This diary is now packing its sleigh for the duration. I'll be back on January 5 (apologies for earlier calendrical breakdown -- obviously too much mulled wine already!!). Best wishes for Chanukah, Christmas and the new year.

Libya's decision to come clean about its WMD programme and dismantle it is a clear vindication of the much maligned American belief that victory in Iraq would put pressure on other rogue states to clean up their act. It was obviously no coincidence that Col Gaddafi opened up a dialogue just after the invasion of Iraq, and decided to put his hands up a few days after Saddam was pulled out of his hole.

As an unnamed minister says in the Sunday Telegraph:'It demonstrates that change can be brought about by standing tough. There is no question that this change of heart by Gaddafi was brought about by the fact that the US and Britain were seen to be standing up to and called Saddam Hussein's bluff.'

Quite. Meanwhile, interesting take in the Sunday Herald, which says the Libyan move also busts an axis of terror between Libya, Iran and North Korea, which the paper says had a secret deal to develop a nuclear weapon.

Nor is this all. As the Washington Post points out, Iran has agreed to surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities, and Syria has seized $23.5 million believed to be destined for al Q'aeda.

Of course, all of this may be window dressing, and we may find in due course that these countries are still up to their old tricks. But it's progress -- and it sure as hell wouldn't have happened if the US hadn't dumped the old corrupt realpolitik in the garbage.

The hysteria is not confined to Europe. This piece about events at San Fransisco State university paints a terrifying picture of the demented Jew-hatred that is now infecting American campuses. Try this for a flavour:

'One British journalist, resembling the picture of Dorian Gray with all his vices on his face, couldn't hide his vampiric thirst for Jewish blood behind the mask of impartiality. And you’d have to be pretty gullible to believe all the staged fraud in his "documentary". Scene: an Arab woman shows that Israeli soldiers left plastic bags full of dog feces after a military raid. The bag looks like it contains the work of 50 dogs or an elephant.

'Can you imagine an Israeli soldier carrying a loaded gun with ammunition on a dangerous military raid, scraping dog-droppings and dragging the bag all the way from Israel (Arabs don't keep dogs because they consider them unclean animals) to the occupied territories in order to leave it in some unknown house? Yes, this is a major insult for all Arabs, so let's just stage it for the film! This “dog-shit insult” was exhibited in another British "documentary" together with accusations of Israelis using poison gas.

'Watching these films, I saw that Palestinian Arabs have become professional victims and actors in the "Israelis-and-Jews-Are-Horrible-Child-Murderers” series. These films are constantly shown in Europe and especially in the Middle East due to heavy demand and plentiful funding...What is strikingly serious in all these films is that if one were to count the most often used words, these words would be "humiliation" and "Kill the Jews!" Even in the most peaceful and idealistic documentary, made by a Jewish director, a young boy asked what he wants to do when he grows up is prompted by his father: "Kill the Jews!" When asked to draw a picture of his future he draws himself killing Israelis'.

Question: who was the British journalist?

What on earth are the Conservatives playing at? Desperate to pin the soubriquet of 'liar' upon Tony Blair at every opportunity, they have now accused him of misleading the country once again in his latest reference to David Kay's Iraq Survey Group report. On the Today programme, their foreign affairs spokesman Michael Ancram denounced these comments as a spin too far. So what did the PM say? Here are his words:

'The Iraq Survey Group has found evidence of a massive clandestine laboratory network system.'

And what did David Kay say? Here, at some length (because it is worth repeating, since the media persist in ignoring it) is his summary in his presentation of the ISG's interim report:

'We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

'A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

'A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

'Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

'New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

'Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

'A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

'Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

'Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

'Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

'In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence - hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use - are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example, on 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents.

'All IIS laboratories visited by IIS exploitation teams have been clearly sanitized, including removal of much equipment, shredding and burning of documents, and even the removal of nameplates from office doors. Although much of the deliberate destruction and sanitization of documents and records probably occurred during the height of OIF combat operations, indications of significant continuing destruction efforts have been found after the end of major combat operations, including entry in May 2003 of the locked gated vaults of the Ba'ath party intelligence building in Baghdad and highly selective destruction of computer hard drives and data storage equipment along with the burning of a small number of specific binders that appear to have contained financial and intelligence records, and in July 2003 a site exploitation team at the Abu Ghurayb Prison found one pile of the smoldering ashes from documents that was still warm to the touch'.

If that isn't 'evidence of a massive clandestine laboratory network system', I don't know what is. The Tories, having supported the war, are now in danger of making their earlier position a laughing stock by aligning themselves with the wicked distortions of the anti-war appeaseniks. And all because they have decided to subordinate absolutely everything to an opportunistic strategy of attack on the Prime Minister. They may think this is clever tactics. What it actually indicates instead is a party so bankrupt in ideas of its own, it will tear up any regard for the truth in its desperate attempt to score points, however cheap or dishonest these may be. Shame.

Powerful piece on the Tech Central Station website correctly analysing the new antisemitism as a deadly nexus between European leftism and radical Islamism, facilitated and camouflaged by political correctness. The author, Jean-Christophe Mounicq, identifies not only the Islamicisation of Europe as the main motor of the new antisemitism, but the censorship of any protest at this process and the appallingly perverted thinking that follows:

'Contemporary political correctness defines any limits on immigration as racism. Any political leader, intellectual or "normal" citizen, who suggests that immigration should be controlled through the application of law or who advocates repatriation of illegal immigrants is denounced as a racist. It is sometimes even considered outrageous to suggest that immigrants should obey the laws of their host country. "We cannot obey this law because it is incompatible with the Koran" is a claim heard more and more often from Muslims. "Native Europeans" often seem ready to abandon their principles to avoid conflict.

'Airplanes full of illegal immigrants sent back to their native country have been compared, by French intellectuals, journalists and political activists, to the trains that carried Jews to Dachau. Thus a former French interior minister, Jean-Louis Debré, who carried out this policy, was portrayed as a Nazi despite being of Jewish origin himself. This attitude was termed as "Reductio ad Hitlerum" by philosopher Leo Strauss. The sophism might be caricatured as: Hitler loved dogs; X loves dogs; thus X is a disciple of Hitler'.

The consequence is a rising tide of hatred and -- particularly in France -- murderous violence towards Jews facilitated by the left under the spurious cover of anti-Israelism:

'This old anti-Semitism from the Right is progressively disappearing. The new anti-Semitism comes from the Left. Eerily echoing the voice of the defunct Soviet Union, anti-Israelism today is the most powerful modern vector of anti-Semitism. Since World War II, anti-Semites have attacked the Jewish state as a substitute for the Jewish people. One may notice that intellectuals from the Left who propagate anti-Israelism and political correctness are often Jewish themselves. But the overwhelming numbers of anti-Semitic acts in Europe are of Arab-Muslim immigrant origin.

'To avoid debate on these facts, as the EU is doing, is counterproductive. On 19 November, one French Jewish disc jockey was murdered by an Arab Muslim. The murderer was proud of "having eliminated one Jewish scum from the earth." To prevent any debate, French authorities said the Arab was "psychologically disturbed." Maybe. But are other crimes from "less psychologically disturbed" Muslims needed before Muslims and the Left are called to task?'

And how many such crimes will be needed before Britain starts asking similar questions?

The Jerusalem Post carries yet another report of the WMD that of course we know Saddam didn't have because we haven't yet stubbed our toes on the physical evidence:

'Saddam Hussein had a team of scientists working on a nuclear weapons program, according to Yonadam Kanna, the Assyrian Chaldean (Christian) representative of the temporary Iraqi government. "One nuclear engineer out of the team of 14 on this project is now on our side," he said Monday. "We know they were working on an nuclear weapon." '

Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, is becoming chairman of Progress, the Blairite campaign group, in order to keep the flame of Blairism alive after the eventual political demise of Tony Blair. The first interesting thing to note is this intimation of Blair's political mortality from one of his closest supporters. The second is the fundamental loss of confidence and direction by the Blairites themselves which lies behind this. According to Patrick Wintour in the Guardian, Milburn is alarmed by the total eclipse in the US of Bill Clinton's 'third way' and the fact that the Democrats have lurched to the left in the rise of the egregiously absurd Howard Dean, who Milburn believes will therefore be taken to the cleaners by President Bush.

Clearly, Milburn thinks there are ominous parallels for Labour if Gordon Brown were to succeed Blair. But there's more to his concerns than the fear of a lurch back to Old Labour ideology. Key passage:

'He admits that the party has lost its way in its second term, saying he would like to restore the original Blairite coalition, balancing rights and responsibilities. He would like specific new work on welfare reform, including housing and incapacity benefits, as well as more political power handed down to neighbourhood level, an initiative already under way with the regeneration minister, Yvette Cooper'.

The fact is that New Labour has lost its way for very similar reasons to the disappearance of Clinton's 'third way' -- the very idea that lay behind New Labour. This failed to put down roots because it was not a living organism that had any roots to put down. It was, rather, a wholly artificial, cynical piece of political 'triangulation' that avoided making the political choices that needed to be made and instead stitched together incompatible values in a dishonest attempt to pretend to voters that it represented a new political maturity.

What Milburn cannot face up to is the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the left -- a bankruptcy which New Labour, far from escaping, actually embodies. All the interesting ideas and all the serious and impressive thinking are now to be found on the right. That's not to say all their ideas are good, by any means; nor is it to say that the Conservative party is either coherent or principled (it is not). It simply means that the left has nothing any more to say that's worth listening to, because it has lost its raison d'etre. It is an empty shell, mired in adolescent fantasies of world transformation which mean that, having uprooted itself from its own ideological base, it can only trample down and vandalise the institutions and values of the society that spawned it -- and then call that 'progress'.

