and commentator. He was a talented linguist who read and spoke more than half a dozen languages, including Hungarian. Yet his career was also dogged by character flaws that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise as a historian. …
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The hadj will now culminate at a glowing crater.

Last Saturday, the left-wing British Guardian launched a full-scale marginalizing and discrediting attack on William C. Bradford, an assistant law professor teaching at the US Military Academy at West Point.

The attack on Bradford was occasioned by his publication of an academic paper last April which made a couple of colorful and controversial proposals.

An assistant professor in the law department of the US military academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.

In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.

Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism, Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist.

“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” Bradford wrote. …

[A] clique of about forty” scholars, Bradford writes, have “converted the US legal academy into a cohort whose vituperative pronouncements on the illegality of the US resort to force and subsequent conduct in the war against Islamism” represent a “super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations” aimed at “American political will” to fight. They are supported by “compliant journalists” marked by “defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries”, but Bradford considers the lawyers a greater threat.

The offending legal scholars “effectively tilt the battlefield against US forces [and] contribute to timorousness and lethargy in US military commanders”, he writes. They are among several “useful idiots” who “separate Islam from Islamists by attributing to the former principles in common with the West, including ‘justice and progress’ and ‘the dignity of all human beings’”. …

The West Point faculty member urges the US to wage “total war” on “Islamism”, using “conventional and nuclear force and [psychological operations]”, in order to “leave them prepared to coexist with the West or be utterly eradicated”. He suggests in a footnote that “threatening Islamic holy sites might create deterrence, discredit Islamism, and falsify the assumption that decadence renders Western restraint inevitable”.

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Bradford’s paper: Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column

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The Guardian’s hatchet job appeared on Saturday, and the next day Bradford was being bundled out the door of West Point, whose representatives were busily disavowing ever having known him.

Yesterday, the Guardian was gloating and finishing up a thorough job of carpet-bombing the heretic’s reputation.

‘Dr William Bradford resigned on Sunday,’ army lieutenant colonel Christopher Kasker, a West Point spokesman, told the Guardian on Monday. Bradford had taught five lessons for cadets in a common-core law course, from 17 to 27 August.

We are given to understand that Bradford is, naturally, some kind of complete crackpot and congenital liar. Bradford, you see, is alleged to have exaggerated his academical positions (never a problem in the case of University of Chicago Law Professor Barack Obama) and –with no actual proof– his military service.

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The Atlantic also piled on, noting that the National Security Law Journal had decided to denounce Bradford’s paper as an “egregious breach of professional decorum” unworthy of publication, to repudiate it, and to publish a four-page denunciation of the Bradford paper by Jeremy Rabkin.

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Rules for Radicals 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange released the stolen Afghan documents to the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel in a private arrangement, allowing those major news organizations to use their enormously greater staff and resources to research and develop the material in advance of an agreed upon simultaneous publication date.

The British Guardian put the leaked documents into a functional database. The German Spiegel fact-checked the logs against German Army reports. The New York Times got in touch with the Obama administration, then declined to link to the Wikileaks “a gesture to show [the Times was] not endorsing or encouraging the release of information that could cause harm.” Julian Assange described the Times as “pusillanimous.”

(Columbia Journalism Review link)

(Beltway Beast link)

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The London Times (behind subscription firewall) reported yesterday that the Wikileaks leak of those 90,000 documents revealed the names and locations of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants exposing them to Taliban reprisals.

(CBS Worldwatch link)

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Julian Assange boasted today that the Wikileaks organization doesn’t know who leaked the Afghan documents, hinting at his own firewall arrangements intended to deny information on his sources to government agencies and law enforcement.

(Google News link)

Herschel Smith points out that the recent Wikileaks documents dump and associated coverage by The Guardian and others are not journalism at all.

There is no news here. So Pakistan’s ISI is complicit in assistance to the Taliban and even supportive of incidents within Afghanistan itself. Who doesn’t already know this? Again, there are unintended casualties in counterinsurgency campaigns. Is this really a surprise to anyone? War is messy. Did the British think otherwise?

The Guardian knows better, as does Julian Assange who defends his work by noting the “real nature of this war” and the need to hold those in power accountable. To anyone with a computer, some time and a little interest, none of this is news. The folks at the Guardian are either stupid (believing that war is bloodless) or they are lying (having followed the body count just like I have). Furthermore, they are either poor countrymen, holding that counterinsurgency is worth it as long as they sacrifice their own and no Afghans are killed, or ignorant, knowing nothing about the necessity to fight and kill the enemy.

The editors of the Guardian are not stupid or ignorant. They are ideologically motivated, just like Julian Assange. The embarrassing part for both of them is that, having admitted that “despite the opportunities provided by new technology, media groups with a global reach still cannot offer their public more than sporadic accounts of the most visible and controversial incidents, and glimpses of the background,” the literate among us know better. The media is preening and polishing their moral credentials. They shouldn’t be. More than anything else, this is a story about letting ideology get in the way of reporting, and about the failure of that same media to do the basic job of compiling information and analyzing it.

Ron Liddle marvels at the words and phrases identified by the Guardian’s latest free style guide for readers as “inappropriate.”

The list of potentially wounding expressions includes:

active homosexual; career women; Third World; blacks; Asians; Australasia; Bangalore; primitive African tribes; crippled; in a wheelchair; hare lip; ethnic minorities; handicapped; spinster; committed suicide; gypsies; Bombay; illegitimate daughter; air hostess; Siamese twins; Calcutta; deaf ears; illegal asylum seeker; province of Northern Ireland; grandmother; bachelor.

The Guardian writes (with big salty tears running down its editorial cheek):

“Why are the liberals always on the other side?” asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror. The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat. Four decades on, Mathieu’s charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror…

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week’s arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had “broken” under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. “I don’t deduce, I know – torture,” she said. “There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all.” If this is shown to be the case, the prospect of securing convictions in this country on his evidence will be complicated.

Rational adults would suppose that a terrorist, apprehended outside British jurisdiction, might have to take his chances with the local legal system, and the sort of unsympathetic treatment traditionally meted out to hostes humani generis [the common enemies of mankind], who have by their own actions placed themselves outside both the laws of ordinary society and the laws of war.

Faced wih a choice of, say, 3000 innocent lives versus Mr. Rauf’s supposed privileges and comfort, any responsible person charged, like Colonel Mathieu in the Pontecorvo film, would inevitably be forced to do what was necessary to protect the innocent.

Only imbeciles and sentimental poseurs would agree with the Guardian.

Martin Rowson, Britain’s answer to Ted Rall, in the Guardian yesterday published the above cartoon, expressing the left’s irrational view of the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah terrorist operating out of Lebanon: Israel, having been attacked, is a knuckleduster-wielding bully for defending her own people. The Hezbollah-sympathising, rocket-harboring civilian population of Southern Lebanon is a helpless child, beaten by Israel who is being egged on by Bush. Hezbollah is an elusive hornet, depicted as too agile for clumsy Israel.

The shamelessly anti-Semitic imagery did cause the Guardian some embarassment, provoking this rather farcical “Who, us?” denial:

That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.

Rush Limbaugh was among the first to poke fun at wildly over-stated left-wing claims of American abuse of Islamic terrorist detainees at Guantanamo. He even waggishly offers for sale at RushLimbaugh.Com “Club Gitmo” T -shirts, bearing I got my free Koran and Prayer Rug at Gitmo in large print.

And Limbaugh gets the last laugh too, it seems. Britain’s left-wing Guardian tracked down three teenage former Guantanamo detainees, subsequenty released, to their villages in Southeastern Afghanistan. The former prisoners gave Club Gitmo positive reviews. Said one Afghan:

Prison life was good… The food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and his warders were kind. “Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don’t have anything against them,” he said. “If my father didn’t need me, I would want to live in America.”

“I am lucky I went there, and now I miss it. Cuba was great,” (said another former detainee.)

During his 14-month stay, he went to the beach only a couple of times – a shame, as he loved to snorkel… He spent a typical day watching movies, going to class and playing football.

Can one imagine British and American papers during WWII operating in the fog of war during the uncertain aftermath of necessarily secret military operations happily publishing characterizations of Allied efforts by enemy spokesmen and echoing the viewpoint of the German press? Not very easily, but in our modern, more enlightened age, the MSM in both Britain and the United States has evolved an internationalist perspective, unburdened by patriotic loyalties, characteristically anti-America, anti-Bush Administration, and anti-Iraq War, which treats any murderous outrage by the forces of barbarism in the manner it would treat a particularly successful soccer play by a prominent visiting team, which carefully studiedly ignores Allied successes, and which makes a policy of publishing enemy allegations as factual news.

Under 48 hours after the US attempt to eliminate Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri by missile fire in remote tribal regions of Pakistan, the Guardian and the Washington Post pretend to have all the answers. There was a “botched operation” based upon “flawed intelligence” which resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children. They know all this on the basis of the testimony of a combination of irate Islamic villagers, who –of course– would be among the hosts of targetted Al Qaeda terrorist commanders, and sundry Pakistani officials representing a government obliged in the circumstances created by precisely this kind of reporting to assume a posture of indignation in order to avoid bringing down upon itself the wrath of its own domestic Islamofascist sympathisers by appearing too closely aligned with Western governments.

Regrettably, the CIA is not in the habit of playing “Gotcha!” with the MSM, but they may have a good opportunity on this occasion. Earlier reports mentioned five terrorist bodies being carried off for further investigation. And even the New York Times quotes a senior Pakistani official as admitting that

11 militants had been killed in the attack. Seven of the dead were Arab fighters, and another four were Pakistani militants from Punjab Province, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the news media.

Whether Zawahiri was killed or not is obviously, at present, unknown, whatever local Pashtoons, Pakistani officials, the WaPo or the Guardian claim.

Earlier report

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Today’s front-page coverage in the same papers, by some strange coincidence, accidentally overlooks the story of the rescue of a British free-lance journalist in Iraq by US forces.