Charity money goes astray - dog bites man

Let us face it the EU is not the only organization that plays silly-bugger games with other people’s money, channelling it, wittingly or otherwise, to terrorist organizations. I rarely read the Daily Mail (make that almost never) and have to find out about stories in that rag newspaper from various blogs, British or American.

So this story comes with gratitude to the indefatigable Michelle Malkin (how does she do it?). The Daily Mail reports that £20,000 of the money raised by the BBC through its Children in Need appeal went to Leeds Community School in Beeston.

Along with £230,000 from Leeds city council, it was spent on the school and the adjoining Iqra bookshop, which was run by the bombers and became the place they hatched their plans.

Both Children in Need and the council were led to believe they were funding educational work for children.

But, according to Martin Gilbertson, who worked at the bookshop and the community centre, the funds went on propaganda.

"They blamed everything on the Jewish conspiracy, they hated Western culture it was like living with jihad on a daily basis" he said.

The bookshop was run by Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Hanweer of 7/7 bombing fame. They and Khalid Khaliq, jailed this year for terrorism offences, were trustees of the Beeston Iqra charity.

This raises various questions, not least that of why people give money to charities through the BBC or any other media outlet. How can you possibly tell what the money goes on?

Going on from there we have the problem of the Children in Need and Leeds City Council repeating like blessed baa-lambs the mantra of ignorance. They just didn’t know. They gave the money to a registered children’s charity who, they assumed on some basis unknown to the rest of mankind, would spend it wisely. Would it not be a good idea if you are disbursing large amounts of other people’s money to check out what that dosh is being spent on?

Come to think of it, would it not be a good idea to define what is a sensible way for a children’s charity to spend money? After all, why exactly did that school, presumably in receipt of large amounts of taxpayers' money anyway, need extra help from a charity? Why was money given to the bookshop in any event but, especially, why was it given without anybody checking out its stock?

And so on, and so on. One could list questions indefinitely. But the top question will be: what exactly is the purpose of that egregious quango, the Charity Commission?

[Michelle Malkin says that the Children in Need teddy bear is crying out for a clever bit of photoshopping. If anybody is prepared to work on it, I shall post it .]

Meanwhile let us have a look at that aid to various Palestinian groups

Russia is not the only country and the Caucasus is not the only region the EU finds hard to deal with and where, if truth be told, it makes a bad situation even worse. I think it is fair to say that everything the EU has done in the Middle East has helped to deepen the problems there.

Not least, we have the problem of aid to various Palestinian groups. The argument is always the same: we do not approve of terrorism or deliberate attacks on civilian population whether it is Israeli or Palestinian of the wrong kind and we would much rather Hamas, Fatah and whoever else acknowledged Israel's right to exist though if they don’t we understand; and, of course, we would much rather the Palestinians did not waste the money they get in aid on hate-filled school text books or on equipment for terrorists or simply on feathering the leaders' nests; but if we do not give them aid they will produce pictures of hungry children and empty shops and their friends in the NGOs will talk endlessly about humanitarian catastrophes. So, more lucre filched from the taxpayer is sent to completely corrupt and politically impossible Palestinian organizations.

It seems that the Palestinian Authority a.k.a. Al-Fatah is once again struggling to meet the government pay-roll's demands, which, given how many people are on that list, is a serious matter. If they don't get paid they will start using their ammunition and you don’t want that.

Added to which, it would appear, that Arab solidarity does not go very far and the EU had to step in (had to? Who says?) and add another €40 million over and above the €256 million already "disbursed" this year. Handed over to the Palestinian Authority is a better way of describing it than disbursed but let that pass.

The 40 million euro injection of funds comes on top of the 256 million euros in budget support disbursed so far this year by the European Union.

[Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad has struggled in recent months to pay government workers because many Arab donors have not met their financial commitments. "The situation is very, very tight, for sure," a top official from Fayyad's office said this week.

A Palestinian official said the EU money would help Fayyad meet the next government payroll, due in the first week of September. Fayyad has been waiting for months to receive $80 million pledged by Kuwait but it is unclear when the funds will arrive in the Palestinian Authority's coffers, officials say.