Those who believe the EU constitution is now safely consigned to a box under the ground should put the cork back on the champagne. Revenge is already being exacted against Poland and Spain for blocking agreement last weekend as Britain joins France and Germany in demanding budget cuts that will, by an amazing coincidence, penalise Poland and Spain. Thus other countries, too, get the message that anyone who dares frustrate the superstate will get his hands chopped off. And in the best traditions of tyrannies down the ages, this lot shamelessly take the very rules they use to browbeat other countries and bend them to suit themselves. Thus we learn that France and Germany (along with the other main EU budget contributors) have warned President Romano Prodi of 'the need for budgetary discipline'. But France and Germany have just driven a coach and horses through the stability pact, the main instrument of EU budgetary discipline, and are getting clean away with it -- because they effectively make the rules of this whole squalid enterprise.

Bets may now safely be taken on just how long it will take before Poland or Spain's governments conveniently change, or thumbscrews are applied elsewhere in the system, and the constitution is back again on the agenda.

At least one reader of the appeasenik press can contain his disgust no longer. Here is his letter in full:

'Since the Guardian has supported Saddam so steadfastly during the war, why doesn't it take a leaf out of his book and just give up quietly? It isn't Tony Blair and George Bush who need to be worried about the issue of WMD, it is journalists who still squirm about trying to justify their opposition to the removal of the tyrant. With Saddam captured, WMD is the final, wafer-thin line of defence to their pathetic position. Give it up.
Gary Knight
London'

They won't, Gary, they won't.

The shameless contortions of the Iraq appeaseniks know no bounds. Having shrieked abuse at messrs Bush and Blair for their colonialist and imperalist (sic) motives in going to war against Saddam and thus steamrollering into the ground the autonomy of the Iraqi people (to have the freedom to be tortured, murdered and otherwise oppressed, of course), they are now shrieking that these same Iraqi people cannot be allowed to try and sentence the dictator who has caused them such untold suffering. Instead, this must be done by an international tribunal and there must be no question of the death penalty, which the Iraqis almost certainly would wish to inflict. If they were to execute Saddam, these appeaseniks threaten through primly pursed lips, then the world would withhold its approval.

The Guardian's leader (where else?) illustrates this sanctimonious hypocrisy perfectly:

'The crux of this matter is that the Bush administration, opposed to international courts in principle, opposed to UN involvement, planning to hand back direct political control in Iraq next summer, hopeful of a quick judicial result and all in favour of the death penalty, wants the Iraqis alone to deal with Saddam, with semi-optional outside advice. This is despite concerns about fairness, expertise, evidence, flaws in the penal code, undue US influence and the transnational nature of his offences. This will not do. The government, when it has finally collected its thoughts, must oppose such a process - or else suffer a further gross distortion of its policy aims at US hands'.

The only people entitled to distort Iraq's policy are, of course, the western left who believe -- no, they know it as an indisputable fact -- that their values brook no opposition and must therefore be imposed on cultures whicb resist them. This liberal imperialism is, of course, deeply illiberal. It also misrepresents the purpose of the Iraq war. It was not to bring about regime change for the benefit of the Iraqis. It was first and foremost to topple Saddam in order to remove a threat to the west which, post 9/11, was simply unconscionable. It was also, more controversially, to enable the Iraqis to produce a democracy which, by bestowing freedom and prosperity, would destabilise neighbouring terror regimes and thus strike at the roots of global terrorism.

Whether or not that goal was or is attainable, it was always essential that the Iraqis, having been freed from tyranny, should now govern themselves. That means governing in accordance with their own culture. If they want help to bring about a democracy -- great, and we should readily give it to them. If they want a democracy that meshes with their own cultural assumptions, that's their privilege. And if that offends the rest of the world -- tough. The only legitimate interest the world has in interfering in another country is in order to defend itself from the threat of attack. The rest is imperialism, of which the illiberal left is now the prime exponent.

Undaunted by the capture of Saddam, the BBC continues to view even this event through its defeatist, appeasement prism. Yesterday, on The World this Weekend, presenter James Cox distinguished himself by asking whether some Iraqis weren't rather distressed by Saddam's arrest. On this morning's Today programme (0810), there was an utterly extraordinary exchange between Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's top man in Iraq, and John Humphrys, who was ostensibly discussing with him the wider implications of Saddam's capture.

Humphrys asked whether Saddam didn't have allies in other states. Greenstock replied that other states were frightened of him and that he had very few friends. Humphrys: 'Doesn't that rather weaken the argument for having gone to war in the first place? If he didn't have support in the Arab world; if he didn't have (as we must assume in the absence of any evidence that he didn't have WMD)...'

Eh? What an astonishing series of non sequiturs! Saddam was a threat because he wanted to overthrow his neighbours, not because he was always round there watching a video with them. He had regional ambitions to rule the Arab world. By definition that would imply the Arab world wouldn't have been too keen on him. And as for the 'assumption' that because WMD haven't been found, they never existed -- for heaven's sake, is there absolutely no-one in the whole of the BBC's editorial hierarchy who can tell Humphrys that this argument, which he loses no opportunity to make, is simply idiotic? Or do they all share this obsessional delusion?

Not surprisingly Greenstock, who responded that he did not agree there had been no WMD and that Saddam had definitely had the capability and the intention of developing WMD programmes, expressed some mild irritation in suggesting this was not the time to rake over old ground. To which Humphrys, quite unabashed, riposted that 'questions over going to war don't just disappear because people are bored with them'.

What this particular licence-fee payer is absolutely bored with is BBC interviewers asking ludiucrous questions which are simply not rooted in anything approaching reality but instead spring from a deeply distorted set of prejudices. Such brazen and continuing bias shows that, however many trouble-shooters the BBC appoints with an eye to the impending Hutton report, it still hasn't grasped the fact that its journalism remains institutionally biased and a repudiation of the whole ethos of public service broadcasting.

Tessa Jowell, please note.

In all the excitement over the capture of Saddam, Con Coughlin's remarkable story in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph (referred to in my article, 'Tipping point for Iraq' has been almost completely overlooked. Coughlin, Saddam's biographer, has got hold of a top secret memo made available by Iraq's interim government which explicitly links Saddam's regime to Mohammed Atta, the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Written to Saddam by the former head of Iraq's intelligence service, it contains the following incendiary passage:

'Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision. We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy'.

Note the date: July 1 2001. Note the phrases 'the targets that we have agreed to destroy' and 'under our direct supervision'. Note also the following:

'The second item contains a report of how Iraqi intelligence, helped by "a small team from the al-Qaeda organisation", arranged for an (unspecified) shipment from Niger to reach Baghdad by way of Libya and Syria'.

Could it just be that 'the targets' referred to were those hit in the US just two months later on 9/11? Could it just be that the '(unspecified) shipment from Niger' was the uranium from Niger, of which the report of an approach to obtain it was of course one of the things we are told ad infinitum was a lie told to us by Tony Blair? Could it be that this document provides the clearest evidence yet of Saddam's links, not only to al Q'aeda but to 9/11? Could it be that Messrs Bush and Blair actually understated the case for attacking Iraq?

And will this document too be ignored by the rest of our appeasement media, just like the Weekly Standard scoop a few weeks back?

A week ago, the Health Secretary Dr John Reid announced a 'call to arms' against hospital infections (see my article, 'Washing their hands of responsibility'). His department press released this by announcing various new initiatives. The Tory MP Peter Lilley, who complained that any new policy should have been announced to Parliament, then received a letter from Dr Reid claiming that nothing in this announcement was new but that it merely drew attention to the Chief Medical Officer's observations on the matter. But the CMO had issued an actual plan, targeted at an array of bureaucrats, which was said to cost some £12 million. On Radio Four's World at One today, a junior health minister Lord Warner blustered his way quite preposterously through justified scepticism at this outrageous sleight of hand.

When this Humpty Dumpty government wants to pretend it is doing something to allay popular concern, it produces 'new' initiatives. When it is told that any new initiatives have to be brought before Parliament -- hey presto, there's nothing new in them after all!

An earthquake appears to be under way in Israeli politics. All of a sudden, light appears to have dawned among some Likudniks about the trap into which they have managed to manoeuvre themselves. By hanging onto the disputed territories in the wait for a negotiated settlement which will never come, the Jewish state is under existential threat from demography, a threat greater even than terrorism or war, since within the forseeable future Israel will be ruling more Arabs than Jews even though many of these Arabs will be outside its borders. This realisation provoked the deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to astonish everyone and enrage many within his own party by stating that Israel should now unilaterally withdraw from 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza.

Quite right. Welcome to sanity. Since the 'two-state solution' called for by the Palestinians out of the western side of their mouths was always a ruse to conceal the real agenda --which remains, as it has been since 1948, the destruction of the Jewish state -- it follows that the Palestinians will always block the creation of their own state, waiting instead for the combination of terrorism, poisoned world opinion and demography to bring about their final solution to the impasse. That is Arafat's strategy. It is extremely shrewd, and the Israelis have fallen for it almost as badly as has benighted Europe.

Until now. With Olmert's sensational remarks, the Israeli debate has been transformed. Never mind that a similar proposal was made by the Labour party and dismissed as absurd. Its time has now come -- precisely because such a suggestion can only be made by the militaristic hawks. The result is that Ariel Sharon is also making unilateralist noises, which may be clarified in a major speech next week.

