On Sept. 14, Yves Cabannes, UN advisor on forced evictions, visited the contested Dale Farm site at Basildon in England's Essex county, where a community of "Travellers" and Roma face imminent removal. Cabannes charged that the Basildon council and British government are "violating international human rights law on three points. These are the right to adequate housing, the right to be defended from forced eviction and discrimination." To howls of protest from Britain's conservative press (notably the Daily Mail), he drew a comparison to recent forced evictions in Nigeria, in Zimbabwe, and in China. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Gypsies, Roma and Travellers has also issued an urgent appeal to local authorities and Prime Minister David Cameron to put off the evictions, saying a postponement would allow for "the brokerage of a solution which we believe is achievable."

The Economist, sacred guardian of the neoliberal order, fears "Anarchy in the UK" in an Aug. 9 commentary:

There is something deeply disturbing about the idea that your own city is out of control. There have been riots in London before but usually these have been confined to a single area—Brixton and Tottenham in the 1980s. These disturbances were in multiple locations, familiar names to all Londoners—Camden, Clapham, Croydon, Ealing, Hackney, Peckham and Woolwich—as well as other big cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool.

Belarus faced condemnation from European and UN leaders Aug. 5 over the arrest of Ales Beliatsky, head of the human rights group Vyasna (Spring) who was detained outside his home after months of police pressure and charged with crimes punishable by seven years in prison. Beliatsky was ostensibly arrested on tax evasion charges, but his organization had been closely monitoring the regime's response to ongoing "social network" protests in Belarus. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Belarus "to guarantee in all circumstances the physical and psychological integrity of Beliatsky and all human rights defenders in Belarus." (AFP, Aug. 5)

Jim Lobe on InterPress Service informs us that Israeli pundit Caroline Glick was among those cited in the manifesto of accused Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik. Now Glick has a screed in the Jerusalem Post of July 28 with the oxymoronic title "Breivik and totalitarian democrats." In it, she acknowledges that she was cited by Breivik, and frets that this demonstrated commonality of ideas is being used to discredit opponents of multiculturalism:

The Israeli troll-o-sphere appears to be abuzz with ghastly cheerleading for the Oslo attacks. J.J. Goldberg notes the phenomenon in a July 24 comment for The Forward: "Judging by the comments sections on the main Hebrew websites, the main questions under debate seem to be whether Norwegians deserve any sympathy from Israelis given the country’s pro-Palestinian policies, whether the killer deserves any sympathy given his self-declared intention of fighting Islamic extremism and, perhaps ironically, whether calling attention to this debate is in itself an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic act."

Media reports have noted that accused Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik indicated through his online spewings that he is a fan of professional Islamophobe Pam Geller, who led the protests against New York's "Ground Zero Mosque" last Sept. 11. At the time, we noted the irony that the same pseudo-left hucksters (especially Workers World Party and its satellites) that organized the counter-protest against Geller's thugs ironically shared in demonization of the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosova with such right-wing mosque-opponents as Terry Jones and Glenn Beck. Now, as paranoid pseudo-left hucksters line up to charge (on no evidence) that Breivik is a Mossad agent, it emerges that he was actually motivated by... rage at NATO's bombardment of the Serbs! This from AP, July 25:

Gee, that didn't take long. Conspiranoid cranks claim (on no evidence) that Mossad was behind the Oslo terror attacks, providing an opportunity for the right-wing Israeli press to tar "anti-Zionists" as conspiranoid cranks. Arutz Sheva, far-right organ of the settler movement, swoops in on the kneejerk spewings of two perennial faves of the conspiracy set. The first is Wayne Madsen, a self-proclaimed former US military analyst, who plays an utterly specious connect-the-dots game to link accused Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik to Israeli intelligence...

The blood was not even dry from the July 22 coordinated bomb blast and shooting rampage in Oslo that left at least 94 dead before Britain's The Telegraph was asking in a headline, "Oslo explosion: Is al-Qaeda behind this?" Among their specious arguments was that jihadis are still miffed over the Danish cartoon affair and are too dumb to tell one Scandinavian country from another (perhaps in the same manner that Muslim-hating thugs in America beat up Sikhs). The screed remains live on The Telegraph's website despite the fact that the accused perpetrator, one Anders Behring Breivik, appears to be a homegrown right-wing extremist in the style of Timothy McVeigh—except, this being Europe in 2011, with a special Islamophobic twist...