You can't always get what you want...

Okay, they wouldn't let me near Heather Graham, so I'm back.

I see some foot-dragging going on in Israel over the Arab League plan for a lasting peace settlement in the region.

Beleaguered Israeli leader Ehud Olmert, who faces a lot of criticism at home for losing a war with Hizbollah last summer, is quite right to describe the plan as revolutionary, even though it amounts to pretty much what the Arabs offered in 2002.

The difference between then and now is that in 2002, the intifada was at its height, whereas now there's an elected Palestinian government.

The deal on the table for Israel is simple, as most good deals are. Return to the 1967 borders (ie keep the land you stole in 1948, but not the extra land you've been stealing since) and you get normal relations with all your Arab neighbours.

Israel might rather hogtrade for a bit of land around Jerusalem and various settlements in the West Bank, but they ought to give these up and accept the deal on the table. It's the only solution for a lasting two-state settlement that might allow Israelis to normalise their society and live in peace in their region at long last.

The Arabs want to see the right of return, ie all the Palestinians in refugee camps since 1948 be allowed to return to where they were expelled from within Israel. That would obviously undermine the Jewishness of the theocracy, so they don't want to agree to that.

One solution might be to take some of those arms-dealing and diamond industry profits sloshing around Israel and put it into a compensation fund for the refugees, to help them build new lives outside of refugee camps, possibly within a Palestinian State.

You can't always get what you want, as the song goes. Israel will never get a better offer than this, and the Arabs won't be able to force them on the right to return while America props up the apartheid state.

But as we've found in Northern Ireland, if everyone takes a leap of faith and compromises a bit, you just might get what you need.

A solution for the Holy Land after nearly six decades is finally with everyone's grasp. Let's hope they take it.

Heather Graham

has been spotted in Belfast of all places! I'm there!

Normal blogging services will be resumed later this week.

Mind where you walk, you dozy crooks!

Here's some quality bit of research done yesterday by Fine Gael. Basically, they uncovered the fact that the Dublin councils paid out a mammoth 15 million euro in a four year period to people who tripped and fell on the footpath.

Now, have they paved Dublin with minefields when I wasn't looking, or does this sound like another compo tidal wave to you?

The worst part, or best depending on whether you're a member of the Law Society or not, is that half of that money went to solicitors.

This isn't the first example of the current government shovelling money at our learned friends in the Four Courts, of course. The tribunal payouts have made multimillionaires of many legal eagles, or as I prefer to refer to them, tax-sucking parasites on society.

Interestingly, the Dublin councils managed to spend a mere 17 million euro on street repairs while ponying up almost the same amount to people claiming compo. Seems a poor return, doesn't it?

I recall there was a road in Turf Lodge in Belfast that during the Eighties was known as the most dangerous street in the world. Not because of any Troubles-related violence, but because of the number of local residents who had claimed compo off Belfast City Council after going arse over tit on the pavement.

No matter how many repairs were done, it only took a crack on a single slab (one that might occur mysteriously overnight, after some local lads had passed by with a sledgehammer) for the locals to be fighting each other to hurl themselves to the ground as they walked over the crack.

Far be it from me to suggest that anyone in receipt of compensation from the Dublin councils in relation to footpath falls were in anyway claiming illegally. But Dublin pavements are simply not minefields.

Watch where you're walking in future, you dozy crooks!

Divided loyalties

In these days of erratic international football results either side of the border, who is a good Northern Nationalist to support?

On the one hand, we have Stan the Man's merry brigade of wasters, scraping past the mighty Wales and San Marino with all the aplomb and grace of a hippo on ice.

Nary a Northerner among them of course. Which might indeed be the problem.

On the other, there's always Lawrie Sanchez's green and white army, casually wallopping four past the oppo, stuffing teams like England and Spain for fun.

But could a good Nationalist truly consider supporting a partitionist team, even if their football association is the original one on the island, given the crazed Loyalist backing the team gets at that bastion of mutual understanding, Windsor Park?

The answer to this question is, as it is to so many of life's questions, Cliftonville FC. The oldest soccer team in Ireland, and one which despite its non-sectarian origins, claims the hearts of most Northern Nationalists, given the long-lamented departure of Belfast Celtic to the annals of history and Derry City to an even more distant and fabled location, the League of Ireland.