It has always been our contention on this blog that if we really do want to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority or the Hamas government in Gaza, we should stop all aid until all conditions, and that includes an open and transparent budget system, were met. Their Arab brethren would not step in. Of course, the Palestinians deprived of their subsidy might decide to put their economy in order instead of wasting money on rockets to fire into Israel and that would be all to the good.

Autres directions

A perspicacious Guardian today notes that the EU is in as much disarray about how to handle the looming recession as it is over how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus.

Drawing on the experience so many of us have had of baffling French road signs, it suggests that "toutes directions", the often confusing signpost at crossroads in French provincial towns, just about sums up eurozone government responses so far.

Actually, we can do better than that. Attempting to find our way to Strasbourg one day, driving through the by-ways of Alsace completely lost, we came to a T-junction in a small town, unmarked on our map. Witnessed by my increasingly acerbic co-editor, then one of my backseat drivers passengers, we were utterly confounded by a single sign offering the choice between "toutes directions" and "autres directions". That, it seemed to us, was the most appropriate paradigm for the European Union.

Returning to The Guardian, it tells us that France, as holder of the EU presidency, is effectively pushing for a concerted series of activist, counter-cyclical measures to be adopted when finance ministers meet in Nice in the middle of next month - even if it means busting the bloc's three percent budget deficit limit.

In this – predictably - it can count on support from its "Club Med" partners in Italy and Spain but Germany, determined to maintain fiscal discipline and avoid a repeat of the 1970s, is resolutely opposed. And so is the EU commission, while the UK is out on a limb, together with the Irish and the Nordics (several limbs, actually).

Although it retails a sorry tale of confusion, it is a pity though that the paper cannot see the bigger picture. It is not only the "looming recession" and the question of "how to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus" that finds the EU in disarray. The impending clash over the Common Agricultural Policy will point up yet more disarray, while the continued impasse over GM crop approvals, the disagreement over biofuels and the energy policy generally, are all examples of the EU haring off in "toutes directions".

In fact, from the experience of the Common Fisheries Policy – branded by its own commissioner as "immoral" - to the waste policy, immigration and high level initiatives in the Middle East, nothing the EU touches ever works. It leaves behind it a trail of wreckage, disarray and confusion.

Never more has it ever been more urgent that we in the UK should be looking for that sign which says, "autres directions".

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This was not supposed to happen

The well-planned attack by the Taleban on French troops, shortly after midday on Monday, seemingly breaks the trend in a campaign which supposedly has moved into an asymmetric phase. What further marks this out is the ferocity of the attack which had nine soldiers dead within the first minutes of contact ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Nope we still can't solve it

It seems incredible but President Sarkozy still seems to think that he has some kind of a role to play in the crisis in the Caucasus. He keeps running around, accepting Russian peace offers and cease-fire deals and then finding that there is not the slightest intention on the Russian side of fulfilling the obligations that they themselves propose. I must say, it is not entirely clear why the Russians keep playing this game unless, as some analysts have been suggesting, there are splits among the various leaders, military and civilian and, above all, between former President, now Prime Minister, Putin and his teddy bear.

Reuters entitles the news item "Russia starts Georgia pullout" but this is a little misleading. Russia is not starting anything of the kind; she is merely promising to do so.

Russian troops will pull back from Georgia's heartland by the end of this week, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, but NATO said it was freezing contacts with Moscow until all Russian forces were out of the country.

This reminds one of the very popular Russian word, which has flummoxed many a Western businessman: сейчас (seychas). Its direct meaning is this minute (or this hour if you wish to be pedantic) but, in actual fact, it conveys a sense of urgency that is just inferior to the Spanish mañana. Yes, yes, yes, we're going, we're going.

So the soft power of the EU has failed and President Sarkozy's readiness to go along with whatever President Medvedev told him has achieved nothing. To be fair, as Joel J. Sparayregen has pointed out on American Thinker, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Russian expert in her academic days, has faltered at first as well. Unlike President Sarkozy, she has acknowledged it and American demands have become tougher as has NATO's stance, though there is no mention of Georgia becoming a member in the near future. On the other hand, if the near future includes Russian troops on Georgian soil, that might be quite a wise precaution.

