Gerard Baker in the Times (whose website has been restored to us) writes an absolute corker of Swiftian-degree disgust about the state of British politics and society:

'The lack of serious fiscal choice on offer is only a reflection of a broader surrender to the principle that government has the answers and the people should stop worrying their little heads about it. Every conversation one has in this country seems to start from the premise that everything that ails us can be put right by government — whether it is obesity or the decline of classical music.

'And what exquisite irony! The one thing in the past four years that the Government really did get right — the deposing of a dangerous dictator and the liberation of 24 million people from tyranny — is now regarded in the closed circle of serious political discussion as an act of pure evil.

'Of course, underpinning, sustaining and nourishing this consensus is a new Establishment that holds the British people in thrall to its supposedly progressive ideas. Its stultifying and baleful influence is transmitted by the clammy grip of its three main tentacles: the universities; the “experts”, and, above all, the media.

'Most university teachers regard their first duty of course as being to promote and nurture the principle that government has the answers. But spreading from that simple “truth” are a few others: that Israel and America are responsible for the bulk of the bad things in the world; that globalisation is impoverishing; that British history is a matter, mostly, for shame, and that we would all be better off if we would just let Europe run things for us.

'Their close allies outside the academy are the ubiquitous experts — in government, in pressure groups, in think-tanks. In a complicated age of information proliferation, these have assumed a kind of sacerdotal eminence: the people listen meekly as they promote their theories — global warming as indisputable fact and that science must take precedence over ethics.

'Above them all are the media, the self-selecting and self-perpetuating elite in broadcasting, newspapers, the arts (have you ever heard a novelist express an original political view?). This is the pinnacle of the Establishment that offers its highest recognition to people who make such programmes as The Power of Nightmares, the “documentary” whose tendentious bilge flowed from a manifestly false premise that the terrorist threat was all invented by neoconservatives (did the producer ever speak to a member of the Clinton Administration, which spent its last two years increasingly obsessed with the terror threat?).'

Yes yes and yes.

But who is he going to vote for?

In Today's Times (whose website seems to have imploded) Simon Jenkins writes of the Goldsmith opinion on the legality of war in Iraq:

'His lordship was in dire straits over Iraq in the spring of 2003. Mr Blair had declared on November 8 that resolution 1441 was "not an automatic trigger point" for war. The resolution's paragraph 12 made that clear. There would have to be a return to the UN, "as we always said there would be". When Lord Goldsmith prepared his March 7 advice, he recklessly took Mr Blair's word for truth. He said that without such a return to the UN for another resolution, the war would probably be illegal.'

(My emphasis).

Now read what Lord Goldsmith actually said in his March 7 opinion. Having established that the UN Security council needed to discuss Saddam's alleged breaches, he then wrote:

'Whether a report comes to the Council under OP4 or OP11, the critical issue is what action the Council is required to take at that point. In other words, what does OP12 require. It is clear that the language of OP12 was a compromise by the US from their starting position that the Council should authorise in advance the use of all necessary means to enforce the cease-fire resolution in the event of continued violations by Iraq. It is equally clear, however, that the language does not expressly provide that a further Council decision is necessary to authorise the use of force.''

(My emphasis).

He also discussed the fact that other countries might not agree, that the language was ambiguous and that because therefore a court case might be held in which the UK might lose, a second resolution would be the safest course. However, he then said that provided there was strong factual evidence that Saddam had breached the UN resolutions:

'I accept that a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in 678 without a further resolution.'

(My emphasis).

So he did not say the war would probably be illegal without a second resolution. He said that if there was evidence that Saddam was in breach (which there was, in spades) it would be legal. What Goldsmith actually wrote is therefore the direct opposite of what Jenkins claims he wrote.

From this misreporting of what Goldsmith said, Jenkins claims his position is 'now untenable'. On the contrary -- it's not the Attorney's position which is untenable here.

A letter in this week's Jewish Chronicle from Michael Freedland provides a telling and deeply alarming coda to the Muslim attack on the largely Jewish mourners commemorating those who died in the last V2 bomb attack of the war in London's East End:

'I was among those mourners at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the V2 attack on Hughes Mansions (in which my wife's mother was among the 134 people killed). The police are quoted as saying that no-one came forward with evidence or identification. Untrue. When a police van finally arrived (half an hour after being called -- the officer in charge told me they couldn't have come earlier because they were searching for a stolen bicycle) I and others described exactly what had happened and pointed to the balcony from which the missiles were thrown. I added that I was sure I could identify some of the perpetrators. The policeman said: 'Yes, but we can't do anything. It's terrible, but it's a question of human rights'.

More sensitive and compassionate feelings turning Israeli victims into oppressors -- natch, it's routine, just read, nod and turn the page -- from our sensitive and compassionate playwrights and critics. Ian Johns in the Times reviews Naomi Wallace's A State of Innocence thus:

'An amiable Israeli-American soldier is guarding the wretched animals left in Rafah’s battered zoo in Gaza. There he meets a Palestinian woman grieving for her daughter, killed by an Israeli bullet. An arrogant Zionist architect, seemingly from another age, arrives with a divisive “wall and tower approach” to rebuilding any scarred society, his blinkered idealism as sensitive as a bulldozer. A ghostly twist adds to the sense that the soldier and the mother are both victims of history as well as politics. Eve Polycarpou is a powerful embodiment of maternal grief laced with a wry humour that highlights the madness she sees around her. Conrad Westmaas is equally strong as the soldier who eventually seeks comfort in her arms. It’s a poignant final image in a sometimes allusive but always compassionate play and benefits from the low-key, simple staging that Raz Shaw brings to both plays.'

Grieving Palestinian, arrogant Zionist...can anyone imagine a play put on in London featuring an arrogant Palestinian and a grieving 'Zionist'? Even to ask the question is to invite vituperation.

Tony Blair said on Question Time last night that he was 'astonished' to hear that GPs were refusing to book appointments more than 48 hours in advance in order to meet the government target that patients had to be seen in that time. What's really astonishing is that he was astonished. This one small cameo graphically exposed the fact that the Prime Minister doesn't have a clue what's going on as a result of his own policies. Health Secretary John Reid has said that only 2% of surgeries are doing this. I don't believe it's that small a proportion. Several members of last night's audience said they had the same experience, as have I myself. As the woman in the audience said, it drives you absolutely crazy to have to try to phone the sugery at a given time to make the appointment for the following day, only to find all the phone lines are busy and by the time you get through the slots have all been filled. The GPs tear out their hair over it but say they have no choice if their targets are to be met. Another example of the perverse effects of central government control. Madness.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

'Palestinian professor Abdel Sattar Kassem on Thursday accused the Palestinian Authority's security forces of being behind the torching of his car in Nablus. Kassem, who has been waging a public campaign against corruption in the PA for many years, teaches political science at An-Najah University. Unidentified arsonists set fire to his car on Wednesday morning while it was parked outside his apartment in the Rafidiyah neighborhood of Nablus. The attack came days after the professor issued a statement accusing the PA security forces of unjustly detaining members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He also accused the security services of mistreating the detainees."The purpose of this attack is to destroy us from within," Kassem said, referring to the torching of his car. "Those who tried to assassinate me several years ago are also behind this attack." '

When will we see an AUT boycott of the Palestinian authority for its violent attack on academic freedom?

The resistance is growing, as the list of decent people prepared to put their heads over the parapet to fight the AUT boycott lengthens. In the Evening Standard last night, Howard Jacobson wrote a brilliant and blistering piece in which he said he had finally come to acknowledge that anti-Zionism was antisemitism, a conflation he had hitherto resisted:

‘I don’t think Jews, by virtue of their victimisation in the past, have any right to expect exemption from the usual rough and tumble of opinion. And I don’t consider it a mark of ill-will towards Israel — indeed it might well denote the very opposite — to oppose its policies when they are inhumane. It is important to hammer in this nail. No, no and no again, I do not accuse all those who censure Israel of hating Jews. Which nail hammered, it is equally important to drive in another. In the boycott by the Association of University Teachers, what has been expressed is not criticism or censure but vilification.’

This is indeed the crucial distinction. As Jacobson goes on to say, it is the singling out of Israel for condemnation while ignoring those countries where racism and infringements of human rights are endemic which gives the game away:

‘One thing is clear: in the case of Israel, as in countless instances in Jewish history, an exception has been made of Jews…the vilification of Israel of which the academic boycott is but the latest example rests upon contextlessness, Israel’s every act an unprovoked aggression, at every turn the doer and not the done to, all mention of war waged by the other side expunged. Here too I recognise the age-old strategies of antisemitism… Like the Jews who founded it in their image Israel — alone among nations — stands outside history. But then for Sue Blackwell the argument of history is only circular anyway. It is no defence of Israel that it has had to fight against being driven into the sea, because the sea, in her view, is where it belongs’.

Susan Bassnett, professor of comparative literature at Warwick University, writes in today’s Independent:

‘Last week's vote by the Association of University Teachers for an academic boycott of two Israeli universities was a long time coming. A small group of fanatical anti-Israeli lobbyists had been pressing for it for some time. When I heard the news, I found it hard to decide whether I was sad, angry or simply contemptuous. It is sad that supposedly intelligent people (one's academic colleagues) can be so closed-minded as to suppose that boycotting their fellows in another country is going to achieve anything. One feels contemptuous for the bigotry of these people and their refusal to understand that academic boycotts are discriminatory, racist and offensive to fair-minded individuals. I felt angry at the stupidity of it all, and at the boycotters' ignorance of history.’

However, a word of warning has been rightly sounded that some of the anti-boycotters on the left are in danger of recycling some of the very prejudices of those they are opposing. Harry’s Place has expressed support for a new web grouping called Engage which argues:

‘We should be making more links, not fewer, with the Israeli academics who are doing good work and who are resisting the racist culture of the Israeli right. Engage opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. We are in favour of the foundation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. We do not believe that Israel is an ‘illegitimate state’. We are for reconciliation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.’

This prompted a thoughtful response from Judy Keiner, who warns:

‘Engage sounds like a great response to the AUT boycott—till you start to think about what it actually stands for. Actually, it ends up buying into the same game as the boycotters.

‘Like the boycotters’ demand that Israeli academics who want to escape the boycott declare themselves against the racist policies of their universities/the Israeli state etc, Engage starts from a declaration of being against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Why should this be thought necessary in action against a boycott?

'Then there’s the declaration that they want to make more links with “the Israeli academics who are doing good work and who are resisting the racist culture of the Israeli right”. And it kindly agrees that Israel is not an illegitimate state. So that’s OK then. Instead of branding whole universities and a whole country racists, Engage confidently declares the whole of the Israeli right racists. And doesn’t tell us where the right starts and ends. Or how it is that there’s presumably a racism free space to the left of it.

‘Engage declares itself as standing against anti-semitism. How strange then that the statement by implication places all the opprobrium it cares to mention in the Israel-Palestinian conflict as resting on Israel-as-occupier and the Israeli right. It seems that Engage’s fight against anti-semitism is limited to the UK, and not for export to the Palestinian territories. No mention at all of the place of Hamas, which openly proclaims the validity of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion on its website, argues for the elimination of Israel and all Jews who emigrated there, and is a major political force in the Palestinian territories and especially in those
Palestinian universities calling for the boycott. No mention of the role of Palestinian terrorism, exterminism and rejectionism, underpinned by anti-semitism. No mention of the fact that Israeli universities offer academic freedom to Jews, Arabs, Christians, Muslims and everyone else. No mention of the lack of academic freedom in Palestinian universities for people to advocate the sort of pro-Israel activism corresponding to pro-Palestinian activism found in Israeli universities. Or do they honestly believe that the party line represents the thinking of all Palestinian intellectuals?

‘It seems to me that Engage wants to go on playing the old anti-semitic game of sorting Jews into "good" Jews and "bad" Jews. Only it doesn’t go as far as the boycotters in drawing the line round the bad Jews. And of course, it wants to demonstrate loud and clear that it stands with and amongst only the good Jews.’

A timely warning.

Now the Palestinians themselves have opposed the AUT boycott, as the Jerusalem Post reports:

'Al-Quds University in Jerusalem headed by Sari Nusseibeh released a statement against the British association blacklist, saying, "We are informed by the principle that we should seek to win Israelis over to our side, not to win against them... Therefore, informed by this national duty, we believe it is in our interest to build bridges, not walls; to reach out to the Israeli academic institutions, not to impose another restriction or dialogue-block on ourselves." '

Academics appalled at the AUT's boycott of Israeli universities have hit upon an elegant and appropriate way to protest at this infamy. They are asking the AUT to add their names to those to be boycotted as a roll of honour. Thus Emanuele Ottolenghi of St Antony's College, Oxford has sent a message to the AUT thus:

'Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.

'Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to
illiberal minds and repressive regimes. Based on this, the AUT's definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only. Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa
University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.

'In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me.'

'This not only avoids the obvious ethical drawbacks of a counter-boycott, but if enough academics join in making such a request -- particularly those with international reputations -- this can seriously discommode the boycotters, along with exposing them to widening opprobrium and ridicule and creating a coalition of principled revulsion. Brilliant.