Yet what do we find among the opinion formers of the west who have been demanding year in, year out that Israel withdraw unilaterally from the territories? Do we find excited and enthusiastic commentary, congratulating the Israelis for moving the debate onto this territory and encouraging them? Do we hell. These same opinion formers are now throwing up their hands in horror. They say Sharon will not withdraw as Olmert has urged but instead will withdraw from only part of the territories in order to redraw the map of Israel. In the Jerusalem Report, Yossi Alpher, co-editor of an Israeli-Palestinian website expresses the left's view:

'...he does not believe Sharon will dismantle settlements on the Palestinian side of the line to make an equitable two-state solution possible. "Sharon," he says, "believes he can create a Bantustan situation and get away with it. That with settlements and fences, he can isolate the Palestinians in about 50 percent of the West Bank and whatever they have in the Gaza Strip, call it a state and compel them to produce a leadership that will accept it."'

And according to an article in Forward, Washington doesn't like this unilateralist tendency either:

'While Sharon's flirtation with one-sided measures is viewed inside Israel as a clear lurch to the left, it is strenuously opposed in most other capitals, including Washington. World public opinion would view unilateral steps as disrupting any chance for peace and as preceding direct Israeli annexation of areas in dispute. Indeed, senior administration officials were warning this week that the unilateral steps Sharon is discussing, if intended to redraw the map permanently, would "not be viable."'

But if the Palestinians refuse to end their war, then it is eminently reasonable for the Israelis unilaterally to declare the very goal for which the Palestinians and the rest of the world are ostensibly clamouring. Since the entire area of the disputed territories is lawfully occupied by Israel because it is still the victim of a never ending war being waged against it, precisely where any new demarcation lines are drawn (in a place where there are no borders, only the 1948 and 1967 cease-fire lines) is a detail which can be argued over.

ThIs all may simply be a tactical manoeuvre of no real import. But the important thing is the principle -- withdrawal, in Israel's own interests -- for which the world has also been clamouring. Now, though, it seems, there is something it finds worse than occupation and settlements after all -- the prospect that the Jewish state might survive.

Now even the EU itself has been forced to acknowledge the rising tide of antisemitism it has spawned. When they start putting it together with their own attitude to Israel, then we will really start to make progress.

Confirmation that the Tories' ludicrous position on university top-up fees is dictated solely by political opportunism. In the Guardian, Patrick Wintour reports the anger of a vice-chancellor after unidentified senior Tories privately admitted to him that their opposition to top-up fees was purely to garner votes. After Michael Howard became party leader, they considered whether to drop the policy but decided to keep it simply because it was 'the most popular policy they had'.

Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, said: '"I don't think they know whether they should be free, or there really should be top-up fees. They are saying 'that is a debate that we don't want to get into. We just want to have a popular policy'." He added: "One Tory education spokesman said to me, 'It does not matter whether this is the right policy or the wrong policy ... What matters is that we can do nothing unless we are in power. This [opposition to top-ups] is a popular policy. Once we are in power we can then start to really think sensibly about what we should be doing." '

This is notable for two reasons. The first is the bankruptcy of Tory thinking over higher education. Preserving the status quo will a) do nothing to prevent the universities from going bust and b) will keep the government's thumb on their windpipe. The second reason is wider and deeper. It is clear both from this and from what leading Tories now say privately that absolutely everything is to be subordinated to the calculation of winning power. They will therefore not adopt positions they think are right if they think they are unpopular. Instead, they will opportunistically go with the perceived flow, on the basis that 'once we are in power we can do what we want'.

This embrace of the doctrine that the end justifies the means is of course precisely how Tony Blair came to power. It is the Tories' homage to the politician whose manipulative skills continue to mesmerise them. But corrupt means lead to corrupted ends; cynical opportunism does not stop at the door of Number 10. It is the way of focus groups, deception and spin. It is based on a fundamental dishonesty. If the Tories adopt it, they don't deserve to win. After all, why vote for the cynical monkey when you can have the opportunist organ-grinder instead?

What's wrong with these Americans? Why can't they see the wool being pulled over their eyes by wool-puller-in-chief T Blair Esq? Having expressed their fury about French/German plans to give the proposed EU defence force separate planning HQ from NATO, the Americans have now apparently agreed to a compromise brokered by Blair.

As the Guardian reports: 'UK officials describe the proposed EU military "planning cell" as having a skeleton staff that will be employed only as a "last resort". As a further concession to the US, the EU has agreed that Nato can have a permanent liaison office at EU military HQ in Brussels'.

'Last resort' my foot. Trojan horse, more like, for the undiminished purpose of this force which is to undermine NATO and eclipse US influence. On second thoughts, maybe the Americans can see this deal perfectly well for the sleight of hand that it is, but have already made their decision to scale down their commitment to NATO, having concluded the Europeans are a lost cause and Blair along with them. Whichever, it's bad news for the Atlantic alliance.

Those of us wondering how our once Rolls-Royce government machine can have been allowed to descend into quite such a mire of institutional incompetence might do well to ponder Rachel Sylvester's interview in the Torygraph with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull. He is the very model of a Blairite mandarin -- a blairin, perhaps, might be a more appropriate term to describe the change that has come over our senior civil servants.

It goes without saying that Sir Andrew wishes to modernise the service; but it is the way he wishes to change its very ethos which merits attention. He is, we are told, 'trying to change the rest of Whitehall from a policy-advice service into a public-service delivery machine'. A revolutionary change indeed, and an approach which lies at the very heart of the disaster that is now government administration. For the one thing Whitehall cannot do is deliver public services. It is precisely such maniacal, control-freakish centralisation that is destroying our public services. The one thing Whitehall is needed to do is deliver high-quality policy advice to the government. Yet from Sir Andrew's remarks, it appears this terrain has been abandoned to the political 'advisers' whose crass, naive, jejeune, adolescent maunderings are now, heaven help us, official policy.

Yet in the very next breath, Air Andrew tells us that the man in Whitehall cannot run public services and that they must be decentralised! Key passage to puzzle over:

'"Decentralisation hasn't gone far enough," he says. "In the ultimate world, there's a view that this should go all the way down to the users of the services." He uses the Blairite buzzword "choice" frequently - although he admits that the Government's "deeds" have not quite caught up with its "thinking" about the importance of giving users of schools and hospitals more power over local institutions. "Choice is a very big and revolutionary concept for us. Everything else is a variant of instructing down and reporting up. When you get to choice, all of a sudden you're reporting to the people you're serving. Who do schools and hospitals see themselves working for? They should work for the man in Whitehall only in so far as they're fulfilling their duty to meet certain minimum standards - but, beyond that, they should work for the users of their services. That's a big step... Choice not only threatens the people working in the organisations, it threatens our power as well."'

Huh? How to explain such contradictory thinking? Simple. Just listen to the language of government ministers, all about decentralisation this and choice that and empowerment the other; then think of what they are actually doing, which is trying to control everything that moves, including the local communities they have 'empowered', and to destroy the independence of professionals. Their rhetoric is totally at odds with their actions. Sir Andrew is indeed the perfect Blairite mandarin.

I suppose it had to happen. The logic of the Education Department's relentless dismantling of the very essence of education and of teaching is ... schools without teachers. I kid you not. The Times Educational Supplement reports:

'The school of the future need employ just one qualified teacher, Government officials have said. The controversial suggestion is contained in a Department for Education and Skills paper, seen by The TES, setting out priorities for the next phase of school workforce reform during 2006-8. Entitled Workforce Reform - Blue Skies it says that schools are able to operate under new "freedoms" brought in by the workload agreement without any qualified classroom teachers and this should be further exploited'.

Of course! How silly of us to think that teaching children required actual teachers. Professionalism, knowledge, expertise are all to be thrown on the bonfire. Anyone can take a class. That's the new 'freedom' that we must all celebrate. After all, this is 'learnacy' in which children can educate themselves by osmosis, and the great thing is that it will take a lifetime and they'll still not get to the knowledge once held by a 15 year-old. That's what the Blairites call the 'knowledge society'.

That's why we have 'blue skies' thinkers in the government, to take us into the stratosphere of surrealism and nihilism; and if there are hundreds of thousands of human casualties and our culture atrophies into savage ignorance and mindlessness -- well, hey, the blue skies are the limit for the amoral wreckers of Blairism.

Concerned Christians in Canada have spoken up against the 'alarming increase in antisemitism' in their country. Earlier this year, there were reports of a '60 per cent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2002, including harassment and violence against Jewish individuals, synagogue attacks in Saskatoon and Quebec City, and the firebombing of a Montreal theatre showing Jewish films'. Now Christians across denominations have said: '"This anti-Semitism has taken many forms, including violence against Jewish persons simply because of their ethnic or religious background, and the desecration of holy places and cemeteries...We urge all within our church communities and indeed, all Canadians, to exercise the greatest diligence on behalf of our Jewish friends and neighbours, that when they come under attack, and their sacred places desecrated, that they find true solidarity in establishing security and in redressing wrong."'

True solidarity -- and elementary decency, in response to the moral corruption now infecting and weakening the west. What a contrast to the silence -- and sometimes actual connivance at this evil -- by the churches in Britain.

From the Telegraph: 'Australia to send convicts back to Britain'.

At last, the real neo-cons.

Great letter in the Telegraph from law professor Sir John Baker (Constitutional creep) protesting that the full seriousness of the constitutional revolution entailed by the proposed axing of the Lord Chancellor and the imposition of a supreme court has simply not been properly understood. Key passage:

'The upper chamber of Parliament has been mangled without any overall plan for its future composition, at any rate not a plan that has been divulged to the public. The Cabinet no longer seems to govern collectively. The Civil Service has been increasingly sidelined, so that ministers now rely on partisan advisers and favourites who have no apparent expertise except in spin.

'Now it is the turn of the judiciary. No one questions that the judges of our superior courts are of the highest standard in the world and completely independent. So why change a system that works? It is said to be because it falls foul of a supposed doctrine of separation of powers. But the British constitution does not rest on a total separation of powers; if it did, we would not allow - let alone require - government ministers to sit in Parliament.

