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More very alarming evidence indeed of the attitudes of ‘mainstream’ British Muslims. As the Telegraph reports, the Conservative Muslim Forum, a body set up by David Cameron to advise the Conservatives on Muslim issues and which is headed by Lord Sheikh, has condemned the government’s support for Israel on the grounds that this displeases Muslims and says that Iran has ‘legitimate’ reasons for wanting nuclear weapons. It also argues that preachers who advocate a rejection of democracy and its institutions should not be denied entry into Britain.

In the document, the group says:

Regardless of the foreign policies of the United States, hostility to Iran is not in Britain’s national interest. A constructive engagement with Iran offers many possibilities for progress.

But of course, this inverts the facts. Britain is not hostile to Iran; Iran has declared war upon Britain and the west. There can be no ‘constructive engagement’ with a country that is currently blowing up our soldiers in Iraq. For British citizens to state that although they oppose Iran getting nuclear weapons, it has legitimate reasons for wanting them when it is committed to the destruction of Israel and war against the west, is appalling.

But then, their attitude to Israel is diabolical. The Tories, they say, must stop supporting not just Israel’s policies but the very right of the Jews to a homeland at all:

An incoming Conservative Administration must appreciate that a pro-zionist [sic] attitude will not bode well with many. Pro-zionist statements only damage relationships with Muslims nationally and internationally. Thus, statements like the one made by David Cameron on 12th June 2007 can be too easily interpreted as unbalanced and weighted towards only the zionist and Israeli positions.

[Footnote]: David Cameron said ‘If what you mean by Zionist, someone who believes that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country then yes I am a Zionist and I’m proud of the fact that Conservative politicians down the ages have played a huge role in helping to bring this about’ and ‘There is something deep in our Party’s DNA that believes in Israel, the right of Israel to exist, the right of Israel to defend itself and that a deal should only happen if it means that Israel is really allowed to have peace within secure borders and real guarantees about its future’. Source: www.cfoi.co.uk

From this, we must infer that these mainstream British Muslims want the Conservative party to agree with them that Israel’s very existence should no longer be supported. They do not believe that Jews have a right to their homeland in Israel; they do not believe that Israel has the right to exist; they do not believe that Israel has the right to defend itself; they do not believe that Israel should have peace within secure borders and real guarantees about its future.

These are not moderate attitudes. They are vile.

Their views on Islamic terror are all of a piece with this bigotry. In a classic piece of verbal slipperiness, they praise the distinction between Islam and Islamism — which is made purely to distinguish those who derive merely spiritual solace from the faith from those who use the religion of Islam to wage war upon the non-Islamic world — for allegedly denying any relationship between this terror and Islam. But that’s not what ‘Islamism’ means at all. On the contrary, it asserts an explicit relationship netween terrorism and Islam. it simply allows for those Muslims who genuinely do not support terror or the jihad. But just to make sure there can be no doubt, the group goes on to insist that the Tories must never link terrorism to Islam. It instructs them to censor their language:

We accept that some terrorists do abuse Islam for their purposes. However, an incoming Conservative administration must deny their attempt to link criminal acts to any religion. The term ‘terrorism’ must be separated from any religious references. We reiterate that the Conservative Party should not explicitly or implicitly link terrorism with Islam as, similar to other major religions, Islam forbids terrorism.

In other words, the usual mind-bending dissembling designed to mask the true nature of the jihad. These are not moderate attitudes.

The group goes on effectively to defend the Muslim Council of Britain against the charge of extremism because it is

well respected by many Muslims and non-Muslims.

But the MCB itself subscribes to the philosophy of Maulana Maududi, who along with Syed Qutb was one of the founding fathers of modern jihadi Islamism. Its spokesman, Inayat Bungalwala, has said he is committed to the Islamisation of Britain. Furthermore, it shelters under its umbrella many groups which are even more extreme.

