Further evidence that the British government has a seriously warped view of the war against Israel. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, fresh from his diplomatic triumph in shaking the hand of Robert Mugabe apparently by mistake, revealed yet further depths of intellectual rigour when he told the Labour party conference today that the Middle East conflict was:

'the greatest challenge to international order'.

Er, hello? Greater than al Qaeda? Greater than nuclear Iran? Greater than the jihad which is murdering hundreds of thousands from Bali to Beslan to Sudan, and is bending every sinew to strike at the west in order to defeat the free world? Isn't there a single official in the Foreign and Camel Office who can rise above its demented and vicious obsession with Israel and grasp the utterly fundamental and screamingly obvious geopolitical reality: that the greatest challenge to world order is the Islamic jihad in which Israel, far from being itself that 'greatest challenge', is in the front line of the defence of all of us against it -- and that the second greatest threat is this country's brain-dead failure to realise this fact?

From the ever-astute Amir Taheri, back-up for the perception that the west is fighting two wars simultaneously -- the one from without, and the one from within. And he's certain which is the more lethal:

'So the "insurgency" in Iraq is going nowhere fast. It will be as roundly defeated as were its predecessors in so many other countries. The danger for Iraq's future lies elsewhere. It comes, in part, from Americans who want Iraq to fail because they want President Bush to fail. Some 81 books paint the president as the devil incarnate; Bush-bashing is also the theme of three "documentaries" plus half a dozen Hollywood feature films. Never before in any mature democracy has a political leader aroused so much hatred from his domestic opponents. Others want Iraq to fail because they want America to fail, with or without Bush. The bitter tone of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan when he declared the liberation of Iraq "illegal" shows that it is not the future of Iraq but the vilification of the United States that interests him. Add to this the recent bizarre phrase from French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The head of the Figaro press group went to see him about the kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq; Raffarin assured him they would soon be freed, reportedly saying, "The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies." In plain language, this means that, in the struggle in Iraq, Raffarin does not see France on the side of its NATO allies — the U.S., Britain, Italy and Denmark among others — but on the side of the "insurgents." '

Nothing new there about France, although such evidence is always shocking. But the hatred he's talking about is more widespread, of course, and is as he says where the west's defences are wide open. Has a war ever been won by the side which is busy attacking itself rather than the enemy? I think not. Taheri is right. That's the real peril.

For those anxious to gain a more balanced perspective about the situation in Iraq than can be gleaned from the media hysteria-fest, I recommend this article on National Review Online. From it one gathers that among the Iraqis themselves there is a broad consensus that, despite the appalling violence such as today's sickening slaughter, they feel that other things are broadly going in the right direction. That might just be because they rate things like free elections or rising incomes or the absence of the regime of daily terror, the desire for which simply cannot be imagined by all those in the west who would prefer it if Saddam were still in power. Yes, it's probably all going to get even worse there before it gets better; but the fact is that the Iraqis themselves, in whose name Bush and Blair are being crucified on a daily basis, are actually optimistic; and that's because , for the first time and despite everything, they have been given hope.

Having comprehensively denied, omitted, obscured or distorted the facts over Iraq, the media are now starting to claim that the only reason for Tony Blair's actions must be that he is insane. This smear, so redolent of the techniques associated with Stalinism, surfaced today in the august prose of Anatole Kaletsky in the Times. To be fair to Kaletsky, his main complaint was that Blair's conference speech was astonishingly confused and made a serious leap of logic about Saddam's dangerousness, the point that I made in my own post below. But to conclude that as a result Blair must have lost his reason is itself a leap of logic -- and one which surely reflects a more general opinion that not just Blair's oratory but his behaviour over Iraq is so out of kilter with all the known facts that no explanation is possible other than insanity.

But in the course of his argument, Kaletsky reveals, through his display of both ignorance and non-sequiturs, that it is he who is out of touch with reality. He quoted Blair's suggestion that people either thought that what was going on now was essentially the same as before with isolated groups perpetrating isolated acts of terrorism, or they thought there was a completely new phenomenon of worldwide terrorism based on a perversion of Islam. From this statement of the obvious, Kaletsky triumphantly claimed to have spotted a logical flaw:

'If the “new” terrorists are isolated gangs of madmen with no defined objectives, then the fear of “provoking” them is irrelevant, since nihilists cannot, by definition, be provoked. Such nihilists, far from being “traditional” terrorists, as the Prime Minister suggested, are the opposite of traditional groups such as the IRA, Basque militants, Hezbollah or Hamas, all of which have clearly defined objectives.'

If you feel, after reading this passage, that you need to lie down in a darkened room with a wet towel round your head, I sympathise. It's not just Kaletsky's tortuous verbiage; it's that his argument makes no sense at all. First, nothing Blair said suggested the 'new' terrorists had no defined objectives. On the contrary, the objectives that they state repeatedly are to destroy western influence and values and re-establish the Islamic caliphate -- objectives that are no less clearly defined for being, as Blair suggested, worldwide. Next, since Blair dubbed these 'new' terrorists they are by definition the exact opposite of 'traditional' terrorists. So why does Kaletsky claim Blair said they were 'traditional'?

Next, Kaletsky says this:

'If, on the other hand, the “new” terrorism is really a malignant offshoot of the Wahhabi religious movement — then it is similar to traditional Irish and Palestinian terrorism, albeit more vicious and destructive. In that case, needless provocation should be avoided and the response must be political as well as by force.'

Oh dear oh dear. 1) Irish and Palestinian terrorism are entirely different. The former wants to remove a sovereign country from one of its provinces. The latter wants to remove a sovereign country altogether. 2) Irish terrorism used violence for a limited political end. Wahabi-ism and Palestinian terrorism are cults of death fuelled by religious hysteria, and justified by religious edict. 3) The idea that these 'new' terrorists only act because they are provoked is stomach-turning, since what 'provokes' them is any attempt by their designated victims to prevent themselves from being murdered by them in the first place. In other words, Kaletsky's language moves the argument onto the terrorists' own chosen territory. This is morally repellent. Moreover, it is ignorant and idiotic, since everyone can see that what distinguishes these 'new' terrorists is the fact that no negotiation or compromise with them is possible.

Kaletsky invites readers to decide whether he himself rather than Blair is 'the one whose reason has disappeared'. Further comment is otiose.

The Tory party leader, Michael Howard, has now plumbed hitherto unthinkable depths of quite disgraceful -- and dangerous -- opportunism. He has explicitly accused the Prime Minister of lying to the country over the reasons for the Iraq war. As the Telegraph reports:

‘Mr Howard told the New Statesman: “I think people hold the view pretty firmly now that they were lied to over Iraq. I don't think that's the only thing they were lied to about - but Iraq is the great catalyst for the loss of trust in the Government."”Asked whether he believed the British people were lied to, Mr Howard replied: “Over Iraq? Yes.” Mr Howard said Mr Blair had “lied” when he had intelligence “which was hedged with qualifications, caveats, warnings, which he translated into certainty. That was the unambiguous evidence that he put to the country”.’

But if you read the Butler report into the use of intelligence on Iraq, it is plain that no such inference can possibly be drawn that the Prime Minister lied, embellished or exaggerated the evidence. Indeed, Butler explicitly says that he did not. Some of the attention paid to the government’s Iraq dossier, he says, arose from:

‘…subsequent allegations that the intelligence in the September dossier had knowingly been embellished, and hence over the good faith of the Government. Lord Hutton dismissed those allegations. We should record that we, too, have seen no evidence that would support any such allegations.’

What Butler did say, however, was that the dossier had omitted the caveats and health warnings that the Joint Intelligence Committee had originally included about some of their assessments:

‘We believe that it was a serious weakness that the JIC’s warnings on the limitations of the intelligence underlying some of its judgements were not made sufficiently clear in the dossier’.

But then, also: ‘In general, subject to the points below and others identified in Chapter 6, the statements in the dossier reflected fairly the judgements of past JIC assessments.’

Yes, those caveats should have been included. But their omission does not turn the presentation of the JIC evidence into a lie. Howard says the omission made the evidence seem firmer than it warranted. Well, yes; but if you read the weight of all the evidence submitted over many years by the JIC, it is clear that it was warning consistently that Saddam was continuing to bend every muscle to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and that, as the JIC also said, sanctions could not be relied upon to contain him. You do not come away thinking there were too many caveats to take this seriously. Here is a reminder of the kind of thing the JIC was saying, as reported by Butler:

‘Iraq currently has available, either from pre Gulf War stocks or more recent production, a number of biological agents. Iraq could produce more of these biological agents within days… BW work continued throughout the period of UNSCOM inspections and intelligence indicates that this programme continues. Key figures from the pre-Gulf War programme are reported to be involved. Research and development is assessed to continue under cover of a number of legitimate institutes and possibly in a number of covert facilities…Although there is very little intelligence we continue to judge that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme…

‘Although we have little intelligence on Iraq’s CBW doctrine, and know little about Iraq’s CBW work since late 1998,we judge it likely that Saddam would order the use of CBW against coalition forces at some point, probably after coalition attacks had begun. Iraqi CBW use would become increasingly likely the closer coalition forces came to Baghdad. Military targets might include troop concentrations or important fixed targets in rear areas such as ports and airfields…We judge that at this stage, Saddam would order the unrestrained use of CBW against coalition forces, supporting regional states and Israel, although he would face practical problems of command and control, the loyalty of his commanders, logistics problems and the availability of chemical or biological agents in sufficient quantities to be effective and the means to deliver them.’

Yes, Butler observed that ‘we were struck by the relative thinness of the intelligence base’. But the JIC assessment just before the war warned of:

‘a. The continuing clear strategic intent on the part of the Iraqi regime to pursue its nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes. b. Continuing efforts by the Iraqi regime to sustain and where possible develop its indigenous capabilities. c. The apparent considerable development, drawing on these capabilities, of Iraq’s ‘break-out’ potential.’

What responsible Prime Minister could possibly have said: ’Hmmn, frightening stuff – but those caveats mean I can just ignore all this because to assume that there is this threat from Saddam is unnecessarily alarmist’. Or are we to assume that that is how Howard would have responded had he been Prime Minister?

There are certainly criticisms that can be levelled at the Prime Minister for using intelligence at all to try to convince the public. The point about caveats is well made; all intelligence is speculative, and some or much of it may eventually be proved wrong. So much is the nature of the beast. But to imply, therefore, that it should all be disregarded is palpably absurd. And to state that the Prime Minister lied by conveying to the public the broad thrust of those intelligence warnings – which had been saying the same thing consistently for years – that Saddam posed a grave threat from his CBW programmes is untrue and despicable.

