Daily Mail, 24 July 2008

There’s been nothing like it since Beatlemania. As the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama arrives in Britain tomorrow on the last leg of his world tour, Obamania seems to be sweeping across the Atlantic and carrying all before it.

In giant rallies across the U.S., Obama induces hysteria among his adoring multitude, with women fainting from the effects of his soaring oratory and rock-star charisma.

On both sides of the Atlantic the media are swooning over him. Like Berlin and Paris, he is expected to receive a rapturous reception here.

Labour MPs are urging Gordon Brown to emulate him, while a third of Tory MPs are said to support him rather than his Republican opponent, John McCain.

The U.S. election may not take place until November, but in Europe Obama has already won by a landslide.

Nor does he do anything to disabuse people of the view that he is ‘the One’. He is going to win the war in Iraq. He’s going to break the deadlock in the Middle East.

In the U.S., he declared his presidency would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal’.

Doubtless as the water recedes he will walk on it. His tour is supposed to be merely a fact-finding exercise for an election candidate — but it is being treated as a cross between a coronation and the Second Coming.

So at the risk of being a party pooper, may I pose the question: might not a junior senator with less than four years’ experience on Capitol Hill be advised to show just a smidgen of humility?

Significantly, on his first foreign foray he has achieved the feat of upsetting one of his country’s key allies, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel.

She took a decidedly dim view of his intention to hold an electioneering rally today at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate — traditionally used as a backdrop only for non-partisan speeches of global significance. Faced with this rebuff, Obama chose the city’s Victory Column as an alternative venue.

How darkly ironic that the column was moved to its present position by Adolf Hitler as a symbol of Germany’s superiority and its victories against Denmark, Austria and France. Oh, dear. Is this what Obama means by ‘change we can believe in’?

Of course, in many respects the enthusiasm for this charismatic man is understandable.

Obama preaches a seductive message of change for an America which is terminally disaffected with President Bush — not just over the Iraq war, but over the handling of such catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina and, above all, the dive in the U.S. economy.

All this spells failure, depression and cynicism. Obama by contrast embodies success, optimism and idealism.

Sprinkled with glitter like a latter-day JFK, he is seen as the representative of a new kind of politics that repudiates the sordid failures of the past.

Americans are, after all, the most optimistic of people. They just don’t do doom and gloom. So a politician who tells them ‘Yes we can’, and says he stands for ‘the audacity of hope’ gets them whooping and hollering for more.

But such Obamania should worry us all, for it is based on emotion and, where the Democrat candidate is concerned, the normal faculties of judgment appear to have been suspended.

Important questions about Obama’s judgment, consistency and honesty are not being asked, let alone answered.

He has got away with the fact that for 20 years he belonged to a church which preaches black power racism against white people.

He disavowed his long-time mentor, pastor Jeremiah Wright, only when his extreme views could no longer be ignored — despite the fact that Wright is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black power Nation of Islam.

The media brush all this aside as ‘personal details’ which are of no interest to voters. But if, say, John McCain’s pastor and mentor had turned out to support the Ku Klux Klan and his church was found to be sympathetic to its philosophy, his candidacy would have been defenestrated and rightly so.

Equally troubling is the way Obama has flip-flopped on issue after issue. From his brief Senate voting record, he appears to be the most Left-wing presidential candidate America has ever had.

Yet once he clinched the nomination, he repositioned himself as a Centrist to win the election.

So while once he was for a ban on handguns, he is now against it. Once for safeguards on wiretaps, he is now against them.

Once he was for a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq — but now that the acclaimed U.S. commander General Petraeus has said this would be deeply unwise, Obama claims he proposes no ‘rigid’ adherence to a timetable. This is just more of the same old politics of dissembling.

And yet this is the man — so similar to the early Blair — who is supposed to represent an end to opportunism, replaced by the politics of integrity.

What is even more disturbing, however, is that these matters are being brushed aside or ignored –because so many people want desperately to believe in him.

Such a suspension of disbelief calls to mind someone else closer to home: Princess Diana, who also inspired hysterical adoration because she, too, became an icon of idealism — challenging the established order.

A deeply attractive figure, she seemed to embody hope for a better universe by appealing to emotion rather than reason.

Love, as embodied by ‘the queen of people’s hearts’, was held to be the key to a better, kinder, gentler world. There was even a sense that her mere touch was sufficient to heal the afflicted.

It was, of course, all pure fantasy. People had fallen for a carefully spun image which bore little relation to the manipulative and unstable woman who was the real Diana, but which spoke to something deep inside them.

So it is with Obama. Americans’ natural optimism makes them want to believe that, as a black man with a Muslim background (another thing he has cleverly obfuscated), he can heal all wounds, including the U.S.’s history of racism, and bring peace to the world just by being who he is.

They see in his attractiveness a flattering reflection of themselves. He doesn’t embarrass them; he makes them feel proud.

He is not a Texas oilman who can’t string a sentence together: he has oratorical skills to die for.

He is not old, frail and nondescript like McCain, but young, vigorous and attractive. He is, in short, everything they want America — and themselves — to be.

His very incoherence over policy, the fact we don’t know what he really believes in, enables people to project onto him their hopes and desires. He is the perfect fantasy politician. He is America’s very own Princess Obama.

But, of course, the belief that a handsome prince can magic away the troubles of the world is infantile. The idea that there is a new kind of sanitised politics by which problems can be solved without having to make hard choices is a dangerous delusion.

To be fair, there are signs that light may be beginning to dawn in America. Despite — or perhaps because of — the saturation media coverage of Obama’s world tour, his poll numbers are showing no bounce.

This may be because people are beginning to see the media manipulation, with Obama refusing to answer journalists’ questions and participating only in ‘faked’ interviews by the military in Iraq.

While America may be wising up, however, Britain is about to have its Princess Obama moment. Get out the smelling salts and prepare to swoon.

Daily Mail, 21 July 2008

Repercussions from the school tests fiasco are steadily rippling outwards like eddies from a burst sewage pipe.

As a result of the shambles of this year’s SATs, school league tables have been rendered worthless. Ofsted’s school inspections which rely on such results are now in jeopardy.

And secondary schools whose confidence in these tests has collapsed are proposing to test 11 year-old entrants all over again to discover which sets to put them in for different subjects.

This last development is particularly unfortunate. Not only do such children face yet another set of tests through no failure of their own; they are bearing the brunt of the collapse of a testing regime whose original purpose was to find out not about pupil achievement but the performance of their teachers.

Clearly, such is the chaos that these SATs cannot be relied upon to assess anything at all. Some schools are reporting that whole batches of results are still missing. Thousands of pupils may have been awarded no marks at all after they were incorrectly recorded as having been absent for their tests.

The American company administering the SATs, ETS Europe, has now set up emergency marking centres in Leeds and Manchester hotels to clear the backlog of unmarked scripts.

There are reports that, in its panic, the company has even hired hotel bar staff to carry out unidentified tasks in the marking process.

If it really has been getting individuals who are pulling pints to red-pencil these tests, this might explain why some papers look as if they’ve been marked by people with less education than a seven-year-old.