Shocking as all this is, nothing in the document, alas, is surprising. These extremist attitudes are mainstream among British Muslims. The fact that they are regarded as ‘moderate’ — by a British political and educated class that in no small measure actually shares the animus expressed here towards Israel and America —is why Britain has such a terrible problem.

This document follows the recent pronouncement by the 138 Muslim religious leaders reported here which, although hailed as an olive branch to the Christian church, was actually a demonstrable threat. It is only when other Muslims come out and denounce these attitudes loud and clear for the treacherous, bigoted and lethal opinions that they are that we will have any hope that Britain’s Muslims will join the struggle against the jihad instead of fanning the flames of religious war.

A number of people have expressed amazement and scorn after the revelation on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog by Neil O’Brien, the director of Open Europe, that the Independent splashed on its front page yesterday ‘Debunking the Eurosceptic myths about the European reform treaty’ without revealing that the thing was lifted virtually word for word from a Foreign Office briefing note.

The Independent has reacted bullishly, but what remains of its reputation has now been holed below the waterline by this revelation that it is so lazy and craven that it merely passes off government propaganda as its own work. The Guardian reports its editor, Simon Kellner, saying:

‘The source doesn’t really make a material difference. What matters is whether those facts are accurate or not. And no one, as far as I can see, is doubting the truth of what we printed.’

Well, these ‘facts’ are nothing of the kind; they are actually assertions which are variously tendentious, disingenuous, misleading and false. The Indie never can grasp the difference. But the real point is that this government briefing note hasn’t been used as just a ‘source’, implying that the newspaper used it as a basis for its own evaluation and work, but has merely been reproduced — a practice associated with the unfree press in totalitarian societies.

Once again, the blogosphere has shown its power to hold the mainstream media sharply to account and inflict real damage to its reputation.

Last night I appeared on BBC TVs Question Time. You can watch it again here. On Wednesday the Moral Maze, on which I am a panellist, discussed drug legalisation. It was, ahem, rather lively. You can listen to it here.

This is what happens when you appease the unconscionable. After its shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali whom it has thrown to the jihadi wolves, the Dutch have further run up the white flag for their culture by allowing the jihadis to take over the Dutch TV Muslim broadcaster, as this story reports:

Until recently, the Netherlands had two Islamic public broadcasters: the moderate NMO and the orthodox Dutch Islamic Broadcasting Organisation (NIO). Media watchdog Commissariaat voor de Media demanded that the two would merge so that the Islamic faith would have a single representative body in the public system. But according to Nova, this resulted in NIO staging a coup of NMO…

One of the members of the new board of directors is Yahia Bouyafa, who ‘is believed to have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,’ as Nova reported. Another is Abdelmajid Kayroun, chairman of the Al Farouq mosque in Utrecht ‘whose imam was deported from the Netherlands in 2001 for espionage for the Libyan secret service’. Also among the eight directors is Mohammed Nanhekhan, a member of the ‘radical movement World Islamic Mission’.

The Commissionership for the Media says it has ‘no indications’ that anything is wrong. It will only instigate an inquiry if the Justice Ministry or the secret service AIVD requests it, as a spokesperson stated.

If any Dutch person thinks such craven capitulation will buy them peace, they are tragically mistaken. On the contrary, such a display of cultural cringe only serves to embolden and incite the enemy still further. This is what happened in Amsterdam last night:

A group of dozens of youths in the Slotervaart neighbourhood in western Amsterdam set cars on fire, damaged several other cars and threw stones through the windows of a police station. The riots followed the death of 22-year old Dutch-born Bilal Bajaka, of Moroccan descent.

On Sunday, Bajaka entered the police station of Slotervaart, stabbing two police officers with a knife. Although having sustained serious injuries, one of the officers, a policewoman, shot and killed her alleged attacker on the spot…

From the age of 13 up to his death on Sunday, the police said, Bajaka had been involved in several major criminal incidents, including armed robberies and a series of violent incidents. He was allegedly part of a criminal gang. In addition, police said he was personally acquainted with Mohammed Bouyeri, the convicted killer of the late film director Theo van Gogh, as well as with other Moroccan-Dutch terrorist suspects.

