Due to pressure of work, this is the first opportunity I have had to comment here on the edition of Radio Four's Any Questions last weekend on which I was a panellist. It was, as so many of these discussions now turn out to be, a distressing and alarming experience. The first issue was the composition of the panel. Three of the four panellists — Professor Haleh Afshah, an Iranian feminist from York University, the environmental campaigner Jonathan Porritt and Andrew Gowers, editor of the Financial Times, all take a left-wing or appeasement position on terrorism, Iraq and Israel, as well as other matters. I do not. Three against one: the BBC’s idea of a balanced discussion.

But far worse was the reaction of the audience, in a school hall in the northern town of Preston. It was a typical Any Questions audience: largely middle-aged or elderly, conservatively-minded people. Yet from their applause and other reactions, they showed their inability to understand the true nature of the threat faced by this country from the Islamic jihad, their moral confusion over distinguishing between the perpetrators of mass murder and those who try to prevent such atrocities, and their inevitable hostility to Israel — as ever the paradigm issue of our time, the reaction to which tells you all you need to know about the moral health of a society.

So when Jonathan Porritt claimed — fatuously and offensively — that the idea of a concerted Islamic war against the west was ‘bordering on the insane’ and was merely a fiction concocted by the likes of George W Bush and Ariel Sharon to dupe the public (for someone who was so quick to sneer at conspiracy theories, he was remarkably keen to resort to one himself) the audience burst into applause.

Worse still, they applauded the disgusting Haleh Afshah. From run-ins I have previously had with this individual on the Moral Maze, I know her to be someone who sympathises with Palestinian human bomb strategy while demonising and slandering Israel as a terrorist state. On Any Questions, although she was careful to say the Chechen atrocity was ‘appalling and abominable’, everything else she said effectively negated such a condemnation.

According to her, the only reason that Muslim terrorists were called terrorists was because they were Muslim. The fact that they committed mass murder explicitly in the name of the Islamic jihad was brushed aside. When asked whether she therefore thought the link between terrorism and Islam was simply an accident, she said there was a ‘huge link’ between the political experience of being occupied, terrorised and murdered and then ‘choosing’ Islam as a means of ‘counter-attacking’. As is universal among such apologists, the initiators of terrorism are thus inverted through a historical lie to become instead victims merely defending themselves heroically against attack. And there was no doubt they were heroic in her eyes, so much so that they were people who ‘gave up their lives’ – in other words, martyrs. But martyrs don’t kill other people. These human bombs use their own destruction as a means to commit mass murder. They are not martyrs but killing machines, a fact Afshah chooses to ignore — no doubt because in her twisted universe, those who die are to blame for their own fate.

We didn’t have long to wait before she started slandering Israel. Israel had killed 75 Palestinian children since May, she claimed, and so why weren’t those Israeli soldiers called terrorists? When I pointed out that there was all the difference in the world between those who singled out children and unarmed civilians for murder and those who tried to prevent such atrocities, she responded: ‘How can you say Palestinian children are attacking Israel? This really seems to be in another universe from the one I’m living in’. Alas, this is indeed the universe we are forced to inhabit: as anyone with a passing degree of understanding or objectivity knows, Palestinian children are taught from the cradle to hate Israelis and Jews, are brought up to believe that killing for the jihad is the highest glory, and are recruited (or possibly terrorised themselves) to become human bombs. Children killed in Israeli military actions are either being used as armed terrorists, or have been placed deliberately in harm’s way. Those who really are simply innocent children are killed most regrettably by accident. Palestinian terrorists, by contrast, deliberately target children, young people and innocent civilians. Most Palestinians killed by Israelis have been armed men or boys. Most Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists have been women, children and unarmed civilians. That's the difference.

The Israeli army goes to enormous lengths to avoid civilian casualties, such as using house-to-house actions instead of aerial bombardment. That’s why their own attrition rate is so high. No other army in the world would choose to sustain such an attrition rate. For their pains, they are slandered and vilified by the likes of Afshah. She complained that every time she talks on this subject she receives hate mail because she is a Muslim. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the real reason is because of her disgusting apologias for mass murder. The terrifying thing, however, is that a bemused, ignorant, morally confused British radio audience can react to such foul rantings with sympathy and applause.

Posted by melanie at September 14, 2004