Some were unable to add up the marks accurately. Some awarded children with special needs the same grades as children who had already passed the entrance test for grammar school.

In one case, a pupil whose writing was riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes received a higher mark than a pupil who accurately used sophisticated language and vocabulary.

In any half-way responsible government, one would expect the minister in charge of testing to take the rap for this catastrophic breakdown of the system under his control. Not this minister. The Schools Secretary Ed Balls says he’s furious about what’s happened — as if it’s nothing to do with him.

‘I’ve operated this at arm’s length’, he blustered. ‘I’m not the person who on a daily basis has been dealing with this.’

Oh, please! He has been personally dealing with this — or rather, failing to deal with it — since at least last March.

That was when the head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Ken Boston, warned Mr Balls of potential ‘problems with the computer systems to be used in marking the SATs, but said there were ‘mitigation plans’ to ensure the integrity of the results.

Despite the fact that Mr Balls asked to be kept informed, it seems that he did not see the red lights that were then clearly flashing.

Even when the director of the new school tests regulatory body Ofqual, Katherine Tattersall, told Mr Balls of her own concerns about the reliability of the SATs results, he told her that he wanted her instead to prioritise the implementation of his two favoured projects: testing children by ability level rather than age, and the new 18-plus diplomas.

In other words, he didn’t think the SATs were important. He was interested only in pushing tests which artificially inflate results by giving older children tests designed for younger ages, and persecuting the middle classes through the attempt to destroy A-levels.

The small question of the proper administration of school tests affecting the futures of thousands of children was clearly far too insignificant a matter to merit the attention of such a lofty political intellect.

The inevitable shambles first became apparent as soon as the SATs were taken two months ago, with hundreds of complaints of confusion over training, delayed contracts and jammed helplines.

In at least some subjects vetting standards were scrapped so that all examiners passed muster no matter how accurate their marking. As a result, many markers walked out in disgust.

When in May Mr Balls was questioned in the Commons by the LibDems and Tories about these reports, he said he would ‘keep the matter closely under review’ and take ‘an active watching brief on the issue’.

What this actually meant was that he had done nothing about the warnings he had been given.

At every stage this has been a story of almost unbelievable incompetence, buckpassing and political arrogance. According to Ken Boston, ETS Europe was hired because it had ‘the highest rating’ on the things that mattered. But this company had a long history of incompetence.

It has been responsible for wrongly failing 40,000 American teachers, resulting in a multi-million dollar compensation payout; it had been heavily criticised for failures in graduate examinations across the U.S.; and its computer errors had awarded students the wrong marks.

All this had been reported in the American press. It is not remotely credible that Whitehall didn’t know about it.

What’s much more likely is that ETS Europe was awarded the SATs contract because, in Boston’s words, it offered ‘value for money’. In other words, it was test regulation on the cheap. Now this debacle has put rocket fuel behind the demand made by teachers from the moment the SATs were introduced — that they should be scrapped and all testing of pupils done instead by the teachers themselves.

This, of course, would destroy the whole principle of professional accountability that the SATs were supposed to establish. But in truth, they have been pretty useless because they have been systematically fiddled — either by individual teachers cheating, or by pass-marks being lowered the second it looked as if children wouldn’t reach them in sufficient numbers. The result is that their standards are both risible and meaningless.

Such chicanery is inevitable because it’s not just teachers but ministers themselves who are being tested on their promise to improve education. So — lo and behold — such tests will always show that standards are rising, even when the opposite is the case.

The outcome has been that, while children have been subjected to an ever more expanding battery of tests, their qualifications have become progressively devalued. As measurable achievement has been ostensibly going up, the amount pupils actually know has been going steadily down.

There are, in fact, no such managerial quick fixes to our profound education crisis, which derives from the deep-seated belief that children must dictate the terms of their education with teachers taking a back seat.

The idea that knowledge must give way to ‘creativity’, and that what children find out for themselves is of greater value than anything teachers can tell them, is what has created the vicious and self-fulfilling culture of low educational expectations and achievement.

To superimpose SAT tests on such a fundamental negation of education and hope that it will rescue the situation is clearly an absurd delusion. The Schools Secretary, however, isn’t interested, obsessed as he is instead with pursuing his very own class war.

On this MAT — the Ministerial Assessment Test — the once star-pupil Balls, E. should be marked down as ‘failed’.

Daily Mail, 14 July 2008

So, Russia and China have vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution to impose international sanctions on key members of Zimbabwe’s government. The British government’s entire diplomatic strategy on Zimbabwe has thus ignominiously collapsed.

This is a particular humiliation for Gordon Brown after he thought he had persuaded all the G8 countries — including Russia –to back punitive measures against the Mugabe regime.

Our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, says he is ‘very disappointed’. Is he really that wet behind the ears? Just what did he expect?

Apart from what this denouement tells us about our worsening relations with Russia, it has long been clear that the UN is the very last place to look for action against despotism, terror or tyranny.

For sure, Zimbabwe presents clear enough cause for UN action. The sanctions were proposed after Mugabe was ‘re-elected’ as Zimbabwe’s president in a travesty of a poll in which extreme violence forced the opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, to withdraw.

This, in turn, took place against a background of systematic intimidation, torture and mass murder of Zimbabwe’s terrorised population by Mugabe’s henchmen.

The opposition says 113 of its activists have been killed since March. Last weekend, another of its officials, Gift Mutsvungunu, was found dead in a suburb of Harare. His body had been partly burned and his eyes gouged out.

Russia said, however, that there was no need for sanctions, which it described as an attempt to meddle in the affairs of a member state which presented no threat to international peace and security.

But Zimbabwe’s terror regime presents a real threat to regional peace and security. And, in any case, there is a moral requirement to act. If the UN doesn’t take action to prevent uncontrollable barbarism by one of its member states, then what in heaven’s name is the point of having the UN at all?

Of course, Russia and China are simply motivated by brazen cynicism and self-interest. Not only are they increasingly flexing their muscles, they also don’t want the UN poking its nose into their own human rights abuses.

Mr Miliband was hoping that outsourcing the problem of Zimbabwe to the UN would relieve Britain of the task of doing something about a country for whose terrible fate, after all, Britain bears a historic responsibility.

The slap in the face he has received in response is all the more stinging because of the particular place the UN enjoys in the pantheon of ‘progressive’ politics.

Western progressives have come to believe that the nation state is responsible for all the ills of the world, from prejudice to nationalism and war. The only legitimate institutions are therefore trans-national ones which purport to represent the brotherhood of man.

So trans-national bodies and doctrines, such as the UN, EU, International Criminal Court or European human rights law, trump our own national institutions and laws.

The UN was established after World War II with the most noble of aims, to ensure that the world never again allowed the horrors of Nazism to happen. But like all attempts to create Utopia, this produced instead a monster.

For the world consists of many wicked regimes. As more and more countries joined the UN, its moral mission was turned on its head so that, by 2003, only 75 UN members were free democracies.

The result is a UN characterised by endemic incompetence, corruption and worse. It has repeatedly failed to prevent atrocities.

