FrontPageMagazine.com, 26 April 2005

As ye sow, shall ye reap. George Galloway is a far-Left former Labour member of the British Parliament, who was expelled from the Labour Party 18 months ago for reportedly urging Arab armies in Iraq to attack British troops. Now the Islamists he has long courted are threatening Galloway.

An enthusiast for Saddam Hussein, Galloway once flew to Baghdad and told the doubtless gratified dictator, 'Sir, I salute your courage, strength and indefatigability.' He has continued in this enlightened vein, vouchsafing that Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was a 'political prisoner' who should be released.

Having been thrown out of the Labour Party, Galloway founded a new political group called 'Respect,' which is dominated by the Socialist Workers Party, which ran the antiwar movement in Britain. The SWP has gotten into bed with radical Islam, notably the Muslim Association of Britain, which is effectively the British wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Galloway has ridden this motley coalition straight into the current British general election campaign, seeking to harness the monumentally disaffected Muslim vote to give his old party a bloody nose. Under Respect’s banner, he is fighting the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, in the heart of London’s East End. This run-down area has always played host to immigrants. It was where many Jews settled when they arrived in London early in the 20th century. Now, more than half of its electors are Muslim. And they are furious with Tony Blair over the war in Iraq.

This has placed at risk the parliamentary career of the sitting MP, Oona King, who has earned the undying enmity of her Muslim constituents by supporting the war. King herself, however, would appear to have something in common with her tormentors: despite being half-Jewish and half-black, she once infamously compared the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Bigotry, it seems, can make common cause between enemies, at least when the Jews are their common target.

King’s Muslim opponents seem to take the view that 'my enemy’s enemy is my enemy.' Such are the fratricidal and conflicting emotions that flourish along the axis between the Left and radical Islam. The contest in Bethnal Green and Bow now lies between the unspeakable and the unelectable.

Recently, there was a remembrance ceremony in the area to commemorate the deaths of 134 people in one block of flats — of whom the vast majority were Jews — in the last V2 missile attack of the Second World War. Young Muslims threw vegetables and eggs at those attending the ceremony, including King. These detractors subsequently expressed violent prejudice towards the Jews mourning their war dead. Since then, King has had more eggs thrown at her and has had her tyres slashed. The situation has been growing increasingly dangerous, with fears being expressed that someone might get killed.

And much of the blame is being pinned on George Galloway. King has claimed members of Respect had told local Muslims not to vote for her, because she is Jewish. Respect vehemently denied this claim and promptly threatened to sue her for libel, claiming it had 'a long history of fighting antisemitism' – which, given its association with the Hamas-supporters of the MAB, was certainly an original boast.

Apart from the disputed issue of King’s abused ethnicity, there can be little doubt that Galloway has indeed contributed to the increasingly ugly climate in Bethnal Green and Bow. Telling Muslims that Tony Blair was waging war on their community has whipped some of the most dangerously unstable and paranoid young men in the country into a frenzy.

And having done so, he then found to his outrage that they turned their violent rage upon him. Recently, he was forced to flee for his life from some of these very same Islamists, who threatened to string him up as a false prophet. While he was electioneering in the constituency, a gang of 30 fanatics, who claim voting is un-Islamic, surrounded him and his supporters. They said they were angry at his attempt to woo Muslim voters; that they were 'setting up the gallows' for Galloway; and that any Muslim who voted for his party would face a 'sentence of death.' After a fight broke out between the two groups, Galloway was forced to hide in his car in a back alley until the violence calmed down.

But his problems did not end there. The upstanding democrats of the militant group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who demonstrate their commitment to moderation through their attempts to turn Great Britain into an Islamic state, declared they would sue the car-cowering politician for libel for accusing them of having instigated the attack. The Islamists said: 'Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain is an Islamic intellectual and political entity that seeks to change people’s thoughts solely through intelligent discussion and debate' — a claim nearly as reassuring as Respect’s 'long history of fighting anti-Semitism.' It is thought that the attack was carried out, not by Hizb ut-Tahrir, but by a group called the 'Saviour Sect,' which only a few hours before had disrupted a meeting in London’s Central Mosque called by the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain, and levelled charges of apostasy against the Muslim Council of Britain for urging Muslims to vote.

'Gorgeous' George Galloway has not taken all this in the collegiate spirit in which it was clearly intended. He is said to have been badly shaken and very worried by the fact the people in whom he has done so much to foment violent and irrational hatred have now turned that hatred upon him. So shaken is he that within 24 hours he was saying to Ms. King how sorry he was for what had happened to her. For her part, she said that although they disagreed about many things, they didn’t want to be violent towards each other. To this touching rapprochement, the mob on the hustings booed.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer pair. The simple lesson for George Galloway and other appeasenik politicians is: there’s no appeasing bigotry once that beast is roused. What this event means for the future of once-gentle, tolerant, democratic Britain is quite another matter.

Daily Mail, 25 April 2005

A lurid account of home life with Victoria and David Beckham was plastered across a Sunday newspaper yesterday, and a very unsavoury spectacle it was.

The couple’s former nanny, Abbie Gibson, made a number of allegations of what happened while she was employed by Britain’s most celebrated couple, including blazing rows between the two of them, lies by Beckham over a sordid extra-marital affair and boorish behaviour towards his wife.

Many may find this kind of thing deeply distasteful. After all, what greater betrayal of trust can there be than for a nanny to run to a newspaper, shattering her former employers’ privacy with the most intimate details of their private lives?

And who is to say that her allegations are true? Ms Gibson left her job after an argument a few weeks ago. The possibility must therefore be entertained that this is simply a resentful ex-employee getting her own back in the most spiteful way.

In the past, the courts have tended to take a very dim view of this kind of disloyalty by household staff. The Beckhams’ own chauffeur and security guard were prevented from talking about their employers. Elsewhere, the courts have granted injunctions to prevent both the former nanny to Tony and Cherie Blair’s children and the secretary to Lady Archer from spilling the beans.

It was all the more remarkable, therefore, that in the High Court on Saturday night Mr Justice Langley rejected an attempt by the Beckhams to stop publication of Ms Gibson’s allegations. The couple argued that she had signed a contract with them guaranteeing that she would not talk about their lives. Nevertheless, the judge turned down the request for an injunction by ruling that publication would be in the public interest.

His decision was surely right. What he was effectively saying was that people can’t have their cake and eat it — especially when the cake happens to be a vastly lucrative one with ‘celebrity’ iced on it in huge letters.

For if you look beneath the titillating details of Ms Gibson’s allegations, the essence of what she is saying is that the Beckhams have made a mint out of an enormous public lie that they have assiduously created. They went to court not to protect their privacy but to prevent this lie from being exposed.

Indeed, the very idea that their family life is a private matter is laughable given the way they themselves have behaved. For this was a relationship forged from the very start in the crucible of publicity.

As a Spice Girl, Victoria was a global celebrity when she married. She drew her new husband into this same fevered environment of excess, where she ruthlessly marketed him to turn them both into a brand of hyper-celebrity.

