Blistering article by Tom Gross in National Review on the BBC's relentless and venomous bias in its Israel coverage. Gross draws attention to its coverage of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London's biggest mosque last Friday. Gross tells us:

'He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque — the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam. "Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels ... calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers...the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."

Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada. But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this. BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.'

Now scroll on to the BBC's TV coverage on sunday of the Tel Aviv bombing, in which five people died and 49 were injured. Using a clip entitled 'A family in mourning', the family it showed was not one of the Israeli dead but of the human bomb terrorist instead.

BBC panjandrums are embarrassed enough to put their hands up to this one. In what it coyly calls a 'correction', the Beeb has posted up the following comment by Roger Mosey, head of TV news:

'The programme editors and I agree it was inappropriate to begin the report with footage of the suicide bomber's family in mourning.It was also inappropriate to include this footage without coverage of the suffering of the victims' families. Using this picture sequence in this way was a mistake. However, the report's coverage of the political ramifications of the bombing and this week's London conference was balanced and fair - and we did, of course, report fully the events in Tel Aviv in our bulletins on Friday night and Saturday.'

No, Mr Mosey, it was not 'inappropriate'. It was grotesque, outrageous and despicable. And a 'correction' just won't do. It does not begin to address the moral deformity of BBC journalists who, when Israelis are murdered, automatically direct their compassion instead at the family of the bomber. For BBC journalists, Jewish victims, Jewish dead and Jewish grief just don't seem to exist.

The BBC's chairman of governors, Michael Grade, is doubtless heavily occupied trying to protect the corporation from the slash and burn predations of Lords Burns and Birt. But unless he tackles head-on the vicious and endemic prejudices of the BBC's journalism, the BBC will simply not be worth defending.

Once again, I am astonished by the way in which patently flawed research is accepted as authoritative simply because it corresponds with a prevailing prejudice. Research commissioned by the Home Office says rape attacks are going up but convictions are going down. As the Telegraph reported:

'Researchers blamed a "culture of scepticism" towards rape victims among police and prosecutors that had led to a loss of confidence in the system.'

BBC Radio News this morning reported this as the Home Office 'admitting' that rapes were going up while convictions came down. But this is to assume that all claims of rape mean that a rape has actually taken place. It is to assume that rape claims made by women are all true -- a wholly prejudiced assumption that all men accused of rape are guilty unless proved innocent, which has led the government to rig rape trials to achieve more convictions. And which is the department which has led this witch-hunt against men in rape trials? Why, none other than the very same Home Office that commissioned this particular piece of research.

The researchers seem to believe that the 'culture of scepticism' is misplaced. They presumably think this because they believe that all women who cry rape are telling the truth. But how do they know? And why -- if they have actually talked to the police and prosecuting authorities -- do they dismiss their 'scepticism' with such contumely? For although it is undeniably true that such a culture of scepticism certainly exists among police, lawyers and others who routinely deal with such allegations, this is because there are ample grounds for such scepticism. Indeed, there is a view that the majority of rape claims are false.

This view is not plucked out of their air. It arises from incidents where the claim is demonstrably false. Like, for example, the incident where a woman claimed she was sexually attacked in a subway, but the CCTV showed this was utnrue; or where a man was prosecuted (and aquitted) for rape even though the girl had sent him a text message saying her allegation was untrue and she would withdraw it; or where a girl who was being arrested claimed that a police officer had sexually attacked her even though he was observed at all times while he was with her and seen to have done nothing at all; or where DNA evidence shows trhe rape claim to have been false; and on and on.

The police, lobotomised by political correctness and terrified of becoming the object of a witch-hunt, do not generally take action against these women. Instead they pass the buck to the courts. Many men are aquitted becasue they should never have been prosecuted in the first palce. The political climate, in which the government has said in effect over and over again that all male rape defendants are guilty, that any woman who claims rape is telling the truth and that therefore the rate of convictions has to be gerrymandered upwards in a perversion of justice that has - staggeringly -- passed almost without remark, provides a positive encouragement for malevolence and attention seeking, not to mention a more profound confusion about the rules of the dating game and the role of the law in punishing a man for an unsatisfactory sexual encounter.

And before any brainwashed zombie starts screaming that I am trivialising rape, it is this very situation which is doing so. Rape is a terrible crime. And it happens. But its seriousness is grotesquely undermined by this farce which, by exaggerating its incidence and substituting persecution for prosecution, is bringing the very notion of sexual violence against women -- not to mention the law itself -- into disrepute.

One of the constant allegations by global warming fanatics is that among reputable scientists, there is an overwhelming consensus than man-made carbon-dioxide is speeding us to eco-catastrophe and that reputable scientists who say this is a load of bunkum are virtually non-existent. Well, as the excellent CCNet electronic network reveals, there’s been a lot of non-existent scientific activity recently. For example, Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London has said that the collapse of some of Antarctica's ice shelves — the subject of huge excitement recently — is likely to be the result of natural current fluctuations, not global warming. He observed :

‘Taken as a whole, Antarctica is so cold that our present efforts to raise its temperature might be regarded as fairly puny. Change is undoubtedly occurring: in the collapse of the northerly Peninsula ice shelves, and elsewhere in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the circumpolar current appears to reached the ice edge and is eating away drastically at the ice shelves. One cannot be certain, because packets of heat in the atmosphere do not come conveniently labelled “the contribution of anthropogenic warming”. But the warming of the Peninsula has been going on for a considerable time, and the pattern of regional change is variable, and neither of these is favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming’.

The next non-existent sceptical scientist to pop up is geologist Craig Loehl who fitted two 3000-year temperature series to seven time-series models. He writes:

‘Of the seven models, six show a warming trend over the 20th Century similar in timing and magnitude to the Northern Hemisphere instrumental series. One of the models passes right through the 20th Century data. These results suggest that 20th Century warming trends are plausibly a continuation of past climate patterns. Results are not precise enough to solve the attribution problem by partitioning warming into natural versus human-induced components. However, anywhere from a major portion to all of the warming of the 20th Century could plausibly result from natural causes according to these results. Six of the models project a cooling trend (in the absence of other forcings) over the next 200 years of 0.2–1.4 °C.’

The next non-existent sceptical scientist is actually a group of no fewer than 125 climate researchers. Reporting on a climate seminar run by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Gummersbach, Germany a few days ago, Bernd Ströher and Benny Peiser write:

‘Particularly revealing were the almost sensational results of a survey conducted by Prof. Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers. The results show impressively that the much- repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human activities and CO2 emissions.

The detailed investigations by Prof Mangini likewise left little place for any justification of Mann's ‘Hockey Stick’ (see post below). In fact, his results showed quite the opposite. Mangini presented the results from his research on stalagmites which show a very pronounced medieval warming period and an even warmer Holocene Climate Optimum. Mangini attributed these climatic fluctuations to the varying influence of the sun. He also stressed that, at least with regard to geological past, scientists are agreed about ice core evidence which suggests that the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels followed an increase of temperatures - and not the other way round…

[The] perhaps most controversial presentation was that by Prof Gerlich. He did not find a good word for climate modellers and their models and even went so far to suggest that some of the CO2-global- warming theories contradict fundamental laws of physics. In a highly temperamental presentation he argued that atmospheric CO2 with a fraction of only 0.03% of the atmosphere's total volume was quantitatively much too insignificant in order have any measurable temperature effect. With help of mathematical computations that were far too complex and difficult to understand, Prof Gerlich maintained that climate modellers were worse than astrologers, the latter of whom at least observed real planets and their movements.’

The last word for today should go to Lord Taverne, who supports reducing emissions of carbon dioxide but seems to be a genuinely puzzled observer of the climate change controversy and who, having fairly set out some of the many uncertainties that seem to contradict the global warming zealotry, told the House of Lords:

‘There is a sort of political taboo about the issue. If you express doubts, you must be in the pay of the oil industry or a Bush supporter. There is a slight whiff of eco-McCarthyism about’.

A whiff? Some of us can’t breathe for the stink. Of course one has to be wary of reserachers who are funded by any kind of vested interests. And of course, not all research is reliable. But one can use common sense to spot facts which are not true, arguments riddled with holes or false logic, and deductions which are not supported by evidence — and when studies are shredded, one looks to see how these researchers defend themselves. And so far, the arguments presented by the global warming lobby are being knocked down like skittles — and are not bouncing back up.

A positive and heartening development in these difficult times. Recently, the students'union at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies attempted to ban a speaker, Roey Gilad of the Israel embassy, from speaking to the School's Israel Society. This outrageous attempt to suppress free speech, at an institution which is so viscerally hostile to Israel that until recently the Israel society itself was banned, was finally defeated after a firm and courageous intervention by the School's administration, and the meeting with Gilad went ahead. The following is an account of that meeting by a participant:

'The SOAS meeting was rather a special event. Before the talk took place, about 30-40 anti-Israel protesters with (very slipshod) placards and flyers stood outside the building. Soon the protestors moved in to fill the lobby outside the lecture theatre. The lecture theater itself was pretty full, and the speaker, Roey Gilad, entered the room. As proceedings were about to start, the fire alarm went off, whilst some protestors began shouting slogans. It was clear that the alarm had been set off by the protestors, but SOAS security insisted on evacuating the building and suspending the event, pending a visit by a fire crew.

At the time, it was not clear that the event would be able to restart, and we filed outside rather angrily. The exit to the building has a large revolving glass door, and as we arrived at the exit, we saw that this had been smashed, with piles of glass lying around. It was not clear whether this was due to malice or as the result of an accident. It certainly made the atmosphere more tense. Outside the building were now about 300-400 people, including the anti-zionist protestors (now joined by a few Neturei Karta nutters).

Amongst the melee, and quite unannounced, was Trevor Phillips, the chair for the Commission for Racial Equality. After about 25 minutes, we were able to go back into the building and settle in the lecture theatre again. The meeting now began once more, this time with a packed lecture hall, and a considerable number of people standing outside. Trevor Phillips was asked to give an impromptu address. He stressed the need for freedom of expression on campus, and told the audience in a direct and challenging way that anyone who prevented this through intimidation or interference would be answerable to him and to the powers of his commission. His tone seemed to genuinely disconcert some of the protesters.

The meeting then continued with a short introduction from Gavin Gross, the JSoc chair, including the problems he had encountered and overcome in getting the meeting to happen at all, and then the invited speaker, Roey Gilad began. His talk was fairly straightforward in outlining the hopeful signs and the possible pitfalls of the current situation, but what carried weight was his approach - sincere and intelligent with a nice line in self-deprecating humour and some very pointed jokes. The message was very conciliatory and reasonable. He really showed his strengths in answering questions. He handled some predictably hostile and downright rude remarks with very solid rebuttals and a refusal to take insults. He certainly had the best of several hostile exchanges, and made the hostile questioners appear small-minded and negative in the context of the broader and more optimistic message he was conveying. The meeting came to an end pretty abruptly as the late start prevented the full 2 hours originally scheduled. However, by that time, SOAS JSoc members could leave with the sense of real achievement - not only getting the meeting to happen in the face of the appalling obstruction of SOAS student union and the petty sabotage of hostile protestors, but having the luck of hearing a very effective advocate of Israel's position. This positive outcome may well have significant impact at SOAS itself, and possibly beyond.'