It did nothing to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994; it stood by while more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica the following year; and it sat on its hands for 20 years while Muslim militias committed genocide in Southern Sudan and wiped out some two million souls.

One mission was dispatched to examine the killings in Darfur. When it returned with a report criticising the Sudanese government, the UN’s grotesquely misnamed Human Rights Council refused to endorse it or accept its recommendations.

The UN Development Programme has been authoritatively accused of fraud and corruption. Saddam Hussein not only siphoned off some $10 billion from the UN’s oil-for-food programme, but the UN official overseeing that programme was allegedly on the huge list of those receiving kickbacks — as was the son of the former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

A classified UN report detailed 150 allegations that UN peacekeepers and staff sexually attacked and exploited war refugees in the Congo in exchange for food. Similar allegations of sexual misconduct by UN staff stretch back at least a decade to operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

The UN persistently ignores global abuses and supports their perpetrators instead. Astoundingly, it has passed not one resolution against despotic regimes such as China, Russia or Cuba.

It has approved not one resolution against the Arab and Muslim state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, it displayed its contempt for the rule of law and the value of human life by actually endorsing terrorism when, in 1982, it affirmed the legitimacy of actions against foreign domination ‘by all available means including armed struggle’.

While thus ignoring or endorsing Arab and Muslim terror, it passes an unending stream of resolutions against Israel, the principal victim of such terror — but the only country subjected to an investigatory mandate that examines the actions of only one side.

Days before 9/11, the UN’s ‘anti-racist’ conference in Durban turned into a grotesque hate-fest against Israel and Jews. Now it is planning a second such conference next year in Geneva — preparations for which are being led by Libya and Iran, which denies the Holocaust and repeatedly announces it intends to wipe Israel off the map.

Despite the fact that the UN’s Human Rights Council was supposed to end the abuses perpetrated by its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, the continued domination of this Council by oppressive states means it is still acting to suppress human rights.

Hence its recent outrageous decision to ban altogether any criticism of Islamic sharia law, which is responsible for such abuses as women being stoned to death for adultery or young men being hanged for being gay.

With the support of China, Russia and Cuba, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference — which represents the 57 Islamic states — forced through a measure which requires the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression to report anyone who speaks out against sharia law, on the grounds that such criticism represents religious discrimination.

This Orwellian diktat is but the latest evidence that, far from upholding freedom and human rights against their abuse, the UN is simply a club of tyranny.

Yet, grotesquely, it is regarded as the supreme arbiter of international affairs, without whose imprimatur it is illegitimate to act. The fear is that without it the world will descend into anarchy. But the dismal truth is that the UN is the principal engine for the perpetuation of chaos, terror, misery and injustice across the world.

It is high time we abolished this obscene institution and created instead a United Democratic Nations to promote freedom and justice.

The vote on Zimbabwe has implications going way beyond Africa. It is but the latest wake-up call about the UN — and ignoring it means that the world’s ostensible concern for Zimbabwe and all such abuses are nothing other than crocodile tears.

Dail Mail, 8 July 2008

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ‘ Islamophobes’ or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Certainly, the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals –an improvement without doubt from three years ago. And so, particularly within the British elite, people think that things are broadly under control.

They fail to realise that the attempt to take over our culture is even more deadly to this society than terrorism. They are simply blind to the ruthless way in which the Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness (backed up by the threat of more violence) to put Islam on a special — indeed, unique — footing within Britain.

As a result, the steady Islamisation of British public life is either being ignored or even tacitly encouraged by a political, security and judicial establishment that is failing to identify the stealthy and mind-bending game that is being played.

The official counter-radicalisation programme illustrates the problem. The Government wants to tackle radicalisation within Britain’s Muslim community by winning hearts and minds within that community. Its strategy is based on isolating the extremists and encouraging the moderates.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has ‘hijacked’ and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

The reason so many older British Muslims are traditionally moderate is that they were brought up in the Asian subcontinent under a tamed form of Islam, deriving from centuries of colonial rule, which glossed over much of the teaching of the religion.

The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.

The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) was set up to put into effect the Government’s aim of ensuring moderation in the mosques. This was always unlikely, given that members of Islamist groupings were on the steering committee. Although MINAB’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.

Similarly, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government’s chief adviser on Islamic Studies, is a senior member of the Islamic Foundation. A report he wrote for the Government last year, Islam at Universities in England, which was publicly welcomed by the Prime Minister, urged that among other special privileges for Muslims, they should be allowed to teach Islamic subjects in British universities and that non-Muslims should be banned from doing so.

In any event, the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

A report by Professor Anthony Glees due to be published in the autumn will argue that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multimillion-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations.

He says: ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’

Even more terrifying is the increasing Islamisation of the police. It has been reported that up to eight police officers and civilian staff working in the Metropolitan Police and other forces are suspected of links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, with some even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. One suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

No less disturbing is the fact that the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.

Commander Robert Lambert, who until this year ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, observed that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with Salafists (Sunni extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy over the secular state) — one of whom was actually an officer in his own police department.

Commander Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror.

But it surely goes without saying that an officer who is committed to the overthrow of the West, and its replacement by an Islamic society poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria — particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Moreover, there have been disturbing examples of the police protecting Islamic extremism. In 2007, the Channel Four Dispatches programme uncovered evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques.

But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the West Midlands Police first tried to prosecute the programme makers and then accused them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion — a libel for which the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were subsequently forced to apologise.

A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour killings and similar violence revealed that several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have run away from home to escape violence, because they cannot trust Asian police officers not to betray the girls to their abusing families.

In February, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were handing out Bible extracts in Alum Rock, Birmingham. They were stopped by a Muslim Police Community Support Officer, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in ‘a Muslim area’, and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

What on earth is happening when, in the heart of England, a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

When the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Britain was developing Muslim nogo areas, he was denounced as Islamophobic.

The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’

Yet last month, one of the youths in the Ainsworth attack walked free after a judge accepted his claim that the attack was not religiously motivated.

Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions. Last week, Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it could play a role in some parts of the legal system. This followed comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury who declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.

But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.

Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.

His release on bail — into a kind of house arrest — followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured — a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why do the British authorities appear to go out of their way to thwart efforts to fight and defeat jihadi terror? While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.

But Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.

Ms Blears’s lamentable comment graphically illustrates the problem. While the ordinary people of Britain are increasingly aghast at the way their country is being transformed by Islamism, the political, judicial, security and intellectual elites are busy denying the nature of the danger and making it far, far worse through a combination of extreme ignorance, arrogance and sheer funk.

The Islamists launched their jihad against the West because they perceived it was so weak and confused it would not possess the wherewithal to defend itself. When it comes to Britain, they never spoke a truer word.

This is an abridged version of a new foreword to an updated edition of ‘Londonistan‘
by Melanie Phillips, published in the UK by Gibson Square.

Daily Mail, 7 July 2008

The resignation of Ray Lewis as the Mayor of London’s crime adviser is quite simply a tragedy, with profound implications far beyond the insular world of the capital’s party politics.

Here is a man who has literally saved lives. Among the boys whose behaviour he has transformed through his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy in East London are those who, without any doubt, would otherwise have gone on to kill or be killed.

