WIKIPEDIA – THE WORD OF THE LORD? by Donal Kennedy


Wikipedia is a handy but unreliable source of information. Like other media, even Scripture, it needs to be approached with caution.

Take the Old Testament. I’m not convinced that intelligent people wandered for forty years in a desert unable  to read the heavens. Sailors and landlubbers alike navigated  by the stars for thousands of years. Those who built Newgrange, whatever their ethnicity, cannot have been smarter than all peoples to the East of them or in any other direction.

Reading Daniel (Lord)l Finkelstein, in THE TIMES, for some years, I had thought him a well-meaning man, and I told him so, though I disagreed with many of his opinions. He had long been a supporter of the Social Democrats, even when it had become merely a vanity project for Dr David Owen. When in the Labour Party one of his colleagues remarked the Doctor’s prescription for “the Troubles” in Ireland was ever larger doses of repression. The Social Democrats, like the Wagga-Wagga Bird, flew in ever decreasingcircles until it vanished up its own jaksy.

 It’s an unremarked fact that when the Gang of Four founded the SDP in 1981 and commenced their downward spiral, republican prisoners  in Long Kesh were breathing renewed life into Sinn Fein. Today that party is the most popular in “the island of Ireland” and the SDP is forgotten even in Britain.

 Nelson Mandela and his freedom fighter comrades on Robbin Island in 1981 saluted the courage of Bobby Sands and his comrades. Forty years later Sinn Fein and the ANC are fraternal friends.

 Late in the 1980s Tory Councilors in Westminster sported T-Shirts emblazoned “Hang Nelson Mandela”

What reputable creatures anywhere on Earth or in the Heavens were inspired by the Gang of Four?

Escaping from the jaksy of the Wagga Wagga Bird that the SDP had become, Daniel Finkelstein gravitated to the Conservative Party  and its fellow-travellers. 

Finkelstein writes a weekly column  in THE TIMES, has been its chief leader writer and is an executive editor of the paper.

He is a former  Board member of the Gatestone Institute (“A FAR-RIGHT THINK TANK KNOWN FOR PUBLISHING ANT-MUSLIM STORIES” according to Wikipedia).

He stood unsuccessfully in the 2001 General Election. He was raised to the Peerage in 2013 and  has been appointed OBE, deemed an Order of Chivalry.

Wikipedia reports that Baron Finkelstein is a regular columnist in THE JEWISH CHRONICLE, which I understand is now an online publication  . The paper has been repeatedly censured by the Independent Press Standards Organisation. But I have never seen anything about that in the columns of THE TIMES.

The IPSO was established following the Leveson Report following Lord Leveson’s Inquiry into the Low Crimes and Misdemeanours of News International, owners of THE TIMES.

IPSO has the potential, if not nobbled by the Press Barons, of becoming a force for good. The old Press Council and Press Complaints Commission were corrupt and in the pockets of the press barons. 

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