So in honour of the Red Army, I give you this recent team talk from before their successful County Antrim Shield victory this season. Special thanks to Missing Neighbour for smuggling the video camera into Solitude.

Losing the war on drugs

If there ever was a war on drugs, I can only assume that it was fought in order to secure cheap and easy access to illegal drugs for all.

If they fought against the proliferation of 'recreational' drugs, then they have badly lost, a long time ago.

It doesn't matter how many 'Just Say No' campaigns you run, or how many Colombian fields you napalm when illegal drugs are now freely available in rural primary school classrooms, as I became aware of last week.

At that point, if not many years before, you've lost the war.

Anyhow, if there still is some sort of a war on drugs, then the battlefield is about to shift, at least in Britain, where leading medics and scientists have sat down and examined the potential negative effects of twenty different recreational drugs and ranked them for how much damage they cause.

The results aren't surprising to me, but no doubt they won't make a lot of anti-drugs campaigners very happy.

Top of the list? Why, heroin and cocaine of course. Now heroin you can understand. Nasty smelly junkies with their lives in a mess. Of course heroin is poison. But cocaine? Trendy, upmarket, middle class cocaine?

Surely some mistake. Let's look at how they conducted this 'survey':

* They asked a group of 29 consultant psychiatrists who specialise in addiction to rate the drugs in nine categories.
* Three of these related to physical harm, three to the likelihood of addiction and three to social harms such as healthcare costs.
* The team also extended the analysis to another group of 16 experts spanning several fields including chemistry, pharmacology, psychiatry, forensics, police and legal services.

So basically, it's about as comprehensive and scientific an examination as you can get. And yup, cocaine is one of the worst there is. Bad news for marketing executives, catwalk models and Ulster paramilitaries there.

But there's even worse news for the alcohol and tobacco industries. Alcohol was ranked as the fifth most dangerous commonly used recreational drug in Britain, and tobacco the ninth.

Let's just pause and ponder that for a moment. When you abuse alcohol, it is more dangerous than smoking. It is more dangerous than addiction to amphetamines. Think about that one next time you go binge-drinking on St Patrick's Day. It's not a pleasant realisation.

But what about that dangerous gateway drug cannabis and all its scarily potent skunk variations? What about ecstasy, the pill that kills?

They clocked in at 11th and 18th place respectively.

In other words, smoking fags is worse than smoking pot, and a good ecstasy pill is better for you than either.

So to summarise, two of the most dangerous drugs of abuse are currently legal, while much more benign substances are banned.

If the war on drugs had ever been really about saving lives and people's futures from drug dependency, then surely we lost it back in the early 20th century, when alcohol prohibition was lifted in America and cannabis and most other more benign substances were banned.

Then we lost it again when we permitted big tobacco to keep selling their cancersticks, despite discovering the health risks they cause and the fact that they are extremely addictive.

The experts in Britain are to be applauded for applying the rigours of the scientific approach to a subject that for too long has been placed beyond debate by those who sought to demonise drugs as a cause of all society's ills.

But they aren't telling the kids anything they didn't already know.

For every kid like Leah Betts who died on ecstasy, there are literally millions who didn't. Who danced their asses off and went home sweaty and happy.

For every time some pompous suit or judge has lectured about how cannabis is a gateway drug, the highway to dopefiend hell, there are literally millions of people who puffed a joint, munched a spacecake and listened to some music, rather than reaching for a heroin needle and a gun to mug someone with.

And everytime someone watched an older relative wheezing in the pulmonary ward of a hospital, their lungs rotted by carcinogenic tobacco, or fell victim to a raging drunk incapable of reason who beat them, raped them, robbed them or mowed them down in a car, those people realised what the really dangerous drugs are.

It's time to reclassify our opinions on drugs. Then reclassify the drugs themselves.

Tobacco should be banned. Being drunk should in itself carry a legal penalty. And cannabis, LSD and ecstasy ought to be legalised with the sort of caveats about heavy machinery and driving that currently apply to alcohol.

And that's not just my opinion. That's got the latest scientific research backing it up, which is more than the 'Just Say No' brigade have.

Press the freedom button

Some people are surprised at how little television I watch. I'm a bit like my local boozer, which has a telly in the corner, but it has a little sign underneath it that reads 'News and Sport Only.'