'The Lord Chancellor does not act as a party politician when selecting judges, but is bound by his oath and by the high traditions of his office to shoulder a personal responsibility for one of the most important functions in the land. The abolition of his office was self-evidently decided on without Civil Service advice, or competent legal advice, or indeed any serious reflection on the consequences; and yet the Government says the decision is not open to challenge.

'In place of the Lord Chancellor, we are to have a semi-autonomous quango, appointed (on one model) by the Government, subject to instructions from the Government - for instance, about "representativeness", a new and dangerous concept in relation to the higher judiciary - and perhaps even reporting to a party politician, who in making final decisions as an ordinary minister will be free from the traditional constraints that bind the Lord Chancellor. How is that an improvement? How will that secure an independent judiciary to protect our liberties and our human rights?'

How indeed. The intention is, of course, precisely the opposite -- to bring the judges under political control. The great question is whether the Lords themselves will activate their role as constitutional guardians of last resort and stop it, along with that other even more fundamental assault on British independence itself, the EU constitution.

John Clare in the Telegraph gets it right about the Ofsted report on primary schools. Yes, the report painted a devastating picture of gross failings by teachers, with many of them unable to teach maths or English properly because their own grasp of these subjects was too weak. Just think about that for a moment -- teachers who don't know enough about language or maths to teach even primary school children the basics -- and you get a fair picture of the extent of our education calamity.

But what Clare picks up on is the fact that the Ofsted report itself betrays a belief in some of the ludicrous assumptions that have become the education orthodoxy and caused the very problems it is identifying. Key passages:

'Firmly aligning itself with the theories of the education establishment - which permeate all teacher training institutions - Ofsted blames poor progress in the classroom on "chalk and talk", a traditional approach that requires teachers to teach and pupils to learn...In place of such antique heresies, Ofsted prescribes "lively debate", "buzz groups", exercises in "empathy", "scope for pupils to make choices", working in groups, and "drama techniques" such as "hot-seating" in which teacher and pupil exchange roles...Presumably the inspectors will have noticed - I certainly have - that these techniques in the wrong hands (much like formal teaching in the wrong hands) commonly lead to classroom mayhem and a total absence of learning. But if they did, they don't say so.

'They do, though, record where an emphasis on "creativity" can lead. Examples included board games that contributed nothing to pupils' counting skills because they couldn't understand the rules; cutting out instructions for baking gingerbread men that they couldn't actually read; taking so long to word- process their work that they scarcely wrote anything; composing a poem about the rain forest that taught them nothing about geography; and designing a "wanted" poster for a suspected poacher that added nothing to their understanding of the history of the enclosure movement.

'And yet the inspectors lament that "too many schools are not convinced that more creative work will really make a difference to standards". Can they be serious? Not only is there a strong possibility that Ofsted has got it completely wrong - that the "old-fashioned" teaching methods it condemns are not the problem at all - but it also fails to consider the likelihood that the methods it does recommend are principally responsible for the steadily widening gap in the performance of boys and girls'.

Exactly the same conclusions jumped out at me when I read the Ofsted report (plus the fact that, bafflingly, teaching that it labels 'satisfactory' is by its own standards not satisfactory at all). Yet another example of how immensely difficult it is to reform a culture that has rotted from within, from within.

The Tories' tax policy is now descending once again into farce. Yesterday, the shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin was reported in the Telegraph as saying: 'We will not go to the polls at the next election saying that we will reduce the tax bill'. Today, intervewed in the Independent, he says: 'There is some very serious work on this currently under way to find further specific savings on programmes and bureaucracy. We will then explain the attitude we will take to how we use the money from those savings for either the diminution of the [government] deficit or reductions in tax'. Pressed repeatedly by John Humphrys on the Today programme to clarify the position, he refused to repeat what he had said to the Independent and took refuge in the formula that the government's tax rises were appalling and unsustainable and that the Tories would fund improvements to services such as pensions by cutting programmes like the New Deal. But that proposal would not cut public spending, merely redistribute it. In other words, Tory tax policy is still clear as mud.

The reason is transparent. Faced with the fact that much of the public wants improved public services and knows they have to be paid for and that their traditional supporters are clamouring for tax cuts, the Tories have decided to play to both constituencies simultaneously. So they are going to propose what unidentified Tories told the Telegraph today with a straight face would be 'attractive, socially responsible reductions in the burden of tax'.

In other words, tax reductions that would be painless -- the 'look, no hands!' school of political philosophy. What nonsense. New leader; old muddle, old opportunism and all too familiar signal absence of principle.

According to the foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, the Prime Minister intends to initial the EU convention this weekend regardless of whether or not there are still problems with this document. If he does so, it will be an absolute outrage. For not only does this constitution mark the effective demise of national self-rule, but Gisela Stuart MP, the government's own representative on the drafting group and the person who knows more about this than virtually anyone else in Britain, has blown the whistle loudly to say that the government should not approve it.

As the Guardian reports, in her pamphlet for the Fabian Society Ms Stuart highlighted the real threat the constitution poses to the independence of member states:'She also raised ambiguities in the final draft text, including the possibility that the EU could raise a tax for the union in the future by qualified majority voting. And she questioned whether the treaty would have to be ratified by all member states to become law. She warned against clauses allowing future constitutional changes without the formal endorsement of states, or support for any clause allowing a small core of states to press ahead with closer cooperation, using EU institutions against the wishes of the rest.

'She also attacked the convention secretary, Sir John Kerr, former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office. She claimed the secretariat refused to produce some key legal texts in English, or did so only at the last minute. She claimed that at key moments the convention president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, ignored some countries that are to join next year, saying their views did not count. Revealing her doubts yesterday, she said: "If the constitution were to be accepted the way we handed it over to the heads of government, I would not find it acceptable."'

But apparently the Prime Minister would. Indeed, one wonders whether there is anything he would find unacceptable enough to frustrate his obsessional desire to emasculate this country and turn it into a province of the united states of Europe.

Politically correct indoctrination reaches fresh levels of asininity in the British Social Attitudes report that we are becoming more racist. The claim is based on the fact that last year the proportion claiming to be racially prejudiced jumped to 31%, the highest figure since 1994. And guess what the researchers blame for this. Yup, the media -- to be precise, its coverage of the immigration issue.

People whose brains have not already been totally fried by our Kulturkampf might care to pause here and think about this. It requires us to believe that respondents to this survey are racist because they are saying in effect: 'I hate people of foreign races because the media have told me that illegal immigration is out of control'. Huh? The idea that objections to illegal immigration must be racist is a) not true, and belittles and trivialises real racial prejudice, and b) unlikely, since anyone who really is racist is hardly likely to say so and tick the box for bigotry.

What's far more likely is that people have been so brainwashed into thinking the entire country is institutionally racist that they meekly accept that if they think hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants per year is, well, not really right, they must be racist. What they actually are is victims of a totalitarian pathology perfectly illustrated by the Social Attitudes survey report.

But wait -- there's yet more. 'The study said: "Increasing levels of education help explain why Britain has gradually become less racially prejudiced. Generally speaking, more educated people are the least likely to be racially prejudiced. Less than one in five graduates (18%) admit to being prejudiced, compared with more than a third (35%) of those with no qualifications'.

Let's all read that again, slowly. Because fewer graduates admit to being prejudiced, the researchers conclude that better educated people are less prejudiced. Didn't it occur to these alleged social scientists that better educated people might be a tad more wary about voicing their true opinions, especially if those opinions were politically incorrect?

I mean, come on, guys! How dumb can you get!

Michael Howard is being pressed by people on the Tory right to say he will cut taxes. They think this is the Tories' big idea. Well, actually it's the Tories' old idea and it sucks just as badly as it did on its previous airing (under Mrs Thatcher). This is not because high taxes are a good thing. They are not. It's rather that the argument needs to be radically reconfigured.

The tax-cutters have leapt upon a poll in the Telegraph which suggested that people were in revolt against their crippling (and stealthily rising) tax burden. By contrast, however, the latest British Social Attitudes survey suggests that over the past 20 years the public has become enamoured of tax rises because they want better public services. How I read this is that people do want better public services, do accept they will cost more money, but are appalled at the gigantic waste of their taxes which are being poured into the public services with no real improvement to show for them, and are reaching the limits of their patience with a system that perpetuates this incompetent fraud on the public.

As a result, I think Oliver Letwin is right to continue to insist that he will not propose tax cuts and will put improvements in the public services first. As he says: 'People may tell you they don't want to pay more tax but they will rebel if they think that we're going to cut funding on schools and hospitals.' Instead, he promises: 'We will sort out the public services. We'd make the public services accountable to the consumers, not to the bureaucrats. We'd let people choose their hospitals and schools.'

Yes, that is surely the right approach. One problem, though -- the Tories aren't actually proposing to do this. Yes, they're fiddling round the edges with 'patients' passports' and so forth, but this is very small beer indeed. What they should be proposing, surely, is a radical transformation of education and health funding to combine individual choice and financial leverage with social solidarity -- in other words, social insurance and vouchers.

If they don't go down this road, they'll end up on exactly the same platform as Labour but promsing to 'cut waste' or 'red tape' -- which, if they're upholding the status quo, no-one will believe, and rightly so.

Yet more evidence that cannabis -- far from being the soft, relatively harmless drug we are constantly told it is -- can be a killer. That is to say, it can make users kill other people. A teenager, Jamie Lee Osbourne, stabbed a milkman to death using a 12-inch blade after having 'delusional fantasies' as a heavy smoker of cannabis. His barrister told the court that Osbourne's personality changed as he took cannabis and turned to alcohol. 'Cannabis is a great disinhibitor. He began to have less inhibitions and almost delusional fantasies about getting money'.