The near and mid-term future will, it seems, include missiles positioned in South Ossetia and, possibly, Abkhazia, pointing at Georgia, in order to protect the Russian citizens of those two regions. Since they are now unlikely to be anything but part of Russia, the protections seems excessive.

Almost certainly Russia will institute one of her economic blockades of Georgia. After all, we cannot have the latter being economically successful as that would humiliate Russia.

The latest prediction is that Russian forces will pull back to prearranged positions by August 22, just about the fortieth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but this will not mean simply going back to Russia and South Ossetia but staying in the "buffer zone", that is 14 kilometres beyond the border inside Georgia itself. It would appear that the French negotiators thought this was perfectly reasonable. Then again, did they have an option if nobody was prepared to use stronger methods? G8? Well, no, G7, I think.

CNN entitles its analysis rather whimsically “NATO grapples with angry bear”. In itself, the analysis tells us nothing new. America, Britain, most of the former Soviet colonies and, one assumes, Denmark and Canada are calling for tougher measures; France, Germany and Italy are cowering and chattering about keeping channels open. What that means is anybody’s guess. After all, nobody is suggesting never talking to Russia again.

It is unfortunate that CNN goes along with the analysis that Russia and her self-appointed supporters have managed to feed into the public discourse:

But western ministers, it seems, have only just taken aboard how angry a resurgent Russia, traditionally fearful of encirclement, has been about the U.S. missile defense plan with installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, about the steady eastward march of NATO and the EU, and about the West's ready endorsement of Kosovo's breakaway from Russia's allies in Serbia.

Largely this is tosh. The missile defence plan is no threat to Russia and the former Soviet colonies became members of NATO because they were afraid of the bear. In other words, they are not surprised by the latest developments because they have always expected something like this.

There has never been the slightest indication that Russia cared much about Serbia as the Serbs have vociferously complained about and Kosovo is of little importance to them. The plan to use South Ossetia to threaten and invade Georgia has been maturing for, at least, five years when those Russian passports were first handed out.

Somehow, the myth of the resurgent, angry and humiliated Russia seems to have taken hold. I am in the process of writing a long posting on the subject so shall hold my fire till then but I may add that if Russia is afraid of encirclement then the country she is most fearful of is China.

When it comes to invasion from the east, Monty’s saying of the three rules of war do not apply. Mostly, these have been successful and Russia knows it. A little reported recent development was a border agreement signed between the two countries on July 21, which is returning 174 sq km of territory to China.

The areas to be returned - the Yinlong Island (Tarabarov Island) and half of the Heixiazi Island (Bolshoi Ussuriysky Island) - are territories the former Soviet Union occupied during a 1929 border skirmish.

They are located at the confluence of the Heilongjiang and Wusulijiang rivers that serve as a natural border between the two countries.

Following years of negotiations, the two sides signed an agreement for the return of the areas in October 2004 when Vladimir Putin, then Russian President visited Beijing.

After that, the two neighbors spent three years of negotiations on delineation.

Curiously enough, this was not much reported in Russia, either.

The Eurasian Daily Monitor, which has been following the growing crisis in Georgia long before most of the Western media and politicians realized there was anything to follow (as it happens we have written about it a few times ourselves, here for instance) gives a more detailed analysis of the non-withdrawal and the rings President Medvedev has been running round President Sarkozy.

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The casual lie

In The Times today is an interesting story – for those who are that way inclined – about a plan to install anaerobic digesters in every town.

These, according to Lewis Smith, the Environment Reporter for the paper, "could turn leftover food into electricity and fertiliser could be built around every town and city as part of a scheme being considered by ministers."

Tucked into the story though is that insidious, pernicious lie that pervades so much of modern journalism. "The new generation of anaerobic digesters," writes Smith, "has been developed in a government-sponsored trial designed to find ways of solving the shortage of landfill sites."