Yet Mr Lewis has suddenly been accused of a slew of torrid offences including financial irregularities, physical abuse and sexually inappropriate behaviour. At present, we don’t know the truth about these murky allegations. Mr Lewis has already robustly denied the more lurid claims, but perhaps some of them are true.

Maybe all those who have supported him in the past — ranging from the Tories’ social justice guru Iain Duncan Smith to Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone’s (now disgraced) race adviser who described his approach as ‘brilliant’ — are thus shown up to be naive and credulous dupes.

If so, then I am one of them. I visited the Eastside Academy in July 2005, months before David Cameron used it for his first official photo-op as the new Tory leader. I saw for myself the impressive work Ray Lewis was doing.

He took black boys from shattered family backgrounds who were on the way to criminal careers and turned them into high-achieving model citizens.

These were the toughest boys in the neighbourhood. They had fought, bullied, smashed up their schools and set fire to them, barricaded teachers into the classrooms and been in accelerating trouble with the law. Yet when they left Eastside virtually all of them went to college and lived law-abiding lives.

Ray Lewis achieved this by plugging the crucial gap in their lives that virtually no teacher or social worker or probation officer can fill. He was simply the father figure they so desperately needed but who was missing from their own fractured families.

He was a tough, stern, authoritative, totally uncompromising black man — all factors crucial to gaining their respect.

All he achieved was through the force of his personality. The boys did what he told them to do, not because he hit them but because his disapproval was shattering to them.

He loved and believed in those boys, he gave them a sense of unlimited aspiration and he drove them very hard. And because they both feared his tongue and admired him, they responded by transforming themselves.

He made them conform to strict rules of discipline; there were military-style roll calls, they were instructed to make eye contact with their tutors and to walk in straight lines with no deviations and no talking. The importance of such ‘tough love’ to boys who possessed not even the most elementary social skills, let alone self- discipline or respect for authority, cannot be exaggerated.

He had no time at all for sloppy teaching practices, nor the usual excuses for bad behaviour such as ‘poor self-esteem’. His work was the most graphic rebuke possible to all those involved in making excuses for juvenile criminality.

As a result, he made serious enemies on the Left, who regarded him as some kind of fascist. On the local Newham council various councillors and officials badmouthed Eastside as a ‘boot camp’ and gave him only minimal funding.

This was simply because just about everything he stood for was a monumental rebuke to everything they stood for, and to the personal and social damage over which they so complacently presided.

Now at last the Left have finally brought him down. How they must be gloating at this apparent proof that inside every traditionalist disciplinarian lurks a hypocritical humbug.

As a result, the very continuation of Eastside itself is in jeopardy. Its closure would be a tragedy not just for Ray Lewis but for our entire society.

We are in the middle of an epidemic of violent crime. In the last few days, 16-yearold Shakilus Townsend was murdered in South London by a gang armed with baseball bats and a knife — the 18th teenager to meet a violent death in London this year.

Only days before, 16-year- old Ben Kinsella was knifed to death in North London, while the bodies of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez were found riddled with knife wounds after a fire at a flat in south-east London.

Ray Lewis is one of the very few who know how to turn this situation round. Whatever he may have done in the past, he has probably done more good for society through his work at Eastside than all his accusers put together.

And that achievement has arisen out of his character — including his undoubted failings. For failings he certainly has. He is abrasive, disorganised, hopeless at papermeanour-work, imprecise in his use of language and cavalier with the niceties of bureaucracy.

That certainly might explain his confused and often contradictory attempts to defend himself against the allegations that have emerged in the past week. But on the basis of what we know so far, it does not make him guilty of the more lurid claims of sexual and financial impropriety.

Indeed, there remain many peculiarities about the specifics.

Questions arise, in particular, about the behaviour of the Church of England, whose hitherto buried file on Mr Lewis detonated the affair when it mysteriously came to light.

It appears that Mr Lewis, an Anglican priest, was banned from preaching after what the Bishop of Chelmsford said was ‘a serious misde-Yet the bishop’s chaplain said Mr Lewis had been banned because ‘things had been alleged against him’. Didn’t the church find out whether they were true?

It says it alerted Mayor Johnson to them shortly after Mr Lewis’s appointment. But this turns out to have consisted merely of a) an exchange between Boris and the Bishop of Barking at a football match, which Boris says he can’t remember and, b) a passing reference in a letter to the fact that Mr Lewis ‘did not have permission to exercise his priesthood in the diocese’.

Was this really an adequate way to bring such serious charges to light? Nor did the church appear to tell the Home Office about them when Mr Lewis was appointed as a junior prison governor, nor did it inform the Eastside trustees.

The fact is that for now, the allegations remain just that. The police found no cause to proceed against Mr Lewis on any complaints that were referred to them.

What is unarguable is that he claimed to be a magistrate when he is not. By his own account, he was merely told that his application to serve on the bench was going through. That was very wrong, of course, and it is why Boris had to ditch him.

Maybe worse will eventually be proved against him. But while this whole sorry episode may demonstrate that Mr Lewis was ill-suited to political life, it should not negate his achievements in turning jail fodder into model citizens. The fact is, we simply cannot afford to lose the work he was doing with the young.

Whatever his personal failings turn out to be, it would be social suicide if his approach to delinquent youths was also discredited. Even if Ray Lewis is to be taken out of the picture, we need more people like him to continue what he started.

Our crime problem will not be solved by the dead hand of state bureaucracy but by individuals who don’t conform. Using such people means taking a risk. Sometimes that risk blows up in our face. But if we are ever to give hope to our troubled young and restore order to our society, it’s one we surely have to take.

Jewish Chronicle, 4 July 2008

Last May, the Paris Appeal Court delivered one of the most momentous of all libel judgments. It declared that a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, was entitled to say that television footage by the France 2 TV station purporting to show the killing of 12 year-old Palestinian Mohammed al Dura by Israeli troops in November 2000 was a staged piece of theatre and that the boy had not been killed at all.

This ruling could hardly have been more significant given the iconic nature of that footage and the evidence behind the court’s decision. For the image of Mohammed al Dura clinging to his father moments before he was apparently shot dead by Israeli soldiers at a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim junction fuelled the intifada, which began in earnest at that point, and led directly to countless terrorist deaths around the world.

Hitherto, public doubts about this event had been confined to whether the boy had been killed by Israeli or Palestinian bullets. But the court saw hitherto untransmitted footage of that Gaza demonstration. This showed clearly that, far from being under continuous fire, not one Palestinian appeared to be harmed at all; indeed, the demonstration was conducted in a carnival atmosphere.

Most astonishing of all, after the reporter on the film, France 2’s veteran Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin, pronounced that the child now slumped on the ground had been killed not only were Mohammed and his father unmarked by any wounds, not only was there no blood at the scene, but the allegedly dead child moved his arm.

To date, not one British media outlet has reported this case (apart from my own piece in this month’s Standpoint magazine). In France, minimal press coverage pooh-poohing the ruling has been accompanied by a petition signed by 300 journalists in support of Enderlin. None of them appears to have seen the courtroom evidence. Enderlin, a national institution, has many powerful friends.