The myth they constructed lay in the combination of fame, talent, astounding wealth — and most crucially of all, a ‘fairy-tale’ marriage. It was this that was used to provide an antidote to the off-putting stereotype of the loutish and dissolute football star. So Beckham was marketed as the iconic ‘new man’, supposedly besotted with his wife and devoted to his children.

But Ms Gibson’s revelations have blown this myth to bits. Indeed, from her account Beckham emerges as a monster of callousness — cheating on his wife and lying about it, screaming abuse at her and even threatening to leave her when she was heavily pregnant, and generally behaving as if fame and wealth had gone to his head. Nor does Victoria appear a paragon from this account, failing to support Beckham and needling him at every opportunity when he went to Spain.

The real sting, however, lies in the way the Beckhams manipulated public perception to perpetuate the myth of their blissful family life. On the day the story broke about Beckham’s affair with Rebecca Loos, he and Victoria posed on the ski slopes smiling for the cameras. As Ms Gibson commented, it was a contrived publicity stunt to keep Brand Beckham on the rails.

Indeed, the very existence of Ms Gibson as the couple’s nanny was something of a revelation, given that they often spoke of not having one. The image they so carefully cultivated was one of full-time parenthood with Victoria’s mother Jackie being wheeled in on occasion to help out. Ms Gibson’s existence was kept secret, so much so that at first they told her to walk a long way behind them when out in public so that no-one would know they had employed a nanny at all.

In other words, the image they have so carefully presented of a happy marriage and traditional family life is false. Brand Beckham, the foundation of their fortune, turns out to be a sham.

This is surely why their court action failed. For celebrities should not be able to project the image of their private lives they want to, milking it for commercial gain, while suppressing any inconvenient facts that destroy this fabrication on the grounds that this is a breach of their privacy.

People who keep their private lives private are entitled to keep it so. Those who seek to exploit it for their own ends cannot complain when the same tactics are used against them.

The Beckhams appear to be in the process of being destroyed by the celebrity they have so desperately sought. In more than one sense, this is a personal tragedy.

It isn’t merely that Beckham’s majestic gifts have been so conspicuously squandered by his inability to cope with his celebrity. It is more that for both of them, fame has seemed to become an end in itself.

Why else would Beckham have demeaned himself by appearing in a series of stunts to advertise various products in television commercials? Why else would his wife, who once declared that she wanted to be ‘as famous as Daz Automatic’, have desperately tried to re-start her singing career in a destructive competition with her husband over who was the bigger celebrity?

Everything we now know about the Beckhams suggests that these are two inadequate people. Victoria seems to be a control-freak unhealthily tied to her domineering mother’s apron-strings, Beckham a weak character who was originally content to be bossed around by his wife.

A couple with a most fragile sense of themselves seemed therefore to be desperately seeking celebrity as a way of convincing themselves that they were important.

But of course, the more they have ratcheted up the trappings of fame, the more absurd and even pathetic they have become. Thus the woman with whom Beckham had one of his dalliances was more normally employed in providing him with a spray-on tan.

Paying her ten times her normal charge for the service and crayoning on the envelope: 'Thank you for the tan and coming over’ hardly qualifies as one of the grandest gestures in romantic history.

The celebrity the Beckhams constructed on the back of a myth of family life has now torn down that family life. What was really precious beyond price to both of them has been destroyed by the hollow riches that it helped create.

Worship of fame, self pity, greed, narcissism, infantilism, jealousy— and three small children who are now the victims of their parents’ selfishness and inadequacy. The story of Brand Beckham is surely a morality tale for our times, and it is in the public interest for it to be made known.

Jerusalem Post, 21 April 2005

The following article is an extract from a presentation delivered on 10 April at a conference on 'Terrorism and Global Antisemitism' to the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

In recent weeks, as the British general election campaign has loomed, it has seemed as if an anti-Jewish virus has been unleashed by the Left.

Labor election posters, now withdrawn, portrayed the Jewish leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, as a sinister cross between Fagin and Svengali. A Labor minister, Peter Hain, referred to Howard as an 'attack mongrel.' And in the House of Lords, a Muslim Labor peer hosted a rabid Swedish anti-Semite who informed his audience of parliamentarians that the Jews controlled the mass media, that they were treacherous and that British Muslims would turn the tide against 'Judaic values.'

Jewish students are running a gauntlet of left-wing and Muslim hatred on campus, causing three Jewish officers of the National Union of Students to resign in protest at its indifference. Even now, the university teachers' union is debating a boycott of Israeli academics who fail to denounce Israel's policies. Jews are prominent in this hate-fest, too. Indeed, the media now like to use the good Jew/bad Jew device in public discussion, in which the "good" Jew dumps on Israel while the "bad" Jew defends it – thus additionally exposing the bad Jew to the charge of 'dual loyalty' since the allegiance of Jews to Britain appears to have been made conditional upon their denouncing Israel.

Demographic change and crude political calculation explain some of this. There are 1.8 million Muslims in Britain and 280,000 identifying Jews. Senior Labor figures say privately that, as a result, the Jews have got to get used to the fact that their concerns are no longer of any account, that the Muslim vote is the only show in town and that therefore the Labor Party will adopt the 'Muslim narrative' on Israel/Palestine.

There is no doubt that the paranoia and prejudice about Israel and the Jews that pours out of the Arab and Muslim world has significantly poisoned the atmosphere in Britain. But this is not the full explanation. There is a firestorm of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American hatred in the wider population. On BBC panel shows, overwhelmingly conservative audiences cheer the view that America is the fount of world terror, that George W. Bush is more of a danger to the world than Saddam Hussein ever was, and that if any country is a menace to world peace through its weapons of mass destruction it is Israel.

More generally, far from expressing horror and outrage at the rampant medieval and Nazi tropes of Jew-hatred pouring out of Arab and Muslim countries, the British media seem to agree that there is indeed a world Jewish conspiracy linking the Jews of America, Israel and the war in Iraq.

In The Times, its premier columnist Simon Jenkins wrote in support of the argument that: 'a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people'; that they were 'traitors to the American conservative tradition' who achieved a 'seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11' and that their 'first commitment was to the defence of Israel.' So according to Jenkins, the Jews possess extraordinary and sinister power which they exercise in a covert way to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind.

People say openly it would have been better had Israel never been created. The 'oldest hatred' has mutated from a desire to rid the world of the Jews into a desire to rid the world of the Jewish state.

I was discussing this with a commentator on the Left, someone with a reputation for an open-minded approach. 'You've got this entirely wrong,' he told me. 'There is no upsurge of anti-Semitism among the public. What you have to understand is that we are just so relieved that we don't have to worry about the Jews any more. Ever since the war we were told that because of their suffering the Jews were above criticism. But now that's no longer the case.'

In other words, the perception of Israel's misdeeds means that all the old prejudices that were kept under wraps can now be unleashed once again, and it is now open season on the Jews.

