Mohammed was NOT a paedophile, OK?

There's an old joke about a disconsolate Welshman complaining bitterly to his local pub barman. "I've written poems for eleven Eisteddfods - but do they call me Dai the Poet? I painted the sign for this pub, the general store, the post office and the chapel - but do they call me Dai the sign-painter? I've made garden gates for every house in the High Street but do they call me Dai the gate-hanger? No. But they catch you fucking ONE goat ...." 

Dai, had he existed in reality, would have enjoyed the ruling this week from the ECHR. Not so Douglas Murray, writing in the Speccie. I fear Douglas has actually got it wrong. He either hasn't fully read the court decision, or doesn't understand it. Let me reassure him. It's OK to state anywhere in Austria that the Prophet Mohammed married Aisha when she was six years old, and had sex with her when she was nine. No problem. The court accepts this as a fact that can be openly stated. 

The ECHR even accepts that this act is open to moral critique, as to whether it was an act of child abuse, was detrimental to Aisha's mental and physical well-being, or even whether Aisha could have given informed consent, or whether a pre-pubescent child, being the vassal and property of a man who was her husband under the belief system of that time and place, could be subject without restriction to his sexual penetration whatever her age or willingness. All fine. Discuss.   

What the court ruled we can't do is to call Mohammed a paedophile. A paedophile demonstrates a sexual predilection for sex with an entire class of pre-pubescent girls or boys - it is a state of continuous sexual perversion, a condition not an act. There is no evidence that Mohammed inflicting sex upon a single prepubescent child is sufficient evidence of a condition of paedophilia, ruled the court. Therefore the accusation is abusive and unlawful under Austrian law. 

Dai the goat-fucker would down his pint in satisfaction.

Plausible deniability - West decides to believe Saudi lies

It was the threat of oil at $200/bbl that erased any doubts in the President's mind. King Salman told him the silly Grand Vizier had done it and the US administration decided to believe it. Of course we understand, said the US ambassador. Your Grand Vizier was just a little overzealous in questioning Mr Khashoggi and instead of waving his biro about mistakenly reached for his chopping sword and chopped the poor journalist into several box-sized pieces by accident. It was a mistake anyone could have made. Phew. Well that's kicked the recession back into 2019 and we're still hoping something will turn up. 

The Saudi king has no doubt promised the harshest punishment to be meted out to the offender - his wives are to be banned from their London and Paris shoplifting trips for a month. 

Meanwhile the Salafist fanatics continue pouring Saudi blood money into Europe to subvert Islamic moderates, continue to export Islamist imams to preach hate and death and through bribes, kickbacks and corruption have fouled those charged with preventing such abuses. The dead of 9/11 cry out from their ashpit graves for justice, for the indictment of the Saudi backers of the massacre. And the Western press puffs out its cockerel chest in boast and braggadocio about press freedom and quietly closes down all news stories about the murder of a fellow journalist by the Saudis in their Turkish consulate. 

Gentlemen, you disgust me.

Blair, Straw must face trial for rendition & torture conspiracy

I said at the time of the peak 9/11 rhetoric that you could no more have have a 'war on terror' than you could have a war on swords, or a war on light machine guns. Terror is just a weapon. You can protect yourself against a weapon, but to end the threat you must deal with those using it. And any group with a big enough grudge can use terror.

Our domestic war criminals Blair, Straw, Hoon and Irving - the holders of the four great offices of State who lied this country into an unlawful war - have also now been exposed as complicit in the most vile and despicable acts of torture. 

Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee has just published its long awaited report on UK complicity in rendition and torture under Blair and Brown's governments. Not only are the facts a damning indictment of Blair's hubris and utter immorality, but the intelligence service bosses, Scarlett and Dearlove, are also exposed as deeply complicit in this disgusting business. And please don't defend torture - "When we torture people, even if we win the battle, we've already lost the war for hearts and minds, especially our own". Blair's torture policy was Not In My Name and not, I suspect, the name of the vast majority of essentially decent British people. 

The Chair of the committee is one Dominic Grieve. This report has been long awaited, and perhaps those wondering why the long delays may look to Blair's machinations as in Chilcot's report and wonder if he has not adopted the same tactic here.

Blair and Straw at least must face trial over this. And both Dearlove and Scarlett, as Peter Oborne recommends in the Mail, must at the least be stripped of their kinghthoods.  

It is high time we put these people in the dock to answer for these crimes.

Poland's judges are not independent. But neither are the rest of Europe's.

Poland's judicial independence comes in at 99th in the 2018 World Economic Forum tables, below Swaziland, Mali and Zambia. Nigeria is at 82. Poland's judicial system, like all those in Napoleonic law nations, is deeply politicised - the reason that Poland has over 4,000 cyclists in prison is not for any great breach in natural or moral law. 

However, only very few nations in Europe - the UK and the Netherlands amongst them - can criticise. Italy is not far from Nigeria, neither is Spain. Turkey, at 103rd place, receives hundreds of millions of Euros in bribe money from the EU to keep Syrian migrants within Turkish borders, despite draconian restrictions on press freedom, tens of thousands of political prisoners in detention and a growing number of unexplained deaths in custody of military officers. EU officials are not driven by human rights abuses, clearly, in their actions against Poland. The EU's excuse for action, Poland's changes to judicial appointments, are a smokescreen to disguise the use of the Brussels knout to bludgeon a disobedient vassal state into line. 

