The advanced state of Britain's utter moral bankruptcy is on vivid display today with the publication of the scream of venomous outrage by 52 ex-diplomats against Tony Blair's backing for George Bush over Iraq and Blair's failure to rein him in over his support for Israel. Their letter speaks volumes for the rancid prejudice which animates so much of the British foreign policy mandarinate, and has now unfortunately influenced the attitude of so much of the population.

It is revealing that the diplomats not only link the issues of Israel/Palestine and Iraq, but give the former priority among their concerns. This reflects the view in such circles that Israel, and specifically their perception that Israel is frustrating the creation of a Palestinian state, lies at the root of global terror and that toppling Saddam Hussein was not only therefore the wrong issue but only made Israel/Palestine worse. This analysis is to invert history, logic and morality and -- like everything else they say -- merely recycle Arab propaganda. Israel is not the cause of Arab and Muslim terror, but its victim. That terror will not end if Palestine is created; Palestine will only be created if that terror ends. And the terror will only end if the root causes -- the Arab and Muslim states that promote it in their genocidal desire to annihilate Israel and their wider demented animosity against the west --are confronted and faced down.

The diplomats are furious that the road map is dead, but ignore the reasons why it died. Falsely, they blame America. ‘Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence’, they say. But the reason the road map died was because the Palestinians killed it. They simply refused to fulfil the map’s very first condition, that they dismantle the infrastructure of terror. Not only did the Palestinian Authority refuse to do so, but its own militias and even its security personnel continue to perpetrate such acts of terror and incite their population to murderous hatred. The diplomats make no mention of this whatsoever. Don’t they know? Do they know and yet wilfully ignore it to misrepresent the facts? Are they stupid or wicked?

Coyly, they say: ‘The legal and political principles on which such a settlement would be based were well-established: President Clinton had grappled with the problem during his presidency; the ingredients needed for a settlement were well-understood and informal agreements on several of them had already been achieved.’ But the current war of terror against Israel started as the Palestinians’ response to being offered a state of their own by Clinton, based on virtually all the territory they wanted. Yes, Clinton did grapple with this problem; and the outcome of that process was to demonstrate with crystal clarity that a state for the Palestinians was not the casus belli at all. It was rather the very existence of Israel, as made totally clear by the ramping up the Palestinian agenda of the demand for the utterly spurious ‘right of return’, more honestly described as the demand to settle in Israel (while demanding simultaneously a country of their own) in order to destroy Israel through demographic means. In other words, Clinton effectively called the Arab bluff; and the result was that the war of terror was promptly ratcheted up on a horrific scale.

The diplomats make no mention of this. Instead, they berate Israel and its US backer for ‘new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood’. One-sided, eh? That’s rich, coming from this lot. Seeking to defend one’s citizens against terror, having exhausted all diplomatic measures because of the murderous intransigence of the other side, is one-sided, is it? There is nothing remotely illegal about any of Israel’s policies, either the occupation or the settlements or the decision to leave them. Nor for that matter is its policy of targeted assassination illegal. Whatever these diplomats might wish, there is no law in the world which requires a state to sit on its hands while its citizens are murdered. And having castigated Israel for occupying the territories and establishing the settlements, is it not beyond perverse for these diplomats now to be excoriating Israel for deciding to get out of Gaza and dismantle some of those settlements?

Notwithstanding their ignorance of international law, they effortlessly segue into the lazy and weaselly claim that ‘we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.’ Again, it is not illegal. And brutal? What are they talking about? The only brutal things about Iraq are a) the regime of Saddam Hussein that has now been toppled and b) the terrorist war being continued by the remnants of his regime plus assorted opportunistic jihadists from around the region. ‘To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful’, the diplomats whine. Why ever not? For it happens to be true.

Predictably, they fawn on the UN which they imagine will now clear up the mess. But the UN is a fundamentally corrupt, incompetent and useless body which not only allowed the gross abuse of the Iraqis under Saddam to occur but has actively encouraged and promoted world terror by legitimising its tactics, rewarding its practitioners and providing platform after platform for incitement of hatred and murder against Israel and the Jews.

The essence of the diplomats’ moral and political bankruptcy is summed up in their dismay at the abandonment of ‘the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced’. But these were decades whose appeasement and encouragement of terrorism and demented Jew-hatred led directly to the current mass murder and persecution of Israelis, Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims and anyone else who stands in the way of the global jihad.

The diplomats’ arguments are as vacuous as they are disgusting. Unfortunately, they speak for a great swathe of the British establishment. They are themselves an incitement to terror in advertising the decadence of the west.