But all this can only properly be explained in a wider context still. People fix on Israel as the cause of Islamist terrorism, because through the relentless British TV pictures of Palestinians weeping in the rubble of houses demolished by the Israeli army, with a running commentary which predicates the myth of Israeli tanks against Palestinian stones, they are provided with a neat cause of righteous armchair indignation.

The actual causes of terror – the indoctrination from the cradle in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the West and a cult of death sanctified and even mandated by religious edict – are studiously ignored by the media which present it instead as a dispute over land.

Israel is demonized in a way that goes far beyond legitimate criticism. Of course, it should be criticized when it behaves badly. But its every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the worst possible motives and denying its own victimization. Indeed, its self-defense is regarded as intrinsically illegitimate and is routinely described instead as 'vengeance' or 'punishment.' Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian: 'Israel does itself relentless harm by venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people.' And he implied that attempts by Israel or Russia to defend themselves from attack by killing terrorists were the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes.

But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel is the BBC. Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a default position on the Left. And since it regards this as the political center of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system.

When it comes to Israel, it persistently presents it in the worst possible light. Its language and tone are loaded, it handles Arab and Israeli interviewees with double standards, and panel discussions are generally skewed with two or three speakers hostile to Israel against one defender or, more often, none at all. And it wears its heart on its sleeve for the Palestinians, who are presented not as aggressors motivated to murder by brainwashing in hatred of Israel and the Jews, but as innocent victims.

Why has the media succumbed to this epidemic of bigotry, blindness and bias?

Many reasons. The first is incompetence and fear. In tyrannies or police states where information is hard to get, journalists report what they are told and have neither the language skills nor the freedom to inquire whether it is actually true. At home, journalists are terrified of being tarred and feathered as an Islamophobe or 'right-wing.'

The second is the mind-set of the Left. Since it demonizes America and Western capitalism, and lionizes the third world and all liberation movements, America and Israel can never be victims, only aggressors, while the Muslim and Arab third world can only be victims because they are the powerless pawns of Western imperialism.

Then there is the cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of intellectual Britain, has fallen victim. Some time ago, British journalism decided that objectivity was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting became an expression of opinion.

These influences have propelled the Left into an unholy alliance with the Arab and Muslim world. As a result, both Western leftists and Eastern zealots share the perception of America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan, and march shoulder to shoulder at demonstrations against the Iraq war in Britain and Europe behind placards saying 'No Blood for Oil' and (in Arabic) 'Jews to the gas.'

But it is not just the Left. Much of this thinking is shared by conservatives too because the Left has captured Britain's monolithic intelligentsia. And it has set itself to impose upon Western culture a deeply dysfunctional, morally inverted hegemony of ideas in which the values of marginalized or transgressive groups are substituted for the values of Western democracy.

Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance caused by a post-Christian and anti-Western victim culture, which stands truth and morality on their heads. The outcome is that British people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior – which has produced a tendency to equate and then invert the role of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims.

British hostility toward Israel and the Jews should be set in the context of this wider assault on the Christian values of its society. And behind these Christian values are Jewish values. It is the Jewish moral codes constraining human appetite in the blueprint for the values of Western civilization that are now under attack in the culture wars. It is therefore no coincidence that the people who gave the West its moral codes now find themselves at the very heart of the firestorm of hatred now engulfing Britain and Europe.

Daily Mail, 18 April 2005

Are we seeing double? For it appears that there isn’t just one Blair making Labour’s case in this general election campaign, but two.

On BBC TV’s Breakfast with Frost programme yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said that in the wake of last week’s conviction of Kamel Bourgass for trying to make poisons, there should be new measures to combat terrorism such as identity cards and a new legal offence of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’.

This was an astonishing intervention. For the Labour party manifesto contains proposals for precisely such an offence and the re-introduction of the ID cards bill, the policy that was dropped because the government could not get it through Parliament before the election.

Labour had already challenged the Tories, who had been divided on ID cards before abstaining and thus blocking the measure in Parliament, on whether they would now support them. Then up popped Sir Ian to throw the ostensible weight of the police behind Labour’s position.

Not surprisingly, ministers spent yesterday falling over themselves to climb onto the bandwagon that Sir Ian had so obligingly parked for their convenience outside their campaign headquarters.

Both Alan Milburn and John Reid leapt aboard to twist the political knife and accuse the Tories of being soft on terrorism — an accusation now given apparently lethal authority by the backing of the Metropolitan Police commissioner.

With stomach-churning cynicism Mr Milburn wrapped himself in the borrowed mantle of Sir Ian’s professionalism to claim — while proceeding to taunt the Tories — that ID cards were ‘not an issue to play politics with’.

Since the most senior police officer in the country knew more than anyone about terrorism, he said, he should obviously be backed in saying that ID cards were needed.

On the contrary — the most senior police officer in the country should surely have known better. For it is simply disgraceful that Sir Ian should have allowed himself to be used as a partisan in this election campaign. Whatever his opinions, the middle of an election is not the time for a police commissioner to air them — especially if they mirror a party’s policies.

There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for a senior police officer to get involved in party politics, particularly during a general election. It would never have needed to be said that public servants should scrupulously avoid making any statements that might imply favouring one political party over another.

Nowhere is this more important than in the police, whose political impartiality and independence from politics is absolutely essential if the country is to avoid literally turning into a police state.

By dropping these remarks into the election campaign Sir Ian has compromised his position and, at a time when the whole of the public service has been politicised by the Labour government, placed an especially worrying question mark over the independence of the police.

What’s more, the issue of ID cards is being used to divert attention from a series of policy and operational failures in fighting both illegal immigration and terrorism.

Bourgass, a failed asylum-seeker, had only been able to set up his poisons factory and murder DC Stephen Oake because of the shambles of asylum policy. After the trial the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, tried to cover up this egregious policy failure by claiming that ID cards would help strengthen the fight against terrorism.

The fact is, however, that ID cards — which in any event would not become fully operational for about ten years — would have been irrelevant in this case since they would not apply to failed asylum-seekers. In addition, there would be no requirement to carry an ID card or produce it to a police officer on demand.

Spanish ID cards did not stop the Madrid train bombings last year — because identification is not the major issue in preventing terrorism. In the past, the police have said they have had no problem identifying terror suspects.

The difficulty lies either in finding evidence that can be put before a court, in summoning the political will to arrest such people or deport them, or in carrying out effective policing operations.

The proposal for a new offence of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’ is a rather better suggestion, since the conspiracy laws make it difficult to prove there was an agreement to commit a crime, especially if some of the alleged conspirators are abroad.

Nevertheless, Sir Ian’s call to add yet another offence to the police armoury also has the whiff of a diversionary tactic about it. For the ricin investigation developed in part into a policing shambles which cost the life of a brave officer.

Although Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism squad appears to have destroyed a particular terrorist cell of which Bourgass was a member, the operation which netted him by Manchester police, in which Bourgass managed to kill DC Oake, was a sorry saga of eye-watering incompetence.

Advance surveillance of a flat which was thought to house a terrorism suspect failed to uncover the fact that Bourgass was there too. The pre-operation briefing, which was in many respects utterly inadequate, took place in a noisy police station garage so that at least one officer had difficulty hearing.