This small but significant victory showed what can be achieved by a courageous and princpled refusal to be cowed by the forces of prejudice and suppression. All credit to the students, to the SOAS administration and to Gilad for determinedly pressing ahead and turning a black episode in the annals of university freedom into an intelligently handled occasion to redress the poisonous imbalance of hatred and propaganda. And credit too to Trevor Phillips, who unexpectedly chose to make a strong statement defending freedom of expression in the face of this attempt to shut it down.

Sure, it's only a small victory. The British mind is currrently remorselessly closing all around us. But at this SOAS meeting, a small candle was nevertheless lit for freedom, decency and truth. The SOAS students kept their nerve and fought back in a calm, dignified and proportionate way. It's a lesson for all of us.

Update: a reader who was also at this meeting adds:

'Trevor Phillips made a powerful statement about the 'resurgence of overt anti-Semitism' in this country and how criticism of Israel is sometimes driven by hatred of Jews. I was also impressed by the atmosphere of civility throughout the meeting. Israeli and Palestinian supporters in the audience were engaged in a polite dialogue with one Lebanese man even apologising to Roey Gilead for interrupting. Understanding each other and attempts at finding a compromise was precisely what the 'boycotters' tried to derail.'

Almost every day, it seems, brings fresh revelations, accusations or even arrests displaying at last for all to see the dirty secret of the Northern Ireland 'peace process' -- that Sinn Fein and the IRA are indissolubly linked, that Sinn Fein/IRA is still committed to killings, torture and thuggery and that by treating Sinn Fein as a legitimate democratic partner the 'peace process' has merely appeased terrorism and been party to an attempt to suborn democracy on both sides of the Irish border.

The crisis was detonated by the robbery before Christmas of £26 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast, and the subsequent discovery by Irish police of a vast money-laundering operation in the Irish Republic using this cash. Subsequently, the police commissioners on both sides of the Irish border, the Irish Justice Minister and the International Monitoring Commission have not only stated that the IRA was behind the robbery but also that Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are members of the IRA army council.Today, the Times reported:

'THE IRA uses Sinn Fein’s Northern Ireland headquarters to hold high-level meetings and to plan terrorist operations and financing, security sources have said.The IRA’s Belfast Brigade has until “very recently” gathered at Sinn Fein’s Connolly House headquarters in republican West Belfast, where Gerry Adams has met international peacemakers such as Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of Cape Town, and American congressmen, intelligence officials said last night. Members of the IRA’s Belfast “Command”, its head of intelligence and one of the most hardline IRA figures in Northern Ireland had held meetings in the Sinn Fein headquarters at Andersonstown they said. One senior source told The Times: “Connolly House was always the focus point of both IRA and Sinn Fein meetings, though they were cute enough to have other meetings at different places that we weren’t aware of.” He said that at the meetings, known IRA figures would discuss “everything from forthcoming operations to who was moving to what position”.

To which one can only say -- what took them so long to make these links known? They were surely the worst-kept secret in recent history. The truth is that everyone from Tony Blair and Bertie Aherne downwards knew perfectly well that Sinn Fein was umbilically linked to the IRA. But such was the self-delusion behind the 'peace process', which was sustained by the fiction that bringing terrorists into the ambit of power turns them into democrats, that murder after murder after kidnapping after kneecapping was simply ignored -- as was the descent into Mafia-style extortion, intimidation and paramilitary punishment which took over parts of Northern Ireland as the emasculated police retreated and the rule of law on the streets was replaced by the rule of law-breakers.

In the light of all this, the presence of Adams and McGuinness as MPs in the British parliament has always been grotesque. Now, in the wake of these revelations, Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has suspended their access and allowances. But the proper response should have been to expel them as MPs altogether. As Ann Treneman reported in her Times parliamentary sketch, Labour MP Frank Field demanded yesterday:

'“Is membership of this House compatible with membership of the Army Council? And, if it is not, what action does he propose to take against those individuals who have a dual mandate?” Mr Murphy sidestepped this question, again and again. Now he was a man in a straitjacket doing a soft-shoe sidestep shuffle. And still the outrage poured over him. The Labour MP Kate Hoey’s voice dripped with disdain as she demanded to know why Mr Murphy did not admit that Sinn Fein MPs should not be at Westminster. “Isn’t it an absolute nonsense?” she demanded.'

Sure thing, Kate. And it always was. Many people of goodwill believed and hoped in the Northern Ireland 'peace process'. They were naive. Now this appeasement process lies in the ruins of its own profound dishonesty. For 'peace processes' are built on a series of lies. The deepest one is that all people are fundamentally good, and that all disputes, however ancient and bloody, can be solved by the application of reason, which persuades lions to lie down with lambs and terrorists to turn into statesmen.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. People have the capacity for good and bad. If bad deeds are encouraged and condoned, this merely provides an incentive for them to multiply. In a fight between good and evil, you cannot split the difference. Good has to win and evil has to be defeated. The most intractable disputes are sometimes beyond reason, rooted as they are in irrational hatreds, tribal loyalties or systematic brainwashing into murderous paranoia and hysteria. To attempt to appease such forces is lethal.

Peace processes -- which I am discussing tonight on BBC Radio Four's The Moral Maze at 8pm -- are a Faustian pact which create their own deadly momentum. Because they become ends in themselves, nothing can be allowed to derail them. Well, in Northern Ireland, that particular delusion has now finally collided with reality.

The BBC has completely missed the point in its report of the government's new Prevention of Terrorism Bill. The bill does not bring in 'house arrest' after all. On the contrary, the control orders that it does bring in do not involve the deprivation of liberty, which is what house arrest means. To deprive terror suspects of their liberty, the bill provides instead for the government to require Parliament to give its approval to derogate from human rights law. In other words, a completely fresh legislative process would be required if the government should want, at some point in the future, to confine a suspect to his house.

This means that the Belmarsh detainees, who the Law Lords said must not be locked up in prison without trial, will not be confined to their houses either. The implications of this are startling. For it means that terror suspects, who the Home Office has until now vigorously argued posed such a threat to the life of the nation that they had to be locked up without trial, will now be given their liberty -- subject to various lesser restrictions. So if they are now deemed not dangerous enough to be locked up in their houses, why were they said to be so dangerous that they had to be locked up in prison indefinitely, until the Law Lords threw their human rights spanner in the works?

The government's answer is that, until this bill, the only reason the Belmarsh detainees were put in prison was that at that time the alternative to prison was complete freedom. Now, the government says, it is equipping itself with a range of intermediate restrictions which -- mirabile dictu -- the security service says will be perfectly adequate to deal with the level of threat these people pose.

What a load of utter bilge. The inescapable fact is that if these Belmarsh detainees are as dangerous as the Home Office always said they were, they should be locked up, period. Either they were not so dangerous after all; in which case the government and security services are utterly incompetent. Or they are; in which case the government has effectively caved in to the Law Lords and the 'human rights' industry and left this country unprotected.

For my money, the latter is the case. All the stuff about 'concessions' to do with judicial oversight of tough procedures to protect this country is a smokescreen. Charles Clarke may initially have roared, but he has brought forth a mouse. What a shambles.

The former Conservative party leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has rightly drawn admiring comments for an excellent article he wrote in the Guardian last weekend about the far-reaching political implications of blogging. He needed to spell this out to a British readership because, unlike in the US, blogging has not yet caught fire in sleepy little Britain (we're always about a decade behind our transatlantic cousins in social trends). As Duncan Smith observed, blogging democratises the national conversation by providing an alternative discourse to the world view of the left, which the mainstream media (MSM) regards as the neutral middle ground. This warped perception means not only that it presents news through a distorting prism, but that by definition it cannot acknowledge that it is distorted, thus creating a closed thought process. This phenomenon is what leaves the BBC, in particular, unable to fulfil its public service obligation to objectivity and fairness.

After pointing out how the blogosphere brought down two big names in American journalism, Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN, by pursuing the story about their corrupted journalistic ethics when the MSM chose to ignore it, Duncan Smith observed:

'...the blogosphere will become a force in Britain, and it could ignite many new forces of conservatism. The internet's automatic level playing field gives conservatives opportunities that mainstream media have often denied them. An online community of bloggers performs the same function as yesteryear's town meetings. Through the tradition of town hall meetings, officials were held to account by local people. Blogger communities are going to be much more powerful. They will draw together not only local people but patients who have waited and waited for NHS care. They will organise parents of disabled children who oppose Labour's closure of special-needs schools and evangelical Christians who see their beliefs caricatured by ignorant commentators.

'All this should put the fear of God into the metropolitan elites. For years there have been widening gaps between the governing class and the governed and between the publicly funded broadcasters and the broadcasted to. Until now voters, viewers and service users have not had easy mechanisms by which to expose officialdom's errors and inefficiencies. But, because of the internet, the masses beyond the metropolitan fringe will soon be on the move. They will expose the lazy journalists who reduce every important public policy issue to how it affects opinion-poll ratings. Tired of being spoon-fed their politics, British voters will soon be calling virtual town hall meetings, and they will take a serious look at the messenger as well as the message. It's going to be very rough.'

Roll on that happy day, say I. But two other things are notable about this intelligent article. First, it was written by someone who has been written off as a failed Tory leader. The fact is that although he did indeed fail in that position, Duncan Smith has subsequently shown time and again that he gets it, over a range of issues, in ways that leave his Tory colleagues standing. He has understood, for example, that the territory on which new Labour is so very vulnerable is precisely that moral ground from which his pusillanimous Conservative colleagues run away screaming. He has understood that President Bush won power because of his staunch and consistent espousal of 'values' that chime with the mainstream -- the very values that so many Tory MPs foolishly believe they must publicly renounce. And now he has understood that the web has the power finally to topple not just individual journalists caught with their hands in the ethical till, but the whole wretched hegemony of insidious and civilisation-threatening views that has driven Britsh society off the rails.

The second interesting thing to note is where this article appeared -- in the Guardian, the very heartland of those views. This is surely because the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, is astute enough to grasp the nature of the gathering threat to the MSM. Word has it that he intends to use the opportunity afforded by the imminent radical redesign of the Guardian into a format somewhere between a tabloid and broadsheet in size to 'put the "r" back into reporting' -- in other words, to rid its news pages of their fabled prejudice and bias.