Basically, down the pub, the box goes on if there's a big game on, or for the Six-One news. All other times, it rests in blissful silence. I've adopted a similar policy.

This doesn't mean that no telly gets watched in our house. My other half is still an addict, and after a hard day's graft, like so many people, she likes to sprawl on the sofa and zone out in front of the goggle box.

I've long since learnt to either leave the room or ignore the prattle of the box in a zen-like fashion when she's watching.

This is not to say that there aren't things I might like to watch. But generally, those are few and far between. They tend to be documentaries about nature or history, or movies I haven't seen.

But the annoyance of having a programme broken up by hard-sell advertising, or on at an odd hour, simply doesn't suit me. So if I want to see those documentaries or movies, I simply go and rent them from the video store or download them (in an entirely legal manner, when available, of course!)

My objection to television is a scientific one - research has linked TV watching to everything from childhood obesity to attention deficit disorder and autism among kids. Leaving your child in front of the boobtube is not the easy alternative to childminding you might have thought it was.

And for adults, the effects of television are just as baleful. Television watching causes insomnia, stress, indolence, obesity, and it doesn't educate, despite what its makers might tell you.

So dangerous is television to health that doctors are now being advised to monitor their patients' viewing habits as part of a general health check-up.

Television is anti-social, ruins public gathering places and the art of conversation, and erodes children's ability to create their own playtimes. It is the ideal tool for advertisers, short of beaming ads onto the inside of your eyelids, as the audience will mindlessly sit in front of their sales pitches for hours upon hours without moving.

It's time to turn off the demon in the corner of the room. Time to reclaim your leisure time and do something useful with it.

When I was a nipper, there was a TV programme on BBC during school holidays called 'Why Don't You...?' It was aimed at encouraging slothful kids out of the couch and outside to do something with their time that was useful. That impulse seems to be too ironic and subversive for contemporary TV producers. The programme was dropped years ago.

There is an organisation aimed at encouraging more people to free themselves from TV slavery. They are called White Dot. Ironically enough, I came across them on the television. They once used the media format they abhor to broadcast a documentary about the evils of television watching.

One of the exercises they suggested to the viewing public was so potent it has stuck with me, affecting my own viewing patterns and indeed my life as a whole. I urge you to try it yourself.

Get a shaving or make-up mirror and position it on top of your television so that when you sit in your favourite chair or couch, you can see your own reflection.

Then turn on the telly and start watching.

Wait for a moment of high drama, the sort of screaming match in the pub that soap operas love to portray, and look up suddenly from the screen to the mirror. See what you're doing while these imaginary people are living life in top gear.

Or turn over to a nice holiday show. When Kathryn Thomas is skiiing down the alps or scuba-diving in the Seychelles, look up from the box to the mirror and take note of what you're up to.

After a day or two with the mirror on the TV, you'll soon realise that a small cohort of actors and presenters are living a wonderful life which your indolence is paying for. By sitting in front of the box immobile, you facilitate the adverts and the funding that pays for their fantastic careers and existence.

While you, meanwhile, are doing nothing more than vegetating on your couch as life passes you by.

When that sinks in fully, you'll start watching less television, becoming truly discerning about your viewing, and eventually you'll be only turning it on to catch up with the news.

And many hours of your day will open up to you suddenly. In this time-precious world, you'll have freed up more hours in the day than you know what to do with.

So use your life. Write a novel, dig the garden, go for a walk, meet some friends for a pint, take up a hobby, or go to evening classes and learn a new skill or language.

Just as no one yet said on their deathbed, "I wish I'd done more overtime at work", no one is recorded to have said "I wish I'd watched more telly" either.

Join White Dot. Press the freedom button to turn the goggle box off, and reclaim your life today.

Redefining the English language

I'm getting well annoyed by continual attempts by various lobbies to redefine aspects of the English language to suit themselves and their narrow agendas.

The latest stunt comes from those obesity-peddlars McDonald's, who are apparently so miffed at the usage of the word 'McJob' that they want to change it.

Of course they want to change it. The word, which has been current for decades, is understood to mean a crappy, low paying job with few decent conditions and little security in an appalling fast food or other menial environment.

Which is extremely apt, since those are exactly the sort of jobs generally on offer in McOutlets.

But Guardian writer Brian Whitaker has uncovered an attempt by the corporation to redefine the word, as it is apparently insulting to restaurant staff. No it isn't. It's insulting to the corporation. It's the wages and conditions offered by the corporation that are insulting to the staff.