As soon as Lord Goldsmith’s preliminary advice on the legality of the Iraq war was leaked yesterday evening, I took a bet with myself that it would instantly be ruthlessly cherry-picked and spun by the anti-war brigade in the most tendentious and misleading way — as has every single development in the Iraq saga. So it proved within a very short time, as a procession of pundits streamed across our TV screens last night, most of them selectively wrenching the Attorney-General’s comments out of context to shore up their case that this March 7 document was wholly at variance with his March 17 answer to Parliament, which said unequivocally that the war was legal. Goldsmith thus stands accused of dissembling, and today’s papers are full of claims that the Prime Minister lied about the legality of the war. ‘The whole thing reeks’ said Professor Peter Hennessy.

But it is the reporting that reeks. For the fairest summary of Goldsmith’s position on March 7 and then March 17 is that on March 7 he sat on the fence, and on March 17 provided the argument in support of the case that the war was legal. Let us remind ourselves, therefore, of the persistent claim over the past two years: that Goldsmith originally told Tony Blair that the war would be illegal without a second UN resolution and then was pressured to change his mind. We now know from the leaked March 7 document that Goldsmith did not say the war would be illegal.

The whole of his document has now been published. But if you just read the few summary paragraphs here that were leaked this morning — which a number of papers signally failed to reproduce in their entirety for the public to make their own mind up — you can see that he says in those few paragraphs that there are arguments on both sides, and that for every statement which suggests the war might be deemed to be illegal he produces a counter- statement saying there is a case for saying it would be legal. Yet many of the news reports on the BBC and in the press omitted those counter-statements in much of their reporting.

Now that his full opinion has been published, which you can read here, we can see even more clearly than from this morning’s leaked paragraphs that far from Goldsmith having said initially that war would be illegal, he inclined on March 7 to the view that it would be legal — but that there were formidable difficulties both from key ambiguities in UN Security Council resolution wording, and from the hostility of much of world opinion to war in any circumstances.

Much of this document is taken up with an immensely detailed discussion of a key point in the legality argument — whether the Security Council needed to make a further decision on going to war, or whether it was merely necessary to have a discussion about Saddam’s further breaches of the UN resolutions. Thus he writes:

‘It is clear that the language of OP12 was a compromise by the US from their starting position that the Council should authorise in advance the use of all necessary means to enforce the cease-fire resolution in the event of continued violations by Iraq. It is equally clear, however, that the language does not expressly provide that a further Council decision is necessary to authorise the use of force.’

If the Security Council failed to decide on a course of action, he writes,

‘The more difficult scenario is if the views of Council members are divided and a further resolution is not adopted either because it fails to attract 9 votes or because it is vetoed.’

The ambiguous language in the Council’s resolutions, he says, mean that the French may not have realised that were voting to allow military action with discussion but no decision. And there was a contrary argument, which he puts, to support the contention that no military action was possible without such a further Council decision. And in any event:

‘A further difficulty is that, if the matter ever came before a court, it is very uncertain to what extent the court would accept evidence of the negotiating history to support a particular interpretation of the resolution, given that most of the negotiations were conducted in private and there are no agreed or official records’.

He then summarises the arguments (the paragraphs that were leaked this morning) and says they are balanced. In saying that ‘the safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further resolution’, he is not saying the war would be illegal without it. He is saying instead that, given the fact that there is significant opinion that it would be illegal, with all the ambiguities and opposition he has just elucidated, it would be prudent to obtain a second resolution — which was of course the government’s view and why it spent so much (fruitless) energy in trying to obtain it. There is all the difference in the world between saying a course of action is prudent — essentially a political judgment — and saying it determines whether something is legal or illegal.

He also says that war would be legal without a second resolution

‘if there are strong factual grounds for concluding that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity. In other words, we would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-cooperation. Given the structure of the resolution as a whole, the views of UNMOVIC and the IAEA will be highly significant in this respect. In the light of the latest reporting by UNMOVIC, you will need to consider very carefully whether the evidence of non-cooperation and non-compliance by Iraq is sufficiently compelling to justify the conclusion that Iraq has failed to take its final opportunity.’

Much is being made of statements made at that time by Hans Blix that Saddam was cooperating. But as Jack Straw has been saying, Blix also released a 174-page appendix which contained copious examples of Saddam’s non-co-operation, thus amply meeting Goldsmith’s point. In other words, his opinion changed because circumstances changed, but in a way he had previously allowed for. I recall that at the time, media reporting of that vast appendix was virtually non-existent. Thus history was falsified and continues to be so.

The reporting of Goldsmith’s leaked opinion is in keeping with most of the reporting of the Iraq crisis. Those who formed a passionate opposition to the war view any development in connection with it through the distorting prism of their prejudices. So great has been this big lie that even many people who originally supported the war have come to believe unshakeably that Blair lied, and are thus vulnerable to the misleading impression continuing to be given by the media.

An egregious example of this distorted-prism thinking is provided in the Guardian, where the ‘human rights’ lawyer Lord Lester provides a point-by-point deconstruction of this morning’s leaked paragraphs. But if Lester’s analysis itself is deconstructed, it betrays an astonishingly selective approach. You can read Lester’s analysis here. What follows are a few examples of the bias in his analysis that struck me (I show his annotations to the Goldsmith document in italics):

1)

‘A key question is whether there is in truth a need for an assessment of whether Iraq’s conduct constitutes a failure to take the final opportunity or has constituted a failure fully to cooperate within the meaning of OP4 such that the basis of the ceasefire is destroyed. If an assessment is needed of that situation, it would be for the Council to make it.’

Lester comments:

‘That’s very important because that shows that it’s not for President Bush or Blair to make the assessment.’

But he ignores Goldsmith’s caveat that immediately follows:

‘A narrow textual reading of the resolution suggests that sort of assessment is not needed, because the Council has predetermined the issue. Public statements, on the other hand, say otherwise.’

2)

‘However, the argument that resolution 1441 alone has revived the authorisation to use force in resolution 678 will only be sustainable if there are strong factual grounds for concluding that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity.’

Lester comments: ‘

Very strong words

’. But he fails to highlight this from Goldsmith which immediately precedes them:

‘Nevertheless, having regard to the information on the negotiating history which I have been given and to the arguments of the US Administration which I heard in Washington, I accept that a reasonable case can be made that resolution 1441 is capable in principle of reviving the authorisation in 678 without a further resolution.’

3)

‘In reaching my conclusion, I have taken account of the fact that on a number of previous occasions, including in relation to Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 and Kosovo in 1999, UK forces have participated in military action on the basis of advice from my predecessors that the legality of the action under international law was no more than reasonably arguable’

.

Lester comments:

‘He’s covering his back’

. This uncharitable interpretation is hard to sustain when in the very next sentence, Goldsmith says this argument is not enough:

‘But a “reasonable case” does not mean that if the matter ever came before a court I would be confident that the court would agree with the view. I judge that, having regard to the arguments on both sides, and considering the resolution as a whole in the light of the statements made on adoption and subsequently, a court might well conclude that OPs 4 and 12 do require a further Council decision in order to revive the authorisation in resolution 678.’

4)

‘However, it must be recognised that on previous occasions when military action was taken on the basis of a reasonably arguable case, the degree of public and Parliamentary scrutiny of the legal issue was nothing as great as it is today.’

Lester comments:

‘He is saying you can’t get away with it these days because parliament and the press will be a more effective watchdog.’

True in itself; but he has again omitted the crucial caveat that preceded this:

‘But equally I consider that the counter view can be reasonably maintained’

by which Goldsmith meant the argument that the war would be legal.

The anti-war lobby claims that the government misled the country by failing to record the ‘caveats’ in either the intelligence assessments or Goldsmith’s advice. But removing the caveats is precisely what this faction has now done to Goldsmith himself in spades.

There is a further point which appears to have been missed altogether. Much is being made of the fact that, while Goldsmith's March 7 opinion was full of finely balanced argument, his March 17 reply to Parliament was an unequivocal endorsement of the legality of the war. Actually, it wasn't. The two documents were in response to very different requests. The March 7 opinion was in response to Tony Blair's request for '

advice on the legality of military action against Iraq'.

The March 17 answer was in response to this question from Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale:

'What is the Attorney-General's view of the legal basis for the use of force against Iraq'.

In other words, he was being invited to provide merely his view of the argument that the war was legal. Which is precisely what he did. His view of whether or not it was legal was in the March 7 document -- which was a lawyerly presentation of the legal arguments on both sides and an evaluation of the politico-legal context, and which said, in effect, that the war was probably legal but was fraught with peril in the absence of a second resolution.

There are many reasons why I passionately oppose Tony Blair, who I believe has done enormous damage to Britain’s core institutions and values and if elected for a third time would do yet more. The deeper problem in our society, however, is the systematic corruption of truth, in which his administration has in many instances been complicit. But on this issue he is, in my view, the victim of this culture of lies. Michael Howard’s attack on him for lying over Iraq, using the Goldsmith opinion as ammunition (while conceding that the war was ‘probably legal’ anyway) is cynical, opportunistic and quite disgusting because it itself is based on something that has no basis in fact -- that Blair took the country to war on a lie.

The evidence simply does not support this. Despite the volcanic lava of claims to the contrary that has flowed through our national debate these past two years, there has never been a shred of evidence that has stood up to scrutiny that Blair lied over Iraq. Not one. Behaved unwisely, opportunistically, misinformedly – for all of these there is evidence. But not for lying. The ‘evidence’ to support that has all derived from systematic misinformation, selectivity, distortion and omission – all flowing from the cancer at the heart of all this, the visceral hatred of George W Bush and the opposition to the war in Iraq, the expression of prejudice and the desire for appeasement to which all subsequent developments have been wrenched to fit.

Hearteningly, there are still voices of decency left in academia. The Jerusalem Post reports a wave of protest at the AUT boycott of Israeli universities from Britain and around the world:

'The backlash, which may take the form of mass resignations from the union, has seen an outpouring of protests by Jewish and non-Jewish academics across Britain. John Vail, lecturer in political economy at Newcastle University, wrote in an e-mail to fellow academics: "The boycott is blatantly discriminatory and reeks of double standards." He added: "Although I have no current research links with Israeli academics, this has made me want to go out and develop some just so as to show my disapproval of this motion.'

Resignations, as I have said before, are not the best policy since the AUT motion needs to be fought from within the union. Counter-boycotts are also counter-productive, since they obviously undermine the point about freedom of speech. What seems to me far more important is to publicly challenge the lies such people are telling, ensure that the truth is aired in the public domain, and that these named academics are exposed for the sloppy, ignorant and mendacious corrupters of the academy that they are.

Moves are currently under way to mount a legal challenge to the way in which the AUT voted to implement its disgusting boycott of Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities in Israel and launch an ‘investigation’ into the Hebrew University. The process was demonstrably unfair, given that no speeches opposing the boycott were heard at all, the later votes were taken on a show of hands even though the voting was very close — the first motion to boycott Bar- Ilan was passed by a mere four votes — and the whole thing took place on Friday afternoon, when orthodox Jews were not able to be present.

There have been calls for members to resign in protest from the AUT, and a few have already done so. Understandable though this reaction is, it is surely short-sighted. The urgent need now above all is to overcome this evil that has taken over the AUT, and that can only be done if people of principle stay in the union and fight it.

Indeed, a much broader battle now needs urgently to be waged within the universities, to challenge the lies about Israel and prejudice towards the Jewish people that have been allowed to drive out the truth. In particular, this means that those academics who have made careers out of promulgating such mendacious propaganda should have their arguments publicly deconstructed and the lies they tell held up to public scorn and opprobrium. It is not enough to oppose this boycott on the grounds of protecting freedom of speech, important though that is. The demonisation of Israel within the universities has been allowed to go by default. The boycott is merely the culmination of this process. Now the process itself, which has corrupted thought itself, must be challenged.

A start could be made by publicising, through the mainstream media, the false allegation which lies behind the boycott of Haifa university. Haifa stands accused of censoring a student’s thesis for political reasons. This thesis, by a student named Teddy Katz, claimed that in the War of Independence in 1948, Jewish forces perpetrated a massacre in the Arab town of Tantura — a massacre which never took place. Haifa university — which the AUT never asked for its side of the story — has now issued a statement in which it says:

‘An independent committee was asked to examine the validity of the quotes that were used as the "scientific basis" for the highly controversial charges proffered in this thesis, authored by Mr. Teddy Katz. After a thorough examination, the committee members concluded that, in fact, the quotes in the written text did not match the taped comments of the interviews and that the text was grossly distorted. Therefore, they disqualified this MA thesis. This decision, it is important to note, matched a court decision given on the same matter’.

The thesis, however, was being supervised by the Israel-hating far-left academic Ilan Pappe. The university statement goes on:

‘As Dr. Pappe did not like the committee decision, despite the undeniable discrepancies between the text and the taped interviews, he reacted by calling the academic community to boycott the members of this committee and the University of Haifa.’

It was this account of the disputed thesis and the boycott call that has now been recycled by the AUT. Details of the story behind the alleged ‘massacre’ itself, along with Pappe’s role in pushing this account, are to be found on the Dafka website as follows:

‘In fact, there was no massacre at all. The student had simply
invented the story as part of the leftist campaign by self-hating Israeli Jewish anti-Semites to libel and delegitimize the country. The thesis was supervised by Ilan Pappe, Israel's academic version of Taliban John, a vile anti-Semite who openly calls for Israel's annihilation, an "academic" whose publication record consists mainly of anti-Israel screeds published in a PLO propaganda "journal", the Journal of Palestine Studies, and by a radical Druse professor.

‘Later Katz admitted in court with his lawyer present (the Marxist
lawyer Avigdor Feldman) that he had fabricated the story, this after being sued for libel by the Palmach veterans organization. SInce then, the story has come to symbolize the leftist pseudo-scholarship and extremist faculty sedition common in Israel and especially at the University of Haifa.

