AN OUTSIDE VIEW

My comments in the Guardian's Comment is Free section, under the name Nazarene1563, are being pre-moderated ie censored. Here is why. Q: When I post a comment, it says that my comments are being pre-moderated – what does that mean? Does that apply to everyone in the conversation?   A: There is a further exception to the overall reactive-moderation approach adopted by the Guardian website: in isolated situations, a particular user may be identified as a risk, based on a pattern of behaviour (e.g. spam, trolling, repeated/frequent borderline abuse), so a temporary filter can be applied to anything they post, which means that their comments will need to be pre-moderated before appearing on the site. This is a temporary measure applied by moderators to a very small handful of people based entirely on patterns of actual behaviour, and should result relatively quickly in either their posting ability being suspended completely if no improvement is shown, or the filter being removed...

Paedophilia has been in the news for about the past ten years. First it was the Catholic clergy, who were alleged to be paedophiles to a man, when in fact it turned out that 98% of them had not been involved in paedophilia. There were some places where the incidence was higher, and the cover-ups by the hierarchy were reprehensible, but on the whole this was not a major issue. Then we have had scandals in care homes, and last year there was the case of Jimmy Saville case, and other well-known and popular entertainers. But the really big scandals are only just emerging - those of predatory gangs of Muslim men. This is a widespread problem across Europe. If the authorities do not deal with it, then people will take matters into their own hands.

Why is so much of the strict end of Islam so ugly? Arabic script can be beautiful but the lettering on the ISIS flag looks as if it was done by someone sticking their finger in a bottle of ink. Then there is that rough white circle. Don't they have compasses to draw a proper circle? This is the sort of "artwork" that would be expected from Orcs. This is part of a wider picture. Beyond abstract patterning, Islam has produced little in the way of art. Its architecture has been formulaic and has not evolved qualitatively in a millennium. What is there in Islamic architecture comparable to the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic and the classical revival of the Renaissance? The Islamic world has produced no music comparable either to that of Renaissance composers, or the nineteenth century symphonists. Where is the Islamic equivalent of a Palestrina or a Mozart? Who were the Islamic world's Albertis, Michaelangelos, Berninis, Rembrandts and Vermeers? Nor has the ...

The report was that children playing on the beach were shelled by an Israeli vessel and killed. What really happened? If you do a search on the incident, you will find conflicting reports. One account says that the boys were playing football, another that they were collecting scraps of metal. The photograph of the alleged site of the incident shows a beach but not the kind of beach where people would relax in deckchairs and play games. There was a container which was reportedly targetted by the Israeli gunners, and there seem to be various other bits of industrial debris lying around. There was a report that the Israelis would carry out an investigation but no report of the results of an investigation seems to turn up if you search for it. The worst is indeed possible: that the boys were shot and killed for fun. Other possibilities are that they were in front of the actual target and the shells fell short - which happens constantly when firing from a vessel at sea. What else was on...

Life at the receiving end of the Hamas firework show... Just to let you know......= the hamas broke the sease fire for the 7 time- just 1 Hour ago, and fire rockets at israely cities...!!!!!!!!! what would you do if it was on your home ????? at your family ??? for 14 years ????? no time to take a shower..(15 seconds to hit) , cant go to schol, cant sleep at night? can live regulary...??? and above all they are bilding yunnels to get inside people houses and kill children' and kidnapped some more....? what wold you do??? help humanity stop terror....!!!! ( 24:00 NOW, CANT SLEEP..!)

The Palestinian owners of the land are mostly long dead, so any possible rights would belong to their heirs, who will be the children or grandchildren. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Israel were to evacuate the entire country. The putative rights of the successors to the original owners would have to be established. Documents would have to be provided, which would include not only land titles, but papers relating to the intended disposal of the estates of the deceased, all properly dated, witnessed and signed. Disputes over claims would take decades for the courts to deal with. Some people would resort to extra-legal means to make their claims. It should also be remembered that large areas of agricultural land were owned by absentee landlords who rack-rented their tenants. Their successors would also lose no time in asserting their claims; thus the majority of the descendants of those who departed in 1947 would end up as impoverished tenant peasants scratching a bare livelih...

A Jewish state west of the Jordan was part of the deal for helping to get rid of the Ottomans. The Arabs got Transjordan as part of the same deal. Nobody would have been forced to move. Arabs who did not move but stayed in Israel have a better life than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, with democratic rights limited only because of their potential as a security threat, so we are not talking about some evil, oppressive alien regime. Whether there ever would be enough Jews to constitute a Jewish state was in doubt until the rise of the Nazis. The Balfour Declaration was only part of the picture. The British did not give away the same land to two different people.

An Israeli perspective on the action in Gaza "I appreciate how it might have been better from a public perspective point-of-view to have waited, although I have my doubts. It seems no matter how clear-cut the case, no matter how Israel tries to act ethically, no matter that other areas in the region and the world have far more deaths and the like, the world condemns Israel and spends an inordinate amount of time on it. "Be it because of oil, Jew-hatred, anti-this or that, it just seems to be the case. In any event, we could not wait. The people in the South had been living with missile fire for years, as I am sure you know. It kept increasing and increasing. People demand that their government protect them. Otherwise, they will lose hope and abandon the area. Then, once the tunnels were discovered, we had to act. "The government and the people have a social contract: we will live there, build it up, but the government must take action to protect us. For years peopl...

In all the discussion about the business in Gaza, it is almost never pointed out that this dispute has a very long tail. You can call it karma. Israel has not always fought as clean as Zionists would have us believe, but when Zionism was little more than an idealistic fantasy, there were attacks by Muslim Arabs on the handful of Jews in the area that became Palestine after WW1. These include anti Jewish riots in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924, 1929, 1933 and 1936. At that time Zionism had no traction at all amongst the majority of Jews - it was considered a cranky minority interest, so the Arabs had no reason to fear a mass immigration of Jews. This did not occur until after the Holocaust, when Jews moved into Israel for lack of any other options. Most Jews in Israel are descendants of refugees. When most of these people arrived, it was a place where nobody in their right mind would go if they had any better options. It is not generally realised that the Palestinian leader...

The new Christian symbol, courtesy of ISIS. It is the Arabic letter "N" for Nazarene. It has been painted on the doors of Christian houses in areas they have occupied. Christians are being given the options "pay", "convert" or "be killed". So far the Christians have been leaving quietly but I don't think this passivity will continue for much longer. Then the Jihadi thugs will get a nasty shock.