If this action was really aimed at improving judicial independence, then Latvia, Slovenia, Greece and Italy would be next in line for EU sanctions. they're not. Their courts can be as corrupt as they can be without fear, because they obey Brussels. And that's the reality about the utterly crooked, despotic regime that we're desperately trying to leave. 

German car bosses face jail if they step outside the EU

I'm sure, in the worldwide diesel fraud issue, that carmakers around the globe were complicit in at least a massaging of the test results. But none were as industrially efficient at defrauding the public as German carmakers VW, BMW, Audi et al. With Teutonic efficiency, they defrauded the world on a massive scale.

Now the first German VW executive has been jailed - in the US. He was unlucky enough not to escape back to Germany quickly enough, and the Americans scooped him up. Oliver Schmidt is now doing seven years in a federal penitentiary. The US indicted five other VW executives last January - Heinz-Jakob Neusser, 56, Jens Hadler, 50, Richard Dorenkamp, 68, Bernd Gottweis, 69, and Jürgen Peter, 59. They face summary arrest and detention without bail in the US if they are caught. 

No one has yet been prosecuted in Germany. No EU countries that have been defrauded have issued EU arrest warrants for any of the five VW bosses. The US isn't trying to extradite them from Europe. And this is all because the world knows full well that European justice and its organs the ECHR and the ECJ are corrupt political courts. Courts in China and Russia are rated by the WEF as having greater judicial independence than those in most EU countries. 

However, should those five VW bosses, and others from the other big-name German carmakers, step outside Europe to any country that has an extradition arrangement with the US, they face arrest and detention. After Brexit, if the UK breaks free of the corrupt claws of Euro justice, this includes Britain. And this forms a large part of the reason that the EU is fighting so hard to keep EU citizens in the UK under the protection of the bent ECJ - to allow VW bosses, fugitives from justice and other Euro criminals to visit Britain (and Ireland) without being banged up and extradited to the US. It stinks. EU 'justice' stinks. The collusion between the EU and the global corporates stinks. We will be far better off after Brexit away from that noxious putrescent foulness.  

Judicial competence

This is a post in praise of the EU. Or maybe to the UK's influence in having introduced to sclerotic and protectionist Europe just a little of the many advantages in terms of access to justice that we enjoy in the UK.

Austria, like much of Europe, has no commercial law small claims procedure. To resolve an intractable contract dispute here, even a small one, means each side lawyering-up at €300/hr for even the most mediocre and least competent of lawyers and a full court hearing before career commercial judges. Contrast with the UK, in which claims for up to £10,000 (£1,000 for personal injury and landlord/tenant) are dealt with under the small claims track of civil procedure, often called small claims courts or county courts, in which an experienced local solicitor often sits as Recorder. Legal costs are not claimable, and court fees are fixed in advance. 

Well, the EU has introduced a cross-Europe small claims track, and you can sense the dragging of the vast protectionist hulk of Euronational self-interest in opposition to it. For a start, the limit is €5,000. And it only applies to disputes with persons or firms in other EU countries. Otherwise, it's remarkably like our own small claims procedure. It's invaluable to anyone doing business with Germans, who have still to discover how customer relations works. I buy a lot of building material online from German firms - they tend to be 30% cheaper than local Austrian outlets for the same materials - and of course from time to time there are problems. 

I ordered two WCs for the en-suites from a German firm. One was broken in transit and they went back to the firm without reaching me. A UK firm would have said "Tut mir leid Herr Raedwald we've broken one of your WCs. We can't get another for three weeks. So if it's OK we'll send you the good one now and the other when they come into stock. And we'll give you a £50 online voucher by way of apology". 

The German way? "One of your WCs has been broken and we can't replace it until September. If you want the other one now, that will be an additional €90 carriage." Well, I wasn't happy. The emails went back and forth until the Germans smugly responded "And what are you going to do about it?" whereupon I sent them my draft of the EU claim form, requesting also that the case be heard near to me in Austria, by an Austrian court, this option being available for consumers when dealing with foreign firms. 

The result? No online voucher - they haven't learnt that much - but a surly confirmation that my intact WC was on its way. Free of additional charge.   

From the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair

As with Nigerian 419 scammers, Mr Barrister Tony Blair doesn't himself address anyone. Such people imagine that heading a polite written request for £5,000 or an excuse for killing 100,000 people with the words 'From the desk of ...' or 'From the office of ...' adds gravitas to their own actual insignificance. Guys, it really doesn't. 

So we have Chilcot clarifying that the truth for Mr Barrister Tony Blair is what he believes it to be, and that he approached War in the same way an advocate defending a man charged with waving his todger about on the Central Line. For Mr Barrister Tony Blair, an emotional and persuasive appeal always trumps stuff like actual facts, real intelligence and credible evidence. And that probably goes for his Desk, his Office and any other objects that speak for him. 

But just as learned counsel don't actually deceive the court when they aver that their client claims he was just shaking raindrops from a newly purchased Bratwurst in that tube carriage, and that this could indeed have been the case, that there exists a reasonable doubt, so Mr Barrister Tony Blair wasn't actually deceiving us when he claimed with all his emotional wringing that Iraq might represent a threat. 

The difference is more than a £500 fine. Iraq is a nation drenched in innocent blood and spattered with detonated body parts, home to pain, suffering, desperation and despair, the source of Islamist hatred, and a graveyard for an entire generation. And for that we must thank the Desk of Mr Barrister Tony Blair, 419 scammer and blagger extraordinaire, a man who avoids jail as an eel eludes the hand. 

Coffee needed. I've got a vomity taste in my throat.