The media silence is not surprising. For those images of the ‘dead’ Mohammed al Dura perpetrated against Israel the ancient anti-Jewish libel of deliberate child killing. This was done by the media, which levelled a charge which anyone looking at the evidence can see was patently absurd. As the Paris judge wrote, there were ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ between Enderlin’s commentary and the images he was describing.

But for the media to admit this is to concede that Israel has been grievously wronged by Palestinian lies. It will not acknowledge this, because that would open up the possibility that Israel might be the victim of Palestinian lies transmitted by the western media as a matter of course.

Some have even said ‘So what if this child wasn’t actually killed? It doesn’t alter the fact that Israel murders Palestinian children!’ Thus a blood libel inoculates individuals against truth and reason.

There is however a further twist to this extraordinary story. Charles Enderlin, who claimed that the boy was killed by the Israelis on the basis of what he was told by his Palestinian cameraman Talal abu Rahma, himself holds Israeli citizenship. Not only that, when he did his own army service he actually served as a press spokesman for the IDF.

Indeed, the IDF trusted him so much that when he reported his sensational scoop it accepted responsibility for killing the child –without even asking the commander on the ground. It was only later that it conducted an inquiry and discovered that logistically it was impossible for its soldiers to have killed him.

So why did Enderlin – who is now spraying around allegations that Karsenty is the tool of ‘right-wingers’ — transmit this lethal falsehood? According to some who know him well, Enderlin believes that anything is justified if it helps force Israel to end its ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. And ‘anything’, it seems, included transmitting the fiction of the killing of Mohammed al Dura.

This murderous corruption of journalism by France 2 was further exacerbated by the supine response of the Israel government. For seven years, it deliberately ignored the evidence of its own expert, Nahum Shahaf, that the boy had not been killed at all. It said nothing because it thought that it would not be believed, and so it would be counter-productive to focus more attention upon the affair.

During this period its own spokesman Danny Seaman did say that the killing was a fabrication – but was slapped down by the government and his remarks disowned. Meanwhile France 2 has continued to operate inside Israel with no government comeback.

The whole disturbing affair has been in short an object lesson in how the western media acts as the tool of psychological warfare waged by the enemies of civilisation, leading to the murder of countless innocents and the demonisation of a country under siege.

Daily Mail, 2 July 2008

Surely, you think despairingly, this has just got to be a spoof.

A candidate was awarded marks in his GCSE English exam for writing ‘F*** off’ on his paper as a gratuitous profanity.

Perhaps the examiner was making a pointed comment about standards of incivility among the young? Maybe he mistook this exam script for an art installation at Tate Modern?

But no, this was no spoof. It was all too genuine. The candidate’s expletive earned marks for accurate spelling and for conveying a meaning successfully.

Ye gods. It’s not just that this pupil was rewarded for unacceptable and oafish behaviour.

No, the real issue is that education standards have now fallen to such rock-bottom level and examiners’ expectations are so low that they actually find achievement in spelling that four-letter word — which surely does not leave a great deal of room for error.

Nor was the examiner, Peter Buckroyd, some aberrant teacher with a nose-stud and an attitude problem. He is the chief examiner for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance — and has instructed fellow examiners to mark expletives in exactly the same way.

Let me quote you precisely how this important educationist explained his decision to record a level of achievement in the expression of this expletive. ‘It would be wicked to give it zero,’ he said, ‘because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling.

‘It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.’

So this is what our once glorious education system has come to — that if a child writes anything at all on a sheet of paper, examiners are so pathetically grateful, they will award him marks.

What next –prizes for children who scrawl obscene graffiti on the school wall on the grounds that they too are ‘conveying meaning and some spelling’? Bonus points in an exam for the candidate who manages to write his name?

The point about expletives is that far from showing any skill, they demonstrate inarticulacy; the only ‘meaning’ they convey is aggression and rage.

What’s really wicked is an educationist degrading the meaning of achievement and education in this manner, and bringing the exam system into disrepute by a decision which is beyond parody.

But then, the state to which our education system has descended has long been beyond parody. So much of what schoolchildren are now expected to do is a joke.

Too many pass exams by ticking boxes with pictures in them. Too many are told they can read when all they are actually doing is memorising or guessing the words on the page. Too many have never been taught the rules of formal grammar which actually enable them to decode foreign languages.

Heaven forbid they should be taught anything in a structured way which might mean that some children are slower than others to master it — and might therefore suffer crippling self-esteem problems from the trauma for the rest of their lives.

Far better to reduce achievement itself to a farce — which has been the education world’s own great achievement.

According to some teachers, some GCSE tests in French are reduced to little more than an exercise in memorising four words.

Every year, GCSE and A-level results themselves defy the rules of mathematics as they appear to display ever more vertiginous levels of attainment.

Yet the Royal Literacy Fund has described the writing skills of British undergraduates as a public ‘catastrophe’ — undoubtedly because even good A-level grades are being awarded for illiterate and substandard work.

In addition, many exams effectively provide candidates with the answers to their questions, and it is possible to pass some GCSEs with just 20 per cent of the answers correct.

Almost every day brings more news of this catastrophe.

There has been a huge fall in the number of pupils studying foreign languages in English secondary schools, from around 80 per cent when Labour came to power to under half last year.

New research has found that almost one in four secondary schools in England no longer has any specialist physics teachers. Half of these have only a GCSE or A-level in the subject, despite being expected to prepare pupils for university.

This is itself the outcome of decades of dumbing down science teaching. Much of it no longer teaches individual sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology in depth, but provides only general science teaching.

Worse still, this is increasingly replacing scientific knowledge with politicised applied-science issues such as nuclear power or bird flu. Indeed, the curriculum body has actually gloated that the over-14 science curriculum has ‘reduced content and factual recall’.

This whole education farce has been playing now for more than three decades. Attempts by both Tory and Labour politicians to stop the rot have ranged from the ineffectual to the wicked.

This is because the root of the problem is the education establishment; and when it comes to what used to be called the education ministry (before it tellingly removed the very word ‘education’ from its title) the lunatics long ago took over that particular asylum.

So it is successive governments that have helped destroy the very nature of education by replacing knowledge with ’skills’. Children may therefore no longer know a word of French or German, but under a new-style ‘functional’ GCSE they will be able to study travel brochures, magazines and biographies.

In fact, the obsession with ’skills’ has effectively de-skilled the country. For as we all know, to find a plumber who knows enough geometry to do his job properly you now have to employ a Pole.

Instead of knowledge, our anti-education department has been busily promoting something called ‘learnacy’. The idea is that instead of being taught knowledge, children have to learn how to learn.

That means instead of teaching them facts, teachers must build up pupils’ self-esteem and ‘emotional intelligence’. Learnacy — or lunacy?

Education is the very life-blood of a country. If the education system goes down the spout, the country must follow. Yet public outrage about this catastrophe is remarkably muted.

There is one — dismal — reason for this: those in a position to kick up a fuss buy their way out of the system, whether through independent schools, the few good state schools in leafy suburbs or by judicious (and discreet) use of home tutors.

Those who are left high and dry are those without the financial means to play the system like this. And it’s their children, of course, who need excellent schooling the most.