He goes on to write: "Pressure on space means that the country is running out of suitable sites for landfill and, with punitive landfill taxes introduced to encourage alternatives, digesters are increasingly being seen as an environmentally friendly solution."

Read my lips: there is no shortage of landfill sites. There is a shortage of landfill capacity, which is a wholly different thing. And that is entirely because of the EU's landfill directive which imposes severe constraints on the use of landfill as a waste disposal option.

We actually dealt with this issue in an earlier piece, where we relied on another blogger who had done the maths, demonstrating unequivocally that landfill sites are actually being generated faster than we could fill them.

As it happens, flying into Manchester last week, after our trip to America, I spotted (as one does) several open quarries, just a few miles from the city centre, which would – in the fullness of time – make ideal landfill, but for the dead hand of the EU. One is pictured, top left.

This is not so say, of course, that Smith personally is lying. Merely, in his ignorance and lack of focus, he perpetuates the lie that has crept into the body politic to explain and obscure the fact that we, as a nation, are no longer allowed to run our own waste policy.

That lack of knowledge also pervades the rest of his story. He writes uncritically of the government being "so confident that anaerobic digesters offer a realistic means of dealing with food waste that earlier this year it offered £10 million in grants to encourage the construction of further demonstrator plants. Plans for at least 60 are under way in Britain."

This we dealt with in a story last January when I set out a dire tale about how private enterprises had embraced anaerobic digesters as an admirable solution to organic waste disposal, only to have the economics of their systems wrecked by the dead hand of the Environment Agency.

The EA insisted on classifying these systems as "scheduled processes" – under an EU directive – and then charging exorbitant "authorisation" and "subsistence" fees which, with the stultifying and time-consuming bureaucracy involved, ensured that few digesters were installed. Those that were quickly became disused simply because, under the burden of regulation, they were too expensive to operate.

So, now that the government has effectively priced the system out of the market, it is offering public money – our money – to encourage the use of a well-tried and working technology that it, itself, has hamstrung.

Had Smith known anything of the subject – and the background to it – he could have written a really interesting and critical piece. As it is, we are condemned to the usual ration of extruded verbal material which has become the only fare available. Thus, as we keep saying, are we served by the fourth estate.

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A question of negligence

On the day one more soldier is reported killed in Afghanistan, another stage was reached in the tortuous path which is hoped will eventually bring the MoD to account for the death of Pte Phillip Hewett in al Amarah, Iraq in July 2005 – now over three years ago. This happened yesterday when Phillip's mother, Sue Smith ...

Posted on Defence of the Realm

Things must be bad

There is nothing so sacred as the holiday period in France, when only a major catastrophe would cause ministers to return to the heat of Paris. And yet … that is precisely what is happening

While Nicolas Sarkozy gads around on the world stage, giving into the Russians, his ministers have been summoned back from their holidays by prime minister Francois Fillon (pictured). They are to attend, according to The Times, an emergency meeting, "in a bid to head off recession after the economy shrunk for the first time in six years."

However, it seems that Fillon has nothing concrete to offer, other than an acknowledgement that his government has abandoned hopes of escaping the global economic crisis. Instead, he is pledging to push ahead with Sarkozy's programme, which includes modernising the economy, reducing state spending and introducing flexibility into a rigid labour market.

Quite why that should warrant an emergency meeting is not quite clear, so there may be another agenda at play. And there is also an EU dimension as Fillon is threatening to call European Union finance ministers together in the search for a "common response" to the slowdown. EU countries should "commence this attempt at coordination," he declares, "which ... hasn't happened yet."

Yet, if Fillon is not quite sure what to do, the depth of the crisis is clear. The French economy shrunk by 0.3 percent in the second quarter and the Bank of France is predicting growth of just 0.1 percent in this quarter. The country is teetering on the edge of recession.

That compares with Fillon's prediction that France would enjoy growth of about two percent this year, although he has not openly admitted that he was wrong, simply that his figures will have to be "adjusted".

Needless to say, the left wing daily Liberation is not being so generous. Mr Sarkozy's dream of kickstarting France, it says, is "turning into a nightmare". That is something, undoubtedly, M. Fillon will be keen to share with the "colleagues".