It also lines up the Conservative party squarely behind those who are attempting – with increasing success – not just to discredit Tony Blair but to induce such cynicism and fury about the Iraq war that Britain withdraws its troops, peels off from the US and undermines the defence of the west. That may not be Michael Howard’s personal agenda – indeed, it almost certainly is not. But by lending his authority to this despicable and opportunistic attack, he has placed the Conservative Party firmly on the wrong side of this great fight to defend the free world.

A reader writes to ask about the Salman Pak terrorist training camp in Saddam's Iraq, mentioned below. For the benefit of others who may not know about this, the following information comes from ''The Connection' by Stephen Hayes, pp 85-89:

Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraqi army, worked at Salman Pak for six months in the mid-1990s. Khodada defected to the US in 2001 and spoke to the American media. Hayes points out very fairly that the fact that the Iraqi National Congress encouraged Khodada to speak has led some to question his story. You decide. This is some of what he said.

'This camp is specialised in exporting terrorism to the world... Training is mainly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism...They were special trainers or teachers from the Iraqi Intelligence and al-Mukhabarat...We know that Arabs, non-Iraqis who come to train in these kind of camps, are going to be sent to very dangerous and important operations outside Iraq; not inside Iraq. They come in small numbers, and they come with the intention to do some real suicidal operations... We all met with Saddam personally... And he told us we have to take revenge from America. Our duty is to attack and hit American targets in the Gulf, in the Arab world, and all over the world. He said that openly.'

Hayes writes that UN inspectors independently verified the existence of the camps and the plane at Salman Pak. 'When they asked the Iraqis for an explanation, they were told that the instruction focused not on terrorism but on counter-terrorism.' Another Iraqi commander made available by the INC confirmed that Iraqi intelligence trained devoutly religious Arabs at the camp. And Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, spokesman for US Central Command, said coalition troops captured foreign fighters in the vicinity of the camp who spoke of having been trained there. According to Brooks, Salman Pak was one of a number of places where there was terrorist training inside Iraq.

The Prime Minister made a slightly better fist of the case for the Iraq war on the Today programme this morning (8.10am). At least he tried to relate the UN resolutions not just to the legality of the war but to the nature of the threat posed by Saddam. Even so, he didn't get very far in nailing that key issue of the nature of the threat to us all posed by Saddam. Once again, one has to ask why.

One reader has written to suggest that he didn't get much of a chance, given the barrage of inane and partisan questions being put to him by John Humphrys. Apparently he did rather better on GMTV, which I didn't see, where he was given more time to develop his answers. This reader also suggests that he seems to perform better once he has warmed up, and the Today interview had been pre-recorded early.

Well, maybe there's something in that. But it still doesn't solve the mystery of why Blair doesn't refer explicitly to Saddam's long history as a key sponsor of global terrorism. Simply by noting, for example, that the Salman Pak terrorist training camp in Iraq trained terrorists in plane hijacking on a full-scale areoplane parked in the camp would have taken the wind out of Humphrys's ignorant and bigoted sails.

Another reader suggests that Blair simply realises that there is unfortunately no argument and no facts on earth which will alter the mindset of the millions who are certain that he took us to war on a false prospectus; as a result, any additional facts he adduced at this stage would be regarded as yet more lies and would deepen his difficulties. I sympathise with this point of view, since I tend to feel similar despair at the terrifying irrationality and denial of truth that seems to have replaced intelligent and informed debate in this country. And yet even so, I cannot accept it. I still believe that truth drives out lies, and that the principal reason why so many people now swallow the Michael Moore-esque fantasies spouted by the Humphrys tendency is the ignorance that has developed among the public. And this is partly because of the role played by the malign and lazy media, but principally because the Prime Minister allowed so many fundamental misapprehensions to develop -- such as, for example, that the reason he took us to war was that Saddam had actual weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Blair and the rest of the world thought he did have them; but the real issue was that if Saddam was left in place he would have continued to develop them, an assumption which has been borne out by every piece of evidence and every official report into the whole wretched business.

When this WMD myth first took hold, Blair should have marched into the Today studio and firmly told Humphrys that this was a lie. But he didn't. He gave the impression instead not only that he was too frightened to be questioned by Humphrys, but that he had no answers to this and other absurdities. And even now, he has made things yet more muddled by this apology for intelligence that was wrong (Was it? As he half suggested this morning, he seems not to think it necessarily was) while failing to hammer home the point that only some of the intelligence -- about the existence of stockpiles -- is questionable but the rest of it was right on the button.

As I said yesterday, if the intention was to draw a line underneath the issue and move on, I don't think he's succeeded. The acid test will come when he has to decide what to do about the fact that the ayatollahs in Iran are shortly going to have nuclear weapons. This country has now been well and truly softened up for surrender to these and other forces of darkness. By abandoning an argument that he never made properly in the first place, the Prime Minister has helped ensure that, as the decisions he is forced to make become progressively even more difficult, the pressures upon him from the British people will be huge, and impelling him in precisely the wrong direction.

Quite apart from the subject of Iraq, Tony Blair's conference speech (see below) incoporated some apparently glancing remarks about social change which tell you a lot about where he's coming from -- and which should strike a chill in anyone who understands the terrifying implications of political correctness. This is what he said:

'And remember when to be in favour of gay rights was to be a loony leftie, race relations was political correctness, and Red Ken frightened people even as brave as your own leadership? Now the parties compete for the gay vote, unite against the BNP and Ken has led and won the debate on congestion charging and community policing. So many things that used to divide our country bitterly, now unite it in healthy consensus.'

What this passage indicates to me is that here is a man who does not understand the difference between tolerance and totalitarianism. Respecting the dignity and privacy of homosexuals is a mark of a civilised and liberal society. Gloating about the grip of the 'gay rights' agenda, which avowedly aims to destroy sexual and social norms and is acting as the spearhead of a movement to destabilise family life while viciously suppressing, through intimidation and character assassination, any attempt to warn of the harm this may do -- the agenda that this Labour government has ruthlessly and obsessively embraced since 1997 -- reveals the purportedly 'right-wing', 'Tory' Tony to be a different political animal altogether.

Then look at the reference to race. The implication that to have been against neo-fascism was ever sneered at as 'politically correct' is as disgusting as it is fundamentally confused. People whose innate decency motivates them to oppose the BNP and similar groups may well be motivated by exactly the same decent impulse to expose and oppose the many falsehoods and tyrannies of the 'multicultural' fallacy, or the way in which the smear of 'racism' or 'institutional racism' is used to perpetrate gross injustice. But instead of opposing such neo-Stalinism and defending liberal values, Blair actually praised that most self-destructive oxymoron, a 'multicultural society' -- and even promised a new law to outlaw religious discrimination, a sop to those Muslims who want to criminalise anyone who dares tell the truth about Islamic terrorism.

And as for a 'consensus' supporting Ken Livingstone, presumably Blair has failed to spot what the Guardian has called 'an unprecedented coalition, encompassing Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, gays and lesbians, and the National Union of Students' protesting at the platform Livingstone gave to the Jew-hating, gay-bashing, terror-supporting Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

People assume that, because he espouses the market in contrast to Gordon Brown's command economy tendencies, Blair is a conservative. Not so. The key to Blair's position is the importance he attaches to being a 'radical'. This is because of his great weakness -- his knowledge that he is not a child of the Labour movement, and therefore vulnerable to the charge that he is really a Tory in drag. So without any deep roots in a radical philosophy, he has reached down from the peg a ready-made suit of radical clothes -- which happens to be the post-modern, politically correct victim culture. Blair is therefore the dupe of a viciously anti-western agenda whose goal is the destabilisation of western society. The ultimate irony, of course, is that the Tories still can't see that this is their greatest weapon against Blairism -- and instead are trying to turn themselves into politically correct clones, too.

He muffed it. This was the speech in which the Prime Minister needed once and for all to confront head-on the madness that has overwhelmed public debate about Iraq, to spell out in terms why Saddam was so dangerous that whatever the risks of toppling him, the risks of leaving him in place were greater. But he didn't do it. Instead, he made precisely the leap of logic which has given such impetus to the anti-war zealots. Having made his admission that 'the evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong', ' he then said this:

'And the problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.'

But if the implied reason he went to war was wrong, then what was the justification for removing Saddam? Just getting rid of a bad man won't do at all -- not least because this was not the reason for going to war. It was because Saddam posed a threat to the world, and had refused to show the world, as it had demanded, that he no longer posed that threat. But the result of Blair's words today is that people are none the wiser about what that threat was, not least because of his bald statement that the information that there were actual WMD was wrong. No word about the 12 year breach of UN resolutions. No reference to the reports that WMD components were moved to other countries. And most crucially, no word about Saddam's involvement with terror, including the frequent contacts with al Qaeda.

This was clearly a strategic decision to draw a line under the whole WMD issue by stating the worst case scenario that the intelligence was wrong. But in doing so, Blair has done the cause of truth and rationality a grave disservice. Nor has he drawn a line under the controversy that dogs him over Iraq. He might have done so had he come out fighting. But he blew it.

And as a result, the warning he then went on to make about the unprecedented threat we are facing from a type of global terrorism that we have never seen before -- a fundamentally important point -- disastrously begged the question of whether that was the cause or the result of toppling Saddam. Blair promisingly singled out for attention the key charge that he is being accused of making things worse in Iraq rather than better. But then he just went on to describe the new type of terror -- yet without explaining that Saddam's Iraq was always involved in the export of such terror, even though it was not at that time itself a theatre of war.

So all those people in Britain who think that a) there are certainly a lot of very bad people who are going round cutting people's heads off and blowing up children but b) this has nothing whatever to do with Saddam Hussein and c) that Blair has turned Iraq into a crucible for these characters whereas it was never associated with terror before, will now feel even more confirmed in believing such garbage. Incredible! Wasn't there anyone in or around Downing Street with an ounce of intellectual or political nous who could have read this before allowing Blair, at such a critical juncture for both his premiership and the defence against terror, to muck up this opportunity so badly?

There was even worse to come. For Blair also said this:

'Two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in an enduring peace would do more to defeat this terrorism than bullets alone can ever do.'

With this statement -- which he has made before -- the Prime Minister surely revealed the alarming extent of his abject failure to understand the single most important thing about the Middle East impasse. The absence of a state of Palestine is not the cause of demented, paranoid Islamic and Arab terrorism -- it is the result of it. Yes, the existence of Israel -- not a dispute over its behaviour or a quarrel about land, but the very existence of the Jewish state -- is a totemic cause for the jihad. But it is only one such cause, taking its place alongside Kashmir, Chechnya and Bosnia as the iconic grievances behind which the jihadis march for their goal, not of a state of Palestine but the restoration of the medieval Caliphate across the globe.

Does Blair really imagine that, if a state of Palestine existed, the jihadis who are slaughtering the innocent from Bali to Beslan would stop? The Palestinians could have had their state when they were offered it in 1947 or in 2000, or when Jordan and Egypt (illegally) occupied the West Bank and Gaza from 1947 to 1967. They didn't take these opportunities because a Palestinian state was never the issue. It was rather the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Israel.

The Middle East impasse is not about a state of Palestine. It is about the fact that a significant part of the Arab and Islamic world, unable to live with the reality of western progress and the global spread of freedom and democracy, has resolved to extirpate them anywhere they come into contact with present-day Islam or its ancient empire. Does the Prime Minister understand this? If he does, his failure to spell this out is contemptible. If he does not, then Britain's role as a principal bulwark in the defence of the free world is no more than an illusion.

The appalling butchery in Iraq and the unbearable ordeal of the hostages and their families has been given an extra dimension of horror by the videoed pleas of Ken Bigley as he begs Tony Blair to intercede to save his life. The intention of the hostage-takers is all too plain: to put the maximum pressure on Blair, and to sicken the British public to such an extent that they pile mounting pressure upon him to pull out of Iraq and fracture the relationship with the US. As with every act of barbarism by this particular enemy, it is conceived and executed to further a deadly and manipulative strategy based on a careful reading of the state of public opinion in the west. Those countries where the public is deemed to be flaky get the full treatment. That is surely why, although two Americans were appallingly beheaded in the current spate of hostage-taking, it is the British victim whose ordeal is being beamed into British homes. That is why the current prevailing hysteria, blaming Bush and Blair -- obscenely -- for these atrocities, calling for Blair to be impeached and so forth and daily displaying a lack of stomach or even a shred of understanding of the struggle we are in, are directly responsible for the perpetuation of the carnage.

But there's something else that's just as troubling. The Iraqi butchers are only taking these hostages and murdering them in this disgusting snuff-video style because the media -- of which I am a part -- are behaving exactly as required and putting these pictures on our screens and front pages. If the media did not do this, it would stop. I think therefore that we in the media have to examine our consciences and say we have a responsibility here beyond informing the public. We should not be giving these pictures this treatment; we should find ways of reporting the bare facts of what is going on without turning ourselves into accomplices to murder. Because that's what it is.

When I said this to colleagues over the past few days, their riposte was, as might be expected, to say that freedom of speech and the need to inform the public were essential in a democracy. They also said it would be impossible to police. As Nick Robinson says in the Times today:

'To censor our coverage now would be a political act. We can no more censor images of the appalling deaths of hostages than we can of the victims of war. The Pentagon’s decision to refuse to allow pictures to be taken of coffins returning from Iraq was, I have little doubt, not simply to show respect, as officials claimed. There is another problem. Even if all the terrestrial broadcasters wanted to we could not black out CNN, Fox and al-Jazeera, not to mention the internet.'

Yes, he has a strong point. And in normal times I would agree. But these are not normal times. Yes, all terrorists exploit the media. And I don't think that all terrorist acts therefore should not be given any coverage. But what we are facing is not conventional terrorism, nor conventional warfare. We are in a totally unprecedented situation, one for which all our existing rules are simply inadequate. I think the western media cannot avoid the fact that it is now being used -- appallingly -- as a weapon of war against the west.

I think this piece in the Telegraph makes the point very well. Commenting on the fact that the US media has given the hostage murders a low profile, it quotes the media columnist of the Washington Post who, after saying that unfortunately the number of these atrocities has now blunted their news value, adds this:

'Mr Kurtz also suggested that American newspaper editors - who are expected to be more high-minded than is always the case in Britain - were wary of allowing terrorists to force their way on to the front page by the sheer brutality of their crimes."I don't think there were any secret meetings of the media elite. But there seems to have been a subconscious desire to play down these incidents and not allow the terrorists to seize the press agenda," Mr Kurtz said. A similar defence was offered by the Chicago Tribune to its readers.The paper's ombudsman wrote: "The Tribune doesn't want to be in the position of a puppet with the Islamic kidnappers pulling the strings. To grab the attention of the American public and, yes, to terrorise them is the reason Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his henchmen stage these grisly murders." '

I think the British media should follow suit. But the problem is that America understands we are at war. Britain does not.

The madness continues to escalate. The British ambsassador to Italy, Sir Ivor Roberts, has been outed for having said: ‘If anyone is ready to celebrate the re-election of Bush it is al-Qaeda’. It rates alongside the infamous remark by the French ambassador to Britain that Israel was a ‘shitty little country’ as a revelation, not so much of one diplomat’s maladroit absence of diplomacy but the corrupted mindset of a country’s foreign policy establishment. Indeed, as the Times reported, the ambassador revealed his true agenda by adding that the Jews were behind it all. The Corriere della Serra 'also quoted the ambassador saying, at the conference near Siena, that the Bush Administration was subject to “conditioning” and “pressure” from Israel and “the Jewish lobby”. '

In normal times, this ripe piece of ancient conspiracy theory and racial prejudice would have created uproar. Now it occasions no remark whatever. Indeed, as far as I could see yesterday it was only reported at all in the Times: other papers reported the al Qaeda barb but left out this contemporary update of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No doubt that’s because — astonishingly — this demented racial libel is now a commonplace among the so-called cognoscenti, not to mention anyone else. I read and hear it frequently — including from the lips of a distinguished military figure, who confidently told me that Rupert Murdoch had personally decreed that the Times should severely restrict the number of pieces opposing the war in Iraq ‘having been told to issue such an order by the Jewish lobby in America’ -- oh, and that one of the main reasons President Bush had removed Saddam Hussein was because ‘Bush had Ariel Sharon’s hand up his back’. Once upon a time, this kind of comment would never have been made, and if it had been would have consigned the speaker to public opprobrium and contempt. Now you can barely open the Independent, Guardian or even the Times without falling over it, with no protest other than the occasional squeak from Britain’s beleaguered and shell-shocked Jewish community.

But never fear: the media have got a grip on the real story. This has now moved on from the collective screech of ‘Blair lied. Bush lied. People died’, as Mark Steyn puts it. Now the latest cerebrally-challenged group-think is that there was no terrorism in Iraq before the war. As the Guardian leader (which referred to Sir Ivor Roberts’s disgusting comments as merely ‘a diplomatic indiscretion’ and commended him for performing a service to the anti-war lobby) put it yesterday:

‘Mr Blair's comment on Sunday that Iraq is now the "crucible" in which the war on terrorism will be won or lost will infuriate those who have long pointed out that there was no terrorism of this kind in Iraq before the war. Its secular Ba'athist dictatorship had many faults, some of them overlooked or underplayed by critics of the US and British governments, but as the British intelligence services reported consistently, it had no links with the fundamentalist al-Qaida. Mr Blair has often argued that the key issue for him was the possible nexus between WMD and terrorists. But we now know that in February 2003, the joint intelligence committee reported that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent "by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". Tragically, the mayhem of the post-Saddam era is fertile ground for the al-Qaida affiliate led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is threatening the lives of a British engineer and two Americans.’

So Saddam’s regime had ‘many faults’, eh? Steady on there, Guardian! Don’t go overboard! Remember just who is the Great Satan in this story! But of course, to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with reality, the claim that there was no terrorism in Iraq under Saddam is grotesque beyond belief. Saddam’s Iraq was the sine qua non of terrorist states. It tried to murder President Bush’s father. It paid blood money to Palestinian families to turn their children into human bombs. It funded and trained terrorists. It gave shelter to terrorists. Indeed, al Zarqawi was given sanctuary in Iraq for years under Saddam. Terrorists came to Saddam’s Iraq for training in the use of poisons and gases.

As for 'no links between Saddam and al Qaeda’' this is simply a lie. There is no known connection between Iraq and 9/11. But there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence of long-standing links between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report: ‘The CIA produced 78 reports, from multiple sources, documenting instances on which the Iraqi regime either trained operatives for attacks or dispatched them, to carry out attacks…Iraq continued to participate in terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s…From 1996 to 2003, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] focused its terrorist activities on western interests, particularly against the US and Israel…throughout 2002, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against US interests…. Twelve reports received from sources that the CIA described as having varying reliability cited Iraq or Iraqi national involvement in al Qaeda’s CBW efforts… In March 1998, after bin Laden’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraq intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to met first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden’.

Or this from the September 11 Commission report:

‘With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request… the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections…The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were several likely instances of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship’.

According to Stephen Hayes’s book The Connection, on February 3 1998 bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al Zawahiri met the Iraqi Vice President in Baghdad. ‘The goal of the visit was to arrange for co-ordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in al-Falluja, an-Nasiriya and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz. The visit coincided with a payment of $300,000 from Iraqi intelligence to Zawahiri’s Islamic jihad, which merged that year with al Qaeda…’

A Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed: ‘Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb-making from the IIS’s [Iraqi Intelligence Service’s] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden’s farm in Khartoum in Sep-Oct 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti…’

According to Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraq army who worked at the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad, the camp ‘specialised in exporting terrorism to the whole world… they would be trained mainly on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism’.

And so on, and on. Now, by its nature not all intelligence stands up to close scrutiny. But there is so much of this it is inconceivable that the general tenor is wrong. Yet the British and American media almost totally ignore it, and state falsely instead that there was no linkage with al Qaeda and no terrorism until the war’s aftermath sucked it in. Wicked, wicked stuff.

Of course, it is undeniable that the current conflagration in Iraq would not have occurred had Saddam not been toppled. It is also obvious that much of this is the direct result of the coalition’s grievous errors after the war. All wars create a vacuum, and unless the good guys fill it immediately the bad guys tend to move in, with disastrous effects. That is exactly what happened in Iraq. As the leaked Whitehall memos revealed last week, Blair’s advisers warned of such an eventuality. But the fact that they warned of a possibility that everyone with half a brain foresaw, and the fact that this tragically came to pass because of the ineptitude of post-war planning, does not mean that the removal of Saddam was not necessary and right. It was. And it does not mean Saddam’s Iraq was not involved in terrorism. The above quotes might usefully be sent to every journalist and newspaper editor who has published or broadcast this untruth in the past few days.