Indeed. There is ample evidence about the link between cannabis and psychosis, and more and more evidence that cannabis is implicated in violent death. It is not so much that users turn to crime to feed their habit; it is more that the drug 'disinhibits' them by destroying those parts of the brain that deal in cognition and produce any kind of moral sense. All this is quite clear from the research evidence. Yet the government has reclassified cannabis to be on a par with slimming pills, and has all but decriminalised it. That's surely another kind of madness.

Fascinating interview with Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, who describes himself as a 'Muslim Zionist'. Indeed, he might be described as a Muslim who is more Likudnik than the Likudniks, since he believes that Israel should annex Judea, Samaria and Gaza! Read this and gasp:

'In my opinion, the area of Palestine is already divided into a Jewish Palestinian State (Israel) and an Arab Palestinian State (Jordan). Creating a third Palestinian state for the PLO in neither in the interest of Israel, nor in the interest of Jordan, and even less in the interests of those Arabs who would be compelled to live under that kind of barbaric regime. Moreover, accepting the creation of such a state would mean that terror works, and must be rewarded; it would represent a defeat of legality and an undue encouragement to terrorist groups'.

Now that's what I call a moral position! I don't agree with him, as it happens, about annexing the disputed territories; indeed, I have come to believe that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from them simply because of the threat from demography and the corrupting effects of occupation, both of which will destroy Israel more surely than any war.

Nevertheless, Prof Palazzi's analysis is not only moral but historically true. There are indeed already two states, one Palestinian and one Jewish, a fact which is almost totally forgotten. The Middle East crisis is entirely due to the fact that the Arabs refused to allow the Jews to live in even the tiny sliver of their ancient homeland that was given to them by an international community trying to be fair to both sides, and have instead tried to destroy the Jewish state, against the will of the world, for more than half a century, period.

Tellingly, Prof Palazzi observes that Italy only stopped being virulently anti-Israel and started to adjust to a more balanced perspective when Berlusconi came to power; it was only when the left was defeated that people stopped being too frightened to voice politically correct (ie murderous, immoral and bigoted) views.

And he does not mince his words either about the post-9/11 collusion between the US and the terror-sponsoring House of Saud :

'One cannot forget that after 9/11 President Bush invited Saudi crown prince `Abdullah to his ranch in Texas, and told him, "You are our ally in the struggle against terror." Now, that man is - from the very beginning - the real mastermind behind al-Qa'idah, and the one who used al-Qa'idah to hospitalize King Fahd and to become the de facto ruler of the country. That is like inviting the Emperor of Japan after Pearl Harbor, and telling him, "You are our ally in the struggle against Nazi-Fascism."

'The relatives of the victims of 9/11 sued three members of the House of Sa`ud for damages, and the State Department tried to create obstacles. While many Taliban are held in Guantanamo, 50 members of the Bin Laden families who were in the United States on 9/11 were on the contrary immediately sent back to Saudi Arabia, in order to prevent investigations. Taking into account that many of those people were in the U.S. as businessman for investments, a U.S. court could surely benefit from questioning them about the level of involvement of the Bin Laden family within the U.S. economy. Those people surely knew about their relative more than most of the Taliban detained in Guantanamo, many of whom are only illiterate militiamen of a local tribal war between Tajiks and Pashtus. A member of the Al Sa`ud family declared that he is not afraid of the recent developments since, "We control the West, but the West cannot control us". If one reflects on how the evident links between the Al Sa`ud family and al-Qa'idah were and still go on being passed over without scrutiny or public outcry, one must admit that unfortunately that claim is well founded'.

Prof Palazzo makes the case for the defence of the west far better than the west's own politicians. Once again, the web shows up the ignorant uselessness of the mainstream media in ignoring such a contribution in favour of its own lazy, dangerous and malevolent stereotyping of both Muslims and Jews.

Those who just can't figure out why Tony Blair should be on the same side as George W Bush over Iraq should read the remarks made by Hillary Clinton. As William Safire reports in the New York Times, she startled her conservative detractors (and doubtless anti-war democrats) by her hawkish stance on Iraq, saying more troops were needed there. But it is these remarks that should give our own appeaseniks pause:

'When Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" gave her the opening to say she had been misled when she voted for the Senate resolution authorizing war, Senator Clinton countered with a hard line: "There was certainly adequate intelligence without it being gilded and exaggerated by the administration to raise questions about chemical and biological programs and a continuing effort to obtain nuclear power." ..."I think that Saddam Hussein was certainly a potential threat" who "was seeking weapons of mass destruction, whether or not he actually had them." '

Bill Clinton has said pretty much the same thing, too. So why would the Clintons line up on this issue with their political enemy George? Smart politics on Hillary's part, without a doubt. But the overwhelming reason why Hillary, Bill and Tony always said and still say that Saddam posed a WMD threat of which the west could not wait for the physical proof is that it was true.

The inevitable doubts have surfaced. The Independent reports that the Iraqi occupation authorities are sceptical about Col al Dabbagh's claim that he was the source of the 45 minute claim and that it was correct. However, the 'question marks' round the story are themselves somewhat vague, and cover issues openly aired in the Sunday Telegraph's story. For example, this acknowledged that the alleged weaponry was primitive; and al Dabbagh also volunteered that he didn't know whether the WMD in question was chemical or biological. So what? Why are these, according to the Independent, supposed to be killer objections?

The Sunday Telegraph did not treat this as a marginal story of doubtful provenance. It gave it the front-page splash, a two-page inside piece and a leader. Con Coughlin's inside piece suggests why the paper has taken it so seriously. Coughlin describes the lengths to which he went, acting on an educated hunch (he is the author of a book about Saddam), to track down al Dabbagh, who did not want to be interviewed and whose house was attacked before he was.

Al Dabbagh was a spy working for the west, and a member of the Iraqi National Accord group of exiles. One of my correspondents suggests this means he is a compromised source. Why? Surely it means he was trusted by western inteligence services as someone whose previous information had been shown to be reliable -- precisely what the spooks told Hutton. If this man is to be believed, what he told Coughlin lifts the veil a little further on what is happening now in Iraq and confirms the suspicion that Saddam is not only behind the continuing terror attacks but planned them all along (which makes sense):

'Saddam was well aware that Iraq could not possibly win a conventional military conflict against a US-led coalition, and in early 2002 he gave orders for large quantities of weapons to be hidden at strategic locations throughout the country. "The battle with America is inevitable," the document states. "What is of paramount importance is how to sustain the continuation of war after occupation." To that end Saddam ordered that 30 per cent of the country's weaponry be hidden at secret locations which were to be marked by Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) co-ordinates. These were to include guns, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and Strella surface-to-air missiles (such as the one fired at the DHL cargo plane last month). The only people who knew the precise location of all the arms caches were Saddam, his son Qusay and Abid Hamid Mahmud, his private secretary, since captured by coalition forces. "Saddam Hussein said that if any of these weapons were found by ordinary Iraqi people then the head of the military unit would be hanged immediately," said Lt Col al-Dabbagh'.

He also gave quite a detailed account about the '45-minute' weapons:

'The weapons themselves were finally deployed at his own unit towards the end of last year. "They arrived in boxes marked 'Made in Iraq' and looked like something you fired with a rocket-propelled grenade," Lt Col al-Dabbagh explained. "They were either chemical or biological weapons; I don't know which, because only the Fedayeen and the Special Republican Guard were allowed to use them. All I know is that we were told that when we used these weapons we had to wear gas masks." According to information he learnt subsequently from his military colleagues, the weapons were made at factories at Habbaniyah, al-Nahrawan, Nabbai and al-Latifia.

'Saddam's officials also gave elaborate instructions on how to use the weapons. Because of their limited range, those responsible for firing them were to dress in civilian clothes and drive in civilian vehicles with yellow number plates. "Each military unit was given two four-wheel drive Isuzu cars," said Lt Col al-Dabbagh. "We were not allowed to use them and they had to be kept in good condition." If the war reached a critical stage and Iraq's forces were in danger of being overrun, then designated officers would be given the task of driving the vehicles towards coalition positions and firing the weapons. We were instructed that when we got the order we must use these cars and use the secret weapon. We were also told that if any of us discussed this weapon with any of our colleagues we would be hanged immediately."

'He believes that the only reason these weapons were not used during Operation Iraqi Freedom last spring is that the bulk of the Iraqi army refused to fight for Saddam. "The West should thank God that the Iraqi army decided not to fight," he said. "If the army had fought for Saddam, and used these weapons, there would have been terrible consequences." Lt Col al-Dabbagh has no idea what became of the weapons because shortly before hostilities commenced he was recalled to Iraq's air defence headquarters in Baghdad, although he believes that most of them were taken away by Saddam's Fedayeen and hidden away.

'He did, however, see a group of Fedayeen attempt to use one of the warheads against an American position on the outskirts of Baghdad on April 6. "They were going to use this weapon, but then they realised that they would kill lots of Iraqis who did not have masks, so they put them in their cars and drove off. "Convinced that the weapons are still hidden in Iraq, Lt Col al-Dabbagh doesn't believe any of them will be found until Saddam is caught or killed. "All the people who worked on these weapons have either escaped or disappeared. Only when Saddam is captured will these people talk openly about these weapons. Then they will reveal where they are."'

To repeat -- it is certainly possible that this is a scam: that al Dabbagh isn't what he says he is, or that he is but his information is or was rubbish, or that he is playing some kind of double-double spookery game. Who knows. But surely other media outlets, normally not known to be backward in the credulity department when it suits their anti-war agenda, might at least investigate?