This is a bit like trying to turn Pravda into a paper of record. The attempt will be fascinating to watch. But whatever happens to the Guardian, the blogosphere will undoubtedly come to expose the systematic lies being told by the British media, as surely as it is doing across the pond.

The row over the Thought for the Day broadcast by the Scottish cleric Rev Dr John Bell has taken an even more surreal and sinister turn. As I noted in a previous post, BBC Radio Four allowed Bell to broadcast a totally unsubstantiated smear that the Israel Defence Force ordered its soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinian children. He was reporting a conversation he had had with a waiter in a Vancouver restaurant, who claimed to be an Israeli Arab who had resisted such an order. Embarrassed by the fact that Bell had made no effort to discover whether any of this was true, the BBC posted a qualified apology for factual ‘inaccuracies’, although it did not apologise for the libel about the IDF.

Now, an official in the Church of Scotland has weighed into the controversy -- by comparing Bell to Jesus! In a letter to the Herald, Sandy Gemmill, a deputy treasurer in the church, has written:

‘Two thousand years ago there was a man in Israel who used such uncorroborated tales of Samaritans, servants, agricultural workers, sheep, weddings and the like to illustrate various controversial points. Clearly the passage of time has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Israeli authorities to speak out against such tales and take action to suppress apparent lies …Unfortunately, any criticism of the Israeli government is now taken as being anti-Semitic…The term should not be used to deflect unfavourable comments about the way that governments abuse their powers. The Israeli government is no different from those in authority in, for example, Great Britain and the United States. Governments are like monoliths in exercising power on behalf of the people and from time to time must be reminded of the need to see beyond their own self-centred interests to those of the human race. If an uncorroborated story concerning any member of the Israeli Army, real or imaginary, can aid that process then that should be applauded.’

So faced with a libel perpetrated against the Jews, Gemmill concludes that the Jews who are protesting are trying to suppress the truth and crucify the perpetrator, just like he thinks they did to Jesus! One is aghast at this calumny piled upon calumny, at the anti-Jewish prejudice that is here revealed and at the brazen revelation of the ancient theological underpinning of this prejudice. Gemmill assumes that what Bell said was true, even though there is not a shred of evidence for it and even though his account contained two demonstrable errors of fact which should surely give any rational person grounds for suspecting that the whole thing was a farrago of nonsense. Gemmill nevertheless assumes it to be true because he knows, beyond any shadow of doubt and beyond the small question of demonstrable evidence to support such a claim, that Israel abuses its powers. Indeed, he would like to see even more such uncorroborated claims expressed – even about ‘imaginary’ Israeli soldiers — simply in order to throw mud at Israel. So even lies will do. What pathological spite is this? What terrifying beast has been unleashed here?

Gemmill also claims that claims of anti-Semitism are being used by Jews to ‘deflect unfavourable comments’ about Israel -- in other words, to promote ideological censorship. But this is itself a grossly defamatory and wickedly unfair accusation. Jews like myself do not cry anti-Semitism at any ‘unfavourable comments’ about Israel. What we are up against is a systematic campaign of falsehoods, ignorance, misapprehensions and grotesque prejudices designed to delegitimise Israel by falsifying current and historic realities and further delegitimising the moral probity of the Jewish people. Israel does not generally abuse its powers. Rather, it is abused by people spreading lies and libels about it, which are believed by the likes of Gemmill because -- as he has so graphically revealed -- they correspond to a vicious theological Christian prejudice against the Jews.

Bell, who has apologised for unintentionally giving offence, has expressed his bewilderment that what he thought was an unexceptional account should have been taken to be an expression of anti-Jewish prejudice. But now we can see that, whatever Bell may have thought he was thinking, there is a strain of thinking in the church which is indeed virulently anti-Jewish -- and can express such prejudice without any shame. Right from earliest times, the Jews have been doubly victimised -- first by being systematically persecuted, attacked and murdered, and then by being blamed for the destruction of others and of themselves. The Biblical antecedents of this vile scapegoating have now been shamefully reaffirmed in this aftermath to the Thought for the Day affair.

These are indeed the most dangerous and worrying of times for the Jews of Britain. And that's bad news for everyone else.

Some readers may have heard me on Wednesday night's Moral Maze on BBC Radio Four on the subject of Kyoto (repeated on Saturday night at 2215). I was battling vainly against a green witness, my three fellow panellists and the chairman to get them to acknowledge not just that there was a division of scientific opinion about global warming but that, one by one, the key claims supporting the theory wwre being demolished. Now theWall Street Journal draws attention to the fact that one of these claims, which was absolutely crucial in informing the Kyoto protocol, has turned out to be not worth the paper it was written on. Michael Mann's 'hockey stick' curve showed continuous temperatures for about 700 years and then a sharp upward rise in the past 100 years. So persuasive was this 'hockey stick' research for the theory that global warming was happening and was caused by man-made emissions that it appeared no fewer than five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark 2001 report on global warming. Doubts, however, were expressed from the start since Mann's research managed to air-brush out of of the historical picture altogether the medieval warm period in Europe, which lasted for about six centuries and when temperatures were some two degrees higher than they are now. Some omission!

As the Journal relates:

'Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann's method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley's Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS Center essentially agree.'

Now, McIntyre and McKitrick have produced an even more devastating demolition of Mann's 'hockey stick'. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they say:

'The “hockey stick” shaped temperature reconstruction of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) has been widely applied. However it has not been previously noted in print that, prior to their principal components (PCs) analysis on tree ring networks, they carried out an unusual data transformation which strongly affects the resulting PCs. Their method, when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue. In the controversial 15th century period, the MBH98 method effectively selects only one species (bristlecone pine) into the critical North American PC1, making it implausible to describe it as the “dominant pattern of variance”. Through Monte Carlo analysis, we show that MBH98 benchmarks for significance of the Reduction of Error (RE) statistic are substantially under-stated and, using a range of cross-validation statistics, we show that the MBH98 15th century reconstruction lacks statistical significance.'

'Their method...nearly always produces a hockey stick...'

Wow.

And so many people have made huge reputations from all this rubbish. What an astonishing scientific scandal this is, and growing by the day.

In the Times, Gerard Baker ponders the alarming comment made by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that that she thought the new European constitution, with its creation of a single foreign minister articulating a single foreign policy, was a good thing. According to Baker, this eye-popping remark -- so much against American interests, since the aim of the European superstate that the constitution is bringing into being is to be a rival and challenge to American hegemony -- came about because Tony Blair is playing devious politics to manipulate British public opinion:

'The word in Washington is that the British think it would be quite helpful if the US were to get on the EU constitution bandwagon to improve the chances of success in our referendum next year. Britain is arguing that a unified Europe would represent no threat to the US but would help it to achieve its foreign policy goals. Yet once again it seems that a combination of British naivety and misplaced confidence about its ability to control things European has infected the Government’s judgment. The real leaders of the EU — in Paris, Berlin and Brussels, are quite clear about where they want this newly united Europe to go, and it is not in London’s direction, still less Washington’s.

'There is growing confidence in Europe that the US can be persuaded, once the constitution is approved, to change the terms of transatlantic debate; to recognise the EU as the principal interlocutor on US-European relations and to abandon the outdated notion of nation states making their own foreign policy. A key element of this strategy is to encourage the US to abandon Nato as the principal forum for the discussion of transatlantic relations. As a genuinely multilateral body, Nato is an inconvenient obstacle to the EU’s superstate ambitions in foreign policy. Time to ditch it.'

As Baker also reports, however, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears to have got the point since he refused to endorse the EU constitution and said Secretary Rice did not make US policy. Ouch.

Two things leap out from this little episode. Rice -- supposedly a tough nut -- seems to have already succumbed to the foreign policy establishment's version of Stockholm syndrome. And not for the first time (see the debacle over the Road Map and Arafat) Blair seems to have had a dangerously bad effect on American policymaking.

The very special relationship forged over Iraq has the distinct downside that the US administration -- or at least, part of it -- actually listens to him. This is bad news for all who wish to defend the nation state and the security of the world. Blair's support over Iraq was a blip. In the great global battle between democracy and transnational progressivism, Blair is on the wrong side. Washington, please note.

Many years ago, I regularly engaged in hand-to-hand combat with British academics who argued that there was no link between on-screen violence and children's behaviour. I argued that there was plenty of evidence of precisely such links, although the consequences were variable, and pointed to various American studies which demonstrated this. They riposted that there were no reputable studies that showed any such evidence at all. No causal links! they cried.

So I was entertained to read today of a British study published in the Lancet, which is saying that -- guess what -- children who are exposed to violence in films, on television, in video games or on the internet are at significant risk of displaying aggressive or fearful behaviour. The Times reports:

'A review of the influence of media violence shows that both “passive viewing” of television and film and “interactive viewing” of video games have substantial short-term effects on children’s emotions and increase the likelihood of aggression. Parents should treat adult media entertainment with the same caution as medications or chemicals around the home, the authors of the paper, from the University of Birmingham, conclude.

'...Professor Browne said that the causal link between such imagery and violent behaviour was statistically similar to that between passive smoking and lung cancer. He said that family and social factors were likely to affect how a child responded to televisual or computer violence.“Some children are more vulnerable than others,” he said. “If you have a child who is vulnerable then you should not allow them access to this sort of material. It is the same as knowing that your child is depressed and leaving a bottle of paracetamol around. Media violence just adds to the problem and gives them ideas about how to express their anger.” Professor Browne and his co-author, Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, said that media violence clearly had short-term effects by arousing emotions and increasing the likelihood of “aggressive or fearful behaviour”. The influence was particularly evident in boys, they added.

So countless thousands of aggressively-primed children later, British social science is dragged kicking and screaming to admit the truth. The damage that has been done in the meantime by this electronic abuse is incalculable.

The broader issue, however, is the corruption of the academy by researchers whose work -- over a wide range of issues -- is as bent as a corkscrew by ideological agendas of one kind or another. As a result, finding out where the truth actually lies means stepping through a minefield. One can only do so, I think, by measuring what any researcher is saying by as many external verifiers as possible -- including other research, the integrity of the methodology being used, demonstrable facts on the ground, the logic or otherwise of the argument, and so on.

On the relationship between screen violence and children's behaviour, the conclusions became unequivocal in the US some time ago. It is only in Britain -- as ever, a decade or more behind the US in social trends -- where we are just catching up with the news that the electronic earth is not actually flat.

Emanuele Ottolenghi reflects on what is laughably called freedom of speech among the students at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, a hot-bed of anti-Israel feeling. After a lot of pressure from the School, the Student Union agreed to allow an Israel society to be established. But this hardly ushered in a new era of liberal thought:

'Pro-Israel students can now have their society, but that does not mean they can hold events. The Israel Student Society invited a speaker, Roy Gilead from Israel's embassy, to speak on campus on February 22. The Union voted to force the sponsors to disinvite him. Again, a swift intervention from the administration had the Union backtrack and the event can now go on. Still, Kavita Meelu, co-president of the Union, said in a statement, "we have advised the society that the student body... has explicitly expressed that they do not wish for this speaker to be allowed a platform, and therefore will not be actively supporting the society's event."