Mohammed Bouyeri and the others allegedly involved in terrorist activities also came from the Slotervaart neighbourhood… Moroccan-Dutch residents of Slotervaart complained to reporters they were ‘sick and tired’ of continuous ‘negative news reports’ about fellow Moroccan-Dutch, adding they felt increasingly stigmatized.

Several television reporters who came to report on the fatal incident at the police station were threatened by Moroccan-Dutch youths. Responding to the riots, Ahmed Marcouch, Moroccan-born chairman of the Slotervaart city council, said ‘it is always the same horrible people spoiling things for everyone.’

Rather what the entire free world feels about the global jihad. And maybe, soon, also about the Dutch —the people who have removed their finger from the dyke.

*In 1683, Europe stopped the 300 year advance of the Ottoman empire at the Battle of Vienna.

The political blogs are in their element after the second LibDem regicide in two years. Did Ming Campbell jump? Was he pushed? Which Young Turk will now become top sandal? Will all the contenders for the leadership fit into a taxi? Are there any LibDems who are not contenders for the leadership? Is Nick Clegg unstoppable? Who is Nick Clegg?

Who cares?

Ming Campbell may not have helped himself by seeming to belong to a different era, but the LibDem crisis will not be solved by a new leader. Their problem is that they are simply monumentally irrelevant to the life of the nation, other than acting as a handy repository for protest votes that otherwise have no home. Can anyone say what they stand for that is distinctive in British public life? Precisely. They have made themselves irrelevant by positioning themselves on the left of the Labour party: anti-America, anti-Iraq war, anti-Israel, anti-family, anti-capitalism, pro-green fundamentalism, pro-drugs, pro-victim culture, pro-big state. They do well therefore on the metropolitan dinner-party circuit but not so well where anyone has a passing relationship with reality.

In that happy state, their clothes were nicked by the Cameroons who, eyeing the disaffected people-carrier vote, repositioned the Tory party as pro-green, pro-big state, pro-criminal, pro-drugs, anti-American etc. This worked a treat. Tories went up; LibDems went down. Then Gordon Brown decided to be a cross-dresser too. So he nicked the Tories’ old clothes that they had thrown onto the trash and posed as anti-immigration, anti-crime, anti-gambling and anti-drugs. Labour went up; Tories went down.

So then the Tories pulled some of their old clothes out of the trash can and said they would uphold marriage, all but axe inheritance tax, tighten immigration and fight the EU constitution. Whereupon they shot up in the polls and the LibDems fell to bits. Either the people-carrier classes don’t like the taxman snaffling their children’s inheritance (who’da thunk it, they’re not so daft after all) or — just as likely — they are natural wet conservatives, who defected to the LibDems only because of the Rocky Horror Show cast who ran the Tory party before, and now feel it’s safe to return because Cameron and Brown between them have decontaminated the conservative agenda.

I hope I haven’t lost you.

So now we have a Labour party that stands for redistribution and responsibility and a Conservative party that stands for responsibility and redistribution. And so what do the LibDems now have to offer that Labour and the Tories have omitted to triangulate? Er…

The one specific area that is ripe for exploitation is the public services — the most glaring inconsistency in the Cameron agenda which promises both power to the consumer and maintaining the current level of state spending on health and education — where Nick Clegg appears to have genuinely radical decentralising views which in themselves are welcome. However, if he is elected the LibDems promise to become merely a consistently libertarian party in both economics and moral values, which the UK needs like a hole in the head. The gap in the political market is a party that will defend British and western liberal democratic values from the onslaught mounted on them by the combination of Euro-federalism and the Islamic jihad from without and by libertarianism and cultural Marxism from within.