Like, for example, the BBC, which knows for a certainty that the real villain of the piece cannot be Saddam, or his successors in butchery who are now behaving with such barbarism in Iraq. They know instead beyond doubt that it is George W Bush. In a scene setter yesterday on the Today programme (8.33 am) for Bush’s big speech, Justin Webb said (and I paraphrase) the following: that President Bush would be displaying the appeal of the cowboy down the ages and a cowboy philosophy; that what he did well was stand his ground outside the saloon bar, but he didn’t react well when the shooting started; that he intended to say the war was justified even though the main justification of WMD hadn’t turned up; that he would continue to link the war on Iraq with al Qaeda even though there was no evidence that a link previously existed; and that whenever he was asked what mistakes he had made he looked completely shocked.

One of the most sickening features of the current media hysteria is the implication that the appalling atrocities now taking place in Iraq are the fault not of the butchers carrying them out but of Bush and Blair for starting the conflagration. But the reason British and American hostages are being taken and murdered is because the terrorists know that with every such death — and the more barbaric it is — the more the British and American media will not blame them but, obscenely, Blair and Bush and thus ratchet up the pressure upon them to quit Iraq and give up the defence against terror.

This is, indeed, working like a charm. Such is the media conflagration of lies, distortions, moral bankruptcy, prejudice and foaming hatred and hysteria directed at their own side that it becomes less likely by the day that Bush, let alone Blair, will feel able to take on Iran and Syria. Unless he does that, however, not only will Iraq be lost but the west might as well put its hands up now and wave the white flag. The jihadis are playing the west for suckers; and the arrogant, ignorant, bigoted media are playing their part to perfection.

For the second week running, BBC Radio Four's Any Questions last weekend reinforced the sense that decency in this country is simply dying. Dr David Starkey, the noted historian, wit and larger-than-life personality who made his name and his fortune as 'the rudest man in Britain', suddenly came out with a piece of the ripest and most ancient prejudice. Musing about the war in Iraq, he said:

'The action in Iraq was driven by one thing, and it was a very understandable desire for vengeance. Americans again are a little bit like Jews (murmur from audience)...no, let me please, I'm being really serious, I'm not calling names but calling for us to understand a different mindset. Here the notion of vengeance is on the whole regarded as deplorable... In Judaism, Islam and American Protestantism vengeance is a wholly acceptable notion (audience murmur) ... that's the truth, and after 9/11 they wanted to strike back. And that is it. End of story'.

Well I don't know enough about the theology of Islam or American Protestantism, but I doubt whether either regards vengeance as 'wholly acceptable'. What I do know is that in Judaism this is the very opposite of the truth. It is an ancient prejudice that the Jews 'do vengeance', based on an ignorant misunderstanding of the Biblical injunction to take 'an eye for an eye'. In fact, for Jews this doctrine is a limitation on any action that is taken after an offence is committed to ensure that any response is no more than proportionate. In other words, it is all about fairness and justice, not vengeance at all. The claim that for Jews 'vengeance is wholly acceptable' is totally untrue and a racial smear.

This idea that the Jews are vengeful is, in fact, one of the most deeply entrenched, vicious prejudices about the Jews -- and one that currently surfaces again and again in the language used to describe Israel's defence against terror. In other words, whenever the Jews try to prevent themselves from being murdered, this is presented not as self defence but vengeance. When the Americans tried to prevent another 9/11, this was not self-defence but vengeance. (Starkey's inclusion of Islam appeared to be a lame attempt to camouflage the outrageous prejudice of his opinion).

Clearly, in his world view there are certain categories of people who are not entitled to defend themselves against mass murder by removing from the scene those who would perpetrate it. They are instead, it seems, people apart, incapable of the instinct that Starkey himself would presumably have if threatened with annihilation to try to prevent it happening. And note also how subliminally he implied that the Americans were only doing the Jews' bidding in this display of primitive and uncivilised instinct.

So let us not call names but try to understand a different mindset -- the dynamics of ugly prejudice, which reveal that in the most educated of company barbarism may be masked by the thinnest of polished veneers.

Time was when scoring 45 per cent in an exam meant you had failed it. Now it’s enough to give you a top grade. As the Telegraph reports:

‘Some pupils taking GCSE maths this year needed less than half marks to score an A-grade, sparking more claims that the exams were being "dumbed down". Exam board Edexcel defended its marking scheme which put the pass level for an A-grade at 45 per cent on its hardest paper, insisting the tests were "robust". Another exam board, OCR, said setting a pass mark of 16 per cent for a grade C on its higher-tier paper showed how difficult the exam was.'

‘Robust’? ‘Difficult’? Can anyone doubt that a) the British education system is in free fall b) notions of excellence, achievement, objectivity and fairness have been excised from that system c) the British education establishment, including government ministers who tell us that rising numbers of top grades mean standards are rising, is playing the rest of us for suckers?

One of the reasons why there is such bitterness on the left against George W Bush is the idee fixe that he stole the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore by a Republican swindle in the Florida recount. So it is refreshing to read this from a new book, 'Stealing Elections' by John Fund:

‘But in fact, every single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency. This includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a consortium of news organizations, among them the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. As the New York Times reported on November 21, 2001, "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward." The USA Today recount team concluded: "Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush.”’

So the myth of the hanging chads is just that — a myth. Fund wonders why it has achieved the status of fact, and concludes that while some on the left sincerely believe it to be true, others have cynically perpetuated it in order to galvanise voters to turn out for Kerry. In other words, yet another example of the Big Lie, now the weapon du jour in the armoury of the unprincipled villains and useful idiots of the left.

The Telegraph’s exclusive report last Friday of a batch of leaked documents from the Foreign Office and Cabinet office told us little that was new other than the lengths to which the British diplomatic establishment is now going to cover its own ineptitude by pointing fingers at the violence in Iraq and saying ‘I told you so’. The fact that the Foreign Office said that it thought the war was illegal demonstrates little other than the intellectual deficiencies of that part of Whitehall. (In any event, these documents preceded UN resolution 1441, which was a key component of the war’s legality — a fact which was unaccountably omitted from the Telegraph’s somewhat confusingly written report). Its advice — that whatever came after Saddam would be no better, that even if it was better it wouldn’t last, that even if it lasted it would revert to being as great a threat and that anyway the whole thing would be messy and violent and take until kingdom come to sort out, was a classic example of the British establishment at its most negative and defeatist. Its bottom line was quite simply that whatever Saddam was up to, he should be left there to do it.

One does wonder why on earth we have a Foreign Office, when it is so patently an office on behalf of foreigners and against the interests of this country.

Here is another sensible piece about Iraq by a former US intelligence officer, Ralph Peters. Yes, he says, the violence is terrible but it’s nevertheless localised and is alienating the population against their attackers. Fallujah is the epicentre of the terror; the Iraqi government wants it sorted, but the Americans won’t risk a conflagration before the presidential election:

‘Allawi wants Fallujah brought into line. Our military has the muscle. Operations will be harder now than they would have been four months ago, since our enemies have had time to prepare for a siege. But we can do it. The delay is because the Bush administration wants to avoid serious combat until after our elections. The Bushies are using airstrikes against terrorist safe houses, but that won't retake the city. The truth is that the terrorists are the lesser problem. The greater impediment to progress has been our presidential elections and the policy distortions they create.

‘The polarization, dishonesty and manipulation on both sides aids the terrorists. When John Kerry states categorically that he'll bring our troops home within four years, it promises the terrorists that they only have to hang on. When he declares our efforts a disaster, he encourages our enemies to believe they're winning. And when he promises a "more sensitive" war on terror, it's read as a pending declaration of surrender. Kerry blathers. Bush delays. Iraq burns. Meanwhile, our intelligence community has once again shown its weakness by covering its backside, instead of finding terrorists. A National Intelligence Council report revealed this week paints a bleak picture of the future of Iraq. Why? Because the intel bureaucrats don't want to be blamed if things go wrong. There's nothing safer than assuming failure. I dealt with the NIC during my days as an intelligence officer. I always found it more interested in playing it safe than in serving our country. Clearly, nothing has changed.’

Exactly the same is going on here on this side of the pond, as the Telegraph’s story on Friday revealed (see above).

Appallingly, as this story reveals, Syria apparently tested chemical weapons on inhabitants of Sudan in June, killing dozens of people:

‘Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in a Khartoum suburb to discuss the possibility of improving cooperation between their armies. According to Die Welt, the Syrians had suggested close cooperation on developing chemical weapons, and it was proposed that the arms be tested on the rebel SPLA, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, in the south. But given that the rebels were involved in peace talks, the newspaper continued, the Sudanese government proposed testing the arms on people in Darfur.’

Apart from the unspeakable fact of this atrocity, and the extra dimension of horror this adds to the already dreadful jihadi campaign of mass murder in Sudan, does this not have a certain ring of familiarity about it? After all, students of actual history rather than the propaganda we are being fed will recall that it was in Sudan that al Qaeda and Iraq forged their links.

And how about this:

‘The United States has accused Syria of trying to acquire materials and the know-how to develop chemical weapons and claims that Sudan has been seeking to improve its capability to produce them for many years.’

Is this not why Saddam was toppled? Syria is similarly a rogue state with a history of terrorism. Accusing Syria is all very well. But what is the US -- whoever wins the Presidential election -- going to do about it?

More graphic evidence of the reasoning (if that’s not a misuse of vocabulary) behind the targeting of the French hostages. As this story revealed, the Islamic Army of Iraq called France’ an enemy of Muslims’:

‘It accused France of "playing a principle (sic) role in blocking Muslims from taking power in Algeria after their victory" in 1992 legislative elections. It said French prisons are "full of Muslims" being held in the name of the fight against terrorism, while denouncing continuing French support for the "Zionist entity" (Israel) and its "war against the symbols of Islam, such as the headscarf" for women… The statement went on to include a long litany of grievances involving alleged French meddling in the affairs of Syria and Lebanon "to serve the interests of Jews and Zionists," of combating the Arabic language and Islamic law in former colony Tunisia, of seeking to divide Sudan and make Chad a French base. Morocco and Mauritania were also listed as victims, while France was also accused of "effectively participating in the war in Afghanistan" against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.’