Veiled threat or grudging concession? Hard to say. Don't anticipate a Student Union welcoming committee when Gilead arrives.

What is obvious is that when it comes to students, at SOAS dissenting views have no place. It is only thanks to pressures exerted from above — and Professor Colin Bundy, head of SOAS, should be commended for coming down on the side of freedom of speech — that a lone Israeli embassy spokesman could get a one-time chance to offer an alternative view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, before the old tune is monotonously sung again by the usual suspects.'

Thus the academy in Britain -- crucible of freedom of thought. Not.

Last Thursday, BBC Radio Four's religious homily slot, Thought for the Day, featured the Rev Dr John Bell, a Scottish cleric. By way of introducing some platitudes about peace in the Middle East, Dr Bell said the following:

'Two years ago, in a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver, I talked to a
waiter called Adam who was an Arab Israeli. That means that he was of Palestinian Muslim stock, born in the State of Israel and, like his Jewish compatriots, he had been conscripted into the Israeli Army. There he had distinguished himself as a good soldier and was made a corporal. He was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed
schoolchildren. And one day, when off-duty, he saved many lives by
killing a suicide bomber who entered the bus on which he was
travelling'.

Thus in the space of a few seconds, the BBC had transmitted the libellous falsehood that the Israelis order their soldiers to kill unarmed schoolchildren, and had been resisted in this murderous and inhuman objective by a heroic Arab citizen (with the improbable name of Adam). And this in the religious slot,too, thus giving the libel the extra imprimatur of godliness and veracity. Yet Dr Bell was merely recycling something that had apparently been told to him by this self-styled Arab Israeli soldier as the truth, without having done anything to check its veracity. And despite the fact that this was likely to add to the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish venom now coursing through British veins, the BBC had put this poisonous piece of unsubstantiated and racially inflammatory saloon-bar gossip on air, complete with demonstrable errors of fact.

Now the BBC has made partial amends. After today's Thought for the Day, the Today presenter announced that the BBC had posted an apology for 'inaccuracies' in last Thursday's broadcast on its Ethics and Religion website. It says the following:

'We have talked to the Israeli authorities and we are unable to find any evidence to support the story told to Dr Bell and recounted by him on Thought for the Day. We also understand that Dr. Bell made two factual mistakes in his script. Those facts should have been checked before the broadcast. The Religion and Ethics Department apologises on behalf of the BBC and regrets the offence that was caused.

The Rev Dr John Bell has written to the BBC to express his own deep regret as follows:

"It is clear that I made two factual errors. The one was that he [the soldier] was 21 and not 19, thus he would have been of the age to be a corporal. The second is that he did not say he was conscripted. My presumption regarding conscription is wrong as regards Arab Israelis. The purpose of my contribution was to highlight the fact that in any peace process, the concordat is not the conclusion, but a stage in a process which will take centuries before peaceful co-existence is secured. It was my specific intention to avoid any bias against one of the two national communities. I perfectly understand that at a time when Jewish sensitivity in Britain is running high because of anti-Semitism that part of my remarks might have been interpreted as furtive racism. However, such a conjecture would be completely untrue. For any unintended dismay I may have caused, I apologise unreservedly." '

Well, that's ok as far as it goes. And one should not underestimate the significance of the BBC making such an apology. Nevertheless, as HonestReporting.com observes, Dr Bell and the BBC have not specifically apologised for the gravemen of the accusation, that the IDF orders its soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinian children. Indeed, Dr Bell did not himself acknowledge that he had recycled an unsubstantiated claim without any evidence that it was true.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Dr Bell -- and the BBC -- saw nothing wrong in recycling such an unsubstantiated claim because they assumed it was true. For this is the poison that has infected British society, and now seems to circulate in the very air we breathe.

Dismaying news that the newly re-opened Finsbury Park mosque, the notorious fulcrum of Islamic extremism which was shut down because of the activities of its former imam, Abu Hamza -- who is now being held at Her Majesty's pleasure -- has fallen once again into the hands of extremists. The Sunday Times reported last weekend that one of the fivew trustees appointed to give the mosque a fresh start, Mohammed Kassem Sawalha, is a former military commander of Hamas. The paper reported;

'Sawalha’s link with Hamas emerged after he was named as a co-conspirator in an American court case involving racketeering and conspiracy. Last week the cleric, who arrived in Britain 15 years ago and has been given indefinite leave to remain, said that he still supported Hamas, notorious for its suicide attacks in Israel.However, he said he was committed to peace in Britain and would help to run the mosque in an open and inclusive way. “I am supported by the Muslim community and have been working ever since I arrived for that community,” he said.

'Asked whether he supported the military activities of Hamas, he replied: “I have no comment on the question of military activity. I am working here to give a new direction to this mosque and break with the past.” According to US court documents, Sawalha was a leading militant in the early 1990s “in charge of Hamas terrorist operations within the West Bank”. The documents, from the federal court in Chicago, claim he met two of the three “conspirators” accused of laundering millions of dollars to finance Hamas activities, including the purchase of weapons.The purpose of the first meeting with the men was alleged to have been to discuss revitalising Hamas’s operations. He met one of the men a second time in London in January 1993. Sawalha allegedly directed him “to provide money to various Hamas members and provided him with contact information”.Although Sawalha is named as a co-conspirator, he has not been charged. Asked last week if he faced arrest in the United States, Sawalha said: “I have not tried to travel there.” '

One again, the question has to be asked -- what in heaven's name are the British authorities playing at, allowing this to happen again and refusing to countenance the action necessaary to put a stop to it? Is it going to take a Theo van Gogh-style murder, or worse, before they finally admit to the nature of the threat and their complicity in nurturing it?

London Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone seems to have completely lost the plot. Under pressure from all sides to apologise for comparing a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a concentration camp guard and then refusing to do so -- to the astonishment and consternation of London Assembly members -- he has now renewed his attack on the Daily Mail, sister paper to the Evening Standard (and for which I happen to write). According to the online Guardian, he said today that the Mail would have been

'"at the front of the queue of collaborators" had the Nazis won the war and branding its papers among "the most reprehensibly edited" organs in the world' ".

He was referring to the fact that in the 1930s, the Mail supported Oswald Mosley's fascists. Now, he implied, the Mail was continuing in that tradition:

'He said the Mail had continued to discriminate against minorities since the war, demonising first Irish immigrants and now asylum seekers'.

The claim that those who are concerned that Britain has lost control of its borders are therefore fascists is not just a smear which seeks to demonise a perfectly legitimate concern. Imputing to it a prejudice of the same type as anti-Jewish hatred grossly belittles that hatred, and implies a profound contempt for all who hasve suffered from it. Similarly, by absurdly calling such concerned citizens -- who probably comprise the majority of the population -- 'fascists' reveals a refusal to acknowledge the true reality of fascism.

This is therefore all of a piece with the Holocaust denial implicit in Livingstone's deeply offensive comparison between the Standard journalist Oliver Finegold and a concentration camp guard. But it leaves open the question of why Livingstone should have alighted upon such a comparison at all, when confronted with an inoffensive journalist door-stepping the Mayor's party to celebrate the anniversary of Labour MP Chris Smith's coming-out as gay. Why exactly has London's uber-pc Mayor so completely lost it?

I think it all goes back to Livingstone's embrace of Sheikh Qaradawi, the Islamic jurist who has expressed poisonous and even murderous prejudice against Jews and gays (an embrace of somewhat more urgent concern than the political agenda 70 years ago of a newspaper magnate who has long been dead). That incident achieved the extraordinary feat of uniting against the mayor a coalition of orthodox Jews, gays, Sikhs, lesbians, Hindus, extreme feminists and others who were appalled by Qaradawi, and who produced a dossier laying out Qaradawi's agrenda in his own words.

Ken hit the roof at this, and no wonder. For among those now ranged against him -- and accusing him, no less, of condoning the most violent prejudice, the pc crime of crimes -- were the very constituencies on which he had constructed his entire political platform. The rainbow coalition of minorities had now turned against their erstwhile patron.

Without these minorities, Livingstone has no power base. That is surely why he threw the party for Chris Smith, to mend his fences with the all-important gay rights lobby (who, incidentally, seemed happy to ignore his support for Qaradawi) -- the party which was door-stepped by Oliver Finegold, at whom the Mayor famously blew his fuse.

But there is one other factor. As I have already remarked in an earlier post, Livingstone's counter-dossier about Qaradawi contained some demented language -- about his accusers being Mossad agents, for example -- of the kind routinely used by Islamists. The Mayor is said to be very close to precisely such Islamists.

And this illustrates an issue far wider than Livingstone -- that the left, of which he is such a shining ornament, has got into bed with radical Islamism and, subscribing to its twisted narrative of 'oppression', routinely libels the Jews of Israel as 'the new Nazis' has breathed life into Muslim Jew-hatred (which itself borrows deeply from Nazi propaganda), and prompted a terrifying increase in anti-Jewish feeling ranging from muttered social prejudice through public accusations of the 'global Jewish conspiracy' to rising physical attacks on Jews, synagogues and cemeteries.

In other words, it's open season on the Jews. Given all these pressures and influences, it therefore surely becomes far more explicable that, when Livingstone saw the Standard journalist come to (as he probably thought) make mischief over his gay festivity, he not only suggested the journalist had been a German war criminal but merely dug himself even further into the hole after being told that the Finegold was Jewish. Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish offensiveness is in the political air that Livingstone breathes.

The Qaradawi affair proved it; now this ouburst reinforces it. The Mayor of London is not fit for public office.

Two things leapt out at me from this morning's argument on the Today programme (0731) between two clerics about the forthcoming marriage of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles and their subsequent blessing by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Canon David Holding, a member of the Archbishop's Council, was having a barney with Rev David Phillips, director of the evangelical Church Society, who was agitated that the Synod does not propose to debate this contentious issue at all.

In the course of wrangling over what the Synod had or had not agreed, Canon Holding suddenly said of Prince Charles:

'Sadly his former partner, the Princess of Wales, is dead...'

Excuse me? His fomer what? The Princess of Wales was not his partner. She was his wife. Has the Church of England really descended to such a point of abject servitude to the secular behemoth that it no longer even talks about husbands and wives for fear of offending those who ofend against Biblical morality and supposed Church teaching?

Then he said:

'It's very important that we don't sit in judgment on any couple that comes to us... we have to move forward.'