The police team did not take specialist arrest kits. Officers found that their mobile phones would not work. None of the officers was wearing body armour, and Bourgass was not handcuffed.

The officer in charge of this debacle has reportedly been disciplined – but is still employed somewhere in the police service. In other words, no-one has taken responsibility for a display of professional incompetence which left an officer dead.

Faced with a potential terrorist plot which made the police and security world believe that they were in a race against time to prevent a terror attack using unconventional weapons, the police responded like the Keystone Cops.

One has to ask, therefore, what is the point in providing more and increasingly draconian laws when the present ones are being so inadequately applied.

At a time when the threat of terrorism requires the highest standards of professionalism, the police and security services are displaying unacceptable levels of incompetence — not least because they are increasingly politicised and paralysed by political correctness.

Even before he assumed his current role, Sir Ian Blair was famous for putting the PC into policing. One of his first actions as Commissioner was to change the Met's logo partly because it was in joined-up handwriting and thus 'discriminated against short-sighted people'.

And barely had he got his feet under the table than he was peppering the newspapers with highly opinionated remarks — including the observation that the police, like ‘all organisations’, was ‘institutionally racist’.

This acceptance of institutional racism is not only a baseless smear. It has left the police so terrified of upsetting ethic minorities that they are forced to tread eggshells when dealing with the Muslim community, thus significantly hampering their effectiveness against terrorism.

For Sir Ian to enter the election arena is not only an abuse of his office. It also provides both police and politicians with the means to divert attention from the immigration and terrorism fiascos and from the urgent need to address professional incompetence which, in the fight against terror, is surely the weakest link of all.

Sunday Telegraph, April 17 2005

After Kamel Bourgass was convicted last week of plotting to make poisons and sentenced to 17 years in prison, ministers sprang to the microphones to claim that the jury's verdict in the ricin trial proved that they had told the truth about the terrorist threat to Britain. But this was far wide of the mark. On the contrary, it was a disaster for those who believe that such a threat exists.

The acquittal of eight of the nine defendants allowed the opponents of the Government's behaviour in Iraq to claim that Bourgass was merely a lone and ineffectual nutcase, that there was no al-Qa'eda conspiracy, and that the threat of a ricin plot was simply cooked up by Tony Blair to justify the Iraq war by mendaciously fuelling a climate of fear, as he had done over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The prosecuting authorities effectively stand accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war. Duncan Campbell, the maverick intelligence analyst, has pooh-poohed the claim that Bourgass's ricin recipe came from al-Qa'eda, and insisted instead that he downloaded it from American internet sites.

Some lawyers involved in the case suggested that the evidence by Bourgass's alleged co-conspirator was obtained under torture. And, in The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins wrote that there was no ricin, no al-Qa'eda plot and that anyone who was alarmed about such a thing was insane. Reality's boot, however, may be on the other foot. For it is surely the Government's opponents who filter everything through the distorting prism of their obsession that Britain was taken to war on a lie.

Evidence suggests that the trial itself was politicised, with the wholly unconnected war in Iraq being dragged in at every opportunity. The jury never actually heard some of the most crucial evidence. It all raises urgent questions about whether the adversarial knockabout and courtroom gamesmanship that characterise the criminal court system can cope with trials of this nature, where public safety is said to be so gravely at risk.

Government opponents claim that because no ricin was found there was no plot. But the charge was conspiracy, not production. Whether or not ricin was actually manufactured is irrelevant. What was found was the means to make a variety of poisons in a flat stacked with poison recipes, equipment and plans for making explosives - along with a pot of nicotine toxin. In what sense was this not a poisons factory? In what sense was Bourgass not involved in a terror plot?

Next, the anti-war camp claims that Bourgass was a loner. Evidence by Mohamed Meguerba, the Algerian informer, who claimed that both he and Bourgass had been in the ricin plot together, has been attacked on the grounds that he was forced to say this under torture. But the police found the poison factory in Wood Green, north London, only because of Meguerba's information. Indeed, virtually everything Meguerba told them checked out. So are we supposed to believe that this was merely an astonishing coincidence, or evidence perhaps of Meguerba's psychic powers to detect the 'loner' Bourgass?

What's more, although the jury acquitted Bourgass's four co-defendants in the dock, it nevertheless found him guilty of conspiracy with Meguerba, currently in an Algerian jail. And Bourgass himself said that he had copied out the poison recipes at Meguerba's request. So, by both his own account and that of the jury, he was not a loner at all.

Although some of Meguerba's evidence has been contradictory and inconsistent, security forces believe that he was part of an al-Qa'eda cell. He told the Algerian authorities that he was trained for terror activities in Europe, that he and Bourgass had received poisons training in Afghanistan's terrorist camps and that they had prepared two pots of ricin in the Wood Green flat. However, his evidence was never put to the jury because the defence successfully argued that, since he was not available for cross-examination, it was inadmissible.

Other crucial evidence was also not heard. The police found two recipes for ricin in Bourgass's handwriting. These are what Duncan Campbell says were identical to the recipes found on American internet sites.

This may be true - although in itself it proves nothing, since there is no reason why al-Qa'eda terrorists might not have got their poisons information from the internet. Indeed, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey, California, the ricin recipe in an al-Qa'eda military manual, Declaration of Jihad Against the Country's Tyrants, appears to have been translated nearly word for word from The Poisoner's Handbook, an underground pamphlet originally published in America.

In any event, the police case that there was a direct link between Bourgass's recipes and al-Qa'eda was never actually put to the jury. Their argument was that his recipes - which were not just for ricin but other poisons such as botulinum and nicotine - were identical to a large number of poisons recipes seized by the British and US military from the Afghan camps, and that, although there were subtle differences between them, their common origin was clear.

But the court never heard this evidence. Since the prosecution was unable to produce the soldiers who had found all this material in Afghanistan, it needed the defence to accept that it had indeed been found in the camps. But the defence made no such concession, and said it would challenge the prosecution's claim about its provenance.

The prospect thus loomed of a protracted battle between expert witnesses on either side. The prosecution concluded that this would leave the jury unable to decide which expert was right. The result was that the link with the Afghan documents could not be argued, and the full range of witnesses lined up from Porton Down to give their views on Bourgass's recipes was never called.

According to the prosecution, a wealth of fingerprints by several of the defendants was found on photocopied poison recipes and bottles of chemicals. But the defence insisted that the men had handled all this material in innocence, not realising what it was.

According to the police, the defence made significant use of another, far more explosive argument - that the whole police investigation was a political set-up to bolster the case for war in Iraq.

Defence counsel, say the police, repeatedly referred to the Iraq controversy. They claimed that the police investigation was going on while the Government was softening up the public for war; they made references to the 'dodgy dossier', and said that everyone now knew how unreliable intelligence was.

In fact, the police investigation that had started in the summer of 2002 was originally aimed at uncovering passport and credit-card scams. Only when the trail led to an address in Thetford, Norfolk, did detectives stumble across photocopies of handwritten Arabic recipes for poisons and explosives.

