So is Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown going to defend the free world or surrender it to its enemies? Will he cut through all the dissimulation and manipulation by jihadis and their western useful idiots and instead call the threat to the free world by its proper name? Will he ignore the ever-increasing defeatism and pressure for appeasement, or will he genuflect to the prevalent anti-Americanism and go along with the moral and intellectual inversion that supports genocidal aggressors and blames their victims? As the dust still settles today over the shape of his government, the signs are mixed and not a little alarming.

Simon McDonald, the UK’s former Ambassador to Israel, is a stalwart defender of Israel and is free of the Arabism that is the stock in trade of the Foreign Office. It is therefore a very positive sign that he is now Brown’s chief foreign policy adviser. However, the other signals are not so good. The new Foreign Secretary is David Miliband, who was reportedly opposed to war in Iraq and who attacked Israel’s action in Lebanon last year. He was reported to have joined other Cabinet colleagues in criticising Tony Blair for not breaking with President Bush by calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon — ie, Israel’s surrender to Iran. His appointment is thus a clear signal that Britain is now distancing itself from America. At such a terrifying time for the free world with Iran racing towards the bomb, to give such a signal that the western alliance is weakening amounts to a treasonable boost to the enemy.

More disturbing still is the arrival in Brown’s government of the former United Nations deputy Secretary-General, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, who has been granted a peerage in order to take up the post of minister for Africa, Asia and the UN. As we know, the UN’s corruption and the way it has been turned into a mouthpiece for some of the world’s greatest tyrannies make it an urgent candidate for root-and-branch reform. Yet Malloch Brown actually actually defended the UN over the oil-for-food scandal.

As I reported here, he also played a key and disreputable role in the Wolfowitz witch-hunt at the World Bank, blaming Wolfowitz’s anti-corruption drive for a loss of funding. He has blamed the Iraq war for disrupting aid to the world’s needy, by identifying such aid as serving Western interests rather than universal values. Yet according to this very important piece by Claudia Rosett in the Weekly Standard, the Wolfowitz affair conveniently distracted attention from a corruption scandal at the U.N. Development Program on Malloch Brown’s watch. UNDP officials were apparently up to their necks in corruption scams stretching from North Korea to Zimbabwe. And all this was going on while the UNDP was run by Malloch Brown. Rosett goes on:

Then there’s Mark Malloch Brown and the upmarket house he has been renting for years on the suburban New York estate of hedge fund tycoon George Soros–for whom Malloch Brown has now gone to work. Reporters queried Malloch Brown in 2005 about potential conflicts of interest in renting from Soros while running a UNDP that by his own admission was collaborating ‘extensively’ with Soros’s network of foundations. Malloch Brown’s response was not to provide documentation on what he claimed was an arm’s length arrangement. Instead, he denounced reporters for their ‘bile.’

Last year, persistent questioning by Matthew Russell Lee of the Inner City Press finally extracted from the UNDP the information that a book about its own history, commissioned in 2004 by Malloch Brown, had cost the organization $737,000 (including such items as salary and travel money for the author, and purchase of copies from the publisher). The book was a paean to the UNDP, and to Malloch Brown in particular, describing his reforms as a model ‘of efficiency and effectiveness.’

George Soros is, of course, the squillionaire funder of campaigns against George Bush and the Iraq war and the man who also backs the legalisation of drugs and thus the enslavement of millions. He now has his man in the heart of the British government. What on earth does Gordon Brown think he is doing?