So apparently, the Church of England now believes that it is 'very 'important' not to make moral distinctions between behaviour that is good and behaviour that is bad; between spouses faithful to each other until death parts them, and spouses who betray each other; between behaviour that observes Biblical injunctions and behaviour that tramples them into dust. As Rev Phillips scornfully protested, the Church was making precisely such a judgment (as far as it goes) by refusing to marry the errant PofW and CPB in church. To which the ineffable Holding replied that this wasn't sitting in judgment at all -- merely that 'the guidelines' ruled it out.

The Church of England appears to have become God's idea of a very bad joke indeed.

Among the many items swamped by yesterday's eruption of royal marriage lava was an instructive display by London's mayor Ken Livingstone at a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Labour MP Chris Smith coming out as gay. According to the Times, it seems Livingstone lashed out verbally at an Evening Standard reporter whom he accused of working on a paper with a history of fascist sympathies (a reference to the war-time record of the Standard's stablemate, my own paper the Daily Mail) and on being told he was a Jew said he was was behaving 'just like a concentration camp guard'.

This is hilarious. When it comes to supporting fascism and Jew-baiting, this is the same Ken Livingstone, let us not forget, who embraced Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, the prominent jurist who has expressed venomous and even lethal prejudice against Jews and gays.

It was always possible that Livingstone really didn't believe that Qaradawi had said such things in the past. But now he himself has accused a Jew of being like a Nazi.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

How desperately one yearns to believe it. The handshake between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas seems to presage the true opening of a new era. The fact that both these men look similarly grandfatherly, the warmth of their mutual body-language, the reciprocal invitations — to Abbas to visit Sharon in the Negev and to Sharon to visit Abbas in Ramallah — all these things make one want to believe that maybe, just maybe this is the breakthrough we dream about.

Certainly, the Sharm-el-Sheikh summit represents some hitherto unimaginable developments. In Ha’aretz — the Guardian of Israel — once Sharon’s most bitter and implacable enemy, Yoel Marcus muses on one such extraordinary change:

‘A distant observer of this ceremony might wonder at Sharon's transformation from the most hated, war-mongering man in the world to a man of peace and hope in the eyes of Europe and America. But more than anything else, he has been transformed in the eyes of the Arabs into the only Israeli leader who can lead to a permanent agreement. Sharon is the man of the hour. The image of a hesitant foot-dragger has been replaced by a decisive and determined leader, who has resolved to put an end to the anomaly of a state living without borders in a permanent state of war. Never was a leader forced to make such a daring political breakthrough under such harsh domestic conditions, with such great opposition from within his own camp and from all the crazed Greater Israel adherents’.

Hmnn. The heart pulls one way, the head pulls in another. Ha’aretz itself has been electrified by Sharon’s proposed disengagement from Gaza, a renunciation of his own supposed ideological position (I say ‘supposed’ because I think the truth about Sharon is much more complex, but that’s another story) which carries the most enormous risks to his premiership, not to mention also the threat to his life at the hands of Jewish extremists.

But as many other commentators have pointed out, the handshake does not get us very far. As another Ha’aretz writer, Aluf Benn points out:

‘Abbas and Sharon will spend 2005 dealing with their domestic problems, Sharon against the rebels and settlers and perhaps new elections, Abbas with his rivals in Fatah, Hamas and other rejectionists, trying to stabilize his regime and lead the PA to parliamentary elections in the summer. Only after they complete their struggles against their opponents will they reach the moment of truth, where they will have to seriously deal with the road map. Yesterday's meeting was a good start to that process.’

But this, of course, is where reality kicks in. The observations about Sharon having changed are correct, as far as they go — and in the Israeli political context, that’s undoubtedly a very long way. But what the world finds so hard to acknowledge -- and what we must never lose sight of -- is that the source of this terrible conflict is not Israel’s behaviour. It is not the settlements, the road blocks, the prisoners. It is not, despite the near-universal assumption, the absence of a Palestinian state. The source is the Arab world-backed Palestinian terror war against Israel’s existence.

The onus is therefore squarely on Abbas to end that war by dismantling the entire infrastructure of Palestinian terror. It is possible — and we must all pray that this is so — that he will turn out to be capable of the statesmanship necessary to end this 100-years war of ethnic cleansing against the Jews of Israel, and to give his own community an identity other than the impulse to destroy another people. But the signs are not auspicious.

Abbas, whose own doctoral thesis comprised a piece of Holocaust-denial, has repeatedly said he will not forcibly disarm Hamas, Islamic jihad et al because he will never cause a civil war among the Palestinians. He has also made it plain that he does not renounce violence on moral grounds but solely as a tactical manoeuvre in order more effectively to realise his aims. And those aims remain — like Arafat’s — not just a Palestinian state but in addition the demand for unlimited Palestinian settlement in Israel, which would of course destroy it as a Jewish state.

As Lt. Col. Jonathan D. Halevi writes in a sobering article for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, the cease-fire that Abbas appears to have brought about (excluding Hamas, which says it doesn’t accept it) is not even a cease-fire in the sense that we understand it in English, since the Arabic terms ‘hudna’ (cessation of hostilities) or ‘tahdi’a’ (calm) which are being used carry a far more contingent meaning:

‘The term "calm" represents a careful approach by both the PA and the terror organizations. It signifies a declaration of intent that does not require an agreement between the sides and is meant to enable continued discussions with Israel on the conditions for a hudna or cessation of hostilities. It is neither a unilateral cease-fire nor an acceptance of Israel's conditions, but rather a reversible, tactical step if Israel does not provide the appropriate political compensation according to Palestinian expectations. On the Palestinian side, there is broad agreement that the PA will not grant Israel a "free cease-fire." The "calm" on the part of the terror organizations is aimed primarily at enabling the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a hudna with Israel from a more comfortable political position in which the political "ball" is in Israel's court. The announcement by Israel's chief of staff (on 28 January 2005) that the IDF is curtailing offensive military actions in PA territory is regarded as an important signal, but this by no means satisfies Palestinian demands… According to the expanded Palestinian concept of hudna, "resistance to occupation" remains legitimate as a major element in sustaining the struggle against Israel simultaneously with the opening of political channels. According to Abu Mazen, "resistance to occupation" is "a right that is implicit in international covenants," one that "the Palestinian people will never relinquish."

In Abu Mazen's view, this "right" is to be fitted into current political circumstances in a way that brings maximum benefit in both international public opinion and at the political level, and prevents the continued "tarnishing" of the Palestinian struggle by defining it as terrorism. In this context, political and popular agitation (in the form of violent demonstrations) against the security fence is viewed as a successful model of the preferred approach for the Palestinian Authority. Even though Abu Mazen himself disparaged turning the intifada into a military struggle, "resistance to occupation" also includes, according to some of the terror organizations, the use of weapons in the territories (including Jerusalem) against military targets and settlers in response to what they perceive as Israeli "aggression." Abu Mazen indicated this himself when he stated in March 2003 that "resistance by any means is legitimate" with regard to Israeli settlers.’

The uncomfortable reality is that, while it is possible that Abbas will turn out to be a world-class statesman, what looks rather more likely is that he is instead a world-class tactician, who will be able to pose with ostensibly clean hands — and the approval of the gullible, Israel-hating west — disclaiming the murderous terrorism that Hamas and co will continue to inflict upon Israel, thus forcing Israel to react and casting it even more decisively as the regional bully. If this is so, then Israel is in even more danger now than it was in before — the danger of being trapped inside a far shrewder and more sophisticated dance of death.

Switching on BBC News 24 just before going to bed last night, I had the disagreeable experience of being subjected to the poisonous ignorance and prejudice of Lauren Booth who was reviewing this morning's papers. Looking at the pictures of the handshake between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, she complained that while the stories said that Abbas had promised an end to Palestinian violence, there was no equivalent mention of any end to 'Israeli violence' -- only Sharon's promise of an end to 'military activity'.

This of course revealed her gross failure to grasp the fundamental moral difference between Palestinian and Israeli 'violence' -- that Palestinian violence is aggressive terror with the aim of murdering the innocent, while Israeli violence is the military defence of the country's citizens against such murderous terrorism.

Booth then went on to make clear that she indeed reverses the roles of terrorist and victim by saying that any cessation of violence by Hamas would depend on an end to 'Israeli incursions'.. and if a Palestinian child is killed next week then Hamas will respond.' But of course, as anyone whose mind has not been warped by propaganda knows, Israeli incursions are solely carried out in response to terrorism by Hamas and other Palestinian death squads, in order to prevent further atrocities from taking place. And of course, Hamas is pledged to the destruction of Israel altogether, a fact predictably absent from the discussion.

The air-head News 24 presenter did not, of course, challenge any of this rubbish from Booth, but merely smirked and nodded along in agreement. No doubt the programme's editors, and the BBC panjandrums who supervise those editors, couldn't see anything wrong in it either. It would doubtless be considered a perfectly legitimate opinion to be aired. They would not dream of airing certain other 'opinions' in the same way -- those of the BNP, for example -- without the most rigorous and aggressive challenge. But this kind of thing goes unchallenged because, basically, the BBC collectively and corporately is simply incapable of recognising the lies and libels about Israel for what they are. Thus poisonous untruths become cemented ever more securely as unchallengeable fact, and the BBC continues to do its historic bit in giving (unwitting) succour to the cause of evil in the world.

Further evidence in today's Telegraph that our human rights culture is straight out of Lewis Carroll. John Steele tells us:

'Scotland Yard detectives have intervened in suspected murder plots to save the lives of more than 100 gangsters and criminals over the past year, senior officers said last night. Human rights legislation has placed an obligation on police to protect drug traffickers, robbers, gunmen and their associates from their own kind. This work is increasing rapidly, tying up surveillance and intelligence teams at a time when the Metropolitan Police is stretched by anti-terrorist work. Other big city forces and the National Crime Squad have also seen increases in operations to protect the safety of criminals in violent struggles with rival gangs. The increase in kidnapping, especially among the ethnic minority communities, is also consuming large amounts of police time. Gangs even call police to report that one of their members has been abducted, relying on the forces of law and order to rescue them...In recent years, the law - particularly European human rights legislation - has also placed a clear "duty of care" on police to protect not only the innocent and law-abiding but anyone suspected of being at risk'.

It is surely becoming ever more apparent that by enforcing the doctrine of 'identicality' -- that treating anyone differently from anyone else is an improper form of discrimination, regardless of circumstances or behaviour -- human rights law is operating as a primary engine for the destruction of the discrimination between good and bad, right and wrong which lies at the very core of the Judeo-Christian moral codes. It is not only increasingly making the governance of Britain impossible, but is increasingly corroding the moral infrastructure of our society itself.