This comes hard on the heels of Israel's continual attempts to redefine anti-semitism as meaning anti-anything Israeli or Jewish. No, anti-semitism is a bigotry against semitic people, as the word clearly expresses.

And obviously Israel would love to change that meaning, since their defence forces, by way of continually terrorising and murdering the semitic people of Palestine, are the biggest anti-semites on Earth.

They've sought to change the meaning by getting sympathetic (ie Zionist) academics in America and elsewhere to write ponderous and dubious essays redefining anti-semitism to mean just what they want it to mean and not what it actually means.

They cleverly plugged into the whole Politically Correct movement for redefining language in order to achieve this. But it's still rubbish, and merely a slimy attempt to eradicate the Zionist responsibility for the bloodbath that is the Middle East.

Languages grow organically. Let people who speak a language decide what words mean, not narrow lobbies with political agendas.

Ever since the homosexual community successfully redefined the meaning of the word 'gay', it has been tempting for other lobbies to seek to put their own sheen on the language.

Don't let them. A McJob is still a McJob, no matter what McDonalds say, and anti-semitism is still bigotry against Semites, bigotry like nicking their land, killing their kids and stealing the money that they're owed.

Happy Paddy's Day

Happy Paddy's Day to all Irish people everywhere, both fake and real, and especially to the Irish international rugby team, who are on the verge of claiming their first Six Nations Championship today, and to the Irish international cricket team, who are on the verge of claiming a historic one-day international victory over test giants Pakistan.

Good luck to both the rugby and cricket teams today. Hope you do Ireland proud.

Edit: And a Belfast touch judge in Paris has given the championship to France by gifting them an inconclusive try. Shame. Good luck to the cricketers, who are storming the Pakistanis at the moment.

Further edit: Pakistan are 132 all out. That's a stunning display from Ireland. They've given themselves every chance of taking a huge scalp here.

I beg to differ

As I chow down on my lunchtime smoked salmon bagel, it's probably not immediately apparent how sympathetic I am towards people suffering very deprived circumstances.

But I am. There have been times I've had little or nothing to my name except debt. There have been times between work when I had to get three days of meals out of a couple of quid and some old cans of beans.

There's even been the odd night I've found myself with nowhere to stay, though I've only ever had to crash outdoors once.

So in real ways, I can empathise with the sort of people you see in the centre of pretty much every sizeable Western European town, the bummed-out grubby faces crouched against a wall, clasping a paper cup.

If I don't smell drink, I'll often hand over a bit of change to them, though I'm well aware that it makes more sense and gets more done to give the few quid to the Simon Community instead.

However, just because I understand how close most of us are to being on the streets ourselves (only three paychecks according to one survey) doesn't mean I think it should be legal to beg.

Which, since this morning, it now is in Ireland, thanks to a madcap ruling by Mr Justice Eamon De Valera (undoubtedly a relation of old Bignose).

The 1847 vagrancy act, a Victorian legal relic from the British statute books, had its section relating to jailing beggars struck down after it was challenged by former student Niall Dillon, who presumably had fallen on hard times.

The result is that it is now legal to beg in Ireland.

I am still trying to get my head around the idea that legalising begging is necessary because it being illegal was an infringement of people's right to self-expression. How is begging a form of self-expression? Surely it's harrassing strangers for cash, which is really annoying not to mention intimidating for the alone, elderly, female, or infirm?

So while I'm all for initiatives to eradicate poverty, and remove the desperate deprivation many people find themselves in, giving out carte blanche to all and sundry to come and beg on my doorstep has to be the stupidest move I've ever heard of.

There are great reasons for begging being illegal. If you're skint and can't beg, you try to get off your backside and find paid employment. But if it's free and easy to beg, then why not do that? Beats working for a living, after all.

It's no secret that many of those currently begging in Dublin city centre are organised into gangs and a significant livelihood amounting to thousands of euro a day is being gained by one begging gang of East European extraction alone.

Methods to extract cash from the public include irritating a child so it constantly wails, 'selling' the Big Issue and asking for more than the cover cost, following people along the street with hand outraised, grabbing people as they walk past, and other even more intimidatory and unsavoury practices.