So much for appeasement.

Intriguing story on Fox News that suggests another route by which Saddam may have been financing al Qaeda by way of the UN’s ‘oil for fraud’ programme. It’s tortuously complex and far from definitive, but it looks like there’s something here nevertheless.

An astonishing article in Muslim World Today by Aisha Siddiqa Qureshi sends in the starkest possible terms an urgent wake-up call to ‘liberal’ Jews with their heads stuck so firmly in the sand they side with the forces of appeasement.

‘Being a Muslim, living under the dark shadows of Islamism, I see, watch and experience every day the reach and depth of anti-Semitism that has taken hostage a whole people. There cannot be a better person than a Muslim to warn you of your misguided sense of liberalism; I live in an environment that is so carefully and skilfully prepared to annihilate Jews’.

Worse, as Kureshi so aptly points out, is the fact that the ‘liberal’ consensus in the west is busy attacking the very values that protect them:

‘Civilization as we know it is in jeopardy because liberals are so eager to abandon the values on which it rests. They are not willing to support the institutions that safeguard those values. Case in point: radical Islam threatens to subjugate the world and murder, enslave or convert all non-Muslims. Liberals are not even willing to support the institution most necessary for our defense against radical Islam: the military. Instead, they blame America.’

Worse still, they smear any attempt to tell the truth about the nature of this threat as ‘Islamophobia’. The tragic stupidity and grotesque inappropriateness of this attitude is reinforced by this astoundingly brave Muslim’s chilling warning to the Jews:

‘You have no time to waste. Help let the world know that you are here to stay. With a homeland, your survival is guaranteed; without one, your own lives are also on the line. You can assimilate as much as you want but that doesn't change your inherent Jewish blood and DNA. The Jew-haters of the world want to eradicate every trace of you. They will not be satisfied by simply watering you down. That was Hitler's belief. Radical Muslim enemies share his goal and are attempting to carry out his plan. Bush understands their end-game. Do you?’

Alas, no they do not. Yet.

Amir Taheri as usual cuts to the chase. Referring to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s claim that the Iraq war was illegal (or to be more precise, his half-hearted endorsement of the words conveniently put into his mouth by a BBC journalist), Taheri points out that such a claim, if true, is immensely serious. It would mean that the US, Britain and the 32 other member states who supported the war violated the UN charter. If this is so and the war was indeed illegal, says Taheri acidly, then the inescapable logic is that the UN should take action against those states and restore Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq:

‘If, on the other hand, he is making these accusations just to look good, he must know that he is destroying the little that is left of the U.N.'s credibility. How can an organization, whose chief executive accuses the principal members of its board of violating its charter with impunity, be taken seriously? Why didn't Annan resign when he clearly saw that the U.N. Charter was being violated by a group of "rogue states" led by America? And why, if the toppling of Saddam was illegal, is the U.N. helping consolidate regime change in Iraq by supervising elections for a new government? Annan knows damn well that the toppling of Saddam was perfectly legal. The action taken by the United States and its allies was backed by no fewer than 12 mandatory Security Council resolutions. In any case, Saddam's Iraq had been at war against the U.N., the only state ever to be in that position, since 1990. Yesterday, Annan's aides were trying to pretend that he had not quite meant what he had told the BBC, and thus there was no need for him to take action against the alleged "law-breaking" nations. The truth is that the U.N. is in the biggest mess it has ever been in since its inception over half a century ago. Annan's latest maneuver cannot but make the mess even bigger than it is.’

Not just the UN’s own mess, unfortunately, but the terror in Iraq and the war against free peoples everywhere.

This website is going off to examine its soul over the Jewish new year. Back next Monday. Happy new year.

Good grief -- a sensible column by Simon Jenkins in the Times! He not only points out the humbug in the position taken by both the Prime Minister and Michael Howard over greenhouse gases, that if they intend to reduce them they will have to build many more nuclear power stations which of course they have no intention of doing. Jenkins also correctly expresses scepticism about the actual premise that both have accepted, that the planet is heating up to danger point and that this is all the fault of mankind.

Tony Blair's speech on global warming was simply nonsense on stilts from start to finish. This is what he said:

'What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialisation and strong economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term.'

Not true. It is unproven and highly unlikely.

'Apart from a diminishing handful of sceptics, there is a virtual worldwide scientific consensus on the scope of the problem.'

Not true. Most scientists who actually know about climate are sceptics. The whole debate has been hijacked by a few thousand ideologues and sycophants who, because of the intensely politicised nature of the claim (it fingers capitalism and particularly the US as the villains hell-bent on destroying the planet) have ensured that no-one gets a research grant unless they come up with conclusions that support the one true faith of man-made climate change and impending catastrophe.

'They have scrutinised the data and developed some of the world's most powerful computer models to describe and predict our climate.'

That's the problem. They have fed into those computers only partial data, and further failed to acknowledge that computer modelling simply cannot deal with the literally millions of feedback mechanisms involved in climate change. You put rubbish in, you get rubbish out. That's what they've given us.

'The 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1990. Over the last century average global temperatures have risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius: the most drastic temperature rise for over 1,000 years in the northern hemisphere.'

Per-leeeease! It was warmer in the 12th century, for heaven's sake, when they farmed in Iceland and grew grapes in Northumberland; it was warmer in the Antarctic in the Roman period, while 55 million years ago there was no ice in the Arctic at all... I mean, can you believe the ignorance in this speech?

'Extreme events are becoming more frequent. Glaciers are melting. Sea ice and snow cover is declining. Animals and plants are responding to an earlier spring. Sea levels are rising and are forecast to rise another 88cm by 2100 threatening 100m people globally who currently live below this level.'

Look, some glaciers are melting but others are thickening; some seas are rising but others are falling. Many contradictory things are happening. So what's new? Overall there's nothing going on to get excited about.

'This summer we have seen violent weather extremes in parts of the UK.'

Ye gods, can you believe this drivel? Heavy winds, storms and floods? Hello? We've had worse before. Bocastle in Devon may have been badly flooded recently, but nearby Lynmouth had far worse flooding half a century previously. And anyway, storms are driven more by ocean currents than by air temparature. To repeat: there's nothing going on to get excited about. Nil, nada, zip, zilch. Temperature rises or falls, hurricanes, ice melting, seas rising, all of it is within the normal fluctuations of climate over the millennia.

'There is good evidence that last year's European heat wave was influenced by global warming.'

The US has just had its coldest summer since 1992; was that influenced by global warming too? Oh, I can't be doing with any more of this. It is ludicrous, embarrassing, too silly for words. Every single such claim made by the global warming propagandists can be refuted by the actual science. Yes, I know the government's Chief Scientific Adviser has said global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism. He's probably where the PM got this nonsense from. He should start listening instead to people who actually know what they are talking about. As Simon Jenkins comments:

'Climate has always changed say Bjorn Lomborg, Philip Stott, John Etherington and the Max Planck Institute. The causes are mostly, if not entirely, natural and beyond our control. Each spell of erratic weather, such as El Niño or Hurricane Ivan, is no worse than the last worst. Hurricane “hits” in America are actually declining. Climate change is chaotic and any linear extrapolation can be used to scare people witless. We would do better, says this group, to mitigate the impact of weather on poor people rather than spend trillions of dollars trying to reverse ecological evolution. This is a disagreement with awesome implications. If the sceptics are right, we can relax. We can even relax if they are wrong in their prediction but right in saying we are powerless to turn the clock back. If the Sun is getting hotter, we are toast whichever way you slice it. Let us be charitable to each other in the interim and guard what is beautiful.'

Global warming is an enormous scam, the greatest scentific scandal of the latter part of the 20th century. Like many who may themselves even boast a string of letters after their name, the Prime Minister has made a complete ass of himself, as history will eventually record.

More of the Beeb's unflagging bias on display on the Today programme this morning. It's the underlying assumptions that are so telling, the premise that informs the way questions are phrased, not to mention the questions that are not asked, or the tone of voice used by the presenters.This morning, I caught two ripe examples. The first was in the high-profile 8.10 slot, when the chief of the Defence staff General Sir Mike Jackson, who is visiting British troops in Iraq, was interviewed by Sarah Montague. Her assumption was that the situation in Iraq was catastrophic, it was disintegrating into civil war, the whole of the country was being submerged by violence. Problem was, Sir Mike kept saying that this was not the case. Yes, there was appalling violence in certain places which he did not minimise. But, he said, the Iraqis were determined to defeat this, that as far as he could see the elections next year would go ahead as planned, and that much of the country was in good shape. Montague was incredulous. But surely, she insisted, everything was absolutely terrible? In vain did Sir Mike, palpably taken aback by this insistence and murmuring things like 'These are your words, not mine', doggedly stick to his balanced view. Eventually, Montague resorted to asking suspiciously why he kept saying 'according to the briefings I have received'. Briefings, eh? No wonder the man wasn't delivering the BBC line! No doubt Sir Mike was just parrotting what some propagandist had told him to say! After all, what does the mere Chief of the Defence Staff know compared to the superior intellects at the BBC? Couldn't he grasp that the real and only story was that Iraq is a total disaster and shambles, as the BBC told us it would be from the start?

Later in the programme (8.31) there was an item about why John Kerry's presidential campaign has gone pear-shaped. The assumption here was that, since no sentient individual could possibly support President Bush, and since therefore it was inconceivable that Kerry would not win the election, there had to be some extraordinary reason why Kerry was mysteriously doing so badlly. The fact that he is a rubbish candidate who has demonstrated over and over again his flakiness, inconsistency, flip-floppery, lack of principle and general untrustworthiness was unsayable.

True, the report from the US itself alluded to mistakes he had made, but the implication was still that the natural order was in the process of being overturned here. And as for Shirley Williams who followed on from this report, she could barely contain herself about the travails of 'brave' soldier Kerry, and told us that it was really all the fault of the evil Bush election team which was doing a vicious job in mincing her hero up. The idea that her side might actually be wrong and that the electorate can smell out weakness and poor character from a great distance is, of course, unthinkable to both Baroness Williams and the BBC. After all, how could anyone who is not clinically insane support George W Bush? That's not bias -- that's just plain fact. And that's the BBC's idea of objectivity and the centre ground.