Thomas Patrick Carroll, who is described as a former officer in the clandestine service of the CIA, makes the screamingly obvious -- and therefore never-made -- point on FrontPage.com about the perversity of blaming America for the rage in the Arab world. Addressing the idiotic remark by another former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, now a high-profile critic of American foreign policy, that global terror 'has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe, and everything to do with what we do in the Islamic world', Carroll observes of American support for Israel, the ostensible key grievance:

'Even though an ocean of ink has been spilled trying to show this is a major source of Arab hatred toward America, the results are unconvincing. Few of the real problems that plague the region have anything to do with Israel, and most Arabs know it. From the slaughterhouse of the Iraq/Iran war, to the invasion of Kuwait, to Syria’s continuing subjugation of Lebanon, to the failed experiments in Arab socialism, to the daily crunching of human beings under the heels of tyrants in practically every country of the Arab world — these are Muslim disasters, not Jewish ones. While Israel is certainly a source of irritation and a focus of anger, Bernard Lewis’s theory probably comes closet to the truth:

"[Israel] is, so to speak, the licensed grievance — the only one that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger." '

It cannot be stressed too often that victim culture, where victims get scapegoated and blamed for the wrongs committed against them by those who are committing those wrongs, lies at the root of our current confusions -- made infinitely worse by the fact that people like Scheuer and all the rest of the anti-war, anti-west, appeasenik malcontents and useful idiots have eagerly swallowed the whole lunatic anti-analysis and regurgitate it daily to pollute and distort the public debate.

I have written before in this diary of the appalling case of Daniel Scot, the Christian pastor who has been convicted in the state of Victoria, Australia, of incitement to religious hatred under a law which bears a striking similarity to the one the government is proposing and which it insists — falsely, in my view — will not criminalise legitimate criticism of religion. I think that it will, and a number of Christians, secularists and others think so too and are very deeply alarmed. The Australian law, and in particular the conviction of Daniel Scot, provides a highly disturbing guide to what we are letting ourselves in for, particularly given the militancy with which Muslims attack any criticism of Islam. There is every danger that this new law in will stifle, through self-censorship as much as anything else, vital British debate about religion.

What I had not realised until today was quite how shocking is the case of Daniel Scot. This became clear from a poorly attended meeting at the House of Commons, where he briefly related his story. Born in 1951 in the Punjab, he belonged to the small Christian minority in Muslim Pakistan. He wanted to become a lecturer in maths at the University of Punjab but as preference was given to Muslims he studied the sacred texts of Islam and passed his exam in Islamic studies with a perfect score to get the job.

In 1986, however, Pakistan made the offence of insulting the Prophet Mohamed punishable by death. Shortly afterwards, the university authorities pressured Scot to convert to Islam. He refused and was forced into hiding after death threats were issued against him. Months later, he fled Pakistan for the safe haven (!) of Australia. He became a maths lecturer, was ordained as a pastor and began holding seminars on Islam. Two months after the religious hatred law came into force, one of his seminars — conducted at the invitation of Pastor Danny Nalliah, head of Catch the Fire ministries in Melbourne —was attended by three Muslim converts at the behest of the Islamic Council of Victoria, working in tandem with the Equal Opportunities Commission of Victoria. They took notes, which became a complaint which formed the basis of the case against Scot and Nalliah.

Much of this complaint related to statements made by Scot which were merely direct translations from the Koran. According to Scot’s supporters, the three complainants later admitted their knowledge of the Koran was slight and they had not recognised the verses. An audio transcript of the seminar, say Scot’s supporters, shows that he told his audience several times that ‘Muslims are not the enemy. We must love Muslims’ and that most were peace-loving, kind, family-oriented people — but that most Australian Muslims didn’t know what the Koran actually said.

Scot and Nalliah were nevertheless found guilty last December. The penalty has yet to be handed down. But the Islamic council of Victoria is considering asking for penalties including a public apology, an injunction prohibiting Scot from conducting further seminars, the suppression of the disputed seminar’s audiotapes and transcript, and the suppression of the court files relating to the hearing.

When our Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart next repeats her fatuous and misleading apologia for this terrifying piece of legislation, the case of Daniel Scot — a refugee from Islamic death threats arising from the suppression of free speech, who found that his place of sanctuary had been nightmarishly suborned by the same clerical fascism — should be read into the parliamentary record as witness to the surrender to religious intimidation in which the government is now so terribly complicit.

I have been rubbing my eyes in astonishment at the blizzard of pronouncements over the past few days by the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. He has long been referred to as the 'PC pc' on account of his relentless, on-message polyversity-speak. But now he has become Britain's most senior policeman, some of the things he has been saying and doing are, to put it mildly, alarming.

One of his first actions as Commissioner, it seems, was to change the Met's logo, at a cost to the taxpayer of several thousand pounds, because its motto 'working together for a safer London' was in joined-up handwriting and thus -- wait for it -- 'discriminated against short-sighted people'. A Met spokesman told the Sunday Telegraph:

'The old logo was not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 because it was slightly italicised and it may have proved difficult to read for visually impaired people.'

Any longering hope that Sir Ian might have been having a bit of a high-spirited tease to celebrate his arrival was dispelled by the outbreak of highly opinionated remarks with which he peppered the newspapers over the weekend. In an interview in Saturday's Telegraph, appositely headlined

'Offbeat ideas of the nation's top policeman',

he was asked whether the Met was still 'institutionally racist'. He replied:

'Yes it's institutionally racist because all organisations are at the moment, but we've moved on hugely'.

All institutions? The whole of institutional Britain is racist? With this sally, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner not only repeated the notorious libel against his own force which has all but paralysed it, but also -- doubtless unwittingly -- lined himself up with the most extremist position which falsely portrays the whole of British society as racist in order to damn and damage it.

Next, we were treated to the kind of impenetrable jargon which has turned sociology into a joke:

'Most muggers are black because criminality is a function of other dysfunctions. This is about the link between criminality and deprivation, family dysfunction and poor education. All we in the police are is the anvil on which these inequalities are beaten.'

Uh-huh. No doubt they talk of nothing else in the anvil canteen. Next, we had Sir Ian's declaration of war on middle-class weekend cocaine-snorters, which predictably preoccupied the media who furnish a goodly proportion of those about to feel the warmth of sir Ian's interest. Any belief that this might presage a welcome zero tolerance approach to drugs, however, was alas quickly dispelled when Sir Ian informed us:

' "I'm relaxed about cannabis," he says. "My job is to deploy the resources I have in the best way, and I don't think [arresting people who smoke cannabis] is the best way." '

So it's zero intolerance of cannabis; in other words, business as usual in stoking the tinder of the rising drugs conflagration.

But maybe the most alarming observation of all was published in another interview in the Sunday Times, in which Sir Ian said:

'There is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist. The question is how we help the vulnerable young who are attracted to violence.'

Ye gods. Even the normally cool interviewer, Jasper Gerard, was astonished by this. Does the Metropolitan Police Commissioner really not get it? He seems to believe that all religious 'fundamentalism' is the same -- bizarre or irrational views of which we should all be tolerant because we must not be nasty or prejudiced or bigoted towards what anyone else thinks. He does not seem to understand that Islamic fundamentalism is very different because it explicitly preaches hatred, violence, conquest or death for all unbelievers.

Sir Ian is now the police officer upon whose shoulders rests a large part of the responsibility for the security of the nation. Heaven help us.

Another important article by Anthony Browne in the Times last Saturday reported on the horrifying consequences for British Muslims who try to leave Islam for Christianity. They face not merely being shunned by their family and community, but attacked, kidnapped, and in some cases killed. And yet the police do not offer them protection:

'For police, religious authorities and politicians, it is an issue so sensitive that they are accused by victims of refusing to respond to appeals for help. It is a problem that, with the crisis of identity in Islam since September 11, seems to be getting worse as Muslims feel more threatened...Mr Hussein told The Times: “It’s been absolutely appalling. This is England — where I was born and raised. You would never imagine Christians would suffer in such a way.” The police have not charged anyone, but told him to leave the area. “We feel completely isolated, utterly helpless. I have been utterly failed by the authorities. If it was white racists attacking an Asian guy, there would be an absolute outcry,” he said. “They are trying to ethnically cleanse me out of my home. I feel I have to make a stand as an Asian Christian.” '

The government wants to create a new crome of incitement to religious hatred because it says it wants to combat 'Islamphobia'. Isn't this the real Islamophobia, where the police -- and, for that matter, the astonishingly silent churches -- are too frightened to confront the intimidation and violence being carried out in the name of Islam?

Further to my post below, 'Attitudes to genocide', a reader has sent me the following correspondence that he had with BBC Online:

'Sir I'd like to bring to your attention a graphic example of why the BBC receives much criticism with regard to its reporting on the Middle East conflict. As I write this letter, the BBC has on its website, two articles about killings in the Middle East and Africa. One story, about a single Palestinian man killed while he approached a border fence is entitled "Israelis Shoot Dead Palestinian". The other story, about 100 people killed in a bombing raid by the Sudanese government is entitled "Sudan Troops in Darfur Offensive". The details on the killings do not appear in the headline nor in the following paragraph printed in bold. If this example of unbalanced reporting were an aberration, one might suggest that it was due perhaps, to poor discretion being exercised by BBC website editors on this occasion. This type of asymmetric reporting however, is routine for the BBC. When Israelis are involved in the deaths of Palestinians -- one in this case --, the BBC employs direct, active language in the headline and body of its articles to describe the incident and assign unambiguous culpability to Israel. By contrast, when reporting on the killings of Israelis by Palestinians -- or in this case, the murder of 100 civilians by the government of Sudan -- the language is typically passive and circumspect. As a frequent reader of the BBC website (and a TV license payer in the UK), I find the BBC's bias transparent and deeply offensive. It also represent a clear violation of your public charter to be fair and balanced in your reporting'.

This was the BBC's reply:

'As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the conflict in Darfur take place in completely different contexts, it is clear that different editorial approaches need to be taken. The Middle East editorial team tries - as far as possible - to address each deadly act of Israeli-Palestinian violence in a balanced and objective way, with a focus the team tries to apply to all the countries in its region, even Iraq. That close-up focus is much less likely in African conflicts of which Darfur is an example which are dealt with by the Africa editorial team. In addition, headlines are not to used to assign culpability, but rather to sum up the story in as brief a way as possible (in a template of 31-33 characters). This inevitably results in an avoidance of longer words, which may be why there may be a slight imbalance. Nevertheless a search through the BBC News website archive produces headlines where:

1. Palestinians are killed without mentioning an agent:

Five Palestinians killed in Gaza (30/12/2004)

2. Israelis are killed with an agent mentioned:

Suicide blasts kill 11 Israelis (14/03/2004)

3. And where there have been multiple (Palestinian) deaths which are not mentioned in the headline

Major Israeli incursion in Gaza (25/10/2004)

To which the irate license-fee payer replied in turn:

1. Why should the "focus" of BBC reporting be different for the Middle East than for Africa such that your ME editorial team takes a "close-up focus" while your African editorial team takes a -- presumably -- "remote" focus? Do the deaths of 100 Sudanese merit less personal attention than the death of one Palestinian?