So here's an Iraqi soldier who says he was the source for the 45-minute claim, and he tells the Sunday Telegraph it was absolutely true:

'Lt-Col al-Dabbagh, 40, who was the head of an Iraqi air defence unit in the western desert, said that cases containing WMD warheads were delivered to front-line units, including his own, towards the end of last year. He said they were to be used by Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitaries and units of the Special Republican Guard when the war with coalition troops reached "a critical stage"...The devices, which were known by Iraqi officers as "the secret weapon", were made in Iraq and designed to be launched by hand-held rocket-propelled grenades. They could also have been launched sooner than the 45-minutes claimed in the dossier."Forget 45 minutes," said Col al-Dabbagh "we could have fired these within half-an-hour."'

Let's have a bit of a memory check here. This is the claim which the anti-war crew said wasn't true, a lie with which the Prime Minister is supposed to have browbeaten the intelligence service and misled the British people into war. Here's an Iraqi soldier, however, who corresponds to the information given by British intelligence about their source, and who says it was indeed true and he should know.

Is he for real? I don't know. Did he originally tell the truth? I don't know. Is this something that should excite the media, which has been going on and on and on about how this claim wasn't true? Yes, it should. Are they excited? No, they appear not to give tuppence about it. Indeed, during the Hutton inquiry the media moved the goalposts so that the new accusation against the government was that it had given the impression that Saddam had ballistic weapons that could fire within 45 minutes (which it never actually said, but is being additionally blamed for the fact that certain newspapers jumped to the wrong conclusion) whereas the claim related only to battlefield weapons (as al Dabbagh confirms). No-one ever suggested, of course, that Saddam ever had ballistic weapons that could reach us, tipped with WMD or not; so the idea that we were all supposed to be petrified that the dossier was talking about weapons we knew he didn't have is, of course, one of the many lunacies in the current rewriting of history. But hey, the story is that Blair lied; and no damned Iraqi soldier who pops up to say excuse me, it was actually all true is going to stop the media's finest from nailing Blair to that cross they've so slaveringly constructed.

Politically, Michael Howard is playing a blinder. Having scored mightily over Tony Blair in Prime Minister's Questions last week, when he used his relatively humble grammar school origins to crush public-school educated Blair's charge that the Tories wanted to prop up university privilege, he suddenly descended on his home town of Llanelli to visit said grammar school (now transmogrified into a sixth-form and further education college) and continue his reinvention as a man of the people.

Howard is on a roll. Blair has not only been wrong-footed, but doesn't know how to cope. He must realise that every week, Howard is likely to get the better of him on the floor of the House. Blair's difficulties, over top-up fees and Hutton, need no further explication here. But if the Tories think (as they are all too likely to do) that Howard's undoubted political skills mean they're back in business because the knock-out political game at which he excels is all that matters, they should think again. Their opposition to top-up fees is clever politics but lousy statesmanship. Yes, they should be opposed, but not on the basis the Tories are doing so.

Stating they oppose the target for university admissions of 50 per cent of 18-30 year olds does nothing to address the fact that the universities are going bankrupt now. The Tories have come up with no suggestion for raising more money for the universities. They are instead effectively defending the status quo, complete with government stranglehold over university finance. They are thus aligning themselves with the Old Labour revolt based on class envy. This is not a principled or coherent position.

What they should be advocating instead is a proper root-and-branch reform, involving freedom for the universities from government control, the ability to set their own fees, vouchers to combine the public good with individual choice, and a system of bursaries and scholarships to offset any extra costs for poor students.

Political adroitness is one thing. Political opportunism is quite another. The public smell this out pretty efficiently. The show Howard is putting on is very impressive, but he should attend to the substance, too.

Sympathy with Monica Ali, author of the acclaimed novel Brick Lane. It has fallen foul of the Greater Sylhet Welfare and Development Council, which is complaining it stereotypes Bangladeshis as backward and ignorant. Ali is not only irritated with them, but is also furious with the Guardian's attempt to compare this row with the reaction to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Her sensitivity on this point is understandable, but sad. Although the Council's demand for the book to be withdrawn from circulation for 'corrections' is clearly totally unacceptable, there is no comparison between this and the death sentence passed on Rushdie for 'blasphemy'. Even to make the comparison, she has angrily claimed, invites a dangerous escalation of the Brick Lane controversy. Such fear is yet another illustration of our 'dhimmi' society.

What seems to have caused offence is the contemptuous dismissal of the Bangladeshis by the novel's principal character, Chanu. This is hypersensitive nonsense on various counts. First, and most important, Chanu is a fictional character. He does not represent the views of the author. Indeed, he is also a heavily satirised character, especially because of the extreme absence of self-awareness with which he slates his community without realising his own very similar limitations. But above all, the portrait Ali paints of the Bangladeshi community -- and of Chanu -- is deeply affectionate. Wry, satirical, critical, certainly -- but poignant, warmly sympathetic and, insofar as it describes the bewildering tensions and pressures within any first-generation, unsophisticated immigrant community, true.

As Colin Powell disgracefully fawns today over the authors of the Geneva road map to war , this piece by two journalists who attended the Geneva hate-fest raises some urgent questions. The explicit questions, which they list, include the fact that although the document requires Israel to start withrawing immediately from the disputed territories, there is no timetable for the Palestinian authority to disband the terror infrastructure; that there is no provision for clearing out Palestinian weapons, despite the alleged commitment to their state being 'demilitarised'; that Israel couldn't patrol its own airspace over Jerusalem; and so on. The conclusion from all this, and from many other implications of this document (not least the fact that, far from abandoning the demand for all refugees to be able to settle in Israel -- the key demand which is intended to destroy the Jewish state -- the document encpompasses precisely that demand), is that the agreement is a recipe for Israel's dismantlement.

There are also just as disturbing implicit questions, too. As the authors report, the scenes at the document's launch were a sickening display of prejudice and hatred towards Israel. Key passage:

'... ten Palestinian speakers stood up and cursed Israel as an "apartheid," "criminal," or "racist" state, glorifying their martyrs and praising their people in jail, regardless of their crime. Ten Israeli speakers also spoke, all in a lethargic tone of apology.The Palestinians brought singers to sing the "praises of their prisoners." The contrast could not have been clearer: while no Israeli speaker mentioned any pain suffered as a result of 20,000 terror attacks perpetrated over a period of three years, the Palestinians turned a "peace" event into a plenary session to demonize and justify further discord with Israel. The Israelis brought a rock group starring Israeli rock star Aviv Gefen who never served in the IDF and who sang about a world "without nations and settlements." '

A 'world without nations'? This is what the Israeli peaceniks want? From the description of their craven behaviour in the face of the overt demonisation at these proceedings, it would seem that this is indeed the case -- that this part, at least, of the Israeli peacenik left has so internalised the hatred of the enemies of the Jewish people that their response to the attempt to destroy it is to agree, meekly, that there is good reason to do so and to sign its death warrant.

To go back to the beginning -- what price Bush's war on terror when Colin Powell is bestowing his blessing on this fatal charade?

News that another terrorist attack has been foiled by Israel raises even more desperately serious issues. Two Palestinian alleged human bombs were captured by the Israelis in the West Bank, on their way to blow up the pupils of a junior high school in Yokne'am. Just pause for a moment and take that in. They were setting out deliberately to murder children. Not even innocent civilians in some cafe or on some bus where children might have been present: they intended schoolchildren to be the specific targets of their death cult. Truly, the Israelis are up against something that is anti-human.

But strategically, the foiled attack was even more serious. For these two would-be human bombs were both members of the Palestinian Authority security forces, heaven help us, and the Damascus-based Islamic Jihad. If the attack had not been foiled, the strategic implications of Syrian involvement -- three days after Syrian President Bashar Assad called for renewed talks with Israel-- would have meant a dramatic escalation of the conflict. And how can the PA be regarded as anything other than a straight terrorist organisation and front for the annihilatory programme of hostile Arab regimes when members of its 'security forces', no less, are themselves Syrian-backed terrorists?

Needless to say, the British media have ignored these implications altogether, and the next Israeli military action against this evil will doubtless once again be presented as unwarranted aggression.

There is now clearly the mother of all rows in progress between President Bush and Tony Blair over the Prime Minister's decision to back the EU defence force proposals. In the euphemistic world of diplomacy, 'severe, frank and intense” talks' means the phone link has gone ballistic. It's hardly surprising, since the proposed independent military planning headquarters is clearly a direct threat to NATO. Bush can see it; Colin Powell can see it; anyone with half a brain can see it; the only person who can't see it, apparently, is the British Prime Minister who cannot understand that even if he has an unlimited capacity to fool himself, he can't fool everyone else. So now he's stuck. Now he knows that he cannot have a foot in both camps without falling down the crack. Now he knows beyond a shadow of doubt what the stakes are for NATO if he continues to support France and Germany on the defence force proposal. To oppose it, however, would be to challenge his core belief that Britain must be subsumed into (sorry, be the dominant voice in) the EU. How's he going to wriggle out of this one? Is the anti-NATO die irrevocably cast?

The suppressed EU report on antisemitism in Europe has now been published on the Board of Deputies website, and a powerful, sobering and important read it is. It records a wave of antisemitism across Europe in the wake of the outbreak of the present terror campaign against Israel after the Camp David talks in 2000. It says the physical attacks on Jews have been perpetrated mainly by extreme right wing groups and young Muslims mostly of Arab descent, who themselves were often victims of racism.

'Desecration of synagogues, cemeteries, swastika graffiti, threatening and insulting mail as well as the denial of the Holocaust as a theme, particularly on the Internet. These are the forms of action to be primarily assigned to the far-right. Physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts often committed by young Muslim perpetrators in the monitoring period. Many of these attacks occurred either during or after pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which were also used by radical Islamists for hurling verbal abuse. In addition, radical Islamist circles were responsible for placing anti-Semitic propaganda on the Internet and in Arab-language media'.