‘Today, the newest twist to the story was exposed. The IMRA news
service reveals that the PLO itself was involved in financing Katz and his activities. Pappe by the way has written about the "massacre" for a wide number of Islamist and anti-Jewish papers and web sites and the "story" of the "massacre" is now standard fare on the PLO's web site as well as neonazi web sites around the world.’

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick does not just excoriate the AUT but rightly sets the incident in the context of the escalating hate-fest against Israel and the Jews in decadent Britain -- whose fate as a ‘dying lion’, she concludes, cannot now be reversed:

‘

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain's aristocracy and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain's steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction.’

But as she also points out, much of the ammunition is being provided by Israeli academics like Pappe:

‘The highest density of anti-Israel activists in Israeli society is to be found in the humanities and social science faculties of Israeli universities. Indeed, it is Ilan Pappe from Haifa University who, while scandalously receiving a taxpayer-financed salary, travels around the US and Europe vilifying his country and calling for anti-Semites like the members of the AUT to boycott us.’

The fight for Britain’s soul is not over. Indeed, it has barely begun. But if it is to take place in earnest, it must tackle the very source of the rot: the universities, where hitherto insular academics must take their heads out of the sand and restore truth, objectivity and integrity to the corrupted scholarship that is feeding this monster of lies, prejudice and hate.

Michael Howard’s attack on Tony Blair for ‘lying’ over the Iraq War is inept, opportunistic and squalid. Inept because, although people generally believe Blair did lie (which I do not), it reminds them that Howard would have supported this unpopular war too. Opportunistic, because he is trying to have it every which way – supporting the war, and acknowledging (on Sky News) that it was ‘probably legal’ and yet seeking to profit from the popular opposition to the war by attacking Blair over it.

And more important than these factors, squalid because the basis of his attack is deeply and startlingly misleading. His claim that Blair lied is based on the Butler report on the use of intelligence on Iraq, from which he selects the phrase used by the Joint Intelligence Committee that the intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’ while Blair claimed it was overwhelming. But Howard omitted to mention what, according to the Butler report, the JIC went on to say:

‘270. The JIC produced in parallel a ‘status report’ on Iraq’s nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes. It warned in the text (although not in the Key Judgements) that: Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy. Iraq is also well practised in the art of deception, such as concealment and exaggeration. A complete picture of the various programmes is therefore difficult. But it is clear that Iraq continues to pursue a policy of acquiring WMD and their delivery means. Intelligence indicates that planning to reconstitute some of its programmes began in 1995. WMD programmes were then given a further boost in 1998 with the withdrawal of UNSCOM inspectors. [JIC, 15 March 2002]’

And there was much more in this vein. On Iraq’s nuclear programme:

‘272. Underpinning this assessment, the JIC noted that: Although there is very little intelligence we continue to judge that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. We assess the programme to be based on gas centrifuge uranium enrichment . . . Recent intelligence indicates that nuclear scientists were recalled to work on a nuclear programme in the autumn of 1998,but we do not know if large scale development work has yet recommenced. Procurement of dual-use items over the past few years could be used in a uranium enrichment programme. [JIC, 15 March 2002]’

On Iraq’s chemical weapons programme:

‘275. Underpinning these judgements, the JIC said that:
We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare (CW) programme, although there is very little intelligence relating to it. From the evidence available to us, we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons. Anomalies in Iraqi declarations to UNSCOM suggest stocks could be much larger. [JIC, 15 March 2002]’

On Iraq’s biological weapons programme:

277. On Iraq’s biological weapons programme, the JIC sustained its prior judgement that: Iraq currently has available, either from pre Gulf War stocks or more recent production, a number of biological agents. Iraq could produce more of these biological agents within days. [JIC, 15 March 2002]

278. Underpinning this judgement, the JIC reported that: BW work continued throughout the period of UNSCOM inspections and intelligence indicates that this programme continues. Key figures from the pre-Gulf War programme are reported to be involved. Research and development is assessed to continue under cover of a number of legitimate institutes and possibly in a number of covert facilities . . . There is no intelligence on any BW agent production facilities but one source indicates that Iraq may have developed mobile production facilities. [JIC, 15 March 2002]

And also:

281. On the longer-range systems themselves, and Iraq’s indigenous capabilities, the JIC said that: Iraq has rebuilt much of the military production infrastructure associated with the missile programme damaged in the Gulf War and the few high profile sites targeted in Operation Desert Fox in 1998. New infrastructure is being built, with a particular focus on improving the support to the solid propellant missile programme.

and that:

Iraq is seeking to develop new, larger liquid and solid propellant missiles, contrary to UN limits. Recent intelligence indicates personnel associated with the Al Samoud programme have now been tasked to concentrate on designing liquid propellant systems with ranges of 2000–3000km. New intelligence indicates the main focus may be on the development of a SCUD derivative, which we judge has an intended range of around 1200km . . . Providing sanctions remain effective, Iraq is unlikely to be able to produce a longer-range missile before 2007. [JIC, 15 March 2002]

Elsewhere, Butler recorded of government officials:

‘261. They set against those objectives an analysis of whether the policy of containment had worked, drawing heavily on JIC assessments, concluding that: Since 1991,the policy of containment has been partially successful: - Sanctions have effectively frozen Iraq’s nuclear programme; - Iraq has been prevented from rebuilding its chemical arsenal to pre-Gulf War levels; - Ballistic missile programmes have been severely restricted; - Biological weapons (BW) and Chemical Weapons (CW) programmes have been hindered; - No Fly Zones established over northern and southern Iraq have given some protection to the Kurds and the Shia. Although subject to continuing political pressure, the Kurds remain autonomous; and - Saddam has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbours.

but also that:

Iraq continues to develop weapons of mass destruction, although our intelligence is poor. Iraq has up to 20 650km range missiles left over from the Gulf War. These are capable of hitting Israel and the Gulf states. Design work for other ballistic missiles over the UN limit of 150km continues. Iraq continues with its BW and CW programmes and, if it has not already done so,could produce significant quantities of BW agents within days and CW agent within weeks of a decision to do so. We believe it could deliver CBW by a variety of means, including in ballistic missile warheads. There are also some indications of a continuing nuclear programme. Saddam has used WMD in the past and could do so again if his regime were threatened.’

On which Butler concluded:

‘262. We consider this part of the advice to be a fair and balanced summary of the most recent JIC assessments.’

In other words, despite the fact that the intelligence was 'sporadic and patchy', the overwhelming and continuous assessment by the intelligence service leading up to the war was that Saddam was still very much in the WMD business. Faced with such an assessment, what Prime Minister would not have concluded that Saddam was an increasing danger? So where is the evidence in Butler that he lied? Is it not rather Michael Howard who has played fast and loose with the facts?

You don't need to go to the theatre in Britain or belong to a teachers' union to be ambushed by the current firestorm of hatred against Israel, just when you least expect it. In the Times today Caroline Holliday muses why her son's teenage fatherhood isn't such a disaster. She thinks of all the terrible things that might have happened to him instead, including this:

'He could be conscripted into the Israeli Army at 17 to learn how to humiliate Palestinian families on the West Bank'.

The casual malice and malevolence of the libel, the ignorance and prejudice it reveals and the stunning irrelevance of the reference feel like a physical punch to the solar plexus. This is a newspaper feature about teenage pregnancy. It has nothing to do with the Middle East at all. Yet reaching into her general knowledge for an example of the horrors that might have befallen her son, this woman's mind not only turns seamlessly to Israel but to the big lie that is being told about its behaviour. It does not occur to her that the principal danger to her son, in the unlikely event that he were ever to be an Israeli soldier, would be being blown to bits by a human bomb, with his head used maybe for a football as certain Palestinian butchers did with their Israeli soldier victims not long ago. No, for this woman 'Israeli soldier' means humiliating Palestinian families. For her, Jewish victims in Israel clearly just don't exist, despite the 50 years' Arab war waged against it, and Jewish self-defence is instead viewed as the humiliation of its attackers.

This filth is now so entrenched it has become part of everyday, humdrum discourse -- not even questioned by the editors and sub-editors at the Times. The demonic nature of Israel is now accepted in Britain as fact. Monstrous.

A reader has sent me the following deeply disturbing account of the current atmosphere on a British law course:

'I must say it's been an eye-opener for me regarding the level of antizionism/antisemitism I have encountered from the people on the course, many of whom have training contracts and will go into practice as the next generation of lawyers. Upon realising the hostility I decided not to tell anyone that I was Jewish. 'One day, at the end of a workshop, someone raised the issue that an Israeli soldier was in the headlines for shooting a Palestinian boy. Three other people - an Asian girl who is Hindu, an Asian Catholic and a Philipino Catholic all jumped in at how they "hate" Israel and "agree with suicide bombers". At that point a young, white girl joined in claiming how she also agreed and how she'd been to a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and heard of how a farmer had his house bulldozed by the Israelis.

'I just had to intervene, and when I spoke up that I didn't agree with suicide bombing one bit and that dialogue is the best way to secure long-term peace, they were all silent and drifted away but the looks on their faces expressed that I was politically barmy! There are some religious Jewish men at the college who wear black, velvet kippot and I know one of them. I was so angry by the encounter that I went to speak to him about it afterwards and to see if he'd encountered such problems. He was bemused and told me that of the 22 people in his group he reckoned 22 "wanted him dead".

'To me this was an eye-opener and very shocking. I don't consider that I have lived a particularly sheltered life and I have friends of different colour, religion and shades of political opinion. I wonder what is being taught at these students' universities or why none of them are willing to hear the other side of the question. I appreciate that students like to have a cause and side with the underdogs - but it is always Israel that is especially singled out as a pariah state. No mention of Burma, China, Tibet, Saudi Arabia etc. It is definitely creating an intimidating atmosphere for Jewish students on campuses, colleges etc.

'I believe from my experiences the distinction between antisemitism and antizionism is blurred in young people's minds. My point in writing to you, and indeed emphasising the races/religions of those who are exhibiting these views, is that it is a cancer that goes deep into the heart of society and one that I was previously unaware of. No doubt this academic boycott of Israel will only serve serve to strengthen the hands of those who, from the comfort of their Islington armchairs, feel they can pontificate about the Middle East whilst I who have lived in Israel for a short while and have heard a bomb go off, must conceal my opinions/religion for fear of being ostracised and given an uncomfortable time.'

Well, what a surprise. The Power of Nightmares, the TV series which articulated the malevolent conspiracy theory that the threat of of Islamist terror has been deliberately and artificially whipped up by American neo-conservatives who have spent the past thirty years confecting one phantom enemy after another for their own power-crazed ends, has won a BAFTA award. No surprise, because Britain has now been consumed by a culture of lies, where palpable untruths win public acclaim and prizes because they play to a vicious set of prejudices against America and the Jews. Thus the BBC's Orla Guerin gets the MBE; and 'My Name is Rachel Corrie', the London play which draws on the writings of the ISM activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer, has become a sell-out. The Observer reported that the play was attracting young people who were avid for its message:

'Tickets for the play's 24 performances sold out in less than two days, the majority of them bought by one of the youngest audiences the theatre can recall. Actor and director Alan Rickman, whose idea it was to transform Corrie's life into drama, is already looking at taking the play to the US where, unlike in Europe, the 23-year-old's death has generated modest media coverage.In Britain in particular, the woman from Olympia, Washington, has become an aspirational figure for young people often seen as apathetic and uninterested in international issues.'

So young Britons are drawing inspiration from a play that incites hatred of Israel by presenting a selective, distorted and highly emotive account of the sad death of a misguided person who chose to support attempts to frustrate Israel's defence of its citizens from mass murder.

In an article in the Jerusalem Post entitled 'The Forgotten Rachels, Tom Gross writes:

'It is ironic to reflect that there have been several real victims of the intifada called Rachel – and hard to believe that these critics have ever heard of them. All these other Rachels died within a few months of Corrie but – unlike her – in circumstances that weren't disputed. They were deliberately murdered: Rachel Levy (17, blown up in a grocery store); Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus); Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Pessah meal); Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children); Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 16, 13 and five, while at home)...Rachel Corrie's death was undoubtedly tragic. But ultimately, this play isn't really about Corrie, but about fomenting hatred of Israel.'

His article is not just a memorial to the murdered Rachels but to the lost culture of truth and justice, now eclipsed in Britain by lies and racial hatred.

The indefatiguable environment researcher Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University has collated the following recent examples to show that much science reporting simply ignores the evidence contradicting the claims made by global warming catastrophists.

Thus a correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald said:

‘The Antarctic Peninsula has sent a hard-hitting signal that climate change is real: most of its 244 glaciers are retreating. The changes to life and landscape are so rapid that within the past decade, entire iceshelves have broken up and flowers grow where the land was until recently frozen. The first comprehensive analysis of the peninsula's glaciers by British and US scientists, published in Science yesterday, found that 87 per cent of the ice rivers had retreated over the past 50 years, some of them spectacularly.’

A writer at Nature said:

‘Almost all the glaciers that flow into the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating. The discovery comes from an analysis spanning more than half a century of aerial photographs and satellite images.’

ABC Australia reported:

‘A comprehensive study of the history of glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula indicates that the region is experiencing atmospheric warming at a rate up to five times the global average. The British Antarctic Survey found nearly all of the Peninsula's 244 glaciers have retreated over the past 50 years. If the trend continues, and there's no reason that the BAS says that it won't, sea levels around the world could rise and flood low-lying cities.’