2. The suggestion that the substantive difference in headlines is due to space limitations is risible. Please note that the headline, "Israelis Shoot Dead Palestinian" contains 31 characters while the headline "Sudan Troops in Darfur Offensive" contains 32 characters. The latter headline could have just as easily read, "Sudan Army kills 100 in Darfur" which would have required only 30 characters and would have been a far more accurate rendering of the incident.

3. The headline you have provided as an example of the BBC identifying an agent, "Suicide blasts kill 11 Israelis" (14/03/2004), does nothing of the sort. In fact, it overtly fails to identify a Palestinian as the perpetrator of the murders.

As demonstrated, your arguments attempting to justify the different handling of the two stories are weak and facile. The truth is that the BBC maintains a distinct editorial bias when reporting news of the conflict in the Middle East, deliberately maligning the Israelis whenever possible. This is an odious practice for any news organisation, but particularly so for one funded by the taxpayer and pledged to a policy of fair and impartial reporting'.

Further comment is superfluous.

When Islamic terrorists blew up three commuter trains at Atocha station in Madrid on March 11 last year, they changed the face of Spanish politics. Shortly afterwards Spanish voters, blaming the outrage on Spain's membership of the coalition against Saddam Hussein, threw out their government and elected an appeasement-minded administration in its place.

Now, it seems that the belief some of us held at the time that the Atocha atrocity was nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do instead with the aim of the Islamic jihad to retake Andalucia as part of a restored Islamic caliphate was correct. For another, subsequent plot to attack Spain has apparently been uncovered -- and this one would have dwarfed Atocha. According to the Front Line programme transmitted on January 25 by the American TV station PBS, in October 2004 Spanish police disrupted a plot to bomb multiple targets, including a skyscraper designed by the architect who designed the World Trade Center; the offices of anti-terrorism judge Baltasar Garzón; the soccer stadium where the Real Madrid club plays; and, once again, the Atocha train station. 38 suspects are now being held.

This horrific plot was being hatched after Spain had effectively thrown up its hands in surrender over Iraq. According to the programme, the driving force behind these Islamists was the desire to retake Andalucia as an important part of the medieval Islamic caliphate. Well, there's a surprise.

A reader who saw this film, and who happened to be in Madrid last October and observed a great deal of unsual police activity at that time, drew it to my attention. You can access the film by clicking here to get to the PBS Front Line site; the revelation about the October plot comes almost at the end. The rest of it is pretty terrifying too, detailing how the jihad has now now turned its murderous attentions to Europe.

The far-reaching implications of this are surely of extreme importance. Yet as far as I can see, apart from this PBS programme there has been virtually no reporting or comment about this. Is this part of the general fatuous -- and potentially lethal -- denial of the nature of the threat we face?

Gerard Baker in the Times just gets better and better. Shredding the usual suspects who could only sneer as usual at President Bush's State of the Union speech, Baker snorts:

'The Guardian insisted it amounted to a near-declaration of war on Iran and Syria. The BBC was dutifully sniffy about the very idea of promoting democratic change in the world. You sometimes wonder how the BBC and The Guardian might have reported the Sermon on the Mount: “Self-proclaimed Messiah endorses poverty for all. Says persecuted must grin and bear it.” Or Churchill’s oration on taking office: “Prime Minister promises to fight mighty Germans with nothing more than personal body fluids.” '

As Baker says, not only is the President making it harder and harder for the US to return to its pre-9/11 appeasement-of-tyranny mode, but the Iraq election has transformed the atmosphere. Bush's aim, to end tyranny and terror in the Arab and Muslim world, is so breathtaking in its scope that some prudent scepticism is in order. Can it really be done? Are not the obstacles simply overwhelming? Will America have the stomach to carry these words into deeds? And in Iraq itself, it would be foolish to deny that the whole thing might still go pear-shaped.

But -- so far, things are cautiously promising, notwithstanding the terrible violence. Far from the appeasenik predictions of a) the election not taking place b) no-one coming out to vote or c) a mullocracy being voted into power, it looks as if Iraq will be governed by a coalition of secular and religious forces. As the Times reports elsewhere, Ayatollah Ali Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance, headed by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is likely to emerge the winner. But Sistani has so far played a statesmanlike game:

'Although it has a strong religious bias, Sciri is unlikely to propose its leader, the cleric Abdelaziz al-Hakim, as prime minister. Most Iraqis would prefer a more secular face at the helm, making it likely that figures such as Adel Abdel Mehdi, the Finance Minister, or Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the conservative Dawa party which forms part of the Shia coalition, could step to the fore.Another front-runner is Hussein al-Shahristani, a physicist who was jailed by Saddam Hussein for refusing to build a nuclear bomb and who escaped to Iran in 1991. He is also close to Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has rejected the Iranian model of governing theocracy'.

Sciri's links to Iran need not be troubling. Given the huge gulf between the deeply unpopular Iranian mullocracy and the people, an alternative, moderate Shi-ite power base in Iraq that crucially believes in the separation of mosque and state might help bring about the toppling of the Iranian regime that the US hoped would be a consequence of the removal of Saddam, and which they are frantically now talking up.

Clearly, there are enormous caveats to enter in all this -- not the least of which is what President Bush, for all his fine words, actually intends to do to stop Iran from succeeding in developing nuclear weapons. But ultimately, optimism for the eventual success of good over evil rests on a fundamental belief in the deepest impulses of human nature towards peace and freedom, and to act in the long-term interests of the human species. And if one has that belief, one cannot fail to be moved by what has happened already. As Baker concludes:

'There is an unstoppable momentum for change in the Middle East now. In just two years tyrannies have been felled in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Palestine, the inexorable clock of human mortality has ended another. But the crucial element was always going to be the voluntary and courageous act of self-assertion that democratic and free elections represent — a message heard around the region and the world'.

A balanced and generally favourable account by Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post on the coverage of last week's Holocaust Day finds much to applaud in it -- apart from the Arab press, which ignored it, and a couple of lapses by the Guardian.

Gross compares this with the omissions in the coverage of the Holocaust itself, particularly by the New York Times, which played down the Nazi genocide by publishing only brief reports which it buried inside the paper. Gross observes:

'The Times has never properly acknowledged its failings in this matter. And the fact that a comparable mind-set still seems to dominate the paper continues to have consequences – whether in the unfair coverage it gives Israel or the relative lack of attention given to other genocides and systematic acts of inhumanity, such as those in North Korea or Burma, and in particular those for which Arabs are largely responsible, as in Darfur. The tsunami tragedies can occupy the front page for days on end, but Darfur is lucky if it makes an inside page once in a week'.

The NYT is surely far from alone in this. Before Darfur, the Sudan genocide which had been going on for some two decades had been all but ignored by most of the media. The prevailing attitude seems to be that this kind of behaviour goes on all the time in the third world so requires little comment -- in other words, that human life there is of less value than in the west. The fact that this is patently a racist attitude does not, of course, occur to the western 'liberals' who profess it. The result is that barbarism in the developing world is ignored by western media which, by concentrating disproportionately on abuses by its own side, sanitises and even excuses the world's greatest horrors and abandons their multitudinous victims.

A ten year-old Palestinian child, Nuran Deab, was shot dead on Monday in Rafah, after Palestinians fired shots in the air. The Palestinians arrested a suspect on Tuesday evening. But as HonestReporting.com records, intitial false claims by Palestinians that the child had been shot by Israeli soldiers were promoted as correct by a number of outlets, including the Independent newspaper and the UN (of course):

A

gence France-Presse, under the headline 'Palestinian schoolgirl shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza,' prominently quoted the PA prime minister condemning it as 'a crime.' The Israeli denial of responsibility was buried at the very end of the AFP report. The Independent based its story on a UN official who directly accused the IDF of firing on Deab, then passed off IDF spokespersons who denied culpability as 'plainly embarrassed.'Knight Ridder-Tribune quoted both Ahmed Qurei decrying the shooting as an IDF 'war crime,' and a UN official condemning 'the Israeli military's indiscriminate firing into civilian areas.'

They then compounded their offence by ascribing a 'revenge' motive to subsequent Palestinian terror, ignoring the fact that the Palestinians have been constantly firing shells and mortars at Israeli towns and settlements:

'As we've seen repeatedly in this conflict, the terrorists use minor grievances ― oftentimes fabricated ― as pretexts to rationalize their murderous acts against civilians. When media outlets report these statements from Hamas, et al., without directly questioning their merit, the media become a tool exploited by terrorists to promote their anti-Israel campaign'.

As in Iraq, the more barbaric the acts of terror, the more the media allow themselves to be manipulated to reverse murderer and victim -- and then the more likely it is that more acts of terror will be committed to repeat the propaganda victory. The media who perpetrate this outright inversion of the truth truly have blood on their hands.

An absolutely understandable cry of rage from a serving soldier in Iraq, LTC Tim Ryan, excoriates the appallingly distorted media coverage of Iraq which has given such a false picture of the situation there. As he says, only the most negative developments are reported and virtually none of the positive:

'As a recent example, the operation in Fallujah delivered an absolutely devastating blow to the insurgency. Though much smaller in scope, clearing Fallujah of insurgents arguably could equate to the Allies' breakout from the hedgerows in France during World War II. In both cases, our troops overcame a well-prepared and solidly entrenched enemy and began what could be the latter's last stand. In Fallujah, the enemy death toll has exceeded 1,500 and still is climbing. Put one in the win column for the good guys, right? Wrong. As soon as there was nothing negative to report about Fallujah, the media shifted its focus to other parts of the country.

'More recently, a major news agency's website lead read: "Suicide Bomber Kills Six in Baghdad" and "Seven Marines Die in Iraq Clashes." True, yes. Comprehensive, no. Did the author of this article bother to mention that Coalition troops killed 50 or so terrorists while incurring those seven losses? Of course not. Nor was there any mention about the substantial progress these offensive operations continue to achieve in defeating the insurgents. Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being criminal'.

The exaggeration of American misbehaviour and the absence of coverage of real atrocities by the insurgents has further produced a situation in which the coalition are painted as the bad guys while those committing acts of bloody barbarism are simply ignored:

'While the media was busy bashing the Coalition, Muqtada's boys were kidnapping policemen, city council members and anyone else accused of supporting the Coalition or the new government, trying them in a kangaroo court based on Islamic Shari'a law, then brutally torturing and executing them for their "crimes." What the media didn't show or write about were the two hundred-plus headless bodies found in the main mosque there, or the body that was put into a bread oven and baked. Nor did they show the world the hundreds of thousands of mortar, artillery and small arms rounds found within the "sacred" walls of the mosque. Also missing from the coverage was the huge cache of weapons found in Muqtada's "political" headquarters nearby. No, none of this made it to the screen or to print. All anyone showed were the few chipped tiles on the dome of the mosque and discussion centered on how we, the Coalition, had somehow done wrong. Score another one for the enemy's propaganda machine'.