Even some independent schools are being slowly sucked into this spiral of decline. Is it any wonder that this country’s administrative class can no longer run the proverbial whelkstall?

There is only one way to deal with this. That is to remove the power and control of the education elite and transfer that power and control to parents instead.

That means some kind of voucher system for schools.

It means removing teacher training from teacher training institutions, which should be shut down. If it is not true that ‘those who can’t do, teach’, it certainly is true that ‘those who can’t teach, teach the teachers’.

And it means scaling down the Departments of Children, Schools and Families and Innovation, Universities and Skills which, even when they had ‘education’ in their titles, have done nothing but harm for decades.

Britain’s education system? Expletive deleted.

Wall Street Journal, 1 July 2008

It turns out that the U.S., whose Supreme Court last month ruled that non-American prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay may challenge their detention, isn’t the only country where judges are hampering the war on terror.

Many people here are rubbing their eyes at the fact that Britain is letting out of jail some of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members. In June, a British court released the notorious Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who had spent the previous three years in jail pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial on terrorism charges.

Now there are media reports that the U.K. government is considering releasing an even more dangerous terrorist this week, rather than deporting him to his native Algeria. The man known only as ‘U’ (to protect his identity) was a close contact of Abu Qatada and allegedly was involved in planning terror operations in Los Angeles and Strasbourg, France.

Neither Abu Qatada nor ‘U’ has been prosecuted in Britain, because U.K. authorities possess no evidence to charge these men with plotting terrorist acts. Abu Qatada could have faced charges for lesser offenses under Britain’s terrorism law. But since these would have imposed only short prison sentences, the government considered it preferable to deport him to stand trial for more serious crimes in his home country.

Yet in both cases, the English courts have ruled that deporting these men would breach their human rights. Given that they were only being held pending deportation, their subsequent release became inevitable. These cases are but the latest examples of the way in which the English judiciary appears to be bending over backward to thwart the fight against terrorism.

‘U’ is considered so dangerous that his lawyers and the security service are still arguing over the unprecedented restrictions proposed for his bail, including permanent house arrest. Abu Qatada is free on the conditions that he remains at home for 22 hours every day, doesn’t use a cell phone, and doesn’t visit a mosque.

He now lives in a house in a London suburb, to the undoubted discomfiture of his neighbors. Dozens of police officers are required to ensure that he doesn’t violate his bail conditions, at an estimated annual cost of £500,000 ($996,274). Then there are his wife and five children who have to be supported on welfare benefits, as they have been during the years of his incarceration, at a further cost of some £45,000 per year – not to mention an extra £8,000 annually in disability benefits for Abu Qatada on account of his ‘bad back.’

Britain’s welfare ‘rights’ culture only accentuates the surrealism of this situation. How is it that people as dangerous as these two men are to be maintained at vast expense by the British taxpayer rather than being deported? Puzzlement surely turns into astonishment when one learns the grounds on which the Appeal Court decided not to throw Abu Qatada out of the country.

The judges were worried that, at his pending trial in Jordan, the court there might use evidence from a witness that had been obtained by torturing him. This concern persisted despite the Jordanians’ assurances that they would not do so, since this was against their own law.

Prohibiting torture is one thing. But extending such concerns to a witness in a case in which Britain was not even involved, thus preventing it from throwing out someone who endangered its own interests, is beyond perverse.

No sooner had Abu Qatada been released than yet another set of English judges in a terrorist case arrived at an even more bizarre conclusion. Led by England’s top judge, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, the Appeal Court quashed the conviction of the ‘lyrical terrorist’ Samina Malik.

Ms. Malik had been found guilty of collecting ‘information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ after a jury heard that she possessed jihadi literature including ‘The Terrorists’ Handbook’ and ‘The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook,’ as well as operators’ manuals for such firearms as an antitank weapon. She is known as the ‘lyrical terrorist’ because she also wrote jihadi poetry.

The judges reversed her conviction, though, because they decided that information ‘useful’ to a terrorist had to offer practical assistance. While the terrorist manuals in her possession plainly did just that, the judges decided that other jihadi literature did not, and so it was not unlawful to possess such literature. They then concluded that the jury may have been ‘confused’ and wrongly convicted her for possessing the jihadi literature – as opposed to convicting her for possessing the terrorism manuals that did constitute an offense.

The debacles over Abu Qatada and ‘U’ have occurred because England’s overwhelmingly liberal senior judges have interpreted the prohibition of torture under the European Convention on Human Rights to include deportation to any country where ill-treatment might be practiced. This has made it all but impossible to deport foreign terrorist suspects, since the Muslim countries they usually come from are hardly scrupulous in observing the rule of law.

It was surely never the intention of the framers of the Convention to force a country to harbor individuals who posed a danger to the national interest. Yet that is what the English judiciary has brought about. These judgments are a clear signal to al Qaeda that Britain remains the safest and most hospitable place on Earth in which to ply their appalling trade.

The Samina Malik case, meanwhile, showed once again that the judges seem unable to grasp the part played in Islamic terrorism of literature which incites hatred and violence toward the West.

The undercurrent to all this is the belief among many members of the British establishment that the threat of Islamic terrorism has been overstated. This notion flies in the face of a statement last November by the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, that there were 2,000 known Islamic terrorists in Britain.

There is much emotional talk about defending Britain’s ancient rights and liberties, whose erosion in the ostensible cause of fighting terror would, it is said, hand victory to al Qaeda. But this view does not chime with British public opinion – which if anything wants the government to take more draconian measures against terrorism. That’s why Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to extend the current 28-day limit for detaining terrorist suspects before charge to 42 days, a measure which the House of Commons recently passed.

So does this mean that the establishment mood on counterterrorism is toughening up? Not a bit. Mr. Brown forced through the 42-days law only with the last-minute help of the handful of Northern Irish Ulster Unionist MPs. Not only his own Labour backbenchers but the Conservative Party and most of the political and intellectual class are solidly against the measure, which is likely to be thrown out when it reaches the upper house of Parliament this month.

It is surely no accident that this failure to grasp the true dimensions of the Islamic terrorist threat is so pronounced among the British elite. For these are the people whose education and careers embody the key attribute of Britain’s liberal society – the belief that the world is governed by rational agents acting in their rational self-interest.

The British ruling class just doesn’t get religious fanaticism. That is why its judges and politicians are finding it so difficult to fight Islamic terror. Not just Britain but the whole world is less safe as a result.

Daily Mail, 30 June 2008

The stench is becoming overpowering.

Political sleaze scandals are raining down upon us like the unstoppable effluent from a burst sewage pipe.

The leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament, Wendy Alexander, resigned at the weekend over failing to declare donations to her leadership campaign, following a ruling by the Scottish Parliament’s Standards Committee that she should be suspended from Holyrood for one day.

At the same time, the Glasgow East Labour MP David Marshall also resigned his seat — ostensibly on health grounds, but amid allegations that he wrongly used his Commons expenses to pay members of his family.