That means reaching into the tradition of British liberalism itself and reclaiming its authentic values as a moral project rooted in Judeo-Christian values from the left that hijacked them and twisted them into their antithesis. They are indeed within the Liberals’ own tradition. So will the LibDems make themselves relevant again by reasserting these values and saving the nation?

No.

As Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert floats the idea that he might give away some Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as part of a, ahem, peace deal some of the Arabs in those neighbourhoods have reacted in a striking fashion. As this story reports:

…the mayor of Ras Hamis, a Palestinian neighbourhood on the eastern fringe of this divided city, says that he can’t think of a worse fate for him and his constituents than being handed over to the weak and ineffective Palestinian Authority right now. ‘If there was a referendum here, no one would vote to join the Palestinian Authority,’ Mr. Gheit said, smoking a water pipe as he whiled away the afternoon watching Lebanese music videos. ‘We will not accept it. There would be another intifada [uprising] to defend ourselves from the PA.’

…Those who live in the neighbourhoods Mr. Olmert spoke of handing over are nonetheless worried that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who is seen as weak and desperate for an achievement after losing control of the Gaza Strip to the Islamist Hamas movement, will accept the offer. They dislike the idea of their neighbourhoods, which are generally more prosperous than other parts of the West Bank, being absorbed into the chaotic Palestinian territories.

Mr. Gheit, with two posters of ‘the martyr Saddam Hussein’ hanging over his cash register, can hardly be called an admirer of the Jewish state. But he says that an already difficult life would get worse if those living in Ras Hamis and the adjoining Shuafat refugee camp were suddenly no longer able to work in Israel, or use its publicly funded health system. The 53-year-old said he’d be happy to one day live in a properly independent Palestinian state, but not one that looks anything like the corruption-racked and violence-prone areas that are split between the warring Hamas and Fatah factions. ‘I don’t believe in these factions. I only believe in putting bread on the table for my children. I fight only for them. At least in Israel, there’s law.’

Among the Palestinians, Mr Gheit is far from alone in his opinion.

The venomous animosity displayed by the UN towards Israel has been amply documented (if generally ignored). Now John Dugard, the UN human rights envoy for the Palestinian Territories, has vented a stream of this poison. BBC Online reports him saying that he will urge the world body to withdraw from the Quartet of Middle East mediators unless it addresses Palestinian human rights, since the US, EU, UN and Russia were failing to protect the Palestinians.

‘Every time I visit, the situation seems to have worsened,’ he said in a BBC interview. This time, I was very struck by the sense of hopelessness among the Palestinian people.’ Mr Dugard attributed this to ‘the crushing effect of human rights violations’, and in particular Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement.

Yes, the Palestinians’ situation has worsened. This is principally the result of two things. a) The regime of terror instituted by the Hamas administration for which the Palestinians so unwisely voted and which is progressively making their lives a misery; and b) the restrictions imposed by the Israelis to counter the rockets which the Palestinians are lobbing at Israeli towns from Gaza, and the human bomb attacks they are ceaselessly attempting to perpetrate against Israelis. Strangely, Dugard makes no mention of either.

He said that although Israel did have a threat to its security, ‘its response is very disproportionate’.

Let’s see now: checkpoints to stop its citizens from being murdered? Very disproportionate. Targeted assassinations, to kill terror godfathers while sparing innocent Palestinians as far as possible? Very disproportionate. Sitting on Israeli hands while rockets fired from Gaza slam into southern Israeli towns? Very disproportionate.

And what does Dugard have to say about Palestinians murdering other Palestinians? Last Saturday, Palestinian Authority forces shot dead two Palestinians, including a 5-year-old boy in Qalqilyah on the West Bank. Last month, masked gunmen attacked an 28 year-old Christian woman in Gaza city and looted a church.What does Dugard say about such crimes? Nothing. How very disproportionate.

He said the purpose of some of the checkpoints in the middle of the West Bank was to break it up ‘into a number of cantons and make the life of Palestinians as miserable as possible’.