As Evans says, the result is to erode still further international support for America and to strengthen the insurgents' resolve. That's the intention among at least some of the media; the rest are either lazy, or useful idiots. Wicked stuff, indeed, and standard media fare on both sides of the pond as the media do their bit to fight against their own side.

The indefatigable and beady-eyed UN watcher Anne Bayefsky pens a sharp and salutary corrective to the UN's PR stunt on Holocaust Day. As she points out, the fact that it marked the liberation of Auschwitz, with many pious imprecations of 'never again' and so forth, was a startling departure from its normal stance towards the Holocaust -- ignore or deny it, and towards the Jews -- libel and attack them with maximum prejudice in order to delegitimise the Jewish state. Bayefsky suggests that the whole performance was designed to repair the battered image of both the UN and Kofi Annan in the wake of the oil-for-food and Congo sexual scandals. But far from any real change, the UN remains as bigoted and vicious towards the Jews as ever:

'Widening the lens, we notice that last month the U.N. adopted 22 resolutions condemning the state of Israel, and four country-specific resolutions criticizing the human-rights records of the other 190 U.N. member states. Also in December the public entrance of the U.N. sported the annual solidarity with the Palestinian people exhibit, featuring a display about Palestinian humiliation at having to bare midriffs at Israeli checkpoints. (No mention was made of the purpose of the checkpoints or the Israelis who have died from suicide belts on Palestinians who circumvent them.)

On exactly the same day that the secretary-general announced the holding of the commemorative session, January 11, 2005, he also pushed forward the U.N. plan to create a register of the Palestinian victims of Israel's non-violent security fence. (There are no plans to create a register of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism.) In March the U.N. will begin its annual session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, at which Israel will be the only U.N. member state not allowed to participate in full because U.N. states continue to prevent it from gaining equal membership in a regional group. The U.N. remains without a definition of terrorism, never having transformed the names of Palestinian terrorists from abstract entities into the targets of specific U.N. condemnation or consequences of any kind. And any day now we can expect the secretary-general to continue his pattern of denouncing Israel's lawful exercise of self-defense as "extrajudicial killing" or as a morally reprehensible contribution to "a cycle of violence." In other words, U.N. demonization of Israel and the green light to the killers of Israelis that such demonization portends will not skip a beat. This is the face of modern anti-Semitism'.

The UN's slick and cynical performance over Auschwitz will make it even more difficult to persuade people that it is endemically prejudiced towards Israel and the Jews. And even though oil-for-food and the Congo scandals remain as undeniable evidence of its corruption, the world still refuses to face the unpalatable fact that its representative body is not a force for good on this planet but a powerful force for bad.

An excellent and necessarily sobering article by Emanuele Ottolenghi reminds us of what Mahmoud Abbas has to do to qualify for the mantle of man of peace and Palestinian statesman that so many are desperately hoping he will assume. Simply, he has to not only talk the talk but walk the walk -- and that means disarming the Palestinian terror infrastructure. His first gestures were promising - deploying Palestinian police to stop rocket attacks on Israel and negotating a cease-fire. But gestures is so far all they are. As Ottolenghi observes:

'Those who advocate a cease-fire in the hope that bringing extremists into the political process will turn them into moderates forget the lessons of history. Extremists must first be disarmed: leaving them with their weapons will only allow them to challenge state power and blackmail elected authorities. That is why a cease-fire is but an illusion, unless Abbas resolves to fight terrorism'.

Unfortunately, Britain and Europe are all too eager to pretend that such illusions are reality. Once a piece of maybe wishful thinking takes hold -- such as 'Abbas is a moderate' -- it becomes impossible to shake, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary, if other politicians are determined to bury their heads in the sand. There is no doubt that Abbas's character and style are very different from that of Arafat, whom one could not have imagined making these anti-terror gestures. But Abbas's own record in Holocaust denial and his stated ultimate aim -- the right of Palestinian immigration into Israel, which would destroy it as a Jewish state - mean prudent circumspection towards him should be the order of the day.

Of course it is possible that despite this background, he will prove to be a real statesman by putting all that behind him. But as Ottolenghi emphasises, the real evidence for that must be his determination to end both the violence and the institutional incitement of his people to murder the Jews. If he does that -- well, then we really would have a sensational transformation in the Middle East and the first real hope for peace in a century. And that's precisely why I am sceptical.

The Guardian today got terribly excited about a comment made by lawyer Ben Emmerson in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission hearing that granted bail to a mentally ill terrorism suspect, Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh. Its front page splash declared:

'Terror suspects detained without trial will choose to remain in prison rather than be granted bail on the condition that they live under house arrest, a special court was told yesterday. Ben Emmerson QC, who was representing two detainees seeking bail, said the pair would prefer to remain behind bars in Belmarsh if the alternative was the isolation and claustrophobia of house arrest. Speaking at a hearing in London of the special immigration appeals commission, Mr Emmerson said he believed other suspects who are detained without charge would take the same course'.

What the Guardian omitted to report was that when the Commission chairman Mr Justice Ouseley asked Emmerson incredulously whether his clients really would prefer to stay in Belmarsh rather than go home under house arrest, he backed down and conceded that this was unlikely.

Meanwhile, the admirable legal editor of the Telegraph, Joshua Rozenberg*, spotted what other papers missed at that hearing. He reported:

'Yesterday Mr Emmerson, for Abu Rideh, asked Siac to prevent the press from reporting any of the detailed medical evidence in the court's written judgment, even though it had already been disclosed in open court. The application for reporting restrictions was opposed by The Daily Telegraph and dismissed by Mr Justice Ouseley, Siac's chairman, after a brief hearing. Mr Emmerson argued that publication would breach his client's right to respect for his private life under Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention, while the newspaper maintained that this was outweighed by its right under Article 10 to impart information about a court that often sat in closed session'.

So here was a 'human rights' lawyer, of the camp that normally screams blue murder about secret trials and Britain's quasi-police state, asking for this hearing to be made secret simply to censor information detrimental to his client which had already been made public!

Why do I get the strong feeling that these terrorism cases are being increasingly manipulated by human rights lawyers into a politicised circus?

*Author's husband

An astonishing document has been produced by Freedom House’s Centre for Religious Freedom. Drawing on some 200 books and other publications associated with Saudi Arabia which were gathered from a number of American mosques, it provides an utterly horrifying picture of how Saudi is indoctrinating potentially thousands of American Muslim citizens to hate America and work against its democracy and its interests.

These documents instruct American Muslims not only not to integrate but to hate and attack all unbelievers in America:

‘Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion,leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.’

The books and pamphlets tell them that the only purposes for living in America are to represent a Muslim government, conduct commercial transactions, seek medical care, study, seek converts to Islam, and uncover the infidels’ corrupt ways, erroneous beliefs, and plots they may be hatching against the Muslims.

Anti-democracy indoctrination is drilled into their minds:

‘This theme runs through a work published in English by the International Islamic Publishing House in Saudi Arabia and apparently intended for Muslims living in the United States. Copies of this book were collected at the Al Farouq Mosque in Houston, Texas. Chapter 2, of To Be a Muslim [Document No. 31], “The Compulsory Nature of Islamic Activism,” asserts that all available political and economic systems and man-made laws are fundamentally anti-Islamic and “operate functionally to deny the wisdom of Allah on earth.” The book states that the responsibility to change these systems is “binding in principle, in law, in self-defense, in community and as a sacred obligation of jihad.” It is compulsory for every Muslim to establish an Islamic society “in every country on earth and to restore the Islamic way of life taught by all the prophets.” '( my emphasis)

Tolerating other religions is prohibited:

‘

Islam is the final and most perfect religion and by its coming all previous religions, including Judaism and Christianity, have been nullified. The Saudi text asserts that the Koran has rendered both the Torah and the Gospels obsolete because they were tampered with and altered by wicked or wayward men. The call to greater unity among religions is therefore sinful since it erases the radical differences between Islam and systems of unbelief. The Saudi text, distributed in the San Diego mosque declares, “It is basic to the belief of Islam that everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever and that they are enemies to Allah, his Prophet and the believers….That is why the one who does not call the Jews and the Christian unbelievers is himself an unbeliever….” [Document No. 2]

And the worst enemies of all are the Jews:

‘Wahhabis invariably present Jews as falling permanently under God’s curse, and often as less than human… A book [Document No. 38] published in English by the King Fahd National Library in Riyadh for the benefit of Muslim emigrant communities abroad, copies of which were found at the Al-Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, New York, describes Jewish iniquities as follows: “They broke their Covenant; they rejected Allah’s guidance as conveyed by His messengers; they killed Allah’s messengers and incurred a double guilt which included murder and deliberate defiance of Allah’s Law; and they imagined themselves arrogantly self-sufficient, which means a blasphemous closing of their hearts forever against the admission of Allah’s grace.” [Document No. 38] It continues, “They rejected faith; they made false charges against godly women like Mary, who was chosen by Allah to be the mother of Jesus; they boasted of having killed Jesus when they were victims of their self hallucination; they hindered people from Allah’s way; and by means of usury and fraud they oppressed their fellow men.” [Document No. 38]

Note the hatred and demented prejudice against Jews, not just Israel – which of course is also duly demonised. Of particular interest in the context of the prejudice against Israel expressed by much of the Christian establishment here in Britain is the following:

‘Writing in 1984 in English as a member of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Steve A. Johnson, also using the name of Faruq Abdullah, describes what he sees as an “unholy alliance” between “Zionists” on one side and “liberal and fundamentalist Protestants” on the other… In the face of such gathering perils, Johnson calls on Muslims to mobilize and “develop an extensive, well-organized campaign to inform liberal Protestant and fundamentalist Protestant ministers about the history of Palestine and the truth about Islam.” This, he concludes, must become a priority “both at the national level and the individual masjid (mosque) level” [Document No. 14].

This strikes me as an extremely important document which deserves wide coverage. It shows that America is nurturing a deadly enemy. It shows that the American soft-soaping and worse of Saudi Arabia makes a mockery of its ‘war on terror’. It shows that the claim that there are only a few ‘Islamic extremists’ is totally untrue; for while not all Muslims are Saudi-style Wahhabis, as James Woolsey says in his foreword:

‘Wahhabi and Islamist extremism today is the soil in which al Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are growing’.

Saudi influence in disseminating these Wahhabi doctrines round the world is vast, not least in Britain. What, one wonders,might a similar exercise uncover in British mosques?