Of course, no one knows what influences a jury. But, given the widespread public anger about what is generally believed to have been the flawed intelligence and lies told about Iraq, it is more than likely that this drip-drip of insinuations about dodgy intelligence would have struck a powerful chord and undermined the prosecution case.

Moreover, the conduct of the trial hardly lent itself to a clear overview of the evidence. It kept stopping and starting - sometimes for what seemed to be bizarre reasons. For example, when the defence claimed that the Algerian authorities mistreated Algerian exiles, the trial was stopped for a month so that every government department could trawl for evidence of whether the Algerian government might do anything to harm their nationals abroad.

In the eight months of the trial, the jury heard only about four weeks of evidence. The rest was legal argument. Indeed, after the evidence was heard there followed many weeks of yet further legal argument, after which the jury retired to consider its verdict. How can jurors be expected to have the evidence in the forefront of their minds in such fractured circumstances?

The defence would doubtless present a robust challenge to this prosecution view of the trial. The problem is that, because of draconian reporting restrictions, none of the evidence was reported at the time. So it is hard now to form an authoritative view. And this information vacuum lends itself to political manipulation.

Meguerba's allegations of an al-Qa'eda connection were alleged to have been extracted under torture in Algeria. In fact, no one knows how he was treated by the Algerians after they arrested him on terrorism charges. But he was interrogated for three days by an Algerian judge in the presence of British antiterrorist officers, who say they saw no evidence of his having been ill-treated and that he was 'remarkably sprightly' and 'particularly cocksure'.

And it was in these interviews that the police say Meguerba said that Bourgass had been trained in the Afghan camps in the making and use of poisons, that he and Bourgass had made ricin in the Wood Green flat, and that there were two pots of the stuff hidden in a cupboard. So this evidence was not extracted under torture.

Defence lawyers spoke dismissively of a 'massive conspiracy tapestry woven by the prosecution'. But, to the anti-war camp, any actual terrorist conspiracy has to be denied because the only possible conspiracy is one that is perpetrated by the state.

The political climate is one of fevered irrationality in which, because Messrs Blair and Bush stand accused of having exaggerated the terrorist threat, it is believed that anything they have ever claimed demonstrates such a threat must by definition be untrue - regardless of the evidence. The outcome is that a police investigation that destroyed the nucleus of a terrorist cell is misrepresented as a politicised operation.

This trial has been seized upon by both Labour and Tory politicians to make political points. But the real politicisation has taken place in the courtroom, where the law has shown itself to be not only inadequate to deal with the threat of terror but also unable to escape the long and baleful shadow of the Iraq war.

Jewish Chronicle, 14 April 2005

It’s groundhog day in the universities. The spectre of an academic boycott of Israel is now doing the rounds yet again, almost three years to the day since an infamous letter to the Guardian first put it on the agenda.

While their teachers gear themselves up to single out Israelis for discrimination, Jewish students are being forced to run a gauntlet of racial abuse on campus — an ordeal which is being viewed with indifference by the rest of the supposedly anti-racist, diversity and equality-loving student body.

The universities are our historic guardians of intellectual freedom and tolerance. Unfortunately, someone seems to have torn up the lecture notes.

Three Jewish officers of the National Union of Students have resigned in protest at what they say is the NUS executive’s refusal to do anything about the anti-Jewish prejudice openly erupting on campus.

Responding to criticism for organising an event on a Saturday, NUS officer Benson Osawe reportedly said: ‘When Jewish students cough and sneeze within NUS everyone jumps, but it’s not the same for international students’; and for good measure he added that the NUS was ‘pandering to Jewish students’.

At a student union meeting, someone commented that burning down a synagogue was a rational act. A stall at the NUS conference displayed anti-Jewish leaflets which compared Jews to Nazis, claimed that Jews had abused Judaism to obtain the State of Israel, and regurgitated extracts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yet according to the UJS, not only did the NUS executive do nothing about these leaflets and remarks but instead it did remove a UJS leaflet exposing the extremist Islamist movement Hizb-ut-Tahrir. So while it turned a blind eye to brazen anti-Jewish prejudice, it suppressed a protest by Jews against the Islamist fanaticism that threatens themselves and others.

This is racism, pure and simple. But there’s worse.

One of the trio who resigned, Luciana Berger — a convener of the union’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Fascism Campaign, no less — recounted in her resignation letter an appalling litany of racial bullying. She had been accused of being biased towards the Jews because she had tackled anti-Jewish prejudice. An attempt had been made to censure her for speaking out about anti-Jewish feeling at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Five years ago, she wrote, she had been spat at because she was Jewish. In recent years, Jewish students had had to be escorted from the building by the back door because of fears for their safety; while this year, Jews had been accused by union officers of conspiring to write, submit and debate motions that they had had no part in.

Being spat at? Having to be smuggled out by the back door? Baselessly accused of conspiracies? This is simply open season on Jewish students of the most shameless and disgusting kind — and it has been going on for years.

By any normal standards of decency, university teachers should be expressing huge concern about this racial prejudice and intimidation within the student body and taking action to stop it. But look at what they are doing instead — debating a proposal at the Association of University Teachers’ conference next week to boycott Israeli academics.

Not all Israeli academics, mind — only those who fail to denounce their country’s policies in the disputed territories. So in true totalitarian tradition, only those who betray their own people will be permitted to maintain their livelihood.

Of course, the boycotters would say this has got nothing to do with racial prejudice, not least because some of them are Jews themselves. This is self-serving humbug. Tragically, there have always been Jews who have sided with the persecutors of their own people. And this boycott is without any doubt racially discriminatory.

There is no similar proposal to boycott Syria, say, for occupying Lebanon; or China for oppressing Tibet; or Sudan for the genocide of two million Africans. It is only the Jews of democratic Israel — the victims of annihilatory terror — who are being singled out for punishment.

The motion reveals that its proponents are as ignorant as they are prejudiced. They have swallowed the lie that Israel colonised Palestinian land. They thus not only ignore the ancient Jewish settlements in the territories which predated the Arab colonisation by several centuries. They also ignore the fact that this land never belonged to the Palestinians but to the British mandatory authority, from which Jordan and Egypt aggressively and illegally seized it.

What is going on in the universities is no mere sideshow. These academics are shaping the minds of generations of young people. Instead of bringing enlightenment, they are spreading darkness. And in this most oppressive of climates, Jewish students are being intimidated and abandoned.

A virus of anti-Jewish hatred is now coursing through this country’s arteries — and the universities are the swamp in which it breeds.

FrontPageMag.com, 13 April 2005

Here we go again. Later this month, Britain’s Association of University Teachers will debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics. This is almost three years to the day since the campaign for such a boycott was first launched, when Professors Steven and Hilary Rose proposed it in a letter to the Guardian. Although the attempt largely failed, it ushered in a climate of virulent intolerance on campus in which two Israeli academics were sacked from a journal, an Israeli student discriminated against in admissions, and a number of papers from Israeli academics returned unopened.

