Category: News Media

What Is It With The Telegraph These Days?

I mean, The Telegraph is a British MSM newspaper, right? So natural law says it ought to be filled with all kinds of barking moonbat drivel. Yet two of its recent editorials have been disturbingly . . . sane.

HERE’S AN EDITORIAL THAT ARGUES THAT CALLS A NUCLEAR-ARMED IRAN "THE SCARIEST PROSPECT OF ALL."

It goes on to point out that Iranaian leaders have been bragging about how they would use nukes to wipe out Israel and that they would have the ability to project nuclear force to European capitals, and so concludes:

The truth is that nuclear- armed ayatollahs are unacceptable in Europe, America and Israel.

It also says:

When the Israelis bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear
research centre at Osirak in 1981, they were universally condemned. The
Americans showed their displeasure by cancelling arms sales. But the
raid on Osirak prevented Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, a
fact that the Americans and the world fully recognised when weapons
inspectors went into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war. If Saddam had had
nuclear weapons in 1991, it would have been impossible to dislodge him
from Kuwait. Able to intimidate Saudi Arabia, he would have had
decisive power over Middle East oil. That propsect persuaded America,
and most of the world, that Israel had done the right thing in bombing
Osirak in 1981.

Unless European diplomacy
obtains real guarantees [backed up by unannounced inspections] from Iran, President Bush will soon have to
decide to do to Iran what the Israelis did to Iraq. If he decides to
attack, he will not announce it in advance: just a television broadcast
the following morning announcing a job done. The "international
community" will denounce the raid hysterically in public while
approving of it whole-heartedly in private.

Now, if that’s not amazing enough, at the bottom of the page is a link to an editorial called

THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO PROTECT OURSELVES–AND HERE’S THE PROOF  (WARNING: Evil registration requirement).

What is the one way for Brits to protect themselves? Surrender to France? Disband their army as a show of good faith to the world? Give sanctions more time? Start broadcasting the Teletubbies 24 hours a day in every country in the Muslim world?

No, you’d think that these would be the kind of recommendations a British newspaper today would be making, but you’d never guess what this editorial recommends: Start letting ordinary Brits tote guns!

Yes, y’see: The idealistic 1984 society that George Orwell painted in such glowing terms for Britian has been slightly delayed (expect it in a decade or two), and so there’s not yet a security officer hiding in every closet over there. As a result, if someone attacks you–say, with an illegal weapon–then you can’t simply ask Officer Omnipresent to step out of the closet and defend you. It therefore might make sense for the ordinary people to . . . . well . . . have the ability to defend themselves. If fact, if the illegally-armed hooligans knew that even a fraction of the ordinary citizens were legally-armed then they might think twice about accosting them. In other words, violent crime might go down.

That gets to the proof alluded to in the editorial’s title: Back in 1909, ordinary Brits thwarted a terrorist attack in Tottenham because back then the populace was armed. (The police even needed to borrow pistols from passers by because they’d mislaid the key to their gun cabinet.) The article notes:

We should not fool ourselves, however, that such
things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those
years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our
own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial
strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where
there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the
country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland.

In such
troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result
in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World
War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we
see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then,
but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of
firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime.

It also notes:

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of
the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun
laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder
capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New
York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since
1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws,
and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of
Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on
the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in
much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace,
but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction
of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.

Issue
of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was non-discretionary, and
of course aroused a furore among gun control advocates, who predicted
that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false;
Florida’s homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders
was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida’s suit,
and mandatory right-to-carry policies are now in place in 35 of the
United States.

Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the
United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime
rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following
the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice
observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it
has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent
crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached,
the bureau states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While American
"gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of media
demonisation in Britain, the grim fact is that in this country we now
suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United
States.

So, what’s up with The Telegraph? Is it a mouthpiece for the Tory party or something? Or is it that they’re having an outbreak of the sanies over the pond?