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Greenie schizophrenia

Almost in the category, "you gotta laugh", the Wall Street Journal today recounts the extraordinary contortions of the greenies, hoist with their own petard.

With the Democrats embracing an "anything-but-carbon avant-garde" – as the paper puts it – they are finding that, when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

Specifically, the problem with renewables is that the best sites are out in the sticks and, to connect them up to the grid, new transmission lines are needed. Yet, while the greenies are swooning over the prospect of more wind and solar power in the deserts and plains of America, they are contesting the construction of the power lines needed to bring these installations into production.

Only last week, we are told, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities do not expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years - until 2014, at the earliest - because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, home of greenie theology, hundreds of treehuggers turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. This same greenie class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park.

Even the latter-day greenie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is losing patience. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," he complains. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

Even in oh-so-green Oregon, the utility companies are having problems. Once people realised that transmission lines would cut through forests, all sorts of obstacles have been raised. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, says the WSJ the "liberal" (code for illiberal) push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greenies who favour the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Of course, we are experiencing exactly the same dynamic over here, as the greenies get their knickers in a twist over the conflict between saving the little tweetie birds and indulging in their wet dreams of a carbon-free future.

But then, since the real greenie agenda is to force us back into the Stone Age – as long as we don't light any fires with our flints – this sort of confusion is grist to the mill. There is nothing quite so carbon-free as no power at all – the inevitable consequence of this greenie schizophrenia.

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You don't say!

"Britain has been strangely absent from the Russo-Georgian conflict," proclaims the leader in The Daily Telegraph. "To the extent that we have had anything to contribute, we have contributed it through the Council of Europe and the EU", it continues. "We have, in other words, been represented by Nicolas Sarkozy. And while the French president has admirable qualities, his interests are not identical to Britain's."

Well, blow me down with a feather. What were we writing yesterday? And now The Telegraph has actually noticed that, when it comes to our foreign relations with Russia, we defer to the European Union, relying on Mr Sarkozy, in his role as (temporary) president of the EU.

Waking up from its deep sleep, the paper then intones, "The truth is that a common European foreign policy is already upon us. Britain could no more act unilaterally in Georgia than in the World Trade Organisation."

You don't say! Really! But for the stunning intelligence of the Telegraph leader writers, we would never have noticed. How grateful we should be that they are really on the ball and picked this up, especially when they tells us that, "The EU has a foreign minister, Javier Solana, and an accompanying diplomatic corps, known as the European External Action Service."

Go to any non-EU country, they tell us, and you will find an EU mission alongside national embassies. Then they have the nerve to tell us: "The debate about whether or not there should be a common foreign policy is being conducted decades too late."

Er … And why is that? Why is it that, as the EU's Common Foreign Policy has developed, through Maastricht, through Amsterdam, through Nice and now extended via the constitutional Lisbon treaty, there hasn't been a debate? Could it just be – perhaps – that dismal little comics like The Telegraph have been obsessed with their trivia and tat to the extent that they have taken their eyes off the ball?

Entirely unconscious of the irony, however, the paper pronounces that "Britain" – meaning, of course, successive generations of politicians and dim-witted hacks - has given too little thought to the consequences of this development, and needs to consider urgently how a British foreign policy would differ from the current European one.

But, it says:

…before being able to implement such a policy, we must first recover control, in practice as well as in theory. Britain is the world's fifth-largest economy and fourth military power. We have had a benign impact on mankind: ending slavery, spreading free trade, helping to defeat Nazism and Communism. If we cannot act independently on the world stage, it is hard to see who can.

Well, we cannot act independently and remain within the framework of the European Union treaties. That is what being a member of the European Union is all about. If you want to "recover control" over our foreign policy – and any of the other policies that are within the competence of the EU - we have to leave the EU.

But is the Telegraph actually suggesting that? Don't bother answering. That remains the elephant in the room – positioning the paper in its usual hazy mish-mash of incoherence. When it wakes up, it can see the problems, but is terrified of articulating the solution. But, now that it has woken up, perhaps it might think about growing up.

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