The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will address the Israeli parliament. He is the first ever UK Prime Minister to address the Israeli parliament, Knesset. It is expected that in his address he will call the Iranian president’s threat to wipe Israel off the map as abhorrent.

I think that the statement by the Iranian president to wipe Israel off the map of the world is a foolish statement. Iran and for that matter any Muslim country does not have the capacity to wipe Israel off the face of the world. Such statements are made to gain cheap popularity and do not serve any good.

I think that Iran and the Muslim world must realize that the state of Israel is a hard reality for them which they will have to accept. They must try to engage Israel in talks and try to solve all the issues through peaceful negotiations.

Pakistan snubbed at the Common Wealth demand to lift emergency saying these demands were made without assessing the ground realities.

The Commonwealth had given Pakistan a 10-day deadline to lift emergency , release all political prisoners and lift curbs on the media.

Pakistan’s stance indicates that they are not realizing the implications of their behavior. It could face international isolation and suspension of military aid.

Pakistan’s membership was restored in 2004 when they pledged that Musharraf will relinquish the post of army chief. If the government of Pakistan does not honour their pledges this could made commonwealth members angry and get into trouble because we dependent on foreign charity for our survival.

Media owners and journalists condemned the amendments to press laws. These amendments have been made to silence the press under the guise of emergency by the US backed military dictator.

Everyone is shocked at the silence of international community over the coercive measures taken by the government of General Musharraf to gag the press and media.

Chatham House researchers, a leading British foreign affairs think-tank, opine that NATO is unable to beat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, because of lack of resources and planning.

They are of the opinion that NATO and coalition have failed to o develop a "coherent approach to deal with the Taliban.

In my opinion, NATO and coalition do not want to solve the problem. They want to keep Afghanistan in perpetual crisis to justify their presence in Afghanistan. Even a fool knows that they are here to contain China and Iran. They also want to keep an eye on Pakistan , the sole Muslim nuclear power.

Saudi Arabia was awarded a contract called Project Salam, or al-Salam, meaning “peace”, to BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defence company. BAE Systems will supply 72 Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia. The deal is £4.4 billion pound.

There is no doubt this deal good for the aerospace industry and the wider UK economy. But Critics, say the government has put commercial interest before ethics and had given in to Saudi blackmail.

The Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) had dropped a probe last year into a sale of jets to the Saudis in the 1980s under Saudi threat.

The SFO investigation revealed that BAE secretly transferred more than $2bn (£1bn) to Prince Bander's account.

It is also worth mentioning that Britain’s arms export guidelines say sales should not be approved for countries which abuse human rights.

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London police claims that they defused a "potentially viable" explosive device, which was in a metallic light green Mercedes near Piccadilly Circus. However , if we analyze the accounts of eye witnesses , their claim appears to false.

The witnesses say that the occupant was driving “erratically”. He smashed the car into bins outside the nightclub and ran off.

My experience tells me that a trained terrorist will never behave that way. The story was fabricated by London police for some ulterior motive.

Author: clemons
via TPMCafe:

Tony Blair has informed his Queen and his Cabinet that he is stepping down as Prime Minister.

Americans tend to look at other country’s heads-of-state through the prism of their own president -- but Blair even more so.

Blair used to seem a lot like Clinton. Now sadly, he looks a lot like Bush.

Here is a piece I have written for The Guardian and the opener:

Americans used to love Tony Blair.

When Bill Clinton’s presidency ended, a vast majority of Americans - despite a sex scandal and impeachment - preferred him to remain in office over either Al Gore or George Bush. For many Americans, Tony Blair - perceived to be a protege of Clinton - was their chance to see Clinton’s charisma and Third Way style of problem-solving idealism carry on in the work and deeds of Britain’s youthful and globally energetic prime minister. Blair, for a time, became for many "America’s hope".

Now, Blair is telling the Queen that he’s calling it quits - and leaving after ten years at the helm of Britain. And he and his acolytes are grasping for straws of legacy - trying to make sure that all know his key role in helping to settle centuries-old tensions in Northern Ireland and trying to remind his constituents of the massive economic gains the UK made after reforms led by "New Labour".

But the bottom line today is that Blair’s potentially considerable legacy has been almost entirely blacked out by his close association with another American president and an ineptly conducted war and occupation that George Bush and Blair hatched together.

Now it will be interesting to see which President -- Hillary, Barack, McCain, Rudy, Mitt -- we choose to see Gordon Brown through.

-- Steve Clemons is Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Technorati Tags: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair

Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be judged as much for his domestic achievements as his unpopular decision to support the US-led war in Iraq, newspapers said in London said on Friday.