Giving money to a beggar doesn't solve their problems. It merely ensures they'll still be begging tomorrow. The Indian ad campaign against begging pictured above is particularly acute. Basically, begging is not acceptable and we all need to push people out of begging, not out of our way.

And obviously, legalising begging only pushes people into it.

Let's hope that the Government will be as quick to respond to this gap in the law as they were when they accidentally legalised grooming children for sexual abuse earlier this year.

Man plans, Cod laughs

There's something fishy about this. Apparently, codfish in the North Atlantic are dying out.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. My fishmonger could have told you that. Cod used to be a staple in poor households that couldn't afford meat, even the cheap cuts. Nowadays, fresh cod is rarer and more expensive than smoked salmon.

But according to the wonks behind this study, it's nothing to do with the fact that we've had half of all boats in Europe out dredge-netting the region for cod for the past forty years.

It's global warming. Isn't it always global warming?

But if it was global warming, then why aren't the cod being found further north, up by Iceland?

This EU-funded research neatly sidesteps blaming overfishing by the European fleet for devastating cod stocks. And anyone who believes its thesis that we haven't wiped out cod simply by eating too many of them will be prepared to let the same boats overfish the next species.

Global warming is becoming a cover story for all sorts of other nasties. It's a classic example of vested interests hijacking the environmental banner for their own reasons.

An ancient Jewish saying has it that while man plans, God laughs. Well, if we plan fish stocks and fishing rights on the basis of this type of junk science, then the last laugh's on us. Apart from the cod, who we'll have eaten to extinction by then.

By the way, that picture of the man with the fish above? That's the size a cod is supposed to grow to. When was the last time you saw a cod that size? When was the last time you saw a cod, full stop?

Gambling is a mug's game

Gambling is a mug's game.

Paddy Power didn't announce record profits for the umpteenth year in a row due to the amount of cash he's giving away, you know?

Nevertheless, gambling gets more and more popular every year. Now, I have an unusual perspective on gambling. I once worked as a professional croupier. I used to see all sorts come through the doors of the casino, blinded by the neon lights and the sheer James Bondness of it all.

And this in a sleepy South of England town! Most would leave a few hours later, down a few quid but having in many cases enjoyed themselves. After all, if they'd kept their punting to a certain level, they'd have spent less than they might have otherwise in the pub, and at least they wouldn't be waking with a blinding hangover the next day.

But there was always one or two who couldn't let it lie. A former soap star used to drive up to our casino in order not to be spotted in the plush London clubs. He'd regularly blow most of his not insubstantial wages on a single Saturday night.

He could've and probably should've been down the Ivy or some other West End glamspot, trying to score with vampy wannabes and sipping Cosmopolitans. Instead he was up with us, in the quiet hush of a regional casino, handing over his hard-earned.

The saddest case was a little old lady who'd come in every Friday evening with a plastic bag full of used notes. We used to wildly speculate on where she got the cash, which often topped three grand.

She never left till the early hours, and usually with virtually nothing left. Her game was roulette, and the little ball just didn't seem to favour her one bit.

One day, I was in a distant part of town, hoping to hook up with a guy who was selling some concert tickets. I stopped off in a little corner shop to buy some smokes and there she was, behind the till. Throughout the shop, the shelves were mostly empty.

She looked sheepish, and I couldn't meet her eye. Clearly, she was losing the shop's take on a weekly basis. I bought the smokes, attended the concert and then left the job within a couple of weeks.

I used to play poker long before it was online or popular. My friends, even my acquaintances, won't play me anymore, even though it's very likely they'd take my money these days, as my interest in the game waned in indirect proportion to its popularity. I haven't played much since they started televising it and sticking it online.

But I used to like the game. It's a cold hard mix of luck and skill. And it's beautifully karmic, unlike most gambling.

If you've got a lot of chips in front of you, somewhere across the table, someone you know has lost them. You've got to be able to look them in the eye and accept that, even as you have to look them in the eye and accept it when they've got the chipstack and you're the one on your uppers.

Back in 2000, a pal and me decided to find out could we make a living as professional gamblers. Not at poker, but by punting on sports mainly. We reckoned we knew as much about the games as the odds layers, and had a good eye for a decent bet.

We kept detailed and accurate accounts of all bets for a year exactly. At the end of it all, I was up about six hundred quid, my pal back around four hundred. We'd actually done the bookies out of a grand in cash!