Both Edinburgh and Westminster are convulsed by these developments. The loss of Gordon Brown’s close ally in Ms Alexander and the prospect of a possibly calamitous by-election in his own Scottish fiefdom are further, possibly terminal blows to an already punch-drunk Prime Minister.

Quite apart from the implications for Gordon Brown’s long-term political survival, however, these latest ructions surely tell us that something rather deeper in our political culture has gone badly rotten.

As a result of Ms Alexander’s resignation, the spotlight now falls again upon the Leader of the Commons Harriet Harman, who was forced to repay £5,000 in illegal donations made to her own deputy leadership campaign.

If Ms Alexander was forced to resign over such behaviour, why is Ms Harman still in office?

After all, Peter Hain is now a distant memory as a Cabinet Minister, having been forced to resign over his illegally undeclared donations for his own deputy leadership campaign.

Is it perhaps mandatory for British politicians now to pocket illegal donations whenever they run for leadership positions in anything?

Ms Harman nevertheless airily dismisses questions about her probity and suitability for high office, and froths instead about her frightening plan to discriminate against men in the workplace.

Such a Kafka-esque proposal by our satirically-styled Equality Minister, who proposes to punish men for a gender pay gap after having illegally plugged her own funding gap, has a whiff of the last days of the Soviet ruling elite as their empire imploded under the pressures of tyranny, corruption and gross incompetence.

Dodgy dealings by politicians are by no means confined to illegal donations, nor to any one party. The Tories can hardly call Labour to account when they themselves are presiding over a string of such scandals going right to the top of the party.

Their chairman, Caroline Spelman, was revealed to have used a parliamentary secretarial allowance to pay her children’s nanny, who she claimed worked as her secretary.

Now — devastatingly — it turns out that she sacked her real secretary, who had been so shocked to find out that Ms Spelman was using this parliamentary allowance to pay the nanny that she reported her to the party whips nine years ago.

In the circumstances, it is simply intolerable that Ms Spelman has not stepped down. Mr Cameron’s failure to acknowledge the patently outrageous nature of this scam demonstrates once more why public cynicism about the entire political class has now reached epidemic proportions.

But Mr Cameron is undoubtedly painfully aware that once one politician goes down for this kind of thing, innumerable others will follow because such practices have become institutionalised.

When Tory MP Derek Conway had the party whip withdrawn for putting his son on the parliamentary payroll, many other MPs nervously felt their collars.

Since then, we have learned that Labour MEP Michael Cashman pays his gay lover £30,000 from public funds to be his secretary; while at least 23 British MEPs employ husbands, wives, civil partners and daughters on their staff, paid for by the public purse.

Then there are all the jaw-dropping housing scams. Tory backbenchers Nick and Ann Winterton were rebuked by the Standards and Privileges Committee for buying a Westminster flat with their Commons allowance and then effectively renting it from themselves.

Labour’s husband-and-wife power couple, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, are being investigated for claiming a second-home allowance to help buy a £655,000 house in North London last year. By designating this as a second home, they qualified for up to £44,000 a year to subsidise the mortgage.

Yet how can this really be their second home, since not only is it unlikely that as Cabinet ministers they spend fewer nights in London than in their Yorkshire constituency house — which, incidentally, between 1999 and 2005 Ms Cooper had declared as their second home — but it is from their London house that their three children go to school?

Now Labour MP John Mann has poured fuel on to those particular flames by claiming that many MPs are claiming second-home allowances on expensive properties and then declaring them as their main home when they sell them to avoid capital gains tax.

And then there are all the lobbying scams. A report from the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has revealed that several members of the Shadow Cabinet are taking money to run their private offices directly from commercial companies with vested interests in their portfolios.

It is now becoming clear that the ‘Tory sleaze’ of the John Major years was merely the first act in the tragicomedy of modern British politics. The collective snout of the entire political class is now revealed to be deep in the trough.

Of course, this is not new; in previous centuries British politics was mired in corruption. But with the emergence of fully-fledged democracy in the last century, it was reformed to become arguably the cleanest political system in the world.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the erosion of political integrity is intimately related to the erosion of democracy itself in Britain. Politics is falling apart because the national project is falling apart.

Westminster is becoming less and less important. So much power has been transferred to Europe — where the absence of democratic accountability and transparency has instituted a gravy train of endemic corruption which, in turn, has washed back into Britain.

In addition, Britain itself is in danger of fragmenting, as we can see from the skilful way in which the Scottish Nationalist leader Alex Salmond is manipulating events — which is why there is panic in the Labour ranks over the Glasgow East by-election. As sceptical voices warned at the time, devolution has set in train a dynamic of separation that is going to be difficult to stop.

With Westminster thus enfeebled, British politics increasingly attracts moral and intellectual pygmies. As a result, the idea of politics as a duty to serve the public good has all but gone, replaced by a culture of everyone out for him or herself.

The result is unbridled greed and self-interest, exceeded only by a monumental arrogance which leads politicians to believe that they are entitled to feather their own nests and are outraged that anyone should call them to account.

The outcome is an electorate terminally disillusioned with mainstream politics — illustrated by the astounding result in the Henley by-election where Labour was beaten into fifth place by the racist British National Party.

Endemic sleaze is a symptom of decay, not just for a beleaguered Prime Minister but for a democracy itself that is in trouble.

Standpoint, July 2008

On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

It was, in short, a modern-day blood libel, an updated version of the medieval calumny that the Jews target gentile children for murder — which itself caused the murder of thousands of Jews over the centuries.

How do we know the footage was a lie? Because many of us have seen the evidence for ourselves in a French courtroom. Ironically, this blood libel was only exposed to public view because France 2 and its correspondent Enderlin brought a libel suit against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, for saying that the ‘killing’ was ‘pure fiction’ and that al-Dura wasn’t dead at all.

To begin with, a Paris court ruled in favour of the TV station. But in May this year, the appeal court ruled that Karsenty had every right to say what he said in the light of the evidence. This included the ‘inexplicable incoherence’ of footage, whose images did not correspond to Enderlin’s commentary; the ‘inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions’ in Enderlin’s explanation; and the lack of credibility of France 2’s Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, upon whose account of the events at Netzarim Enderlin — who was in Jerusalem at the time — had depended.

Denis Jeambar, the director of L’Express, and TV producer Daniel Leconte saw the untransmitted rushes and subsequently wrote in Le Figaro: ‘In the minutes that precede the gunfire, the Palestinians seem to have organised a staged scene. They “play” at war with the Israelis and simulate, in most of the cases, imaginary injuries.’ At the moment when Enderlin declared the boy to be dead: ‘Nothing permitted him to affirm that he was really dead and even less that he was killed by Israeli soldiers.’

The implications for France 2 are shattering. The state-funded TV station is now appealing to the highest court in France. Enderlin has blustered that Karsenty is backed by US and French ‘right-wing’, pro-Israel organisations. This is the desperate flailing of a journalist whose reputation now lies in shreds. For he never imagined that his attempt to silence Karsenty would lead the court to order France 2 to produce the evidence it had hitherto refused to make public — the untransmitted 27 minutes of footage that Abu Rahma claimed he had filmed.