The Prime Minister’s office said that Tony Blair was ‘appalled by discrimination against academics on the grounds of their race or nationality’ and that ‘universities must send a clear signal that this will not be tolerated’. But it was tolerated, and the unpunished academics did not give up. In March 2004, more than 300 of them signed an open letter in the Guardian asking the leaders of Israeli universities to reveal whether they supported government policies.

They finally managed to reopen the issue at a conference held last December at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The conference, organised by the school’s Palestinian Society, was called ‘Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Strategies and Principles’ and launched a new boycott organisation, the British Committee for Universities in Palestine. This drew up a manifesto calling on academics to break links with Israel by refusing to work with Israeli institutions, referee academic papers, grant applications or attend conferences.

Even before the AUT debates the new boycott call, the Israel Science Foundation, the biggest government funder of Israeli research, has already found itself a victim of the Israel blacklist, receiving two rejections from British academics to review an application. The Guardian reported that an unnamed academic described his ‘utmost respect’ for the scholar whose grant he was asked to review, but refused on the basis that it was Israeli money and he disapproved of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinian people. ‘I hope you understand this is nothing personal,’ he added.

The AUT has been here before, too, having first debated an Israel boycott two years ago when it was defeated after an acrimonious debate. But now, the tactics are more sophisticated. In a tactical manoeuvre to get the motion accepted, it does not commit the union to implement a boycott but merely requires that the full text of the boycott call be circulated to all members.

There is yet another twist to this resuscitated campaign. For the boycott would not be extended to all Israeli academics -- only to those who refuse to denounce their government’s policies in the occupied territories. The motion would generously exclude ‘conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state’s colonial and racist policies’.

This requirement to denounce Israel as the price of continued social acceptance is doubly disgusting. First, it is of course a monstrous inversion which turns Israel, the victim of unbroken annihilatory Arab terror for the past half century, into the regional bully while sanitising Palestinian aggression.

Second, it represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate. If anyone had ever told British academics that there would come a time when they would punish colleagues because of the views they held, and would treat them as pariahs and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous. In the western tradition the universities are, after all, the historic custodians of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.

The motion has already been compared to McCarthyism. This is too kind. However cruel, illiberal and arbitrary that disturbing period was, a number of those who were hounded subsequently turned out to have actually been communists. By contrast, Israeli academics are to be persecuted for failing to denounce their own country for seeking to defend its citizens against genocidal mass murder. A more appropriate comparison would surely be the forced conversion of the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, or the show trials under Stalinism. For in true totalitarian tradition, only those in the pariah group who denounce their own will be permitted to have a livelihood. To survive in the cradle of free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people in the cause of hatred and lies.

But who can be surprised? For this is a natural development from the implicit -- and sometimes explicitly stated -- assumption that courses through British intellectual circles in the ongoing hate-fest against Israel, that only those British Jews who denounce Israel’s policies can be considered to be British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of ‘dual loyalty’. Since defending Israel is a thought-crime which thus calls into question one’s membership of a nation, it follows that Israel’s academics must similarly find called into question their membership of the academy.

What is notable about the AUT motion is that it reflects the truly shocking ignorance of the region’s history and current political reality, the resulting deep gullibility to propaganda based on lies, and the consequent vicious double standards and prejudice that now characterise British received opinion on the subject of Israel.

An unidentified academic has defended the boycott ‘as a means of registering my protest against Israelis’ lack of respect for human rights and continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian land.’ This parrot mindlessly repeats the mantra of the left about the ‘illegal occupation’ in apparent ignorance of the fact that a) the occupation is perfectly legal under international law as the defensive measure against attack that it was; b) that it is not ‘Palestinian land’ at all but territory that belonged to the British colonial power until it was illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and is now -- since they have washed their hands of it -- most fairly to be described as no-man’s land; and c) that parts of these territories, such as Hebron, are the sites of Jewish settlement of great antiquity, predating the Arab colonisation by several centuries but where Jews were massacred and from which they were driven out by Arab occupiers. If we’re talking colonisation here, the Jews of Palestine were the historic victims.

And of course, no other people than the Jews is to have their livelihood or membership of the community of civilised nations made conditional on how they think. No other people is to be forced to take a particular political line as the price of intellectual acceptance. The fine consciences of those calling for this action do not extend to proposing similar boycotts on any of the world’s myriad dictatorships: no boycott of Syria, for example, for the occupation of Lebanon; or China for the oppression of Tibet; or the Sudan for the small matter of the genocide of some two million-plus Africans.

Yet these are our university teachers, the very people responsible for shaping the assumptions of a society, whose own profound ignorance, prejudice and twisted morality are now on such conspicuous display. Rather then maintain their historic role as the disinterested custodians of truth and objectivity, university academics have become the principal promulgators of an agenda to delegitimise the state of Israel and, by doing so, delegitimise the claim to peoplehood of one people and one people alone in the world: the Jews.

And many of those involved in this despicable enterprise have been Jews from both Israel and the diaspora -- none of whom, it goes without saying, has ever boycotted Palestinian academics, even at the height of the Palestinian terrorism onslaught. The particular psychopathology which causes such Jews to march behind the banner of genocide against their own people -- and all in the cause of ‘human rights’ -- is worthy of academic study in its own right. These Jewish quislings -- to call them ‘self-hating’ is misleading since many of them inordinately love themselves -- have done untold damage, since they provide Judeophobes with the fiction that hating Israel cannot be anti-Semitic.

Not all academics, of course, go along with the boycott; indeed, many are appalled. The British National Postgraduate Committee has issued a statement saying that a boycott attempt based on nationality encourages discrimination and goes against the principle of judging academic work on its merits alone. It inhibits progress in areas that benefit humanity, cuts the UK off from leading research, prevents collaborations, and encourages discrimination against some students and staff within the UK.

Nevertheless, despite such evidence of a residual decency the universities have become the swamp in which this virus breeds. In the grip of a group-think that causes them to genuflect to victim-culture and the deconstruction of western morality and the concept of truth, a dismaying number of our supposedly finest minds have been transformed from people who spread enlightenment to those who cast darkness before them. In Britain, being educated no longer means being elevated. On the contrary, it has begun to seem that the more highly educated the person, the deeper the ignorance and the more virulent the prejudice.

Intellectuals assume they are in the vanguard of progress, and that because of their superior brain power are superior human beings. In fact, the higher reaches of learning and the fundamental tenets of human decency are often strangers to each other. From the time of the French revolutionary terror, intellectuals have been listed amongst the principal enemies of humanity. In the 19th century they energetically promoted eugenics in order to eradicate lesser breeds and create a world peopled by finer individuals like themselves. They supported Stalinism until the Hungarian uprising opened the eyes of some but by no means all to the tyranny they had watched unfold but somehow never seen. And as the British writer Paul Johnson observed in his book ‘Intellectuals’, Mussolini had many intellectual followers, as did Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung, while Hitler performed well among teachers and university professors.