Even more significant is that it records the convergence of the radical left, the far right and Islamists in this outbreak of Jew-hatred:

'Israel, seen as a capitalistic, imperialistic power, the “Zionist lobby”, and the United States are depicted as the evildoers in the Middle East conflict as well as exerting negative influence on global affairs. The convergence of these motives served both critics of colonialism and globalisation from the extreme left and the traditional anti-Semitic right-wing extremism as well as parts of the radical Islamists in some European countries'.

Having drawn attention to the explosion of far-right internet sites with links to Islamists (and noted -- startlingly -- that far-right music glorifying antisemitic violence is distributed mainly from Scandinavia), it points out that antisemitism is different from racism in that it centres on demonising the Jews as a nationally and internationally influential group, allegedly controlling politics and the economy.

And it also tackles the canard that the claim of resurgent antisemitism is only being made to conceal or sanitise the wrongdoings of Israel. Helpfully, it establishes some pointers to where the line is crossed from legitimate criticism of Israel into antisemitism, making clear that this line has indeed been breached. Key paragraph:

'Following September 11, 2001, some hold that Islamist terrorism is a natural consequence of the unsolved Middle East conflict, for which Israel alone is held responsible. They ascribe to Jews a major influence over the USA’s allegedly biased pro-Israel policies. This is where anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes could converge and conspiracy theories over “Jewish world domination” might flare up again. The assumption of close ties between the US and Israel gives rise to a further motive for an anti-Semitic attitude. Amongst the political left, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are very closely tied together. Due to its occupation policy, sections of the peace movement, opponents of globalisation as well as some Third World countries view Israel as aggressive, imperialistic and colonialist. Taken on its own terms this is naturally not to be viewed as anti-Semitic; and yet there are exaggerated formulations which witness a turn from criticism into anti-Semitism, for example when Israel and the Jews are reproached for replicating the most horrific crimes of the National Socialists like the Holocaust. In the form of anti-Semitism it could be said that the tradition of demonising Jews in the past is now being transferred to the state of Israel. In this way traditional anti-Semitism is translated into a new form, less deprived of legitimacy, whose employment today in Europe could become part of the political mainstream'.

Exactly. Antisemitism is protean, and it has mutated into a new form yet again in which Israel is the collective Jew to be demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised. The fact that this report was suppressed speaks volumes about the political culture that it is describing. The fact that its details have nevertheless seeped out may mean that it now will be a little less easy for the antisemitism-deniers to blame the victims for their own demonisation.

Horrific ignorance and/or prejudice from no less a luminary than the Archbishop of Wales. In his UNA lecture last month on the relationship between religion and violence, Dr Barry Morgan said this:

'Messianic Zionism came to the fore after the Six Day War in 1967 when “biblical territories were reconquered” and so began a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews rather than co-existing with them'.

What? WHAT? Ethnic cleansing by the Israelis? How can he possibly make such a claim? It is totally untrue. There has been no such 'cleansing' at all in the disputed terrritories. The Jewish settlers in these territories -- controversial as they are -- did not take the place of the indigenous Arabs. They are still there. As for 'the biblical territories were reconquered', this gives the totally false impression that Israel aggressively invaded the West Bank and Gaza. Not true; it took these territories as a measure of self defence in the course of the Six-Day War and offered to give them up in return for peace, an offer which was rejected then and at all times since then.

Morgan assumes the retention of the territories and the creation of the settlements were all down to the 'religious right'. Not so. Certainly, religious or political extremism is part of the story, but only a part. Most of the settlers are secular, relatively poor people who moved to these areas because housing was cheap. Israel remains in the territories for strategic reasons -- because the war declared upon it has never ended.

At Camp David and Taba, it offered to give 95 per cent of them up in return for peace; the result has been three years of Arab mass murder. Yet look at how the Archbishop twists this history: '...and so began the policy of illegally squatting on Palestinian properties and encouraging Jews in the diaspora to come back to Israel – actions which led to violence. The intifada was the Arab response to these activities'. This is simply a monumental falsification of what happened. And 'illegally squatting'? It was not illegal, since international law is quite clear that land taken in self-defence in the course of a war is legally held while that war continues, and the country that holds that land can legally build on it (whether or not one thinks that was wise or right, which I do not).

The Archbishop goes on: 'For religious Zionists, Joshua was seen as the prototype of the powerful Jew bringing redemption with the sword, and taking back what was rightfully theirs. Present day Arabs were seen as the modern descendants of the enemies of Israel described in the Bible. So the Biblical account of ancient Israel’s conquering of Canaan provided the script for the present. They saw themselves enjoined by God to occupy the sacred land and to create as far as possible a pure Jewish culture based on the Torah'.

This is all a simply outrageous and quite disgusting distortion. The picture the Archbishop of Wales has painted is of a primitive, racist Jewish aggressor trying to rid the land of Arabs to make it 'pure' for Jews. The reality is that the Jews of Israel have always wanted to live side by side with Arabs, but have been subjected to half a century of murderous attack by them. And the country is overwhelmingly secular; the 'religious right', who he appears to think represent Israel's government and population, are merely a troublesome minority.

The Archbishop's extraordinary remarks are exactly the kind of demented paranoid fantasy being pumped out by Arab propaganda demonising Israel and the Jews. They are an absolute disgrace to the Church -- but sadly, not atypical of the attitude to the Middle East displayed by many Christian clerics, which amounts to nothing less than ahistorical, ignorant and prejudiced incitement of hatred towards the Jewish state.

Statement of the obvious by Irwin Stelzer in the Times following Tony Bair's support for the Franco-German proposal to establish an EU military planning unit independent of NATO. As Stelzer says, this clearly breaks Blair's promise to do nothing to undermine NATO, since with one jump he has now aligned himself with the long-standing French objective of doing precisely that.

As Stelzer points out, the consequences will be as dramatic as they are inevitable. The Americans will now inevitably wonder why on earth they are supplying troops and materiel to NATO when they are no longer wanted, and when they are desperately needed in the Middle East or wherever else the US happens to be engaged. So NATO, which has kept the peace and helped protect us all these years, may now be judged past its sell-by date and British security will be left to the tender mercies of the chocolate soldiers of Brussels.

A prison officer was sacked for making an insulting comment about Osama bin Laden two months after 9/11. The Telegraph reports: 'Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his "insensitive" comment about the world's most reviled terrorist'. They could have done -- but no-one knows whether or not they did, let alone what they thought about it.

What is really striking is the assumption, by these zealous prison authorities displaying such exemplary concern for the sensibilities of minorities, that Muslims would support Osama bin Laden, and would regard condemnation of him as insulting to them. Surely that really is offensive and cause for serious Muslim complaint?

I suspect that we may now be in for an epic battle between the government and the House of Lords. The peers served notice this week that their collective blood pressure had passed danger level when they voted down part of the Queen's Speech. They voted against proposals to remove the remaining 92 hereditary peers from the Lords, scrap the Lord Chancellor and set up a supreme court. This is only the second time since World War 2 that the Lords have sent any of the Queen's Speech back. It is a measure of their fury, not only over the threat to themselves but the fact that the government has reneged on its promise to leave them alone until a new system was in place.

But it is perhaps even more than that. There's a distinct feeling now, even among supposed Blair loyalists in the Lords, that the government has now overstepped the boundary between a controversial programme and wholesale wrecking of the constitution and an attack on our fundamental liberties. If the Lords do decide to make a stand as the defenders of the constitution, we could be in for the biggest clash since the Liberal party came to grief on the same battleground a century or so ago.

Yet more evidence of the staggering display of incompetence and chaos that is our government. The Home Office had to withdraw its press release announcing its Domestic Violence Bill after it stated wrongly that the abolition of the defence of provocation to murder -- a proposal still being fought over between Solicitor-General Harriet Harman and Home Secretary David Blunkett -- was in the bill. It wasn't. But that wasn't all. As Richard Ford reports in the Times:

'The Law Commission is studying the proposal and the Home Office says its report is expected in the spring. Ms Harman, to the exasperation of the Home Office, says it will report next month. Ms Harman also said that she had “misunderstood” another aspect of the Bill. In a speech released yesterday she said that it would contain new powers to grant anonymity to victims of domestic violence. The powers are not in the Bill and existing discretionary powers to allow anonymity for domestic violence victims will continue to be used'.

How did this woman ever get appointed (and for the second disastrous time) to government? How can our once Rolls-Royce Whitehall administration have descended to this level of bungling? What has happened to Sir Humphrey?

The Prime Minister's skin colour seems alarmingly to change by the day. One minute he's chalky white, fuelling the speculation that he's at death's door. Then he turns up at his press conference glowing with a deep tan. The tell-tale streaks give it away. As Ann Treneman writes in the Times: 'Surely it is now time for new Labour to start its very own brand of cosmetics. I, for one, would be willing to queue for a tub of Peter Hain Golden Glow'. Hmmnn, yes: how about 'Blair's Blusher' for those shameless moments; or 'Without-Foundation' foundation for those claims of improvement in health or education.

Amir Taheri in today's Times makes the important point that the ongoing insurgency in Iraq is not 'guerrilla warfare' against an occupying oppressor but terrorism. It is not a popular uprising with general backing but, in the main, terrorist activity by the Ba'athist remnant (with foreign support). Undoubtedly, the persistence and even escalation of these attacks has been helped by bad mistakes made after the war proper ended -- not least the wrong assumption that all the fighting had ended, when as the British envoy to Iraq Sir Jeremy Greenstock observed on the Today programme, (8.10am) there was still a residue which had to be dealt with.