The checkpoints are there for one reason only; to protect innocent Israelis from murderous Arab savagery. If there was no Arab violence, there would be no checkpoints.

The South African retired professor of international law said the response of the Quartet was weak because it was ‘heavily influenced’ by the US.

Ah; now would that be the same US whose Secretary of State is currently saying:

‘It’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state’

and intends to force Israel to agree, even while the Arabs in this putative state are showing what they would use such a state for by continuing even now to attack Israel by bomb and rocket — thus rewarding annihilatory terror and throwing Israel to the wolves?

The Quartet failed to engage properly on human rights, he said, and was also failing to deal with the current rift between the rival Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas. The militant Islamist movement Hamas seized the Gaza Strip in June, ousting Fatah, which is led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr Dugard said the rift was threatening the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and that the UN ‘should be playing the role of the mediator’. ‘Instead the international community has given its support almost completely to one faction - to Fatah,’ he said. “That’s not the role the UN should take.’

Of course not. It should give its support equally to a group that stands not just for the destruction of Israel and the murder and ethnic cleansing of Jews but the Islamisation of the entire region and its subjugation to tyranny.

Mr Dugard said he saw a greater danger - that of the Palestinian Authority raising expectations too high in the Palestinian community. ‘If those expectations are not met, I fear there may be serious consequences,’ he added. The consequences include the possibility of a third ‘intifada, a large-scale, violent uprising against the Israelis, he said.

Mr Dugard said this should be no surprise.’ Inevitably in a military occupation, there are likely to be those engaged in resistance.’ These people may be labelled terrorists, Mr Dugard added, but history treats them differently. He cited the example of the French Resistance during World War II, and those in Namibia who fought occupation by South Africa. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘they are in government and treated as heroes.’

So there we have it: a UN adviser who is endorsing and justifying a further campaign of genocidal mass murder against Jews by totalitarian Islamists, which he equates with the French resistance against Fascism. And people wonder why the world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Some more informed common sense about man-made global warming in this article by sceptical scientists who, ahem, don’t exist. They propose the following questions to be put to the over-heated warmers:

2.) How do you know the ‘vast majority of scientists’ agree with your viewpoint?
Despite the confident proclamations of Al Gore, the only place that a climate change science consensus exists is in what Essex and McKittrick call ‘official science.’ the collective voice of governments and so-called ‘science authorities.’ But this is not real science. Among qualified researchers, there is a debate raging about the causes of the past century’s modest warming. Ignoring science, but sensing a massive shift in public awareness of the issue, politicians have jumped on the climate catastrophe bandwagon.

3.) If we delayed carbon dioxide, or CO2, reduction decisions by a few years to allow examination of the science, what would be the impact on climate?
Essentially none. Even its supporters admit that complete compliance with Kyoto by all nations held to limits would result in less than a 0.1° C difference to global climate a half century from now.

4.) How closely has climate tracked CO2 levels in the past?
About 440 million years ago, when CO2 levels are estimated to have been over 10 times today’s, our planet was in the depths of the coldest period in the last half billion years. At other times, high CO2 levels coincided with warm periods. There is no meaningful correlation with temperature in the geological record.

Al Gore points out that, over the past half million years, the Antarctic ice core records show a link between temperature and CO2. What he neglects to mention is that these records consistently show that temperature rises some 800 years before CO2 rise, not after it. Even over the past century, the CO2 and global warming correlation is poor, with significant cooling taking place between 1940 and 1980 while human produced CO2 emissions were increasing rapidly.

And what is the likely response to these facts? We can write the script now:

‘evilinsaneooilindustrystoogesworsethanholocaustdeniersflatearthrightwingdrivelconsensus
ohmygodIjustcan’tbelieveyouarestillsayingsuchthingswhenveryimportantpeopleindeedaresayingthe
preciseoppositewhichthereforewemustallbelievewithoutquestionalgorenobelherohowdareyou.’

Or some such intelligent, evidence-based and above all scientific reply.