As he concluded: ‘Violence has always exercised a strong appeal to some intellectuals. It goes hand in hand with the desire for radical absolutist solutions’. With the collapse of communism, the intellectuals of the universities have alighted upon a neat replacement instrument to bring about their radical absolutist solution to the existence of the west -- the destruction of Israel, and with it the Jews who first gave the west the civilisation they so despise.

Daily Mail, 11 April 2005

The stoical, phlegmatic British may be slow to anger. But when they are roused they are implacable, a national characteristic politicians ignore at their peril.

It was no surprise, therefore, that Michael Howard chose to set immigration at the very forefront of his electoral stall yesterday, on the opening day of the campaign after the royal wedding and the obsequies for the Pope.

For he knows that public fury about immigration could bring Tony Blair down. As a weekend poll showed, some 69 per cent want tougher controls or a halt to immigration altogether. On this single issue the Tories are streets ahead, and Labour has little chance of redressing the situation.

To the horror of Tony Blair, he has discovered that voters’ hostility on the subject is drowning out everything else that Labour is saying.

This is because the enormous rise in immigration since he took office is simply changing the face of the country -- as yesterday’s report by Migration Watch makes plain -- and putting key public services under intolerable strain. Colleagues are advising him that his policy on this issue needs to be much clearer and tougher.

Indeed, it could hardly be less clear and less tough. Labour has done everything possible instead to conceal the true scale of immigration. It has played down or even denied the huge numbers who have already come here or are projected to do so. And it has persistently failed to get the crisis under control, with policy changes that amount to little more than window dressing.

By contrast, the Tories are very clear. In saying that Parliament would set an annual limit for the number of immigrants, pull out of those treaty provisions which prevent Britain from controlling immigration and policing asylum and establish round-the-clock border police, they have thrown Labour firmly onto the back foot.

This is because the immigration crisis can only be tackled by such root-and-branch measures (although the proposed quota for asylum-seekers may have to be rethought, since it appears to conflict with the moral duty to admit genuine refugees).

As a result, Labour’s response yesterday was demonstrably feeble. Wheeling out Charles Wardle, a discredited former Tory minister who had the whip withdrawn, was a cheap shot clearly born of desperation. Indeed, neither he nor Alan Milburn had anything to say except vaguely protest that the Tory policy was unworkable.

The plain fact is that, whatever details need to be fine-tuned, setting a cap on immigration is the only policy which would work to bring down the numbers.

But Labour refuses to go down this road for one overwhelming reason. It actually wants to encourage immigration — a fact which it is anxious to conceal.

Ministers have repeatedly said they envisage no upper limit to the number of new immigrants. And as Peter Lilley pointed out in a recent pamphlet, although it has paid lip service to controlling illegal entrants the Government has actually been encouraging mass immigration by systematically making it easier — without ever informing the public of such a momentous change of policy.

Of course, immigrants have brought great benefit to this country and enhanced its culture, of which they have become a welcome and integrated part. Most immigrants are hard-working, law-abiding people. But if too many arrive in an uncontrolled manner, the structures of society in an already overcrowded island cannot cope, and the integration of such newcomers into the host community becomes much more difficult.

For the fact is that current rates of immigration are simply unsustainable for a country of this size, amounting to a new city the size of Birmingham every five years. In addition, taking in so many people from very diverse backgrounds will transform this country’s identity and character.

By any normal reckoning, it is not only legitimate but essential that such a fundamental change be debated openly and honestly. But of course, Labour won’t put this policy to the public because it knows that people wouldn’t tolerate it for an instant. Instead, the left tries to shut down debate altogether by smearing anyone as a racist for voicing such concerns.

While Mr Blair carefully refrains from such gutter politics, some of his supporters have no such scruples, accusing Michael Howard of using immigration to ‘play the race card’. Yesterday Peter Hain continued in similar vein, accusing the Tories of ‘scurrilous, right-wing ugly tactics’.

But concern about mass immigration has nothing to do with race. Much of it is simply about justice, since most asylum-seekers are not genuine refugees but trying -- at present, with considerable success -- to bust immigration law.

People are aghast that both the character and smooth running of their country should be compromised by admitting unsustainable numbers of newcomers. And to be called racist for saying so is to add insufferable insult to injury.

Moreover, many of the immigrants in contention are white people from eastern Europe. The argument is not about the desirability or otherwise of immigrants but the numbers who are coming in.

Indeed, some of the most vociferous critics of the immigration crisis happen to be ethnic minorities and even recent immigrants, who understand that illegal scams and unlimited numbers threaten the national values that they found attractive in the first place.

To suggest that any such criticism is racist is effectively to entertain no policy other than open borders and totally unlimited immigration. But no-one but a handful of extremists would actually argue this. The stench of hypocrisy on this issue is overwhelming.

The purpose, of course, is to stifle debate. Smearing people as racist is the left’s favourite weapon of intimidation. But in deploying it in this way, they are insulting millions of decent British voters, who are not only deeply concerned about the scale of immigration but find themselves demonised as racist even for thinking such things.

They are incandescent that the issue has become a no-go area for public debate. Indeed, this effective disenfranchisement is one of the reasons why they are so dangerously disillusioned with politics. After all, what is the use of politicians who are too cowed by political bullying to address the extraordinary fact that, in the face of a terrorist threat, the country has lost control of its borders?

By tackling the issue head-on -- and crucially, using the language of values in calling the asylum shambles ‘inhumane’ and ‘unjust’ -- Mr Howard was not only protecting himself from the taint of racism. He was also signalling to the beleaguered majority that at last they have a champion who will stand up for mainstream decencies against the lies and smears of political correctness.

Mr Blair thought that on immigration, as on so many other issues, he could pull the wool over people’s eyes. He has made a major error.

For it touches some of the deepest feelings of the British people — about fair play, bullying and the make-up and orderliness of their country. They know they are being taken for a ride, and that something of inestimable value is being lost.

And they know something else too -- that the issue is not just about immigrants. It is nothing less than the demonisation of decency. That’s why Mr Blair is right to panic; for to all these most serious of charges, he simply has no answer.

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Daily Mail, April 4 2005

With the death of Pope John Paul II, the world has suffered a loss which has touched it to the core.

In Rome, thousands of mourners gathered in St Peter’s Square in an act of mass respect and shared feeling. No fewer than one million people are expected to file past the coffin when the Pope’s body is taken to St Peter‘s Basilica today.

The grief of the Catholic faithful, who feel they have lost a father, is palpable. But the impact of this death has been felt way beyond the Catholic community. Millions around the world have found themselves profoundly moved by the Pope’s final illness.

People of all faiths and none -- even including many of those who disapproved of some of the Pope’s attitudes and actions -- feel that a great man has now departed from their midst and that the world is all the poorer for his passing.

This is not merely because, throughout his 26 year reign, he had become through the force of his personality a papal superstar, turning the world into his global parish as he travelled from country to country addressing the millions who flocked to hear him.

It was much more than that. By the example of both his life and the manner of his death, the Pope gave expression to some of the deepest yearnings of the human spirit and provided an uplifting example of transcendent human dignity, at a time when such attributes appear to be under siege.