As Taheri writes: 'What we are witnessing is terrorism — and strong policing is the only way to combat it...What the coalition needs — and has failed to establish — is a counter-terrorism force that can hunt down the remaining Fedayin and the criminal gangs that work with them. This is not a task for the conventional war machine which the coalition has assembled'.

Against a blizzard of the usual anti-war defeatism emanating from Today presenter John Humphrys, Greenstock managed to provide a sane and balanced picture of Iraq. Yes, the security problems are immensely serious and troubling. But there are large areas of the country which are peaceful, and many thousands of Iraqis are living normal lives with children going to school and university, traffic jams, teeming markets and falling crime. Of course the situation isn't normal -- and the recent Spanish and Japanese casualties, he said, had failed to observe the necessary precautions against terror, no doubt because the situation seemed to them to be too normal.

But who in their right mind would have thought that, at this stage after a war that liberated an already devastated and terrorised country, things would turn normal overnight? The assumption that after such a war, violence simply stops and everything snaps into democracy mode is not only ahistorical but absolutely idiotic. The absence of balance in the reaction here to the undoubtedly serious and troubling situation in Iraq is frightening.

Very good to see Daniel Johnson in the Telegraph taking apart John le Carre for his jaw-dropping remarks on yesterday's Today programme. America, claimed le Carre, was now controlled by a 'neo-conservative junta' in league with 'corporate media' which had 'appointed the state of Israel as the purpose of practically all policy', and these neo-cons would not stop their 'war machine' from wreaking havoc 'until they have quelled the world'. Since 'neo-con' is code for Jew, le Carre was giving utterance to the kind of demented Jewish global conspiracy theory which is now pouring out of the Arab world. And by implicitly comparing the Americans to the Nazis, and declaring 'I'm waiting for the real Americans to come back', he also managed to insinuate that these neo-con Jews were a) Nazis and b) not proper Americans.

Needless to say, this obscene display of racist bigotry and irrationality was handled with sycophantic deference by the Today presenter Jim Naughtie, whose strongest objection was to murmur that perhaps le Carre might possibly have gone slightly over the top. Such is the state of British public discourse at present. It is a mortal sickness.

Astounding, ignorant, malevolent and morally bankrupt oputpouring from ex-US President Jimmy Carter at the Geneva 'accords' stunt today. Apparently, global terror is all the fault of America and Israel. No mention of the little matter of 9/11. No mention of the Palestinian terror which alone is responsible for Israel's military activity. Instead, Carter blames the victims and excuses mass murder!

The man's remarks, as reported, are scarcely credible from someone who once led the free world, even as a rubbish President. Viz: 'Bush's inordinate support for Israel allows the Palestinians to suffer'. What's Bush's 'inordinate support for Israel' got to do with the human bombs, the incitement to Jew-hatred, the rejection by the Arabs of offer after offer of a state for the Palestinians? The Palestinians are suffering because a) they have been used as pawns for decades by the Arab states waging annihilatory war against Israel by proxy and b) because they are now engaged in or supporting a terrorist war against Israel. Yet to Carter, it is not the Israelis who are suffering, but their attackers!

Carter 'called repeatedly for the return of Palestinian refugees to the territories, beyond what is called for in the Geneva Initiative'. So he wants the destruction of the Jewish state altogether.

'Settlements prevent the return of the refugees who led (sic) their homes after the 1948 and 1967 wars'. Eh? How do the settlements, which have been built since 1967, prevent anyone 'returning' to anywhere? And why should people who claim to be refugees but whose claim is shaky, to put it mildly, be allowed to muscle in on a state they have attacked for more than half a century? Or does Carter think this a just reward for mass murder?

'Carter said the main flaw of the US-brokered road map is its step-by-step approach, which he said has allowed Israel to stop its advance by building "an enormous barrier wall" and with "the colonialization of Gaza." ' But the advance of the road map was stopped by the Palestinians' refusal to observe the very first of these steps, namely the dismantling of the infrasructure of terror, and the fact that the whole premise on which the exercise was founded, the disappearance of Arafat from the scene, was destroyed by the fact that Arafat is still calling the shots (literally).

Is this man Carter just terminally stupid, or evil?

Geneva was demonstrably unnecessary. There was a perfectly good peace proposal on offer at Camp David, which was rejected by the Palestinians in favour of mass murder. Geneva was always a stunt, designed merely to sow division within Israel and its supporters as these quotes from Palestinian Geneva participants make clear:

'What Palestinians do agree about is the utility of the exercise: "One of the goals of the Geneva Accord is to create a rift in the Israeli street and a crack in the Sharon government," said Qadura Fares, an Accord architect who is going [to today's Swiss launch]. "Our aim was to create divisions inside Israel and block the growth of the right-wing in Israel," said Hatem Abdel Kader, an Accord negotiator who is staying home'.

Geneva was a manipulative farce from the start. Today it morphed into a legitimation of terror. 'Palestinian General Zuheir Manasra defended both Palestinian uprisings as legitimate struggles for Palestinian independence...Both Palestinian and Israeli speakers criticized the government of Israel. Neither criticized the Palestinian leadership'.

Lord Levy was there too, reading out pious platitudes from Tony Blair. Did he or anyone at this disgusting charade point out the little matter of Palestinian annihilatory aggression -- or did they all unite in morally inverted agreement that the Jews were once again the cause of their own destruction?

If ever anything was predictable, it was that far from strengthening moderate opinion the Northern Ireland peace process would polarise the community into unionist and republican extremism. The issue is not the principles of the agreement itself, which in talking about power-sharing, rights of the minority and so forth are unexceptionable. It is rather that the fundamental principle of reciprocal steps along the path to law and democracy was immediately abandoned when Sinn Fein/IRA refused to keep its side of the bargain. Thus terrorist prisoners were released, even though arms 'decommissioning' turned into a farce and the IRA remains as heavily armed as it has ever been. Nor was any action taken against the thugocracy on the streets, where paramiliatry terorrism has merely mutated into a mafia state where the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the Armalite. The craven appeasement of this process has ensured the province's nascent democracy is stillborn at gunpoint and has sunk David Trimble, who sold this particular pass for the Blair government.

As ever, Conor Cruise O'Brien has the most interesting take on the debacle. In the Financial Times, he writes that the situation may soon be transformed once the three IRA terrorists arrested in Colombia are dealt with. If they are convicted of using false passports, says O'Brien, the US government will press the Brits not to readmit Sinn Fein to the Northern Ireland executive. If they are convicted on the far more serious charge of training guerrillas hostile to the US, the pressure on Blair to exclude Sinn Fein ministers will become irresistible.

Indeed, at that point the war on terror will take on a particularly fascinating green tinge -- reflected, no doubt, in the shade Blair will turn when his less than consistent role in dealing with the axis of evil (Irish branch) comes under such a revealing spotlight.

Another brave voice from within Saudi Arabia tries to tell the truth. Dr Muhammed Talal al Rashid has written an article in the Saudi Gazette in response to the murder of Saudi Prince Talal Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Rasheed of Hail by 'Islamists' in Algeria. It is not enough, says al Rashid, to tell the world that the Saudis are victims of terrorism too:

'We have bred monsters. We alone are responsible for it. I have written as much before my personal tragedy and will continue to do so for as long as it takes. We are the problem and not America or the penguins of the North Pole or those who live in caves in Afghanistan. We are it, and those who cannot see this are the ones to blame. Castrated as we are, we look to America. Why? Because they went into Iraq and made a difference. Better or worse is another point. Once America has demonstrated its willingness to do something, the moral imperative is that it should not stop at the first station along the road. The majority of us are sick and tired of this carnage and President Bush, wrong on just about everything else, is right on this one. Does he have the (courage) to finish the job? I wonder'.

Hang your heads in shame, all you Bush-loathers and fellow-travellers of terror. You are on the other side to this courageous man. No chance, of course, of such heroism ever being reported by our sick media.

Meanwhile, Irshad Manji, a Canadian broadcaster who describes herself as an observant Muslim, has told an even more dangerous and wider truth in her book, 'The Trouble With Islam: A Wake Up Call for Honesty and Change'. A best-seller in Canada, it has earned her death threats, and this is why:

'The charismatic and self-assured Manji, an avowed feminist and a lesbian, shocked her audience by describing how she visited local mosques incognito, dressed in a full-length burka, and heard the clergy talk of a "Western, Jewish-led conspiracy against Islam and declare that it is the responsibility of Muslims in the West to support the jihadis, with their money, if not with their sons."

'Manji emphasized the need for Muslims to revive the concept of ijtihad, or self-jihad, an Islamic tradition of independent thinking, in which Muslims study the Koran and reach their own interpretations, which she called an "almost Talmudic process." The Koran includes harsh commentaries on Jews, she said, "but it also reminds us of the Jews' 'exalted nationhood' and validates the sovereign role of Jews in the Holy Land."

'The Koran "gives ample opportunities to be respectful of Jews; it's a matter of what to emphasize and what to downplay," she said, "so why have so many Muslims chosen hate?" She said that independent thinking in Muslim scholarship disappeared by the 11th century, "as unity came to be confused with uniformity." For 1,000 years, "Muslim scholars have been imitating each other's prejudices."

'Manji predicted that the Islamic Reformation that she advocates "may very well begin in the West, where we enjoy the precious freedoms to think, challenge and be challenged without fear of state reprisals." She was careful to include Israel, which she has visited, among the multiethnic, pluralistic states she admires. "Mainstream Israel bathes itself in self-examination, as it should. It's time for mainstream Islam to catch up."

Wow. These people must be protected and supported. Their words must be broadcast as widely as possible. They, and they alone, are the route to ending the madness which we are all fighting.