Britain’s dailies overflowed with comments on the Blair legacy a day after he announced he would resign as leader of the Labour Party, and the country, on June 27, concluding more than a decade as premier.

"Mr Blair has met the standard demanded of statesmen of the highest rank, namely to govern largely on his own terms and take his leave as he wished it," The Times said.

"Let history have the time and space to consider him and the Britain he had headed for the past decade."

The Sun tabloid -- Britain’s best-read daily -- remained a Blair supporter to the end.

" The Sun believes the verdict is already in. The overwhelming majority of people believe Tony Blair has served his country well -- at home and abroad," it said.

"And that’s a verdict he should be proud to live with."

The Daily Mirror likened Blair to a "political rock star" on a farewell tour who deserves the "thanks and tributes of his fellow statesmen and the people of Britain."

But the general theme was one of the promises unfulfilled.

"The great landslide of 1997 was a mandate for so much more than the new government was ready to deliver. The same was true in 2001. Much of that was Mr. Blair’s fault," said left-leaning The Guardian .

The Daily Mail’s editorial was along similar lines, though the paper, no fan of Blair’s, conceded that he was "a remarkable politician."

There are three requirements for a state to exist. It must have a territory. It must have a government. And it must have a people - a tribe, or perhaps more tribes than one, but a people united by a shared culture and a shared view of the world.

A tribe can exist even without a territory, as the history of the Jewish people reminds us. A government can rule over a territory, but if it is without a people united by a common cause, it cannot survive. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are modern testimonies to that. The proposed European Union republic will be another.

It is for historians to remind us of the struggles within these islands to create a single kingdom - and before that, of the struggles to weld together the tribes of England, of Scotland, Wales and Ireland into their kingdoms and then, eventually, the creation of the United Kingdom whose 300th anniversary we celebrate this year.

It cost much blood and treasure, but each generation has been repaid by prosperity and by security from invasion, revolution and insurrection. It made possible the creation of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and a linguistic and cultural domination bequeathed to the world's remaining superpower.

Now it is under assault. There are many who doubt if it will long survive. Why is a Union which offers its members and the world such benefit in danger of coming apart?

We English - the senior partners by virtue of our numbers - have become careless of our identity. We were once so confident of ourselves and are now so complacent and so ignorant that we do not celebrate who we are. We forget our national day. In the Guardianesque and BBCish world, simply no one would proclaim themselves as English.

The isolated cadres of "multiculturalists" have been so strengthened and reinforced that the British tribe now scarcely exists in the sense of being a people united by a shared culture and a shared view of the world.

In Blair's decade, people not of the British tribe have settled in these islands. Some, not least the recent arrivals from central Europe, will return home. Others, like their countrymen who came here in 1940 to fight Hitler's empire, will stay, marry and integrate. Many from the former Empire will integrate - more slowly perhaps, but because of their shared values outweighing cultural differences, they will - just as our Jewish population has done.

But others will neither integrate nor go away. They will stay here - separate, resentful, longing to turn the country into one more like the one they have left, living separate lives in cultural and linguistic ghettos.

It is only recently that I have begun to be able to say these things without being condemned as a racist bigot even by my own party. Then, first, that brave man, Trevor Phillips, spoke of his concerns about a society sleepwalking into separation. Now, leading churchmen are speaking out, and even, extraordinarily, the minister for immigration muses in public, while abroad, that immigration is "unsettling society". Even Jack Straw is trying to clamber aboard.

It is doing more than that. It is rupturing the cohesion, the solidarity, the cohesiveness and homogeneity of the British tribe. Their tribe is being broken up: its history untaught, its values brought into contempt, its institutions defiled, its solidarity dissolved by the corrosive mixture of continental law, political correctness and the avarice, greed, corruption and celebrity culture of its political and social elite.

Devolution in Scotland has inflated the SNP. And what is offered by the SNP but undemocratic rule from Brussels rather than shared power in Westminster? What a cruel joke to sell the end of the union as a triumph in which Scotland can be equal of Latvia, or Luxembourg, in a foreign state.

In Northern Ireland, devolution (and surrender to terrorism) has inflated IRA/Sinn Féin. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland are on the path to separation. And England is left too weary even to be angry.

Is it, then, all over?

As surely as the British tribe has been sorely damaged and betrayed, so the European Republic may have territory and a government, but not that third esssential for statehood - a tribe of its own. It will fail.

So, we Scottish, English and British observe our perilous state and look for the leader who can do for our tribe today what a man like Alfred, a woman like Elizabeth, or men such as Nelson, Wellington and Churchill did in earlier days.

We can escape. We can rebuild.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered this week to the Bruges Group.