But as I have already recorded in a previous post, Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London -- who does not dispute that global warming is occurring -- says this is untrue. Die Welt am Sonntag reports:

‘The West Antarctic peninsula only covers one tenth of the south pole's ice. There are rarely spectacular reports about the much larger parts of the continent. These do not provide a uniform scientific picture. In total, however, the ice masses of the continent, which hold about 70 per cent of the world's fresh water resources, seem to be growing. This conclusion was reported at the Earth Observation summit in Brussels in the middle of February by Antarctic researcher Duncan Wingham (University College London). Wingham presented new satellite data which show that the Antarctic ice cover is getting thicker. "To claim that the ice sheets are melting is rather daring," Wingham said in an interview with Die Welt.’

‘Daring’ is not quite the word I would use.

The Register amplified Professor Wingham’s remarks:

‘The high-profile collapse of some Antarctica's ice shelves is likely the result of natural current fluctuations, not global warming, says a leading British expert on polar climates… This is a contrasting picture to one based solely on the northern Antarctic Peninsula - a shark's fin of land jutting out from the body of the continent, and reaching to just 750 miles from Chile - where there has been a drastic increase in temperature, thinning of ice sheets and collapse of ice shelves. The Larsen A ice shelf, 1600 square kilometres in size, fell off in 1995. The Wilkins ice shelf, 1100 square kilometres, fell off in 1998 and the Larsen B, 13,500 square kilometres, dropped off in 2002. Meanwhile, the northern Antarctic Peninsula's temperatures have soared by six celsius in the last 50 years.

"A lot of attention and research has focused on this relatively accessible area of the Antarctic Peninsula, but satellites are giving us a picture of the continent as a whole," Wingham told the Register. This broader picture shows evidence of growth and decay from place to place, a picture more in line with natural variations in snowfall and ocean circulation. The Antarctic is to some extent insulated from global warming because to its north are zonal flows in the atmosphere and ocean, unimpeded by other landmasses. This insulates the continent from warmer events further north and leads one to suppose it is better protected from global warming… 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".’

Finally, World Climate Report rips into the biased reporting that has bamboozled the world on this issue:

‘The fact that a report that glaciers are melting over one extremely small portion of Antarctica that is showing warming, while the rest of the continent is cooling, grabs not only newspaper headlines but finds its way without a regional perspective into a prestigious publication like Science is troubling…The general cooling of Antarctica is highly scientifically significant because climate models run under increasing levels of greenhouse gases predict that the Antarctic continent as a whole, not just the Peninsula, should be rapidly warming. This is clearly a model failure and no amount of going on and on about the impact of warming in the Peninsula, is going to change that fact.’

And Climate Audit levels the same charge of cooked eco-books at the BBC, with particular reference to the recent demolition by Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre of the key ‘Hockey Stick’ model of historic global warming:

‘Here's a typical article about the Hockey Stick and the dismissal of criticism by skeptics is plain for all to see. The usual tactic is to get responses from the Hockey Team (usually Phil Jones) and allow no rebuttal or reply. All of this came into sharp focus when the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme interviewed Michael Mann about his work and the criticism of it. Despite repeated calls and e-mails no-one from the Today programme would immediately call either Ross McKitrick or Steve McIntyre or explain why not. To this day, no-one from the BBC can be bothered. Why? Because the BBC is right and you're a lunatic for suggesting otherwise (you have a bee in your bonnet about it - clear signs of obsessive and irrational behavior).

‘Skeptics are given extremely short shrift. Take the "Apocalypse NO!" conference organized by the Scientific Alliance. The article was posted mid-way through the morning of the conference itself (to prevent anyone who might be interested in going from being unnecessarily forewarned) and only sometime later was a link to the Scientific Alliance put on the article ( I had to google for it at the time). Note the title "Science sceptics meet on climate" as though anyone who disagrees with global warming must disbelieve science itself (ie they're lunatics). The conference a few days later organized by the Uk Met Office got the full trailer of scare stories before, during and after.’

This is, of course, in line with the BBC's general world view that anyone who departs from the Guardian/Independent line on any issue is a far-right lunatic. But more broadly, the way global warming is being reported by the science press is a scandal. In selecting only those claims that support a prejudice and disregarding evidence that these claims are false, it is betraying the basic principles of scientific inquiry and has become instead an arm of ideological propaganda.

Today's Telegraph records a remarkable development in Lebanon:

'Syria's 29-year military domination of Lebanon effectively ended yesterday as all but a token force of troops quit the country before a final ceremonial withdrawal tomorrow.With just 36 hours left before the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, delivers a report on the pullout to the Security Council, hundreds of army cars left in convoy for Syria. 'In the Bekaa Valley east of Beirut long columns of rain-drenched tank carriers, troop-laden lorries and military vehicles towing anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers clogged the roads to the border. At a Syrian base outside the Bekaa Valley town of Deir al-Ahmar, soldiers dismantled buildings and burned documents, local people said.

'In an indication that Damascus's intelligence presence in Lebanon was also finally crumbling, an intelligence outpost in the Bekaa Valley was torn down in the town of Jibjennine near the Syrian army's forward lines which overlook northern Israel. Cement blocks and barbed wire barricades at the base were bulldozed after the unit's commander Brigadier Ali Ayoub left for the border. A Lebanese military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "All Syrian troops will be gone by Monday except for those remaining for an official farewell ceremony Tuesday. After that they will all be gone. It will be over." '

Syria has been forced out of Lebanon, at root, because of America's liberation of Iraq. It's a step towards sanity and a ray of hope for the future of the Middle East.

Jews are currently celebrating the festival of Passover . This commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, the point at which they gained their freedom and became a nation. The two concepts are intimately connected. On Friday afternoon, when orthodox Jews preparing for both the Sabbath and Passover would have been unable to attend, the Association of University Teachers took a large step towards delegitimising the Jewish national homeland as a prelude to its destruction. It passed a motion calling for a boycott of two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar Ilan, which it accused of being complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and agreed to circulate a Palestinian call for a total university boycott.

The targeted Israeli institutions have denied the specific charges. They were given no opportunity to put their case; indeed, a request from Bar Ilan to send someone to do so at the conference was turned down. This was not surprising to anyone who has grasped what is going on here. For it was not these universities which were on trial, but Israel itself. And for the stupid and vicious people who now pass for our intelligentsia, Israel is a pariah nation — an ‘apartheid state’ — simply because the Arabs who are trying to exterminate it say that this is so.

The vote has drawn immediate protests at the denial of academic freedom that it embodies. I have already commented in posts below on this particular aspect, along with the disgusting requirement for Israeli academics to side with those who would exterminate their nation in order to avoid this punishment. In these circumstances, it was astonishing to hear Steven Rose, the original begetter of the boycott movement three years ago, adduce on BBC Radio Four’s The World Tonight as a reason for this action the ‘appalling’ restrictions by the Israeli authorities on the academic freedom of his Palestinian colleagues who were prevented from moving freely between universities in the territories. No mention by Rose, of course, of the 50-year Arab war against Israel and the systematic mass murder of Israeli citizens by Palestinians — the only reason for those restrictions being applied.

But then, the whole premise of the motion is a truly monstrous lie about who is the aggressor and who the victim in the Middle East, with Israel being wickedly blamed for having the temerity to defend itself against annihilation and genocide. Susan Blackwell, the Birmingham university lecturer (described in David Aaronovitch’s Observer column as a former Christian turned revolutionary socialist) who co-wrote the motion, said the union was ‘standing up for human rights’. What is so terrifying is that, in stamping on the human right to life of the Israelis, she probably sincerely believes this Orwellian inversion of the truth. And these people are teaching our young.

The universities are supposed to be the custodians of truth. But these people are systematically purveying a set of big lies. Thus Rose claimed that Israel was becoming an ‘apartheid state’. This is, of course, demonstrably ludicrous. Israeli Arabs have equal rights in Israel — they can vote, they have members of the Knesset, they can serve in the army and as judges and so on. And if he means the Palestinians in the territories, they are not part of Israel. So the charge of ‘apartheid’ (which, apart from anything else, trivialises what actually happened in South Africa) is nothing other than a wicked slander.

Like Shereen Benjamin, the other co-author of this motion, Rose is himself a Jew. As I have observed before, the role of Jews in the demonisation of Israel betrays a vicious psychopathology. For this process is deeply racist and anti-Jewish, and the fact that some of its proponents are Jews does not make it less so. It not only subjects Israel to a process of demonisation and delegitimisation based on lies and libels but does so obsessively and disproportionately. It singles out Israel for opprobrium and worse while ignoring the multitudinous tyrannies and autocracies where intellectual freedom really is stifled, but where no boycotts are ever proposed. It is deeply racist, denying to the Jews alone the freedom to be a nation in their historic homeland, lawfully constituted by the world.

Disingenuously, Rose denied that the aim of the boycott was to attack the Jewish state. If there was any doubt about this, one has only to look at what influences lie behind it. On the Civitas website, David Conway fills us in:

‘The web-site of the AUT reveals those proposing the motion derived both their inspiration and wording for it from a campaign calling for such a boycott that has been orchestrated and organised by Birzeit University. Part of the conference motion reads:

‘[AUT’s] Executive Council notes that nearly sixty of the most prominent academic, cultural and professional associations and trade unions in the Occupied West bank and Gaza… , [whose views are] thus highly representative of the views of major sectors of Palestinian civil society, have now called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.'

The motion also points out that the full text of their call for the boycott can be found on a website of Birzeit University's and obligingly provides a link to it. This link reveals their campaign has been orchestrated by a sociology lecturer there named, Lisa Taraki who is elsewhere described as 'Coordinator for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Occupied Palestinian territories'.

The three Israeli universities whose boycott is being called for are the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. All are located within the so-called 'green line', and hence within Israel-proper as opposed to the so-called 'occupied territories'. The natural inference from the title of the boycott's Palestinian Coordinator must be that those there like her who are calling for it must consider all Israel as occupied Palestinian territory, something their literature fully confirms. Hence, one must infer, they will be satisfied with nothing less than Israel’s complete destruction as a Jewish state.’

This is indeed the agenda now running strongly not just in our temples to idiocy known as the universities but far beyond. The willed destruction of the Jewish state is the poison running through the bloodstream of the British intelligentsia. It’s no use saying that the last time Jews were boycotted in the universities was in 1930s Germany, as the British Israel-haters will merely reply that the Jews have turned into the new Nazis. It’s no use saying that their views are anti-Jewish, since they contend that seeking the destruction of Israel is not anti-Jewish. But of course it is, profoundly and viscerally through its selectivity, double standards, moral inversion, obsessional malice and employment of ancient stereotypes.

The AUT motion cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a tiny minority of far-left academics in a marginal union. It may be that other academics, appalled by what has occurred, will resign from that union or protest in other ways. But this development is merely the latest in an apparently unstoppable stream of comments and incidents of an anti-Jewish nature. And the crucial thing is the absence of outrage in the wider community — indeed, on occasion, it provides its endorsement. The AUT motion came at the end of a week which saw the award of the MBE to Orla Guerin, the BBC reporter whose venomous dispatches from Israel have come to epitomise the virulent anti-Israel hatred at the BBC. For her to be given this award, presented by Baroness Symons, the junior Foreign Office minister, is a calculated kick in the teeth by the Labour government towards the Jewish community in Britain, where feeling about Guerin’s reporting runs very high as the government well knows.

The Jewish community in Britain is under siege.

A reader who is currently at a British university has sent me this cri de coeur about the anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning:

'I have been particularly incensed by the activities of certain universities, most notably SOAS. I am currently attending Aberystwyth University, and I can assure you that the rot within academia seems to be all pervasive.

'The most notable decline in academic rigour is the opinion of most of the academic staff that all the world's current ills can be attributed to the activities of the US and Israel, and those that can't are the result of our colonial legacy. This results in a refusal to try and investigate or understand the problems in the developing world; or more precisely the Islamic world.

'Certain members of the academic staff hold some quite frankly
offensive views. During a recent series of lectures about terrorism,
the lecturer gave an admirably balanced assessment of most of the
terrorist groups and their activities around the world. Then came the
'Middle East Conflict'. He began by handing out photocopied pieces of
his own published work that sought to claim that the myriad terrorist groups operating in Israel and Palestine were necessary to prevent 'Israeli genocide'. He then went on to inform us that during the course of his research he had met and interviewed numerous members of Hamas and Hezbollah, and that he counted some of these men as 'close personal friends' and had invited one of them to his native Holland.

'I found this situation entirely unpalatable. suppose that the lecturer had declared his support for another of the terrorist groups he was lecturing about -- Combat 18 for example, or perhaps the numerous Aryan/White power groups in the US. Can we imagine that he would still be teaching, or for that matter that he would be anything more than a pariah?

'A Jewish friend put this question to the department and was essentially told that first of all he couldn't really have an opinion because religion clouds the individual's judgement, and that secondly he was an undergraduate and therefore not able to understand academic objectivity.

'It also seems that the only way to really succeed within the
university industry is to pander to the prejudices of the academic
staff; anything that differs with the anti-Semitic orthodoxy results
in rather harsh marking. When I first went to university, I came with
the naive belief that study at such an institution was about the
pursuit of knowledge and truth; it is about lies, propaganda and the
worst sort of prejudice.

'Our "Guild of Students" (for some reason we don't have a union) has
been filled with rabid Amnesty International types. I find the ideal
that Amnesty was set up with admirable. However, it seems to have been hijacked by those that oppose the state of Israel. There have been a rash of frankly laughable and ridiculous activities to show support for the oppressed Palestinian victims; we have had a "Stop the Wall" evening, conducted with university approval. This evening featured collections for some rather dubious charities, and interpretive dance and drama to "show solidarity and resistance".

'I have two months left at university and they cannot pass quickly enough.'

A reader rebukes me for my remarks about Paula Radcliffe (see posts below) thus:

'I must suggest that it is unfair to blame Paula Radcliffe for being caught short in the London Marathon. These stomach events are fairly common, and probably inevitable, under the physical stress of marathon running. I saw it happen to a women leader at the Boston Marathon, the difference being that it wasn't shown or even mentioned in the mass media. And if you remember the dreadful, nasty, small-minded abuse Ms. Radcliffe suffered from the British press after the Athens Marathon, and imagine what they would have said if she had left the course in London to look for a proper facility, I think you will have more sympathy for her behaviour. Now what is totally unexcusable and unforgiveable is that the TV and press would film a person in that situation, and then show it to the world. That is really low.'

Since I am not a runner, I confess I am nonplussed.

A typically informed and thoughtful piece by Robert Spencer punctures the great inflated balloon of jejune, knee-jerk 'liberal' horror which has encompassed the election of Pope Benedict XVI on account of his traditionalist views. Spencer crystallises a quite different perspective:

'In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive”...

'The new Pope has criticized Europe’s reluctance to acknowledge its Christian roots for fear of offending Islam’s rapidly growing and increasingly influential presence in European countries — a presence which, as historian Bat Ye’or demonstrates in her book Eurabia, has been actively encouraged and facilitated by European leaders for over three decades. “What offends Islam,” said Cardinal Ratzinger, “is the lack of reference to God, the arrogance of reason, which provokes fundamentalism.” He has criticized multiculturalism, “which is so constantly and passionately encouraged and supported,” because it “sometimes amounts to an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own.”

'He contrasts the modern-day resurgence of Islam with the enervation of Europe. In old Europe, he has said, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one's own desires.” Islam, on the other hand, is anything but relativistic: “The rebirth of Islam is due in part to the new material richness acquired by Muslim countries, but mainly to the knowledge that it is able to offer a valid spiritual foundation for the life of its people, a foundation that seems to have escaped from the hands of old Europe.” '

Spencer has understood the crucial point which the new Pope, by this account, has also understood -- that the reason Europe is vulnerable to Islam is because of the vacuum in its own values caused by the all-out assault mounted by the forces of relativism for the past half-century. The Islamists have understood this very well; and they are not wrong when they call the west 'decadent'. For what they criticise -- and rightly so -- is the 'arrogance of reason' which has excluded the spiritual and worships instead the false gods of ego, selfishness and instant gratification.

What Spencer and the Pope have also understood is that it is only if Christianity manages to retake the lost continent of Europe and revive its abandoned faith that the moral relativism behnd whose banner Europe is marching steadily towards the cultural precipice will be defeated -- and with it the colonising ambitions of Islam to fill the void.

And this of course is the great paradox. For it is only if a muscular Christianity is thus revived that the values of the west -- the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, democracy -- will be saved from extinction under the twin onslaught from both within and without. In other words, it is only through the arch-traditionalism represented by the new Pope that the freedoms prized by those 'liberals' who denounce him will be preserved. It is the former head of the Papal Inquisition, no less, who ironically offers the best chance that western liberalism -- and the freedoms that have been so foolishly squandered and abused -- might survive.

Now stop sniggering at the back. This is a tragic setback for a glittering jewel in our democratic crown.

George Galloway, whose far-left Respect party sucks up to radical Islamists in order to woo the Muslim vote, was last night forced to flee for his life from some of these said Islamists who threatened to string him up as a false prophet for enticing Muslims to take part in the un-Islamic activity of voting. 'Gorgeous' George did not take this in the collegiate spirit in which it was clearly intended. As the Evening Standard reported:

'Mr Galloway was electioneering on the Osier council estate in Bethnal Green last night when a gang of 30 Muslim fundamentalists, who claim voting is un-Islamic, surrounded him and his supporters. The men said they were angry at Mr Galloway's attempt to woo Muslim voters. They said they were "setting up the gallows" for him and warned any Muslim who voted for his anti-war Respect party that they faced a "sentence of death". After a fight broke out between the two groups, police were called and Mr Galloway was forced to hide in his car in an alley until the violence calmed down'.

But Gallows-way's problems did not end there. For no sooner had he most unreasonably objected to the attempt to enact the philosophy that his party has endorsed by stringing him up than the upstanding democrats of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who everyone knows demonstrate their commitment to pluralism, moderation and freedom of speech through their aim of turning Britain into an Islamic state, declared they would sue both the car-cowering politician and the Evening Standard for libel by accusing them of having instigated the attack. It said:

'Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain is an Islamic intellectual and political entity that seeks to change people’s thoughts solely through intelligent discussion and debate. In discussions with concerned members of the Muslim community, the police authorities have also confirmed that Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain had no involvement in these events.'

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

A couple of commentators, such as Daniel Finkelstein in today's Times, have rightly remarked on the elephant in the room in this election campaign -- the war in Iraq. As Finkelstein says, whatever view you took on the war it is an enormously significant issue, both in terms of holding the Prime Minister to account for what has already happened and, no less important, debating his foreign policy of the future.

Whether you think he took the country to war on a lie or that he acted in good faith throughout, whether you think that supporting the development of democratic institutions in the Middle East is an inspired way of bringing peace or is playing with fundamentalist fire, Iraq and its associated foreign policy decisions are among the biggest issues of the day. That's why so many people are bringing up Iraq on the doorstep.

And yet there is a conspiracy of silence on the subject. No politician is mentioning it. It's not clear why the LibDems are so silent, since they had a very clear position opposing the war. The Tories are silent because a) their position became Kerry-esque in its opportunistic backsliding and b) they haven't got the bottle to support their signature desire to cut taxes, let alone face the wrath of the people over the war in Iraq. And Tony Blair was obviously advised to avoid the subject like the plague in case he got lynched.

Like just about everything else in his handling of this issue, I think he's made the wrong judgment call yet again. This was an opportunity to stand up and defend the decision he took, not run in the opposite direction. He could have produced a few home truths about the gross rewriting of history that's gone on, and reminded people of facts that have somehow fallen by the wayside. He'd have got brownie points for courage, and people might have learned something. Instead, his silence is surely piling contempt upon fury. And meanwhile, the election debate is simply ignoring the great issue of our time.

The first time Alistair Crooke burst upon public consciousness was in 2003. Crooke, who had been an MI6 agent for 30 years and was then assigned as a security adviser to the EU's special envoy to the Middle East, Miguel Moratinos, was recalled from Jerusalem by the British Foreign Office against his will. He had been involved in repeated attempts to draw Hamas, Islamic jihad and other terrorist groups into negotiations. The Guardian reported at the time:

‘But British diplomats in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and London, who were described as increasingly hostile to Mr Crooke's role, were said to have lost faith in that option after Hamas killed 23 people in the worst bus suicide bombing of the intifada last month.’

Now, documents seized by Israel which have just been published reveal that in June 2002, Alistair Crooke, then working for Moratinos, met secretly in Gaza with a Hamas delegation headed by the organization’s then-leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

On FrontPageMagazine.com David Hornick waxes indignant:

‘The meeting sheds light on why Europe finds it so hard to label the likes of Hamas or Hizbullah as terror organizations. Crooke’s groveling behavior makes clearer than ever why Israel seeks to limit European involvement in its conflict or diplomacy with the Arabs; while the terrorists express their animosity toward Israel and America and belief that Europe is their ally.’

Grovelling behaviour, indeed; but more than that, a lethal confusion of language. Crooke told Yassin that:

‘The main problem is the Israeli occupation’.

Yassin agreed. But while Crooke appears to have been talking about the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Yassin was talking about the ‘occupation’ of 1948:

‘The Israeli army conquered the land in the year 1948 and followed in our footsteps in 1967. . . . Is it conceivable that the international community should ask us not to resist the occupation . . . ?! . . . instead of supporting my position of self-defense, Europe includes me in the list of terrorist [organizations].'

In other words, the problem Yassin wanted removed was the existence of Israel itself. And Crooke did not demur. Instead, he replied:

‘I completely understand what you are saying… There is an understanding not only on the government level but also on the popular level, and there is sympathy with the Palestinian people...'

Not only that, with Yassin complaining that the EU had proscribed Hamas as the terrorist organisation that it is, Crooke observed:

‘As for terrorism, I hate that word. I have spent some time in my life with freedom fighters like in Colombia…’

So to the EU’s security adviser, the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are actually freedom fighters. In other words, they are morally justified in their campaign of mass murder, and Israel is morally unjustified in trying to defend itself against it. And this was just three months after the massacre of the Passover seder in Natanya.

The transcript tells us all we need to know about the EU’s position on the Middle East. But Mr Crooke’s remarkable influence apparently extends even more widely. Last month, the Sunday Times reported that Mr Crooke had organised another secret meeting, this time between Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan’s Jamiat-i-Islami and -- wait for it -- the Americans. The paper reported:

‘Although still defiant in their anti-American rhetoric, the militants were staking a claim to be part of the so-called “Arab spring” of democratic change that has encompassed elections in Iraq and protests in Lebanon against the presence of Syrian forces… Israel was not slow to condemn the meeting, accusing the American delegates of “extreme naivety” in imagining that they could draw groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah on to a peaceful path. “It does no good to appease or negotiate with such terrorists,” a government spokesman said.’

Can anyone explain why President Bush, whose famous doctrine ordains no negotiation with terrorists and that the Palestinians must develop into a democratic society before they can expect to have a state of their own, is nevertheless allowing his officials to ‘negotiate’ with a general assembly of the world’s mass murderers, including the terrorist army of Iran? And who exactly is currently responsible for the potentially lethal activities of the ‘former’ British MI6 officer Alistair Crooke?

Without wishing to put anyone off their breakfast, a reader has drawn my attention -- a propos the post below about Paula Radcliffe -- to a report a few weeks ago by Kevin Myers in the Sunday Telegraph which observed:

'Paula Radcliffe has described how, physically unable to resist the call of nature during the Athens marathon, she repeatedly (and in full view of the public) emptied her bowels as she ran: the trots on the trot.'

She referred this time to 'stomach cramps'. So maybe this was not even just micturition...

The Guardian records an inspiring moment in Paula Radcliffe's Marathon win yesterday:

'Radcliffe had being caught live on national television by an estimated 5m viewers, stopping in the 22nd mile of the London Marathon to relieve herself. "I have to apologise to the nation," said Radcliffe. "I was losing 10 seconds every mile because my stomach was cramping. I didn't know how far ahead I was but I felt I just had to stop." '

Licentiousness, lotteries, political corruption -- and now micturition in the streets. Does anyone else get the feeling that Britain is hurtling back to the eighteenth century?

Everyone assumes that the Palestinians all want nothing more than to live under Palestinian rule. But in this article, Daniel Pipes has assembled telling evidence that, on the contrary, many Arabs who are already living in Israel, in Jerusalem and in the 'Galilee triangle', view the prospect with horror. They would prefer, they say, to live under Israeli rule:

'‘Abd ar-Razzaq ‘Abid of Jerusalem's Silwan neighborhood pointed dubiously to "what's happening in Ramallah, Hebron, and the Gaza Strip" and asked if the residents there were well off. A doctor applying for Israeli papers explained: "The whole world seems to be talking about the future of the Arabs of Jerusalem, but no one has bothered asking us. The international community and the Israeli Left seem to take it for granted that we want to live under Mr. Arafat's control. We don't. Most of us despise Mr. Arafat and the cronies around him, and we want to stay in Israel. At least here I can speak my mind freely without being dumped in prison, as well as having a chance to earn an honest day's wage".

'In the colorful words of one Jerusalem resident, "The hell of Israel is better than the paradise of Arafat. We know Israeli rule stinks, but sometimes we feel like Palestinian rule would be worse." The director of the Bayt Hanina community council in northern Jerusalem, Husam Watad, found that the prospect of finding themselves living under Arafat's control had people "in a panic. More than 50 percent of east Jerusalem residents live below the poverty line, and you can imagine how the situation would look if residents did not receive [Israeli] National Insurance Institute payments." In the view of Fadal Tahabub, a member of the Palestinian National Council, an estimated 70 percent of the 200,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem preferred to remain under Israeli sovereignty. A social worker living in Ras al-‘Amud, one of the areas possibly falling under PA control, said: "If a secret poll was conducted, I am sure an overwhelming majority of Jerusalem Arabs would say they would prefer to stay in Israel." '

This is because the Arabs of Israel know from first- hand experience the advantages of living under the rule of law, with freedom of expression, economic benefits and the safety and security that derive from living in a free society. So why should their kinfolk in the territories feel any differently? If they were actually to be asked, would this not be the most powerful means of removing the corrupt tyranny that has kept them in servitude and spawned the cult of death that has taken their children from them and turned them into human explosives? And so shouldn't Israel and America be demanding of the Palestinians above all that they develop the institutions of a free society as the precondition of negotiations for a state of their own?

Theodore Dalrymple has a terrific article in the City Journal, the magazine of the American Manhattan Institute think tank, which goes some way towards explaining just why British society has degenerated into its sullen and unthinking infantilism. He reflects on the apparently perplexing fact that Britons who lived through the death and destruction of the Second World War remember it nevertheless as the best time in their lives -- a time that George Orwell managed to fix in the national imagination in a way that came to define the British character -- and concludes that this is because the defence of the country against Nazism provided meaning and purpose. This sense of national unity, however, was translated after the war into the collectivist programmes of the welfare state, causing the economist Friedrich von Hayek to write his counterblast, The Road to Serfdom.

But what happened to the British, argues Dalrymple, was far worse than even Hayek imagined. The unrealisable utopian welfare project resulted in nothing less than a collapse of all the values that had made the British so admirable, as he catalogues in this devastating litany:

‘A sense of irony is the first victim of utopian dreams. The British tolerance of eccentricity has also evaporated; uniformity is what they want now, and are prepared informally to impose. They tolerate no deviation in taste or appearance from themselves: and certainly in the lower reaches of society, people who are markedly different, either in appearance because of the vagaries of nature, or in behavior because of an unusual taste they may have, especially for cultivation, meet with merciless ridicule, bullying, and even physical attack. It is as if people believed that uniformity of appearance, taste, and behavior were a justification of their own lives, and any deviation an implied reproach or even a declaration of hostility…

‘The British are no longer sturdily independent as individuals, either, and now feel no shame or even unease, as not long ago they would have felt, at accepting government handouts. Indeed, 40 percent of them now receive such handouts: for example, the parents of every child are entitled not merely to a tax reduction but to an actual payment in cash, no matter the state of their finances. As for those who, though able-bodied and perfectly able to work, are completely dependent on the state for their income, they unashamedly call the day when their welfare checks arrive “payday.” Between work and parasitism they see no difference. “I’m getting paid today,” they say, having not only accepted but thoroughly internalized the doctrine propounded in the Beveridge Report, that it is the duty of the state to assure everyone of a decent minimum standard of life regardless of his conduct.’

In short, the legacy of the welfare state, argues Dalrymple, has been to render the once lion-hearted British people servile, having surrendered control over much of their lives to the state, thus reducing the choices they are still able to make to ‘sex and shopping’:

‘No wonder that the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced with passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been or is being done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect, pocket money, like the money children get from their parents, reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result, they are infantilized. If they behave irresponsibly—for example, by abandoning their own children wherever they father them—it is because both the rewards for behaving responsibly and the penalties for behaving irresponsibly have vanished. Such people come to live in a limbo, in which there is nothing much to hope or strive for and nothing much to fear or lose. Private property and consumerism coexist with collectivism, and freedom for many people now means little more than choice among goods.’

This profound cultural de-moralisation, this disintegration of the British character, goes a long way towards explaining why British society has become as sentimentalised as it is selfish, as irrational as it is irreligious and as uncivilised as it is uneducated. Given this calamitous decline, the current general election frankly has about as much relevance to the great issues of the day as playing a pinball machine on Brighton Pier.

The British theatre is doing its valiant bit to promote the propaganda of lies and hatred towards the Jewish state. ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’, a dramatised version of the writings of the International Solidarity Movement activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in disputed circumstances while attempting to prevent the destruction of Palestinian houses, has received the kind of enthusiastic reviews one would expect from an intelligentsia which has almost universally inverted victim and murderer in the Arab war against Israel. The ISM have been, on the most charitable analysis, attempting to prevent Israel from taking the measures it deems necessary to protect its citizens from mass murder or, according to the less charitable interpretation, actively assisting the Palestinian homicide squads. Either way, to eulogise Rachel Corrie is the theatre of moral dementia.

Undaunted, the reviewers have emerged from the performance mostly moist-eyed with admiration for this paragon of empathy. The fact that she empathised not with the victims of mass murder but with those who were punished for their part in the death cult that took their lives barely troubles them. In the Telegraph, Charles Spencer allows himself a brief tremor of anxiety over

‘Corrie’s occasionally glib convictions’

and longs for ‘

calmer and more informed viewpoints’

, before leaving the theatre

‘mourning not only Rachel Corrie’s death but also one’s own loss of the idealism and reckless courage of youth’

.

In the Guardian, Michael Billington has no qualms at all but rapidly ascends to the high ground of Mount Sanctimony:

‘Theatre has no obligation to give a complete picture. Its only duty is to be honest. And what you get here is a stunning account of one woman's passionate response to a particular situation. And the passion comes blazing through in Corrie's eloquent reaction to her father's inquiry about Palestinian violence. As she says, if we lived where tanks and soldiers and bulldozers could destroy our homes at any moment and where our lives were completely strangled, wouldn't we defend ourselves as best we could. The danger of right-on propaganda is avoided by the specificity of Rickman's Theatre Upstairs production.’

For a moment, I thought Billington was saying that if we lived in a situation where terrorists could blow children and teenagers to bits in pizza parlours and on buses we would of course defend ourselves as best we could. Silly me; he’s endorsing the side of the killers, of course. Thank heavens he‘s avoided the dangers of ‘right-on propaganda’.

The only discordant note in this sickening festival of humbug is sounded by Clive Davis in the Times:

‘With no attempt made to set the violence in context, we are left with the impression of unarmed civilians being crushed by faceless militarists. Early on, Corrie makes a point of informing us that more Israelis have been killed in road accidents than in all the country ’s wars put together. As she jots down thoughts in her notebook and fires off e-mails to her parents, she declares that “the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance”. Even the late Yassir Arafat might have blushed at that one’.

Tom Gross and Robin Stamler have reminded us of a few of the results of the ‘Gandhian non-violent resistance’ supported by Rachel Corrie and extolled in this uplifting drama:

'1. My Name is Rachel Levy (Israeli girl age 17, blown up in a grocery store) 2. My Name is Rachel Thaler (Israeli girl aged 16, blown up in a pizzeria) 3. My Name is Rachel Levi (Israeli girl aged 19, murdered while waiting for the bus) 4. My Name is Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband and son while at home) 5. My Name is Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a cafe) 6. My Name is Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 6 while sitting at home)’

As Steven Plaut observes on his own website:

‘It would be interesting knowing how many of THESE Rachels were murdered with explosives smuggled in through the same tunnels that Rachel Corrie and her ISM pro-terrorist friends were "defending”!’

Indeed. But of course, that would be propaganda.

In the Times, Simon Jenkins amply fulfils my prophecy of yesterday, that the collapse of the ricin trials would prove a field day for the anti-war mob. Jenkins lets rip:

'No, there were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no 9/11 style threat, no ricin, no bombs or explosives, just some old photostats and a psychotic individual with undoubtedly evil intent...There is not the faintest convergence between the Bourgass case as revealed in the Old Bailey this week and the crazed media and political coverage of it. The BBC’s 6pm news on Wednesday night was a disgrace, worse than anything during the Gilligan affair. But because it served Downing Street’s purpose it will doubtless avoid censure. Nor was the press any better. Mention the word terrorist and sanity flies the coop.'

So everyone who thinks that Bourgass was part of an al Qaeda plot is insane, and party to Blair's lies over Iraq. Bourgass was nothing but a lone nut. Perhaps Jenkins should read his own paper. For a few pages previously, a report by Sean O'Neill paints a very different picture. O'Neill provides details of the belief by police and security sources that the conviction of Bourgass marks the final smashing of a major Algerian terror cell linked to al Qaeda headed by abu Doha, who is currently held in Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to the US. Bourgass was a member of this cell. O'Neill writes:

'Doha was a member of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), a terrorist group which has carried out widespread atrocities in Algeria. In 1998, according to a US indictment, he won permission from Osama bin Laden to set up the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan for Algerians and other North Africans. Hundreds trained at Khalden and some who have since been arrested have testified that bin Laden visited regularly. Many left to fight alongside Islamists in Chechnya, but others were encouraged to base themselves in the West and carry out attacks there. With his camp established, Doha stationed himself in North London amid the growing Algerian population fleeing the bitter conflict in their homeland. The Finsbury Park mosque was a focal point for the community...'

'In December 2001 emergency powers were introduced to detain foreign terror suspects without trial.Many of those rounded up were associates of Doha. They are now free under the terms of terrorist control orders. Almost a year later the network suffered another blow when its new head, Kadre, was arrested in London. Police believe that he had come to activate the ricin plot. Two months later the poisons conspiracy was smashed and Bourgass was arrested.'

So is this all untrue? Are the police and security services also, in Jenkins's world view, either insane or telling lies? Or is it perhaps Jenkins and those who are making the same claim who cannot think straight, seeing everything through the distorting prism that anything at all that Blair or Bush have ever used to show there really was a terrorist threat must be a lie?

More gravely for the rest of us, if it is indeed true that Bourgass was a member of abu Doha's terror cell, then the question that I posed yesterday becomes overwhelmingly urgent: why did the ricin prosecutions go belly-up, and what does this tell us about the adequacy of our judicial system to deal with the terrorist threat?

What is one to make of the ricin trial that has just resulted in the conviction of Kamel Bourgass, who was convicted last year of the murder of DC Stephen Oake, on a charge of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance with poisons and the acquittal of himself and four other defendants on the charge of conspiracy to murder, with the trial of a further four aborted?

The first point, adequately made in this morning’s press, is that the case is a graphic example of the lethal shambles of British immigration and asylum policy, that allowed this man to disappear into the country after his asylum claim was rejected.

The second point, which has all but been buried by the first, is the astounding and lethal incompetence of this bungled police operation that as a result left DC Oake dead. The Telegraph recounts the litany of grievous police errors:

‘Special Branch officers were supposed to have carried out comprehensive surveillance of the flat in advance. But this failed to uncover the fact that there were three, rather than two, suspects in the flat. The extra man was Bourgass. The pre-operation briefing took place in a noisy police station garage as a new shift was clocking on. At least one officer had difficulty hearing. Members of the 23-strong team were told that they would be raiding two addresses. It later emerged that those going to Crumpsall did not know that their target flat was on the ground floor. There was, according to the prosecution at Bourgass's trial, "little or no contingency plan" to cover the possibility of someone else being there.

'The arrest team did not take specialist arrest kits and, having arrived at the flat at 4.25pm, Special Branch officers found that their police-issue mobile phones would not work. They had to borrow personal mobiles. Tactical Aid Unit (TAU) officers would normally have expected to break into the flat and secure it. On this occasion the Special Branch team, none wearing body armour, simply knocked on the door. TAU officers were used to handcuffing suspects in such circumstances. But in Crumpsall Lane they were under specific orders from Special Branch not to do so.’

And so on. The officer in charge of this debacle has reportedly been disciplined – but is still employed somewhere in the police service. In other words, no-one has taken responsibility for eye-watering professional incompetence which left an officer dead. Faced with a potential terrorist plot the consequences of which, according to reports, made the police and security world aware that they were in a race against time to prevent a terror attack using unconventional weapons, the police responded like the Keystone Cops. What faith can we possibly have that our security is being adequately safeguarded when presented with evidence like this – and with no-one prepared to address these failings?

After that, however, the story descends into the very deepest and most troubling murk. For we are now being told that what this story tells us is that there was no ricin, no conspiracy and no al Qaeda plot.

The police and Labour politicians have tried to present the outcome as some kind of triumph, proving that there was indeed a terrorist threat to the nation. On the contrary – this case was a presentational catastrophe. For apart from the murder of DC Oake, the prosecution went belly-up. Of nine defendants in related trials, only one has been convicted. The others have walked free, acquitted of conspiracy.

The result is that the anti-war left is having a field day. For activists such as radical solicitor Gareth Peirce, the maverick intelligence analyst Duncan Campbell and the anti-war media including a bunch of ‘security’ websites, the acquittals mean that Bourgass was a loner, there was never any al Qaeda plot and this threat was simply cooked up by Tony Blair to justify the Iraq war by creating a climate of fear.

This would mean that British intelligence and the British police were all lying too about Bourgass’s connections to al Qaeda, that he was ‘handpicked to be trained in the art of making and dispensing poisons’, as the Daily Mail reported.

It would mean a number of extraordinary coincidences. For this ‘loner’ just happened to be associating with a number of people who just happened to be veterans of the Al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan, where he himself just happened to have been trained, and who all in turn just happened to be engaged in activities which bore a remarkable similarity. As the Telegraph
reported, the police investigation:

‘…led to an address at Ethel Coleman Way, Thetford, in Norfolk. There, detectives found photo-copies of handwritten recipes in Arabic script for poisons and explosives, including ricin and cyanide. Fingerprints, later shown to belong to Bourgass, were found on them. It was, a senior source said, "the first tangible sign this group was engaged in something more malevolent than fund-raising fraudulent activity".’

Next, it would mean discounting as another astonishing coincidence the fact that the police were led to Bourgass by an al Qaeda terrorist, Mohammed Meguerba, who just happened to provide information all of which turned out to check out. As the Times reported:

‘He told his interrogators that he had been part of a group in London planning attacks using homemade chemical weapons. He had fled Britain two months before, after his arrest during the September police raids. He had been bailed and was ordered by his superiors to leave Britain. The 27-page memo on his interrogation, which may have involved the use of torture, detailed the plan to make poisons and gave the first hint of possible targets. It would not be a mass attack, but on chosen individual civilians. Meguerba said that his gang had discussed smearing toxic pastes or liquids on car and door handles around Holloway in North London. The aim was to trigger widespread fear and panic. The leader of the plot was identified as a man called “Nadir”, with whom Meguerba claimed to have filled two Nivea cream pots with ricin. Those pots have never been found. But one discovered in a wardrobe contained a nicotine poison. He did not know the address where he and “Nadir” had worked on their formulas, but his description of how he travelled there led police to a two-bedroom flat above a pharmacy on Wood Green High Road in North London.

Much is being made of the fact that the initial report that ricin was found being found in turn by one Porton Down to have been wrong and then misreported by a Porton Down expert. Apart from apparent incompetence by this second expert, we are apparently supposed to deduce that this means — what, exactly? No ricin, no problem? But all the ingredients for making ricin, the castor oil seeds, the apparatus, the recipe — and the instructions for a bomb — were all found in that flat. Maybe he hadn’t yet got round to mincing up his castor-oil beans. Maybe he had and it’s in the missing Nivea pot. What difference does it make that no ricin was found? In what sense was this not a ricin factory?

Even more is being made of the claim that the ricin recipe found in the possession of Bourgass differed in certain details from the one on the al Qaeda handbook, and that such recipes are two a penny on the internet. This was claimed by Duncan Campbell in the Guardian,
who suddenly revealed today that he had argued this point in court with the Porton Down folk who were claiming a seamless connection between Bourgass’s recipe and al Qaeda’s.

Clearly, this issue of the ricin recipe is set to become a major growth industry for anti-war anoraks and conspiracy theorists (or perhaps in these circumstances, that should read ‘anti-criminal-conspiracy theorists’, on the basis that the only conspiracies they believe in are ones run by the state). The bottom line for the rest of us, however, is that in all this murk we simply haven’t got a clue who is telling the truth for the simple reason that none of us heard any of this evidence.

We read that the al Qaeda connection evidence wasn’t put to the jury. Why not? We don’t know. The whole wretched series of ricin trials has been conducted in total secrecy, with reporters forbidden to say anything about it — or indeed, about other terrorist trials that are pending. As a result, we are left in the dark. Virtually nothing has been reported about the evidence apart from patchy and inadequate stuff today. The vast majority of these trials consisted of legal argument held in the absence of the jury. All we do know is that politicians are making hay with this, that the police have been shown to be utterly incompetent and that a vitally important series of trials has ended in a judicial debacle. In the absence of any credible sources producing credible information, the outcome is going to be yet more cynicism, more confusion and more outright disbelief about the terrorist threat.

Guess who is laughing all the way to the bomb factory.

As the campaign to prevent John Bolton from becoming the US ambassador to the UN intensifies, on the grounds that it is intolerable to appoint someone to that position who actually tells the truth about the UN, a further example has occurred of that organisation's moral and political bankruptcy. A resolution proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and passed by the UN Commission on Human Rights (sic) has condemned the 'campaign of defamation' against Muslims following 9/11. Ignoring the fact that 9/11 and the wider jihad against the west have been perpetrated in the name of Islam, that its perpetrators have not been excommunicated from the faith but, on the contrary, Islamic religious and political leaders have backed their aims and, in the case of Israel at least, openly supported their tactics (remember the standing ovation given by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to Mahathir Mohamed when he urged holy war against the Jews), it singles out Islam as the victim of a 'culture of hatred, disharmony and discrimination' in the war against terrorism, totally ignoring the religions of the world targeted by terrorists and their state sympathisers for murderous attack in the name of Islam.

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury knows all about the culture of ‘hatred, disharmony and discrimination’. The Jerusalem Post has reported that, as the Muslim editor of the Bangladeshi newspaper The Weekly Blitz, he had the enormous courage to condemn the power of radical Islam in his country and to provide his readers with unbiased news about the Middle East (we could do with him here in Britain). 16 months ago he was arrested as he prepared to address the Hebrew Writers' Conference in Tel Aviv on "The Role of Media in Creating a Culture of Peace" and thrown into jail. The Post reported:

‘Shortly after his arrest, police raided his home and business, seizing computers, files and other material. A mob then sacked the premises with impunity. His family was threatened, even attacked. His brother twice fled the capital. Mobs gathered in front of their home, and police blamed it all on the Choudhurys' "alliance with the Jews." The government said Choudhury was "spying for the interests of Israel against the interests of Bangladesh," then orchestrated a vilification campaign. They called Choudhury's undelivered speech their strongest evidence of his perfidy and said he broke Bangladeshi law by trying to visit Israel. Choudhury remains behind bars in deteriorating health, without due process, and facing a capital offense. Blackballed from employment, his family is on the verge of financial ruin.’

In an extraordinary article printed by the Post, Choudhury wrote:

‘Today, I stand before you perhaps as a living contradiction: a Zionist, a defender of Israel, and a devout, practising Muslim living in a Muslim country. Like you I believe in the justice of the Zionist dream. I also acknowledge this historical reality: that the world has endeavored to crush that dream and, yes, even destroy the viability of the Jewish people. At the same time I live in an environment where people believe just as passionately in an opposing view that sees Israel as illegitimate and the Jewish people as evil incarnate.

‘A true culture of peace is far more than the cessation of hostilities. It includes justice and tolerance for all people. It allows each person to have pride in one's own faith, while respecting the pride that courses through the veins of those who follow other paths to God. In Israel, you have any number of viewpoints being aired in any number of forums. You have Likud; you have Labor. You have Shas; you have Shinui. You have Peace Now; you have the Temple Mount Faithful. You have The Jerusalem Post; you have Haaretz…

‘The Islamic missionaries who have taken root in Bangladesh recently have, of course, a very different agenda than their Christian counterparts. Funded by shadowy sources in the Middle East and Africa, they operate under charitable-sounding names like Islamic Hospital, Free Ambulance Service, and Kindergarten Madrassa. But charitable they are not. Whispered allegations – for louder objections place you at considerable risk – that Islamic kindergarten madrassas train children for guerrilla war found support when many of their graduates went on to real battlegrounds in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some even volunteered to fight alongside the PLO and other terrorist organizations here. Repatriated Soldiers from Palestine, an organization in Bangladesh, cares for "soldiers" wounded in the fighting here, then recruits a fresh batch of terrorists to take their place. You might think such revelations would placing these organizations in a bad light. Yet, if anything, to my chagrin, it improves their standing in the eyes of many Bangladeshi citizens.

'That popularity has taken them to more affluent neighborhoods, away from the poorer areas that were once their exclusive location. Children of prominent Bangladeshis now attend the madrassas, where they learn Bangla (our vernacular), Arabic, Urdu, English and, in some places, French, as well as other advertised subjects. But they also learn the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare. Old hates are taught as faith, and they learn to revere Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the shahids. Innocent Muslim children are lured toward "jihad," taught to hate Christians and Jews and encouraged to kill them and destroy their property as a religious duty. It so distresses me that we are allowing these children, the future leaders of Bangladesh, to be brainwashed with hatred and extremism. These institutions are surely breeding thousands of Bin Ladens and Arafats for the future.

'I have listened to this filth since childhood. When I grew up, I turned my eyes to the Bible and many other books, had Christian and Jewish friends, and now am convinced that what the mullahs taught was not merely false, but also evil. That is clear not only to me but to many others in my country. For there to be any chance of lasting peace, this must change. How can we have peace when most Muslims still believe Israel was behind the September 11 attacks on the US? How can we have peace when Muslims see their own leaders refusing even to recognize Israel's right to exist? How can we have peace when we neither hear nor read anything to the contrary?'

This remarkable and immensely brave man currently awaits trial in Cell No.15 of the Dhaka Central Jail in Bangladesh. Just as it did with the Soviet dissidents, the free world must now bring every kind of public and private pressure to bear upon the government of Bangladesh to free him.

But don’t look for support from the UN, for which any such protest will dountless be merely further proof of ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discrimination’.

From the Daily Telegraph:

'Traffic police are being awarded points that vary in accordance with who they manage to pull over. Thames Valley police has given its 120 traffic officers "aide-memoire cards" which carry a chart awarding different points for catching different offenders. Their monthly target is 200 points. Under the system, officers get 10 points for stopping a drink-driver - the same number awarded for arresting a rapist...Thames Valley police insisted yesterday that the purpose of the scheme was to assist officers in setting priorities. It has been criticised because catching a motorist not wearing a seat belt is worth five points, yet arresting a rape or assault suspect is only worth another five. Sources within the force said it risked "trivialising" police work and could result in officers concentrating on lesser, easier-to-detect crimes in order to reach the target.'

Crikey! The Independent, Britain's most virulently anti-war paper, splashes today with:

'Iraq: is the tide turning?'

and cautiously it answers that yes, it just might:

'Attacks on US forces are down from 140 a day to 30 a day. Casualty figures are down. So are assassination attempts. US commanders believe they can reduce forces by up to 40,000. An upbeat General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week: "We're on track." Yesterday, an American civilian contractor was kidnapped in Baghdad. The dying is not over but, in Baghdad and Washington, the feeling is growing that the worst might just be over.'

So if even the Independent now concedes this, it might not be a mirage after all. The paper's leading article, however, says hastily that even if this is the case the war was still wrong. Phew. For a bad moment, I thought the Indie was connecting to reality.

From today's Telegraph:

'A man was killed in an affluent village yesterday after confronting yobs who police were said to have repeatedly failed to tackle. John Dabell, 25, was walking home from a pub when he was attacked and beaten over the head with a plank on a patch of waste ground notorious for drug dealing...Villagers in Linby, which has only 80 houses, said last night they had repeatedly asked police to stop yobs congregating on the waste ground. They said they sold drugs and even let off fireworks...Bob Brothwell, the chairman of the parish council, said: "It is a very quiet village, really quite affluent. But on that particular piece of land you do get gangs of youths meeting up to deal drugs. It has been a worry for around two or three years. There has been little police action to disperse them. We have found hypodermic needles in the bushes there in the past. We complained to the police a number of times, but little has been done".'

First it said there was no problem at all. Then it said reforms were already in place. Then it was revealed that it had previously deliberately rejected a proposal to correct the problem. Now the government has conceded there is a real risk of postal voting fraud and said it will put in place measures to prevent it -- but only after it has benefited from the corruption! As the Times reports:

'Labour is planning to legislate to stop cheating in postal voting immediately after the general election in spite of repeated assurances from ministers that the present system is safe, The Times has learnt. The disclosure will embarrass the Government, with critics pointing out that it is happy for the system to be used in the general election, even though it is clearly flawed enough to require speedy legislation. It will prompt charges that the Government failed to act sooner because it was worried that a shake-up of the laws might affect its own vote'.

It's the brazenness of this that is so astounding. After all, everyone can see the likelihood for fraud from the postal votes system at the forthcoming general election; and the government can see that everyone can see. Yet having now explicitly acknowledged the distinct risk that the election will be bent as a result, it proposes to benefit from this corruption before taking action to correct it that by definition will be too late.

Judicial review is the legal remedy for relief from unreasonable adminstrative actions. Does this scandalous decision not cry out for a concerned citizen to take the government to court?

In an incident whose symbolism can scarcely be over-stated, a black Jewish Labour MP was pelted with eggs by Muslims as she attended a remembrance ceremony in London's East End to commemorate the deaths of 164 people, almost all of whom were Jews, in the last V2 missile attack of the war 60 years ago. Eggs thrown at the MP Oona King missed their target but hit two elderly Jews. The viciousness behind the attack was encapsulated in remarks by two Muslim youths, as reported in the Telegraph:

'Ibn Alkhattab, 21, said: "It will be all about the war. There is enormous anger. No one will vote for her."His friend added: "She represented these people and then voted for the war. We all hate her. She comes here with her Jewish friends who are killing our people and then they come to our back yards. It is out of order. What do they expect?" '

What else indeed, but the violent hatred born of the most vile prejudice and paranoia that dishonours the Jewish war dead and attacks a member of Parliament for supporting a war that has liberated Muslims from tyranny.

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The meltdown in Britain's police service has got so bad that I am inaugurating a new service for readers -- Plod Watch, a regular monitor of policing ineptitude. Yesterday, there were no fewer than three examples of this alarming new genre:

1) Government minister David Lammy was astounded when, cradling the victim of a drive-by shooting that he happened to witness on the Broadwater Farm in north London (a largely black area where a police oficer was notoriously murdered some years ago), he observed that the police who arrived waited for more than ten minutes while making a 'risk assessment' before advancing onto the scene. As the Telegraph reported him as saying:

'The community perceive that they were not being policed. I am told police were making a risk assessment, but this has had enormous implications for community relations. If this young man had died, this would be a much more serious situation.'

2) South Yorkshire police has stopped taking statements from some burglary victims to release its officers from mounting paperwork. The Telegraph reported:

'Grahame Maxwell, South Yorkshire's deputy chief constable, said officers found the required form-filling "burdensome" and the time involved had caused the force to re-examine its procedures. He said: "We have to start looking at things we cannot do as we did previously. Traditionally, we have taken a statement at every single burglary. Detections are 20 per cent and eight out of 10 statements are filed and never used. If that takes an hour it is an hour not spent on patrol. It is a process of change. We are going down the line of saying we cannot always send a police officer every time people ring in. What we can do is talk to people."

So that's all right then.

3) Two police officfers were removed from guard duties at Windsor Castle after a Sun reporter drove a van containing a large box marked “bomb” into the castle after minimal examination at a checkpoint. As the Times reported:

'The “bomb” security breach is just the latest. This year Michael Hammond, a conman, was jailed after getting into the castle grounds posing as a detective. Last year a 49-year-old father of two scaled the gates of Buckingham Palace and chained himself to the top of a pillar, and a journalist got a job as a footman after perfunctory security checks.'

In yesterday's Times, former BBC journalist Tim Luckhurst made some extremely pertinent observations about the BBC. Picking up on concerns expressed by ex-BBC chairman Gavyn Davies about left-wing bias at the Beeb, Luckhurst wrote:

'To someone like Mr Davies, with his experience of the private sector, it is painfully obvious that the corporation is saturated with left-wing values. It disparages competition and worships consensus. Views prevalent in liberal universities percolate through every aspect of policy. Political correctness and cultural relativism are holy writ. Democracy is usually good, but not in America where it produces the wrong result.

'This progressive orthodoxy did not incense me when I joined the Today programme. I had started my career as an adviser to Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. I believed Conservatives were morally deficient and was delighted that most of my colleagues agreed. Those who thought otherwise were considered oddballs to be pitied. But as I climbed the BBC ladder the atmosphere began to grate. Producers argued when asked to consider private schools in a report on educational standards and complained when instructed to interview a French opponent of the euro.

'BBC journalists are aware of their duty to be impartial but they understand it intellectually not instinctively. While the BBC would never endorse one political party, its dominant attitudes are rigidly social democratic. Those values are so dominant that they are treated as virtues not opinions. It is why a BBC correspondent cried when Yassir Arafat died and a Today presenter referred to the Labour Party as “we”.'

Exactly. But what to do about it? The problem lies in the fact that the moral centre of gravity in Britain has shifted to the left. The BBC is simply the mouthpiece of a culture that no longer understands what objectivity is.

Another sign of the moral sickness of the universities. It appears that three Jewish members of the National Union of Students' executive have felt forced to resign over the union's failure to address the anti-Jewish hatred in its midst. In an emotional statement, Luciana Berger, co-convener of the union's Anti-Racism/Anti-Fascism Campaign, no less, accuses the NUS of standing passively by while Jewish students run the gamut of hatred:

'This year, I have suffered baseless accusations of NUS being pro-Jewish and therefore biased because I tackled antisemitism where it stood. There was no defence of Jewish students by NEC members who heard those claims. This year, a comment was made in a Student Union meeting saying that burning down a synagogue is a rational act; when asked to comment NEC members could not even bring themselves to condemn that statement.

'Over five months ago serious complaints were lodged about antisemitic comments made by an NEC member in a public meeting; there is yet to be any form of official response to these complaints.
When it was rumoured that I, a Jewish student, was standing for the NUS Presidency - whispers of antisemitism were used as a political football...At the beginning of this conference I stood here and warned you against the BNP presence in Blackpool. But it is within these walls I feel most afraid. We have talked for the past three days about NUS' values of equality, diversity and respect. In practice this could not be further from the truth.'

So much for student opposition to racism and fascism. What a commentary on the cult of hatred now engulfing the universities. What a frightening prospect for British Jews.

A reader has pointed out the following example of the BBC's famed obectivity. Compare and contrast this item:

'Jews held over Jerusalem 'bombs'

There are fears ultra-sensitive sites could be attacked
Israeli police have arrested two Jews suspected of planting fake bombs in Jerusalem to try to disrupt plans to pull settlers out of the Gaza Strip'

with this one:

'Man admits to grenade in luggage

A man who flew to the UK intending to be a suicide bomber has admitted carrying a hand grenade in his luggage. Hazil Rahaman-Alan boarded a BA jet in Caracas and the grenade was flown to Gatwick in his case in the hold. The Venezuelan, 39, admitted having a high explosive hand grenade with intent to endanger life in 2003.'

The first story mentions the alleged miscreants' religion; the second does not. Now I wonder why?

By common consent, the issue that will dominate the general election called yesterday is trust. Yet at more or less the moment that the Prime Minister fired the starting gun, the realisation was sinking in that the electoral process now under way can no longer be trusted to be free of the taint of corruption.

Finding six Labour councillors guilty of fraud at last year’s council election in two Birmingham wards, the special election commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, said the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’. These councillors had set up a vote rigging factory where they doctored possibly thousands of votes by stealing, filling in and altering ballot papers in a battle for council control that involved death threats, intimidation and bribery.

But the significance of Mr Mawrey’s utterly devastating report is infinitely greater than a handful of corrupt Birmingham councillors. For what he uncovered was not only a ‘massive, systematic and organised’ fraud supported by the local Labour party which, faced with the collapse of Muslim support over the war in Iraq, simply falsified the vote to deliver a Labour victory as implausible as it was overwhelming.

He revealed that the whole electoral process itself was susceptible to precisely the same kind of manipulation of postal votes and that such fraud would continue unabated. And indeed, many other examples of rigged elections, vote-stealing and intimidation have previously come to light. Police are now investigating claims of similar voter fraud in six other areas. Reporters from various newspapers applied successfully for bundles of postal votes, even though the names under which they made these applications were either fictitious or belonged to real people who lived at quite different addresses. The system is intrinsically wide open to abuse. No identity checks are made, and the ballot papers are clearly identified. As Mr Mawrey observed, short of writing ‘Steal Me’ on the envelopes it is hard to see what more could be done to promote fraud.

The examples that have come to light have centred on the Muslim community, which is said to be particularly vulnerable to manipulation because of its high levels of illiteracy, community activism and the way its men instruct the rest of their families how to vote. As a result, those who have tried to sound the alarm have found themselves vilified — like the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Greaves, who when he spoke of people walking down the street with fistfuls of voting papers belonging to others was promptly accused of racism.

But as if the findings of fraud themselves were not bad enough, the real sting of Mr Mawrey’s excoriating report lay in the response by the Government, which simply refused to accept there was a problem. This is because when it pushed through the expansion of postal voting in 2000, it rode roughshod over warnings that it was thereby opening up the electoral system to abuse. It closed its ears to such concerns because, in its ineffably naive New Labour way, it thought the way to combat low turnout at elections -- and bring out its own supporters among the young and disaffected -- was to make it easier for people to vote.

But in its historical ignorance, it failed to grasp the crucial point that the requirement to turn up in person at a polling station was devised precisely because corruption is only prevented by such a public display.

It was all too obvious that the subsequent enormous rise in applications for postal votes — which in some places had tripled, and with no checks being made — indicated that the system was being grossly abused. Yet the government still ignored it. Worse still, the Labour party put Mr Mawrey himself under pressure, obstructing him at every turn and trying to postpone his inquiry until after the general election. Indeed, Mr Mawrey is the hero of the hour, and his courage in refusing to back down under this kind of pressure should be saluted.

Yet the government is still refusing to accept that there is a problem. Fatuously, it tried to dismiss Mr Mawrey’s report as ‘scaremongering’. Yesterday, the local government minister Nick Raynsford feebly suggested no greater safeguard than asking returning officers to take action on voter fraud. As a result of this persistent denial, the stench of corruption now reaches all the way from the Birmingham Labour party to the Government itself. It not only ignored the warnings about postal voting, not only ignored the mounting evidence of fraud but is even now trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The irony is that the low voter turnout that this extension of postal voting ostensibly aimed to combat arose from the calamitous erosion of public trust in the political class. But as a result of the fraud it introduced, now voters realise that they can’t even trust the electoral process itself.

What makes you want to weep is that this is happening in Britain of all places — the country that first invented clean elections in the great reforms of the Victorian era. We appear to be going back in time to a pre-modern age, before Gladstone cleaned up politics of its endemic corruption and developed a disinterested civil service and administrative class that produced a democratic process of transparent integrity.

Alas, no longer. The civil service has been politicised and emasculated to the point where it stands supinely by while constitutional proprieties are systematically shredded one by one. The police, too, have shown themselves incapable of responding appropriately to evidence of racketeering, intimidation and corruption. When the LibDems gave the West Midlands police a list of allegations during last year’s election campaign, said Mr Mawrey, they responded with an ‘Olympian detachment’.

It was only because of Mr Mawrey’s own detective work that this corruption was unearthed—and with it the appalling erosion of electoral probity. The supposed guardians of our democracy appear no longer to care that it is being suborned, and display only a cavalier contempt for standards of public integrity.

People in Britain looked on in amazement at the way President Bush’s bitterly contested first election was ultimately decided by a court. But with postal ballot fraud now rife, there is a distinct possibility that in certain highly contested seats, the result of this general election may similarly depend on a judge’s ruling.

What a sorry pass to which our country has now been brought. The integrity of our electoral system has been seriously compromised. Record numbers —some 15 per cent of voters —have applied for postal ballots. The potential for abuse — and possible legal paralysis — seems immense.

The situation is too serious for inadequate ‘safeguards’. Voter apathy could now be exacerbated by voter disgust as people simply refuse to vote in a Tammany Hall election. Postal voting must simply be scrapped altogether if this coming election is not to turn into a dangerous farce and public trust— and democracy itself — is not to be further undermined.

If anyone had ever told British academics that there would come a time when they would punish colleagues because of the views they held, and would treat them as pariahs and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous. In the western tradition the universities are, after all, the custodians of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.

Yet that is what is now happening in British universities -- and the pariah is, of course, Israel. As the Guardian reported yesterday, the Association of University Teachers is about to debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics who refuse to denounce their government's policies in the occupied territories. But the motion will

'exclude "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies".'

So in true totalitarian tradition, those who denounce their own will be permitted to have a livelihood. Gee, thanks! To survive in the cradle of free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people. This is a natural development from the implicit -- and sometimes explicitly stated -- assumption that has been coursing through British intellectual circles in the current hate-fest against Israel, that only those British Jews who denounce Israel's policies can be considered to be British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of 'dual loyalty'.

This requirement to denounce Israel as the price of continued social acceptance is doubly disgusting. First, it is a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate. And second, it is a monstrous inversion of right and wrong, victim and victimiser which turns Israel, the victim of unbroken annihilatory Arab terror for the past half century, into the regional bully while sanitising Palestinian aggression. Yes, the Palestinians have suffered hardship and restrictions in the last few years; but that is because they have been engaged in a murderous war against Israel which has deliberately targeted innocent civilians and against which Israel, like any other country, has had to defend itself. Before this current intifada started, the Palestinians were living under Palestinian governance. If they genuinely foreswore their war of extermination against Israel, there would be no barrier to their quest for self-government and prosperity. To pretend that their difficulties are caused by the victims of their own aggression is simply Orwellian double-speak.

An unnamed academic defends the boycott in the Guardian story

'as a means of registering my protest against Israelis' lack of respect for human rights and continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian land.'

This parrot mindlessly repeats the mantra of the left about the 'illegal occupation' in apparent ignorance of the fact that a) the occupation is perfectly legal under international law as the defensive measure against attack that it was; b) that it is not 'Palestinian land' at all but territory that belonged to the British colonial power until it was illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and is now -- since they have washed their hands of it -- most fairly to be described as no-man's land; and c) that parts of these territories, such as Hebron, are the sites of Jewish settlement of great antiquity, predating the Arab colonisation by several centuries but where Jews were massacred and driven out by Arab occupiers. If we're talking colonisation here, the Jews of Palestine were the historic victims.

What is notable about the AUT motion is that it reflects the truly shocking ignorance of the region's history and current political reality, the resulting deep gullibility to propaganda based on lies, and the consequent vicious double standards and prejudice that now characterise British received opinion on the subject of Israel. Yet these are our university teachers, the very people responsible for shaping the assumptions of a society, whose own profound ignorance, prejudice and twisted morality are now on such conspicuous display.

Apologies for the absence of posts these last couple of days, caused by a combination of travelling and extra work for the day job. I'm travelling again at the end of the week, but I hope to post some entries before then.

The superior ethical reasoning of the British police service continues to be a source of ever greater wonderment. You and I might fondly imagine that the purpose of policing is to prevent or detect crime and to treat everyone equally under the law. We could not be more wrong. For if lawbreakers belong to a minority group which comes under the magic heading of ‘diversity’, the police will treat them instead as victims and devote time and money to protecting their ‘rights’.

The priority for the police appears no longer to prevent offences, but rather to prevent the giving of offence. Thus Cambridgeshire police have just spent £10,000 on CDs encouraging travellers to take legal action over incidents they claim are racist or discriminatory. According to the Telegraph, 2000 of these discs — entitled Del Gavvers Pukker Cheerus, a Romany phrase for ‘give the police a chance’ — are being distributed to travellers in the Fenland district, with a further 500 being sent to local police officers to make sure they are up to speed on travellers’ rights.

Not surprisingly, local residents are outraged. For they say they are the victims here, suffering from anti-social behaviour, intimidation and criminality by travellers setting up illegal camps in the area. In their innocence, they thought the police would protect them by enforcing the law. Instead they find themselves effectively demonised as racists for making such an outrageous suggestion.

Clearly, they need to attend a few diversity training courses to reprogramme their brains into the permitted mode of thinking. This would teach them that it is racist ever to speak about travellers breaking the law, even though that may be precisely what has happened. They would be taught that Humpty Dumpty’s rule now prevails — that something is racist merely if someone thinks it is. So if the travellers call locals racist for protesting at the harassment they are enduring at the travellers’ hands, racist is what they are.They would learn that travellers have become a protected species, immune from the tiresome obligations that other mortals have to endure such as obeying the law. That is because they are deemed to be a minority group that is persecuted by the majority who are ‘intolerant’ of their alternative lifestyles.

The fact that these alternative lifestyles are often anti-social or unlawful is irrelevant. Tolerance now means tolerating the intolerable when practised by a designated victim group. