Scumbag Politicians

The headline in the BBC News runs: Priti Patel held undisclosed meetings in Israel. The article went on to say that:

The International Development Secretary held undisclosed meetings in Israel without telling the Foreign Office while accompanied by an influential pro-Israeli Conservative lobbyist, the BBC has learned. Priti Patel met the leader of one of Israel's main political parties and made visits to several organisations where official departmental business was reportedly discussed. According to one source, at least one of the meetings was held at the suggestion of the Israeli ambassador to London. In contrast, British diplomats in Israel were not informed about Ms Patel's plans. Ministers are by convention supposed to tell the Foreign Office when they are conducting official business overseas.

Clearly she was up to no good and surprisingly the final part of the article alludes to her possible motives:

The UK currently sends about £68m a year to support the Palestinian territories, most of it from DFID's budget. Some of the money is given directly to the Palestinian Authority, the rest through the local UN agency or individual groups.

Critics claim that instead of just supporting Palestinian refugees and institutions, the money has also been used to pay salaries to Palestinians jailed for terrorism-related offences. 

Ms Patel has long been a critic of this funding. She tightened up the guidelines on Palestinian spending last year, focusing more on health and education, but one Foreign Office source said that she had recently tried to go further, presenting a paper to the prime minister and the foreign secretary for yet more restrictions on the funding.

"But they were not particularly impressed by her arguments," said one Foreign Office source. Another said: "She has been trying this for some time. She has been pushing to get her hands on the PA aid budget and we have been pushing back." 

Others suggested Ms Patel was getting close to CFI in preparation for a future leadership contest. One Whitehall source said: "I have always understood it to be part of her leadership ambitions, if she has got people from CFI who are prepared to put money into her." 

Not surprisingly, Israel works unrelentingly to reduce support or funding for the beleaguered Palestinians while supporting the ambitions of politicians like Priti Patel who are staunchly pro-Israel. Western politicians who are foolish enough to be openly critical of the Israeli government's policies would, one suspects, be actively undermined in all sorts of ways by the Israelis. They have no moral qualms, believing that any activity furthering the interests of Israel is a good thing.

Meanwhile, I quite like this cartoon that says a lot in a very compact way:

The Secret History of Britain

A friend put me onto Stephen Oppenheimer who has an alternative take on the history of British migration and settlement, namely that "everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands". Controversial stuff indeed. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947) is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a graduate of Green Templeton College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In addition to his work in medicine and tropical diseases, he has published popular works in the fields of genetics and human prehistory. This latter work has been the subject of a number of television and film projects.

Of interest are the books he has written:

• Eden in the East
• The Real Eve (documentary and US book title) / Out of Eden (UK book title)
• Origins of the British

I've downloaded from this site, a six page PDF file that summarises his views about the origins of the British and have placed it in my e-library. His books are not available in the local library; however, they are available on Amazon. If what he says is true, then it's another example of the falsification of history in which fictions turn into facts. Here is a quote from the PDF file:

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia. 

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps. 

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. "Celt" is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless. 

I'll keep an eye out for any of his books and they certainly of interest to seekers of truth in history. Here is a YouTube video, divided into two parts, in which Stephen Oppenheimer is talking about the British migration: