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237 thoughts on “The Stolen Seas

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  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Macky

    “a “troll”, ie somebody unwilling or unable to post in good faith,”
    ___________________

    If I were to submit to your judgment as to what constitutes posting in good faith, I should be something much worse than a troll – I’d be an utter fool. A fool of Mackyian proportions.

    ************************$

    Habbabkuk says Macky’s here, bring on the men in flapping white coats.

  • Ben

    ” camouflaged by their fake support of the Palestinians.”

    I’m frequently sick to my stomach when I see the crikey tears of Resident Degenerate. Is he trying to convince us or himself?

  • Ba'al Zevul (For Scotland)

    Fury?? Don’t be daft. ‘Republicofscotland’ is a holocaust denier, and, as far as I’m concerned, a sock-puppet.

    If that’s your opinion, fair enough. It just didn’t seem clear to me that your responses to RoS and other Yes supporters were unrelated to the independence issue. That is perhaps the penalty for not having a stereotypical portfolio of worthy causes, and I can relate to that. (Prepare to be shot by both sides)

  • technicolour

    “In response to being pulled-up for defending a misogynist, she replies by using a misogynistic insult herself; as I’ve already stated “a danger to herself, and everybody else”.”

    pillock. useless, boring, pillock,

  • lysias

    “I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
    “I deeply sympathize.”
    With sobs and tears he sorted out
    Those of the largest size,
    Holding his pocket-handkerchief
    Before his streaming eyes.

  • me in us

    Craig, here’s a transcript if you can use it or plug it into youtube:

    <strongThe Stolen Seas

    A People of Scotland Production

    Craig Murray: There is no agreed international boundary between England and Scotland because they’re not separate countries. There is an administrative boundary which has existed for many years.

    I’m here now on the beach at Carnoustie, just down from the famous Carnoustie golf course. We’ve come up north here from Dundee today, and people are surprised when you tell them that if you go straight out to sea from here due east, don’t go due south at all, just keep going east from here, you’ll eventually hit English waters, because extraordinarily the English-Scottish maritime border runs north of Carnoustie almost as far as Arbroath. That amazes most people. Most people assume that it goes out due east from Berwick-Upon-Tweed, and indeed it did. It did until 1999. The border was a line running due east from the mouth of the Tweed. In ’99 it was changed, and while it still starts at the mouth of the Tweed, it now tends heavily in the northward direction until it finishes up around Arbroath.

    The Secret Change

    That change was made in 1999 in an extraordinary and secretive way. There was never any debate on it in the UK parliament. It was a change made under the authority of the UK parliament, but by secondary legislation, that’s simply a document signed by a minister without having to go through parliament, and it was never discussed in the Scottish parliament at all because it was signed into law literally the evening before the Scottish parliament came into existence. And anybody who believes that was a coincidence is very naïve indeed.

    The reason it was pushed through was because, if, again, you go straight out to sea from here, there’s seven oil fields between here and Berwick-Upon-Tweed which are now in English waters, including for example the Argyll Field, which is now English. Argyll is simply its name; it’s not its location. It’s in the North Sea.

    The reason this was done was deliberately to weaken the case for independence by moving some oil fields from Scotland into England and to distort the revenue figures. When you see figures for GDP for Scotland and for England, remember seven oil fields have been taken off Scotland’s total and put into England’s total by this change in 1999.

    Correcting the Injustice

    This is something we don’t have to accept. If Scotland becomes independent, we can renegotiate that boundary with England. We have to renegotiate that boundary with England and settle it back to something like the line of east of Berwick we had. If they remain obdurate in negotiations, then we have the options to go to the International Court of Justice or to the International Law of Sea Tribunal at the Hague. All of those are entirely possible, and as I say I’ve actually I think participated in the negotiation of more maritime boundaries than any other living human being, and I am absolutely confident that we would win.

    Bad Faith

    The main point I want to leave with you is the issue of bad faith. To do this secretly, to do this without discussion in either parliament, to do it the night before devolution came into force is evidence of bad faith.

    To do it deliberately in order to discourage the prospects for Scottish independence is bad faith. And that this stealing of Scottish waters was done by Tony Blair and Donald Dewar as part of the opposition, if you like, the antidote to the devolution settlement. It just goes to show that you cannot ever believe that the Labor Party has Scotland’s interests at heart. We can never trust the UK government to look after Scotland’s interests. The only way to stop this kind of stitch-up in future is for Scotland to become an independent state.