The fortitude and courage he displayed during his long years of suffering from devastating illness were an inspiration. Both inside the Vatican and elsewhere, there was disquiet that as he became more and more infirm the papacy had to be effectively run on his behalf.

Nevertheless, what beamed out to the rest of the world, right up to that last agonising appearance when the tube in his throat prevented him from pronouncing the words he so desperately wanted to utter to the crowds below his balcony, was nothing less than the triumph of the human spirit over distressing physical adversity.

In an era when the gross infirmities of old age are regarded as an affront to the able-bodied, to be sanitised and swept away out of sight, the Pope’s refusal to allow the ravages of Parkinson’s disease to deter him from continuing to transmit his message of faith was an inspiration.

And after his final illness set in, when he knew he was dying, his insistence on continuing virtually to the end to be seen in public attempting to communicate his message to the world was a heroic demonstration of a spark in the human psyche which suffering can never extinguish.

We live in a society where death has become the great taboo, principally because it brings to an end the corporeal and material existence that so many believe is the only reality. As a result, the process of dying is usually shunted out of sight.

Yet by making his own dying so public and effectively inviting the world to share his experience, the Pope managed to transmute his suffering into a moving affirmation of stoicism, courage and faith.

He thus did not die a frail sufferer wrecked by a cruel degenerative disease. He died as he had lived, a person whose force of character and unshakeable faith carried all before him.

It was indeed a fitting end for a great man, a titanic figure who not only produced a vast stream of religious edicts which impressed through the force and wide range of his intellect, but who quite simply changed the course of history by playing a key role in bringing to an end one of the great tyrannies of the last century.

In effect, he held up his crucifix to communism which crumbled before it. Of course, many factors came together to bring communism down. But the Polish revolt by the Solidarity movement was crucial in starting the process that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall; and the Polish Pope’s contribution to that revolt was key.

By preaching to the Poles against communism, he delivered to that regime the most lethal of blows. For by going into the heart of a society that enslaved people through the myth of its own invincibility and proclaiming that it was morally and philosophically bankrupt, he demonstrated its intrinsic weakness.

With his charismatic gifts of communication and his ability to reach out to the most disparate of people, he became in effect the spiritual leader of the Polish resistance. Having pronounced the Soviet emperor spiritually naked, he preached solidarity among all who loved truth; and with this universalising message, gave courage to those who eventually brought down the tyranny that had denied it.

Throughout his life, this Pope was animated by a passionate desire to defeat the forces of evil. Seared by his personal experience during the Nazi occupation of Poland, and horrified by the genocide against the Jews, he used his high office to fight on behalf of the oppressed all over the world.

Not only did he champion human rights, but in standing up for the poor he gave voice to the voiceless. And he reached out to other denominations and to other faiths -- most notably to Judaism, where he went out of his way to try to redress the ancient wrongs done by the Catholic church to the Jews.

Nevertheless, there was one group to whom he did not reach out at all - the left-leaning liberals who urged that the church should go with the grain of cultural change, rethink its iron opposition to contraception and abortion and admit women and homosexuals as priests.

Not only did the Pope refuse to budge an inch on any of this ground, but he also centralised power to such an extent that any localised room for manoeuvre became more and more difficult. As a result, liberals excoriated him for being an ultra right-wing arch-reactionary.

Yet this very same Pope also castigated what he saw as the ruthless pursuit of profit, championed the cancellation of Third World debt and, in an expression of near-pacifism, was against both wars in Iraq -- an agenda largely identified with the left.

In truth, the Pope could not be categorised as belonging to either the left or the right. What he stood for was upholding faith against secularism, spirituality against godlessness, and morality against selfish individualism.

And in this he struck a chord far wider and deeper than his detractors ever acknowledged -- even within those individualistic western societies against which he railed.

For despite the way it is often caricatured, so-called secular society is not godless. Even though most people no longer go to church, the majority still consider themselves to be Christian. And in an era of unprecedented freedom and material comfort, many people nevertheless feel acutely a spiritual void that they are anxious -- in some cases, desperate -- to fill.

The pull of individualism is certainly very strong. Many -- maybe most -- no longer believe in the supernatural narrative of the Bible story, or in life after death. And yet the very societies which have made a fetish out of instant gratification and which worship at the shrine of individual consumer choice have left many of their inhabitants feeling adrift: devoid of any structure that can anchor them securely, provide a common bond with others and most crucially of all, offer them hope of a better world.

This spirituality gap has provoked an upsurge in fundamentalist belief across the three Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. So at the very same time that people are turning away from religious authority, others are in revolt against the attempt to negate or dilute it.

And even among people who do not subscribe to religious doctrine, there is widespread unease at the assault on values which underpin our civilisation and which derive from religious belief.

Most non-Catholics would not agree with the church’s absolute ban on contraception or abortion; indeed, many Catholics don’t agree with it either. But there is nevertheless widespread distaste for the progressive erosion of respect for human life in developments such as mass abortion, the sex-selection of embryos or starving and dehydrating a comatose patient to death, as well as continuing anxiety about such problems as the rising numbers of fatherless children or ever-younger teenage parents. Indeed, the issues that matter most deeply to people and animate them most vigorously are not political but moral questions like these.

And yet, critics say, while the Pope campaigned against such developments the church that he headed -- which made such strides in the developing world -- nevertheless haemorrhaged members in the west, saw a rapid increase in Catholic divorce and presided over a priesthood weakened by paedophile scandals which were never properly addressed.

This last failure was indeed a serious stain on his papacy. But the charge that he drove believers away because of his uncompromising stance on women and sexuality is deeply unpersuasive. After all, those churches which have sought to accommodate secular values have lost members too.

In other words, appeasing the modern world doesn’t stop the rot, which is caused by the retreat of faith itself against the onslaught of science and materialism.

These pressures have plunged western society into a savage ‘culture war’. The idea of truth has given way to moral relativism, which turns everything into an equal opinion. Militant secularism wants to remove religion from the public sphere altogether and destroy the Judeo-Christian foundations of western civilisation.

The Pope called this a ‘culture of death’; and so it is. It is designed to bring about the death of western society.

Its hallmarks are mass promiscuity, the breakdown of the family, the rise of mass fatherlessness, the epidemic of casual abortion and sexually transmitted disease, the decline in the birth rate within marriage, and the creeping acceptance of euthanasia and eugenics, along with the legalisation of drugs. All these things are evidence of a culture bent on social suicide.

Pope John Paul II, the slayer of communism, did not manage to win the even greater battle in defence of truth against relativism, faith against scepticism and morality against social anarchy. With the Pope’s death, the question now arises of whether the Catholic church will select a successor who will continue this epic struggle or who will abandon the global moral battleground for a quieter life or a period of clerical navel-gazing.

Karol Wojtyla was the most significant and important Pope for centuries. In an age marked by cynical opportunism and spineless compromises, his authority, certainty and leadership made him very special. Whether his successor will also possess such qualities, along with the subtlety to enable them to resonate among the troubled but self-absorbed peoples of the west, is a question on which the very future of our society could hang.