I was in the Paris court on the day France 2 reluctantly complied and I saw the footage (minus a few minutes that Enderlin had excised and which are said to be even more explosive). This showed clearly that the whole thing was a set-up from start to finish.

The cameraman said the Israelis had fired continuously for 45 minutes. Yet the footage did not show people falling under fire. It showed instead Palestinians demonstrating, throwing rocks and so forth, in a positively carnival atmosphere. Youths strutted about, giving declamatory interviews and grinning at the camera; boys rode by on bicycles. And no one showed any sign of injury. There were no wounds; there was no blood. From time to time, demonstrators were pushed on to stretchers and into ambulances — but with no evidence of any disturbance to their anatomy.

Enderlin said he had cut out the scenes of al-Dura’s actual death agony because ‘it was unbearable’. But when the footage was shown, it became clear no such scenes existed. There was no agony and no death. Al-Dura and his father showed no sign of any wound or injury throughout. Supposedly riddled with bullets, their bodies remained totally unmarked. There was no blood anywhere. A red stain on the child turned out to be a piece of red cloth, which suddenly materialised.

You see the boy slumping to the ground. But before he does so, while he is still hanging on to his father and screaming, a voice shouts in Ara bic: ‘The boy is dead! The boy is dead!’ Asked to explain this astounding prescience, Enderlin’s team replied that the Arabic in fact meant: ‘The boy is in danger of dying.’ At this, the courtroom laughed out loud.

After Enderlin pronounces the boy to be dead, the corpse mysteriously assumes four different positions. You see the cameraman’s fingers making the ‘take two’ sign to signal the repeat of a scene. And then you see the lifeless martyr raise his arm and peep through his fingers — presumably to check whether his thespian services are still required or whether he can now get up and go home.

This extraordinary footage was first uncovered by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel’s defence establishment, who was at the centre of the Israeli army’s own investigation of the incident. Shahaf analysed frame by frame the untransmitted rushes from many TV crews.

He observed, from pictures of al-Dura’s autopsy, that the state of the body suggested he had been dead for at least a day; that this boy was older than 12; and that although there were bullet holes in his forehead, there had been no blood on the ground nor on the wall behind him. He also noted, from pictures of the boy’s funeral on the day of the shooting, that shadows indicated this took place around midday. He was told by two doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital that al-Dura’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1pm. But the incident at Netzarim had not started until 3pm.

Shahaf then discovered from al-Shifa’s records that a dead boy named Rami Jamal al-Dura had been brought into the hospital the day before. According to Palestinian TV and the earliest accounts of the incident, the full name of the boy who was killed at Netzarim was Mohammed Rami Jamal al-Dura.

Shahaf concludes: ‘It was just lie after lie after lie.’ He also found several short films shot in the Netzarim area on and around the day of the incident. ‘They used directors, cameramen and volunteer actors,’ he said. ‘You can see them shooting little horror scenes. Often the director scolds the volunteers for their bad acting. The wounded get up and go back for another take; Palestinian bystanders laugh and applaud.’

The implications of this scandal are enormous, going far beyond a disgraced journalist and his TV station. For France itself, it raises a century-old spectre. In 1894, a Jewish French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted for treason on fabricated evidence that he was a spy, in an atmosphere of institutionalised state antisemitism. The al-Dura libel is being seen in some quarters as a second Dreyfus affair — but with Israel playing the role of the defamed army captain.

This perception of France’s revived shame was given fuel by the extraordinary behaviour of the lower court, which found Karsenty guilty of libel. For most of that trial, it had looked as if France 2 would lose, not least because it had failed to answer any of Karsenty’s allegations. But at the last minute, Enderlin’s team produced a letter to Enderlin from the then French President, Jacques Chirac, extolling him as a brilliant and authoritative journalist. As a result, the three judges promptly found for France 2.

This disgraceful piece of political nobbling and judicial grovelling has now been reversed by the higher court. But few in France would realise this — what scant coverage there has been of this judgment managed to suggest that the integrity of the al-Dura footage remained intact.

It’s not just the French media that is in the frame here. Over the years, Shahaf’s findings made their way into a handful of newspaper articles, TV documentaries and on to the internet; yet this evidence was studiously ignored by the rest of the media.

It is the most egregious example of the animosity towards Israel of much of the Western media, which routinely reports Palestinian or Hezbollah propaganda as fact and refuses to correct the record whenever these falsehoods are exposed. One thinks of the Jenin ‘massacre’ that never was, or the evidence revealing that alleged Israeli atrocities during the 2006 Lebanon war were either staged by Hezbollah or significantly embellished. Indeed, the presentation of theatrical fictions as Israeli atrocities has become so widespread that the practice has been dubbed ‘Pallywood’ — a grotesque new genre of terrortainment.

Why do Western journalists go along with such deadly fabrications? The answer lies in a combination of their dislike of Israel, professional self-preservation, and the fact that they depend on local stringers who are virtually all partisans of the Arab and Islamist cause.

According to Danny Seaman, director of the Israel government press office, almost every stringer now delivering local copy and images from Gaza to Western journalists answers to Hamas. Western journalists know that if they cross Hamas, their lives will be in danger — and British journalists, Seaman says, are the most compliant of all.

Palestinian stringers in general, he says — who all see their role as propagandists for the Palestinian cause — have virtually taken over foreign media offices. The result is that footage from Gaza has long been routinely fabricated or doctored, to which practices Western media organisations turn a blind eye. ‘These were good pictures, always getting on the front pages and eliciting an emotional response,’ says Seaman. ‘ “Bad Jews, poor Arabs” sold papers. Then it became so much the reality that no one ever challenged it.’

What Western dupes fail to realise is that Pallywood is a key weapon in the asymmetrical warfare being waged against Israel and the West. Realising they cannot achieve victory by conventional military means, the Palestinians and Islamists use psychological warfare — psy-ops — as a key strategy both to recruit their army of terrorists, and to demoralise, confuse and suborn their victims.

Israel fails to grasp that it is in a psy-ops war — hence its ineptitude in reacting to the al-Dura claims. Within hours, the Israeli army assumed it must be responsible for the boy’s ‘death’ — and said so without even questioning the commander on the ground. It then set up an investigation, which concluded that its soldiers could not have been responsible. But it left it at that for seven years, despite Shahaf’s discoveries.

Although Seaman said repeatedly during that time that the boy’s ‘killing’ was a fabrication, he was slapped down by Israel’s foreign ministry. It decided that the al-Dura image had taken on a life of its own, and so anything that reminded people of that image would be bad for Israel. It failed to grasp that if left unchallenged, that life of its own would cause the deaths of untold numbers of Israelis and other innocents.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman). Similarly in Britain, at time of writing, no daily newspaper has reported any of this; and around the world, only a handful of papers has done so. So the public is unaware that images that have convinced such a lamentable number of them of Israel’s iniquity are false, and that the iniquity belongs instead to the Arabs and the Western media.

In medieval times, the Christian blood libels led to the annihilation of Jews. Today, al-Dura and other similar libels are promoting the annihilation of the collective Jew in the form of the state of Israel. The Western media have shown themselves once again to be the Islamists’ most powerful weapon against the free world on what few realise is the real battleground of the mind.