    Craig Murray is the former Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

    He negotiated the UK’s maritime boundaries with Denmark (Faroes), Belgium, Ireland and France for the United Kingdom Government

    Since leaving the UK Civil Service he has been a Human Rights activist fighting injustice throughout the world

    He is someone you can trust

    Best wishes

  • technicolour

    I saw the swallows flying, spying
    Hollow swallows, made of metal
    Saw the kites come, spying, crying
    Waiting for the deaths to settle

    Saw the field of leaves on flame
    Autumn colours burnt to cinders
    Saw the trees ablaze, in vain
    Hope destroyed to ash and flinders

  • Fedup

    Sort of mistake anyone can make, eh?

    Yeah! It is kind of mistake that passes oppression as “freedom”.

    Israeli consul calls for Cardiff Deputy Lord Mayor to resign or be sacked over rally speech

    Cardiff businessman Philip Kaye said comments made by Labour councillor Ali Ahmed during a “No Nato” rally in Newport on August 30 were “deeply offensive” to the Jewish community.

    Mr Kaye, who has held the post of Israel’s honorary consul in Wales since 2010 said: “To refer to the rockets launched against Israel as ‘toy rockets’ is appalling. One of them killed a four year-old child.”

    Suffering from an extremely low threshold of “offence” the clear course of action is to suppress any kind of dissent anywhere, regardless of the geography, and demography.

    This is the reason for the self inflicted and support elements to interdict and re narrate the standard narrative, in case the goyim cattle get a weaker dose of the prescribed propaganda/hasbara.

  • me in us

    Also, here’s a transcript of the previous youtube in your post “Speaking Date Availability.” Hope it may be helpful, and apologies for errors.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIQ8VVn8AJA

    English Scots for Yes debate
    Buchanan Theatre, Union St., St. Andrews
    August 26, 2014

    Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan: I first of all would like to say I agreed with everything those two speakers said, with the single exception of when the gentleman said that the Labour Party people lie without batting an eyelid. That’s generally true except in the case of Alistair Darling, who blinks furiously when he, uh… [laughter] …when he lies. You may all have seen last night.

    Now I want to come down to a question of fundamental moral principle, because I also do not hold at all with this idea that we should be having a quiet, civilized debate, and whether you want your country to be independent or not is purely a lifestyle choice, like whether you have the milk in your coffee, and when it’s all over we all have to be nice to each other and be terribly pleasant to the traitors in our midst. I don’t hold with that at all.

    I tell you what. I worked for the British Foreign Office. I became a British ambassador. I was a British diplomat for 20 years. I was always patriotic to be British. I was very, very proud. I remember when I first became a British ambassador and first went out in my own flag car with the Union Jack flying on the front as the ambassador – you know, I had a lump in my throat. It was a proud moment for me. It was only six months after that I discovered that in the country where I was ambassador, we and the Americans were shipping people in order for them to be tortured, and some of them were tortured to death. Now as you may imagine my world view changed.

    It was at the same time, about a month later, we invaded Iraq against the will of the Security Council. Not just without permission of the Security Council, but in the full knowledge that if it had gone to the Security Council we would have been voted down. I as a British diplomat saw all the internal memos that went through that decision. I know for certain – I used to be head of the FCO unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell you, that they knew there weren’t any. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a lie.

    I think it is impossible to be proud of the United Kingdom. I think when we invaded Iraq we did to the United Nations what Hitler and Mussolini did to the League of Nations, and I think what we’ve done since, where, you know, the truth is often much hidden — in the bombing – if you look at Libya, disaster now, we bombed it, we cooked 15,000 people when NATO bombed Sirte, something they never told you on the BBC. And did we make it better? No.

    I’ve seen. I saw in Uzbekistan, I saw the gas contract signed by Enron and a company called Unocal, which George Bush Senior was on the board, to dig out gas pipelines from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan over Afghanistan down to the Indian Ocean, and that was actually what the Afghan war was about. They’d actually had talks with the Taliban and Unocal to see if the Taliban would provide pipeline security. The person who held those talks was the consultant for Unocal who was a certain Mr. Karzai, who after being employed by George Bush Senior as a consultant went on to become president of Afghanistan. That was their Plan B. The Taliban wouldn’t do it so they invaded.

    It’s usually, I’ve seen it on the inside, it’s almost always about control of resources. It is every bit as corrupt as our first speaker – I’m sorry, I’m also terrible at names… [“Andrew”]. You were absolutely right, Andrew, and I can tell you it’s not an academic construct. The system stinks. Westminster stinks. The British government is deeply, deeply immoral. They don’t care how many people they kill abroad if it advances them, and anybody who votes no is voting to support a psychological– sorry, a psychologically flawed, a pathological state which is a danger in the world, a rogue state, a state prepared to go to war to make a few people wealthy. That’s why I say it’s not possible to be a decent person and vote no, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to say that.

    Best wishes

  • Macky

    Habba-Clown; “If I were to submit to your judgment as to what constitutes posting in good faith, I should be something much worse than a troll”

    As CanSpeccy will shortly discover for himself, you are a clueless fraud & an out to lunch buffoon, and yes you are much worse than a standard typical troll, so give yourself a much needed pat on the back.

    Technicolour ; “pillock. useless, boring, pillock”

    Too late, the horse has already bolted as your first instinctive response, confirmed the truth of another comment of mine about you, “One of those really very annoying people, who always does more harm than good”; you do as much good for Women’s Rights as the Irish Banshee does for the Palestinian Cause.

  • mark golding

    I agree OldMark under normal circumstances it is impossible for a SU25 to operate above 7,000 metres. In any case the Ukranian air-force has a dozen Su-27s and two-dozen Mig-29s perfectly capable of intercepting and shooting down a 777.

    I would have used the SU25M1 with a pressurised suit (good for hiding my identity) and with minimum pay-load (good for 10,000m). The canon is very accurate to 800m and can be fitted to a laser range finding/targeting system.

    The truth OldMark needs vision and vim in the darkness and paralysis of deceit.

  • glenn_uk

    Gutter: “Your logic says “if we don’t ruin the planet for our grandchildren then those other guys will, so let’s get in there first and have a party”.

    Not my logic, Gutter. That’s the logic of free-fall capitalism.

  • Mary

    I did not miss Technicolour’s attempt at a slur of anti-semjtism against me on the previous page in the strangely worded comment. No not anti-semitic. Anti Zionist Israel, occupiers of another’s people’s land for 66 years.

    He/she might like to absorb this.

    Editor’s note: “Roy asks – “What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes?” It is a question one could well ask of many others who think that the lives of more than 2000 Palestinians recently slaughtered and some 12,000 others wounded is a justifiable price for Israel’s security. – SK

    Denying Palestinians their humanity: A Response to Elie Wiesel
    by Sara Roy
    The Council for the National Interest
    9 September 2014

    Mr. Wiesel,

    I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children included. As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims? Resisting a near half century of oppression imposed by Jews and through such resistance forcing us as a people to confront our lost innocence (to which you so tenaciously cling)?

    Unlike you, Mr. Wiesel, I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza among Palestinians. In that time, I have seen many terrible things and I must confess I try not to remember them because of the agony they continue to inflict. I have seen Israeli soldiers shoot into crowds of young children who were doing nothing more than taunting them, some with stones, some with just words. I have witnessed too many horrors, more than I want to describe. But I must tell you that the worst things I have seen, those memories that continue to haunt me, insisting never to be forgotten, are not acts of violence but acts of dehumanization.

    There is a story I want to tell you, Mr. Wiesel, for I have carried it inside of me for many years and have only written about it once a very long time ago. I was in a refugee camp in Gaza when an Israeli army unit on foot patrol came upon a small baby perched in the sand sitting just outside the door to its home. Some soldiers approached the baby and surrounded it. Standing close together, the soldiers began shunting the child between them with their feet, mimicking a ball in a game of soccer. The baby began screaming hysterically and its mother rushed out shrieking, trying desperately to extricate her child from the soldiers’ legs and feet. After a few more seconds of “play,” the soldiers stopped and walked away, leaving the terrified child to its distraught mother.

    Now, I know what you must be thinking: this was the act of a few misguided men. But I do not agree because I have seen so many acts of dehumanization since, among which I must now include yours. Mr. Wiesel, how can you defend the slaughter of over 500 innocent children by arguing that Hamas uses them as human shields? Let us say for the sake of argument that Hamas does use children in this way; does this then justify or vindicate their murder in your eyes? How can any ethical human being make such a grotesque argument? In doing so, Mr. Wiesel, I see no difference between you and the Israeli soldiers who used the baby as a soccer ball. Your manner may differ from theirs—perhaps you could never bring yourself to treat a Palestinian child as an inanimate object—but the effect of your words is the same: to dehumanize and objectify Palestinians to the point where the death of Arab children, some murdered inside their own homes, no longer affects you. All that truly concerns you is that Jews not be blamed for the children’s savage destruction.