It was just possible, in theory, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, might have confounded those who were aghast that he should choose to commemorate 9/11 by addressing one of the major seats of Islamic learning, Al Azhar University in Cairo. There was the faintest of hopes that he might have used the occasion to speak out bravely against the evil being perpetrated in the name of Islam, and to call upon all people of true faith in the Muslim world to join in the attempt to end it.

Alas, his address revealed an Archbishop on his knees before terror. For cant, humbug and moral spinelessness, this took some beating. He spoke warmly, for example, of the pre-eminent Sunni religious authority, Sheikh Tantawi of Al Azhar:

'I am deeply grateful that it was once again in this country that Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the Alexandria Declaration together, with its commitment to respect for the rights of the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for justice, and its refusal of terror and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to resist settlement!'

Yet this is the same Sheikh Tantawi who -- although he has also issued a number of contradictory comments -- has said it is a religious duty for Muslims to wage jihad against US forces in Iraq, and who said on May 27 1998:

'It is every Muslim, Palestinian and Arab's right to blow himself up in the heart of Israel, an honorable death is better than a life of humiliation. All religious laws have demanded the use of force against the enemy and fighting against those who stand by Israel; there is no escape from fighting, from Jihad, and from [self-]defense, and whoever refrains from such things is not a believer.'

You would never think, from the Archbishop's remarks, that he was the leader of a Christian world that is under murderous attack in Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan and many other countries by an Islamic jihad that clearly states it intends to wipe out or subjugate Christianity throughout the lands of the medieval Caliphate. Not a word of this escaped the Archbishop's lips. Instead -- unbelievably -- he cast Christianity as the villain of the piece:

'And it is sad that sometimes an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking has led Muslims and Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of God that does not recognise the oneness and sufficiency of God, or that we worship something less than the One, the Eternal. In our conversations with Muslim friends, we Christians are rightly challenged to think more deeply, to think as our Egyptian Christian fathers did, about the unity of Almighty God.'

Certainly, Christian religious hubris has a lot to answer for. But in these circumstances, where millions of Christians have been and are still being murdered or persecuted and their churches razed to the ground across the world, one might expect their leader to condemn and oppose such monstrosities and demonstrate a strong desire to protect his flock.

Instead, the Archbishop merely said what he has said before: that in the face of terror, its victims must passively submit. Now, it's one thing for a Christian to turn the other cheek when he himself is attacked. But it is simply monstrous to say that people should not take the action that may be necessary to to prevent themselves and others from being murdered. Yet this is precisely what he did say:

'We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another – our people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness. So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honours God and God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the One Living and Almighty God.'

This is a quite remarkable doctrine. Ostensibly preaching moral even-handedness, it is actually guilty of a quite grotesque moral inversion. Christians and Jews do not murder Muslims; it is Muslims who are murdering Christians and Jews; any attacks on Muslims by Jews, Christians or others in, for example, Israel or America are conducted solely in self-defence and in an attempt to prevent further acts of mass murder. To equate such acts of self-defence with truly indiscriminate acts of barbarism is disgusting. The fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury appears not to understand the difference suggests a staggering moral illiteracy.

Defining self-defence or the defence of others against murder as 'revenge', or 'indiscriminate violence and terror' is tantamount to turning a blind eye to slaughter. It condemns the innocent to death, and claims that this is a godly path to choose. Well, turning the other cheek on behalf of those who are being murdered doesn't fit any religious or moral codes that I know of. It is repugnant, and if followed would turn religion into the accomplice of great evil. It would mean that, if the Nazi Holocaust were to happen again, the Church would once again stand aside. As it is, this address will only provide encouragement and justification for those with murderous hatred in their hearts. It represents a negation of morality and decency -- a new low for the Church of England, and a sign that it is decadent right from the top. Read this address, and shudder for the fate of the free world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again, the admirable Amir Taheri restores some much needed balance and perspective to the picture of unrelieved gloom the media feed us about the situation in Iraq. Yes, the continued terrorism there is very troubling indeed. But this is by no means the whole picture. As Taheri observes:

'The most important is that post-liberation Iraq, defying great odds, has succeeded in carrying out its political reform agenda on schedule. A governing council was set up at the time promised. It, in turn, created a provisional government right on schedule. Next, municipal elections were held in almost all parts of the country. Then followed the drafting of a new democratic and pluralist constitution. Then came the formal end of the occupation and the appointing of a new interim government.

'The events mentioned above, and largely ignored by the media, indicate a remarkably rapid progress toward democratization in Iraq. And, yet, at every step we had countless doomsayers who predicted that this or that step would not be taken because of "security problems." '

And those doomsayers now pretend such progress hasn't happened, to conceal the fact that, if they'd had their way, none of it would have happened and Iraq would still be in the grip of tyranny.

Yet another demonstration on Newsnight last night of the BBC's famed objectivity. At the same time as Tony Blair's shambolic reshuffling of his Cabinet, Michael Howard carried out a clinically efficient reshuffle of the Tory Shadow Cabinet, in which he brought back to the front bench the former Cabinet minister John Redwood. Redwood, a fellow of All Souls, has clearly been brought in to provide some much needed intellectual ballast to Howard's team. Undoubtedly he is a controversial figure, because he was a key figure in an adminstration which came to be regarded as both harsh and incompetent. But Newsnight was intent on destroying him before even introducing him. In the introduction to the item, it played the most toe-curling coverage of his whole time as a minister -- when he was filmed failing to sing the words to the Welsh national anthem during his time as Welsh Secretary. Ok, it was a revealing moment. But of his whole considerable contribution to British politics, this was the image Newsnight chose to stick him with -- and not once but twice during the item, with presenter Jeremy Paxman making a further caustic allusion to his lack of prowess in the Welsh language. Is this kind of playground spitefulness towards people whose political views they don't like really suitable for BBC television's flagship current affairs programme?

Another great advertisement for the English judiciary. The Times reports that a 20 year-old man, Michael Barrett, twice had sex with a girl aged twelve. He was not jailed, however, and received instead a conditional discharge after the judge, Michael Roach, said this:

'It seems to me that while you did what you did, in contrast to many cases, there was no sexual coercion.The girl was a willing participant and her family allowed you to stay in their home that night, after which you had second thoughts and you took the view that you had to do something about it and went to the police. I trust you to behave yourself now after the reports I’ve read about you which have been very positive and encouraging. Set yourself straight.'

'No sexual coercion'? 'Willing participant'? The girl was a twelve year-old child, for heaven's sake. A child canot give infomed consent. A child is open to adult sexual manipulation and abuse. That is why we have a legal age of consent at 16. What does this judge think paedopohilia is? How can a man with such views be on the English bench?

Fascinating little exchange on BBC TV Newsnight last night, which offered a glimpse of the BBC's notion of objectivity. A discussion about why abortion had suddenly resurfaced as an issue, with calls in Britain to reduce the upper time limit for terminations, featured two guests: the LibDem politician Sir David Steel who was the architect of the current Abortion Act, and the feminist writer Suzie Orbach. It was Orbach who pointed out that both she and Steel were broadly on the same side, and that five years ago it would have been unthinkable to have a studio discussion about abortion without a representative of the pro-life lobby. Orbach made this point to back up her view that there was now a cultural consensus on the issue. But while it is true that abortion is not a running controversy in Britain, as it is in the US, there is certainly a very different point of view from the Steel/Orbach position. Yet the Newsnight editors clearly didn't think it was necessary to represent it. The presenter Jeremy Paxman reacted with some sensitivity to Orbach's innocent observation, protesting testily that they had chosen not to have 'that sort of conversation' about the pro and anti-choice argument. Fair enough; it was indeed a different discussion. But even so, the anti-abortion voice should have been heard in that discussion. The fact that it was not is yet another small example of where the Beeb's journalistic centre of gravity now lies.

In the flurry of reactions in the Muslim and Arab press to the Beslan massacre, there have been a number of encouraging signs that some such commentators at least are beginning to say what was previously unsayable and face up to the religious deformity that produced such an event. As the MEMRI translation service reveals, some of these contributions are remarkable in their honesty and candour. Take, for example, Suleiman Al-Hatlan in the Saudi government daily Al-Watan:

'If the "heroes" of the Muslim violence and terrorism do not represent true Islam, then who does represent it? The painful truth is that the acts of violence and barbarism occurring at present are nothing but the natural consequence of generations of Muslims having been misled and force-fed speeches [filled with] hostility and hatred for others over the course of decades, which deepened the backwardness and the ignorance in the Islamic world. There is no nation on the face of the earth that has not had to deal with oppression and war, but these nations have known how to defend their rights through the use of logic and knowledge … while in our Islamic world the voices of ignorance continue in their plans to develop the ignorance and backwardness so that backwardness, degeneracy, and lack of direction will reign even more [than they do now].'

Or Iraqi columnist Aziz Al-Hajj, who wrote on the progressive Internet site www.elaph.com:

'What kind of national cause is this that uses children like gasoline for igniting a total war of destruction in the name of national and religious liberty?… The Islamic-Arab terrorism has turned into the greatest danger in the world, and threatens civilization, security, and life everywhere. It is today the symbol of evil, religious fanaticism, and moral degradation, and it is the essence of political crime in today's world… Islamic terrorism is the outcome of 'moderate' political Islam, as it is generally described. The latest proof of this is Sheikh [Yousef] Al-Qaradhawi's religious legal ruling [ fatwa ] calling for the killing of all Americans in Iraq…The Arabs and the Muslims today contribute nothing to civilization and progress except for blood, severed heads, scorched bodies, and the abduction and murder of children. The Jihad for religion and Arab chivalry have turned into the art of exploding, booby-trapping, and spilling blood. What an innovation and what a social contribution the Arabs have made in the 21st century!!'

When people in Britain say such things, of course, they are sacked from their jobs.

Yet at the same time, the pressures on Muslims to adhere to the culture of lies remain overwhelming. In an exchange on WNYC radio in the US, Mamoun Fandy, a columnist for the pan Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, observed that accompanying the broadcast and publications of the pictures of the massacre in Arab newspapers was a general absence of any sense of outrage. Private views are suppressed, he said, by intimidation:

'I mean, these terrorists killed one of the major writers in Egypt, Farag Fouda, who challenged their rationale for this random jihad. These people are not reluctant to stop and kill in broad daylight'.