However, when I worked out the hourly rate of income, ie how many hours had I spent reading, researching and thinking about my bets that it had taken to make that six hundred quid, it soon became apparent that gambling would never replace going out and earning a living.

Then a couple of years afterwards, I was in a pub in Rathmines, (South Dublin for the uninitiated), and met a bloke who worked as an odds setter for one of the big bookmaking firms. He told me, in tedious detail, about the form, home life and personal circumstances of even youth team members of Irish football teams.

He had to know that detail in order to set the odds, and he wasn't the only one employed in that capacity. A few times a week, he and his peers would gather and argue the toss over every soccer and GAA game, discussing likelihoods of certain players taking the pitch and so on.

It quickly became apparent that I'd never know as much about the games I had a punt on as the guys laying the odds. In other words, I'd been pretty damn lucky back in 2000.

So it seems to me, having been both sides of the table and lived through it without losing my shirt, that gambling is a mug's game. I'll still go out and stick a few quid on a football game that I'm attending or watching on telly, just to heighten the interest as it were.

But I've long dispensed with ideas of making money out of the passtime. I never frequent card clubs or casinos now, don't play any poker, and crucially I bet buttons rather than serious amounts of money.

I view stories of people suffering from gambling problems with dismay. Medical research shows that gambling is as potent an addiction as cocaine. I consider the development of 'super-casinos' in Britain as short-termist and highly dangerous. I'm very concerned about the proliferation of card clubs and online gambling in Ireland.

But I wouldn't ban it. It's unbannable. Gambling would only go underground, back to the shady criminal class who once oversaw all punting. Instead, I place my few quid on the odd game or event I have an interest in anyway, and permit lady luck to do her best and worst, safe in the knowledge that the rent is never at risk.

If only everyone could obtain the same perspective on gambling, I'd feel a lot better about giving money to and taking money from the bookies.

People sometimes ask me for tips, as if I have any great insight into the wheel of fortune from having spun it professionally for a while. I don't generally offer any, because I don't want to be anyone's enabler.

But just this once, I'll mention a bet I've placed. I think the odds are good, and I think it could come off. But if it doesn't, please don't blame me. And whatever you do, don't chase your losses if it or any other bet you place loses.

The SDLP are being priced at 2/1 to retain their 18 seats in the Stormont Assembly elections this week. I think those are generous odds. I've put some pin money where my mouth is. We'll know on Thursday if I'm up or down. But either way, it's just a bit of fun.

After Thursday, when the results are all in and the parties sit down to decide whether to go into power sharing again or not, that's when the serious business begins. And if ever there was some future event I'd love to influence, it's that one, not any bet I've ever made.

If you have a gambling problem or if you thing you might do, please click here.

Who said Americans were stupid?

Aussie broadcasters reveal the true extent of the average American's idiocy and lack of knowledge of the world.

Q. Which countries are in the axis of evil?
A. California, New York, Florida, Mississippi...

Watch and weep!

Irish Bishops condemn Israel

Congratulations to the delegation of Irish bishops who yesterday called on the EU and Ireland to review their ties to the apartheid state of Israel, after concluding that the Zionist regime had turned Gaza into little more than a large prison for the indigenous Palestinian population.

I hope that when they address their concerns to An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, they will be listened to. I hope also that their meeting with Ahern will result in a severing of trading ties with the regime, which was accurately described by the Bishops as conducting an injustice upon the Palestinian people.

Injustice is a very mild word for stealing someone else's homes, systematically killing them and herding them into large open air prisons behind huge walls (see above and here), harrassing them as they try to move about and work in their own land, and denying them access to their families and medical treatment when they find themselves on the 'wrong' side of such illegal barriers.

The illegal Israeli regime, which has long survived only due to being propped up by American money and weapons, is always quick to denounce those who condemn the horrors they perpetrate as anti-semitic.

In fact, they are the true anti-semites, as they steal the land from the Semitic Palestinian people and allocate it to fake Jews imported from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to serve as soldiers and service industry underclass to the Ashkenazi elite.

It is high time, as the Bishops have said, that the people of Europe stand up and denounce this shoddy, apartheid regime and the genocide they are seeking to commit on the Palestinian people.

And it is high time that our own government showed some leadership in this regard by severing ties with such an abhorrent entity.