    Despite your eloquence, it is clear that you believe only Jews are capable of loving and protecting their children and possess a humanity that Palestinians do not. If this is so, Mr. Wiesel, how would you explain the very public satisfaction among many Israelis over the carnage in Gaza—some assembled as if at a party, within easy sight of the bombing, watching the destruction of innocents, entertained by the devastation? How are these Israelis different from those people who stood outside the walls of the Jewish ghettos in Poland watching the ghettos burn or listening indifferently to the gunshots and screams of other innocents within—among them members of my own family and perhaps yours—while they were being hunted and destroyed?

    You see us as you want us to be and not as many of us actually are. We are not all insensate to the suffering we inflict, acceding to cruelty with ease and calm. And because of you, Mr. Wiesel, because of your words—which deny Palestinians their humanity and deprive them of their victimhood—too many can embrace our lack of mercy as if it were something noble, which it is not. Rather, it is something monstrous.

    Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University.
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/09/a-response-to-elie-wiesel/

  • technicolour

    Oh, there you are, Macky. That was a quote from someone reading your comment over my shoulder, which was why I put it in quotation marks. Personally I think it’s a compliment, but I don’t think they meant it that way.

    Mary: no, no slurs of ‘anti-semitism’ – you are having friendly exchanges with someone who posted not only Holocaust denying rottenness but a list of places from which Jewish people have been expelled, as though this somehow excused something. Have you forgotten this, just as you have forgotten your frequent mentions of Habbakuk in your own posts? I imagine so.

    Anyway, place to go, people to see – I’m away.

  • Mary

    That response is so muddled, I cannot be bothered to reply. ‘Friendly exchanges’? Guilt by responding to another by the sounds of it. I try not to mention the troll by name.

    Anyway, good riddance as you gather up your skirts and depart in a huff. You contribute nothing like some others here. Schoolyard stuff.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Mary informs:

    “I try not to mention the troll by name.”
    ________________

    Fine by me – you always take care to let people know whom you’re talking about.

    And not mentioning me by name ensures that your references to me will be read by Captain Komodo-Baal-Afrend (cf Habbabreak) and so assure him that you remain onside.

  • fred

    Now we have another blog entry above this one maybe it’s time to sum up this one.

    The first question I have is why? Why did Craig make the video? The fact that most of it is lies and distortions is irrelevant, even if it were true, so what? The oil fields in question would be negligible to say the least and probably overall a liability. The first fields to be brought on line and the first to need expensive decommissioning.

    So what was Craig thinking of when he decided to make the video? Obviously he is trying to control and manipulate people. What sort of people and how? Well the sort of person who would get angry about where an imaginary line out at sea was even though it is going to make absolutely no difference to them whatsoever outside their heads. A person who doesn’t use their intellect much but is driven by primitive tribal instincts like a dog lifting his leg up to a lamp post.

    Why? To unduly influence a referendum in a country he doesn’t even live in or to feed his narcissistic personality disorder? Who knows.

  • Kempe

    ” I agree OldMark under normal circumstances it is impossible for a SU25 to operate above 7,000 metres. ”

    Not only that the SU25 is actually slower than a B777, it has a Mach limit of 0.8 whereas a B777 cruises at Mach 0.84. At 30,000 ft it would make a difference of about 25 knots (29 mph), in short it would be like trying to chase a car on foot.

  • technicolour

    yes, Mary, ‘friendly exchanges’:

    “RoS Tell the Resident Intewworgator to find out for himself whether the power plant in Gaza has been restored to working order after the Zionist entity bombed it to smithereens.”

    That was you, on the last thread. Even a little joke about Habbakuk in there too. And of course you’ve avoided the point again. Well, you have to live with yourself; I don’t.

    “Anyway, good riddance as you gather up your skirts and depart in a huff” – dear, oh dear.

  • EphemeralDeception

    @ ~Hard.
    Thanks for those treaty conventions links. Very useful….but a bit heavy for a pub debate 🙂

  • Ba'al Zevul (For Scotland)

    Must say I rather enjoyed Fred @ 1046. “All lies and distortion”, without a shred of evidence for the proposition, as usual. Classic Fred.

    Take a Valium and some deep breaths, Fred, calm down, wait until your image in the mirror loses its lupus-like flush, and tell us, do you seriously believe that the propaganda coming from the other side is the unvarnished truth, and that any effort is made to present the facts and evidence supporting its case in an impartial and undistorted manner?

    Really? Any evidence of that at all would be refreshing.

    I really don’t see why you’re so scared, Fred. The latest line from your lot is that Scotland would be ‘forced’ to join the EU – the story’s changed, but that’s normal – just think of the lovely subsidies Alex will renegotiate on your behalf. Have you considered not growing olives? Caithness has the perfect climate for that.

  • haward

    Come off it Craig. You know your Law of the Sea better than that. That 1999 line is perfectly fair in law.

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