Moreover, he said, the Arab media fails to report on killings by Arabs round the world. For the only places where they are free to report is where they are under occupation:

'They are not free anywhere else; that they can report whatever they want from Iraq under the Americans or Palestine under the Israelis, but next door there was the killing of Kurds in Qamishli last month, in Syria, and Al Jazeera was nowhere to be found. There is a genocidal campaign in Western Sudan in Darfur, and there is no coverage of that...There is a general mood in the Arab world to deflect all the problems of the Arab world to the outside world, because governing regimes in that part of the world have very little legitimacy in their own lands, so mainly they live off the threat from the outside that the Israelis are going to get us and the Americans are going to get us, so therefore we don't have to think about our internal situation. There is this slogan that Nasser invented in the '60s [SPEAKS IN ARABIC LANGUAGE] -- "No voice should prevail over the voice of war." That's the dominant slogan, and continues until today.'

That is why the public in Arab lands has no idea of the truth with which to challenge the diet of lies and hatred with which they are fed, to such catastrophic ends. The remarkable thing, however, is that far from bringing this fact in itself to the attention of their own public, the western media impose a conspiracy of silence and instead merely collude with the propaganda of violent conflict.

An apparently well-informed piece in Ma'ariv International reveals why France uncharacteristically supported the US in tabling a UN demand for Syria to get out of Lebanon, and indicates how Iran and Syria are manoeuvring to pose an even greater threat to both Israel and the world. According to this report, Iran's Revolutionary Islamic guards, along with its proxy army the Hezbullah, have been trying to supplant Yasser Arafat's Fatah in Lebanon. Despite the fact that Arafat beat them off, Iran has not given up. It has put 300 men into Gaza, along with 10-15 al Qaeda operatives. The reason, says the Ma'ariv article, is this:

'Iran has two major strategic goals. One is to buy time until it becomes a nuclear power, which it believes will buy it the same immunity from US attack that a similar status has brought Pyongyang. The second is to prevent the US from permanently entrenching itself across the Shat el Arab river in Iraq, and seeing Iraq fall into less than friendly hands...A base on the Lebanese coast under the protection of Beirut’s Syrian overlords would enable Teheran to project power southwards towards Israel, northwards towards Turkey and westwards towards Europe. Teheran hopes this would significantly increase its standing and prestige in the predominantly Sunni Arab world by succeeding in pressuring Israel into accepting a humiliating and unfavorable settlement, something the Arab world has singularly failed to achieve. Such a base would also enable Iran to initiate terror attacks against France and other European countries, to intimidate them into not joining the US in targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, either via sanctions or military action. It could also serve a base to mount attacks on the vital Turkish oil port of Ceyhan, the planned major terminus of future pipelines designed to lessen the West’s dependence on Middle East oil by piping oil from the newly discovered Caspian Sea oilfield.'

It goes without saying that this geopolitical positioning is not being reported in Britain, where news about the Middle East is stuck in its well-worn grooves of ignorance, idiocy and prejudice. The fact is, however, that Iran presents an unconscionable threat which needs to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The crucial question is whether a second-term Bush administration (don't even ask about Kerry) would have the bottle.

Bravo to the Rev Peter Mullen for his brave and impassioned protest in the Times at the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to mark the anniversary of September 11 by preaching in the mosque at al-Azhar university in Cairo, the most important centre of learning in the Muslim world. He quotes extensively from Dr Williams's pamphlet Writing in the Dust, which he wrote after 9/11 (and to which I have previously referred on this website). This small document is a virtuoso display of moral equivalence, whose inability to distinguish nihilistic killing from its defence, along with a denial of moral responsibility, would be staggering if written by anyone, let alone someone who became the leader of the Anglican church. Mullen devastatingly concludes:

'Dr Williams is praised as a man of superior intelligence. But there is no intelligence in Writing in the Dust, only romantic faux naivety. As his writings reveal, he is an old-fashioned class warrior. He dislikes our Western way of life and romanticises the Islamic world as much as Marxists used to romanticise the USSR. This wouldn’t matter much in normal times, but these days we live on the edge of destruction. Before Dr Williams opens his mouth in Cairo, he should remember the slogan from the Second World War: “Careless talk costs lives.” '

*Dhimmi Watch defines dhimmitude thus: 'Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race. The dhimmi attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today.'

Michael Gove characteristically hits the nail on the head in the Times today when he points out that the terrorists responsible for the Beslan massacre were no more likely to be satisfied with Chechen independence than were the Nazis with the Sudetenland:

'When Russia did grant Chechnya greater autonomy in the 1990s, it was only to find that territory become a launchpad for fundamentalist groups intent on exporting slaughter well beyond their borders. In the circumstances, the Russians could no more accept the requirement to respect self-determination than you or I could accept the need to respect property rights when our neighbour’s house has become a crack den. When others abuse their freedom to threaten your safety, there is a need to act.'

So much for the claim that the massacre was the result of President Putin's brutal crackdown on the Chechen resistance. In that respect, there are obvious similarities with the Palestinians, who used the autonomy granted to them under the Oslo peace process to form themselves into an army of killers. The agenda, in other words, is not about national self-determination. It is about conquest.

This is why the EU's peremptory demand for Russia to provide an explanation for the tragedy was so disgusting. The Times leader puts it well:

'There is strong evidence that the techniques are inculcated in clandestine or even semi-clandestine centres all the way from Indonesia to northern Africa. Along this arc of violence, explosives training is available and thousands of madrasahs, traditionally centres of quiet religious study, indoctrinate students in the “politics” of the explosive belt. It was never convincing, and it is no longer remotely safe, for the Islamic world’s political and religious leaders to claim that these activities are marginal and alien to their societies and faith, and leave it at that...It does not help those Muslims brave enough to say candidly that terrorism now has dangerously deep roots in Islamic culture if EU ministers rush to “understand”, where they should without qualification condemn. Their apparent concern to mark a distance from Moscow and Washington is an irrelevance bordering on the irresponsible.'

As is so much comment, alas, surrounding this whole subject.

Not content with de-Islamicising and sanitising the Beslan massacre, the BBC continues to play down and thus misrepresent the war against Israel. The item on the Radio Four 8am news bulletin this morning about Israel's killing of 14 Hamas terrorists was an object lesson in bias. Quite apart from the usual description of terrorists as 'militants' and 'fighters', reporter Alan Johnston's language made it sound as if the event was on a par with the murder of Russian schoolchildren. Thus there would be 'many funerals' today for the Hamas 'faithful', much 'anger and grief'.

And then, to compound this odious tone, came the following staggering assertion: 'The movement is struggling to end Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank'. Thus Johnston presented Hamas as some kind of heroic freedom fighters 'struggling' -- a loaded word if ever there was one -- against colonial oppression. But Hamas is not seeking merely to end Israel's presence in the disputed territories. It aims to eradicate Israel altogether as a Jewish state. Its murderous attacks are directed explicitly to that end. What's more, it presents those attacks as part of a wider Islamic jihad against not just Israel but the Jews, whom it libels in language straight out of the lexicon of medieval Jew-hatred as a conspiracy to take over the world. If the BBC bothered to read the Hamas Charter, this is what it would find:

...'The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up...liberation of Palestine is then an individual duty for very Moslem wherever he may be...in the face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised...

'With their money, they [the Jews] took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there...They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it....Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"...Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep." '

The BBC is undoubtedly the single most important and authoritative source of information for most people in this country about Israel, the Middle East and foreign affairs in general. Its persistent misrepresentation of the threat Israel faces, its sanitisation of its attackers and its manipulation of public sympathy in favour of those attackers and against Israel, are simply sickening. It has probably done more to give succour and encouragement to terrorists and twist and confuse public debate about Israel and the scourge of global terrorism than any other source in the world. When are the Chairman and governors of the BBC going to wake up their consciences and address this scandalous perversion of public service broadcasting?

Classic example of appeasenik idiocy and moral vacuity by Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian about the Beslan massacre. Having observed that terrorism is getting nastier, he opines that the last thing that should be done is to use force against it. Those who do are guilty of 'savagery' and 'vengeance'. The idea that such actions might be designed to stop the terror is not entertained. Indeed, Hastings tells us breathlessly that the real purpose of terror is to produce a reaction from the victims that will recruit yet more to the cause. You don't say!

So what should folks who are being fried in bus bombs or whose children are slaughtered in schoolrooms do instead? Why, 'undramatic, even invisible means: intelligence, politics, diplomacy, special forces operations '. Uh huh. Like those aren't used already? And what happens when they fail to persuade the terrorists to pack up their bomb belts and go home? Hastings says force never works. But where in the world has his approach ever worked?

A little detail like that is, of course, irrelevant. For Hastings, killing terrorists is the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. And of course, Israel is branded accordingly for attempting to protect its citizens. This is described as 'venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people'. As for President Bush, he 'indulges both Ariel Sharon and Putin in any means they see fit, to suppress those who use terrorist methods, without heed to the need for diverse political responses, as well as sensitive military tactics'.

Now, Putin's brutal repression of the Chechen revolt hasn't been clever at all, not least because Russia has long been supplying money and arms to the very people who promote the Islamic jihad -- of which, as Putin now realises far too late, the Chechen resistance is the North Caucasus branch office. Not that Hastings grasps this -- indeed, he expliclty rejects the obvious fact that Palestinian, Chechen or al Qaeda terror are part of the same phenomenon.

But his remarks about Israel are as spiteful as they are ignorant. He suggests that Israel has never attempted any political resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians -- thus totally ignoring the fact that the current intifada was their response to a political process in which Israel was offering them a state of their own. What hate-filled malevolence is this, that can so distort and misrepresent an issue, and make criminals out of the victims of a death cult of annihilatory totalitarianism?

The fact is, as I wrote in my article for the Daily Mail today, the single greatest incentive for acts of terrorist mass murder is the response of those who blame the terrorised rather than the terrorist, respond to every act of mass murder by signalling yet greater weakness, demoralisation and fear, and make it worth the terrorists' while to ratchet up the violence. It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west's response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. Hastings concludes that terrorism is winning. Very true -- but only when it results in attitudes like his own.

From barbarism to bathos. The centrepiece of the British government's legislative programme in the run-up to the election, the issue that is going to define its priorities and dominate public debate, is... the banning of fox-hunting. And for the fourth time, yet. It is truly astounding that, with international terror still at the top of any sane agenda (an issue, however, that was not mentioned at all in Tony Blair's to-do list for the new parliamentary term), with every public service in the country sliding into disrepair or outright chaos, with violent crime rising and disorder out of control, the Prime Minister's big issue is the revival of the attempt to ban hunting.

The reasons he is doing so are entirely, shamelessly, breathtakingly cynical. As outlined in the Telegraph, it is a move designed solely to appeal to voters on the left who have been turned off big-time by the Iraq war, and knock the Tories off balance. To do so, he is prepared to dump bills that are actually of some importance to people's lives and destroy what's left of parliamentary integrity:

'They say he is even prepared to see important legislation such as the Children Bill or the Pensions Bill dumped to make time to get a hunting Bill through the Lords and on to the statute book. Under the plan, a Bill would be rushed through the Commons in a single day next week and sent to the Lords, which has repeatedly blocked legislation. Peers will be given two days to debate the measure, which has to be passed before the parliamentary session finishes next month.

'Business managers have mapped out a strategy that will depend on whether the Lords uses its delaying powers to let the clock run out on the Bill. If peers allow the legislation through, it will become law before the election, which is expected next spring, but the ban would not come into force until after polling day. Government sources said that by postponing implementation, Labour could challenge the Tories during the campaign to say if they would repeal the measure."We hope they will, because we would then campaign to remind people that if they want the ban to stay, they will have to vote Labour," one ministerial source said.'

There are various astonishing assumptions in all this. The first is that the hunting ban is a radical cause of such momentousness that it will indeed galvanise voters. Down in the Pig and Whistle, people will apparently stop watching the football or downloading porn on their mobiles to say to each other, 'Hey, forget Iraq and the rubbish train service and the filthy hospitals and the fact that kids have kicked my windows in for the fifth time this month -- that Blair is okay after all cos he's going to ban hunting!' Somehow, I can't see this. Apparently, the killer move is to put off implementation of the ban until after the election, so any inconvenient, er, violence won't mar the election campaign.

Oh, and the Tories will be put on the spot when asked if they would repeal a ban. Excuse me? If Labour make the hunting ban an election issue, what a gift this would be to a serious-minded opposition party (I know, I know) who could go to town on its irrelevance, undemocratic nature and class spitefulness. As for Blair's mutinous colleagues in Parliament, who he thinks he will buy off with such a move, all it does it advertise their intellectual and political vacuousness. Why should anyone vote for a party with such a bizarre set of priorities?

But there is another issue here -- maybe the most important of all for Blair. He is going to use the hunting ban not only to make a mockery of the Commons by forcing it through in a day, but will then react to the anticipated Lords revolt by forcing it through by means of the Parliament Act. This appears to be a constitutional sledgehammer to crack a nut, since the Parliament Act has only ever been used on a tiny handful of occasions. But maybe the real agenda has been revealed in this poisonous little aside by one of Blair's aides:

'"This approach leaves us with the delicious prospect of a win-win situation," said a Government source. "If it gets through then we make keeping the ban the nuclear issue of the election. But if the Lords block it we can retaliate by putting a pledge for fundamental Lords reform in our manifesto." '

Maybe the real agenda behind the hunting ban is the delicious destruction of Parliamentary process, the delectable removal of all oppostion to the government machine and the delightful abolition of parliamentary democracy altogether.

Further evidence of a Church of England that has so badly lost its way. The Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, the Rt Rev Richard Lewis, has launched into Tony Blair for -- guess what -- going to war in Iraq. And once again, having accused the PM of misleading the nation even if unintentionally, his war critic proceeds to do exactly that himself. For the bishop claims:

'The ultimate responsibility must lie with the Prime Minister. He stuck his head right out and laid it on the block by repeatedly talking about WMD and the 45-minute claim. That was the basis on which he took the country to war and I would have thought he has to stand by that.'

But this is not true. The country was not taken to war over the presumed existence of WMD, let alone the 45-minute claim (which was scarcely mentioned). Blair's speeches always made it clear that the casus belli was Saddam's refusal to obey the UN resolutions requiring him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme, and that Blair's concern was over the link between rogue states such as Iraq, terrorism and WMD -- a link which the entire free world, not to mention the sainted UN, agreed made Iraq a menace.

To repeat for the umpteenth time: the threat posed by Saddam was never in dispute (not until after the war started going pear-shaped, when the chance arose to take a pop at Blair and Bush). Everyone had agreed that Saddam posed a threat. The dispute was over what to do about him. History has been comprehensively rewritten, and the Church of England has played its not insignificant part in that process. According to the bishop, Blair's judgment and integrity are now in question. Au contraire: it's the judgment and integrity of the church that now lies in shreds.

One of the repeated mantras of the anti-war crowd is that the war in Iraq has unleashed the furies of Islamist terror. If only Britain and the US had not invaded and thus enraged the Muslim world, they would not be in the front line for attack. If only they had acted like France.

Well, now the kidnapping of the French hostages provides the clearest repudiation of that idiotic and ignorant opinion. The French hostages have been taken purely in order to force France to abandon its new law banning the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schools. It is an act which makes it as clear as it can possibly be that the aim of the jihad is to oppose with murderous violence any act which thwarts the progress of Islam in the spheres it designates. As Lawrence Auster correctly points out, France is being targeted not for what it does but for what it is -- a secularised western country which does not tolerate religious symbols in public places. As Auster observes:

'This event shows how ineluctably dangerous is the growing Muslim presence in the West. As we see in the French situation, the more Muslims enter and live in a Western society, the more they seek to practice Shari'ah customs and try to make the host society endorse them. Any refusal by the host society to yield to these demands is seen by many Muslims as an "attack on Islam," a conviction which not only sparks civil protests, as in French Muslims' plans to have their daughters disobey the headscarf ban, but, given the existence of the global jihadist movement, leads to terrorism, kidnappings, murders, and the sawing-off-of-heads of innocent people for being citizens of an "anti-Islamic" country. The kidnapping of French journalists over the anti-headscarf rule refutes the belief that jihad is only a defensive reaction against Western interference in the Islamic world. It proves that the presence of large Muslim communities in Western countries, in and of itself, spells unending jihad to force those countries to submit to Islam.'

For that reason, it would be a rare error by the jihadis if the French hostages were murdered. For until now, the jihadis have shown a rare genius in understanding, anticipating and manipulating the weakness, gullibility and astounding ignorance of the west. Thus the west has deluded itself that the jihad is merely a response to US aggression, rather than acknowledge what it really is -- a terrorist programme to reimpose the medieval Caliphate upon the world. The French hostage crisis lets the cat out of the bag -- which is why various Muslim voices have been urging restraint upon the hostage-takers. The illusion is in danger of being punctured. Whatever happens, it will be fascinating to see whether the French line on the defence against terror remains unaltered after this.

Of course, there is no sign that the anti-war crowd here or in the US have even now grasped what is playing out before their uncomprehending and hate-filled eyes. The true nature of the global jihad has never been more apparent. Even if one puts the latest act of mass murder in Israel and the murder of the 12 Nepalese workers in Iraq to one side, the appalling hostage crisis in Chechnya can no more be laid at the door of the Iraq war than can the French hostage crisis. And yet one reads in the Guardian that

'while the Chechen conflict may not have started as a struggle involving Islamist fighters, it is one now'

even though, as a fact box accompanying this article itself makes clear, there has been an attempt to turn Chechnya into an Islamic state since 1858.

If there is any one thing that more than anything else acts as a spur to more terror across the globe, it is the attitude of those in the west whose self-immolating credulousness means that they interpret every act of mass murder as further proof of the west's own wickedness. Every such act is therefore a double victory for the axis of terror, for which the willingness of the west to be so manipulated must surely have exceeded its wildest expectations.

Having just spent three weeks in the US, I was struck once again by how similar and yet how very different that country is from Britain. The thing that really hits you between the eyes is the optimism. You meet it again and again in everyday situations, particularly in the cheerfulness with which Americans deliver any services that are required. Instead of the surly jobsworths of Britain who are always doing you an enormous and onerous favour, American waitresses, counter staff, car park attendants and the rest all convey the impression that they are actually delighted to share the human race with you.

This sunny attitude is surely rooted in America's belief in itself as a force for good in the world, the certainty that American values can make the world a better place. This, of course, is precisely what gets up the nostrils of the cynical, sour, negative Brits. And maybe this helps account for the astonishing and irrational hatred of President Bush. For the dominant force in British society is the opposite belief, that this country's values are rotten and have to be replaced -- and indeed that the whole edifice of western culture is oppressive and coercive and has brought only misery to the rest of the planet. It is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint, anti-progress, which is increasingly having the effect of returning us to a pre-modern state of social anarchy -- despite the fact that it is espoused by people who call themselves 'liberal' or 'progressive'.

There was a time, of course, when liberal progessives believed they had a mission to improve the world by promoting values such as truth, law, justice, morality and freedom. That, of course, is precisely what Bush believes he must do (and, for that matter. so does Tony Blair). For that, he is denounced and vilified as a war-mongering imperialist. Democratic nation-building is now regarded as the new fascism. But the fact is that Bush has stolen the clothes from off the progressives' backs. Ironically, it is now Bush, the man of the right, who is the optimist who believes in building a better world. It is the left, by contrast, who now believe in preserving the tyrannical and murderous status-quo. In this respect, indeed, Bush is not conservative at all but an old-fashioned liberal radical (which is why truly reactionary conservatives such as Pat Buchanan hate him too, and have ended up singing from the same hymn-sheet as the progressives.)

And by golly, do they hate him. For although Britain has far more comprehensively lost its nerve and moral fibre, the culture of irrational hatred, lies and sheer unadulterated spite is raging in the US too like a forest fire. In a Borders bookshop in New York, I leafed through the following new titles: 'The I Hate (Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice) Reader -- Behind the Bush Cabal's War on Terror'; 'The Book on Bush: How George W (Mis)leads America'; 'All the President's Spin: George W Bush, the Media and the Truth' (sic); 'Billionaires for Bush: How to Rule the World for Fun and Profit'; 'Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq'; and the number one New York Times bestseller (natch): 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right' (yes, really).

What madness is this, where fashionable books overtly promote hatred? Please don't get me wrong. I am not an uncritical Bush fan by any means. I think he presides over an administration that compounds its manifest incompetence and mistakes in many areas by an arrogance which prevents it from listening to good advice. But at least he understood one important thing on 9/11 -- the most important thing. And that is more than can be said for John Kerry, the Democratic party and the legions who now march behind the sickening banners of hatred and lies.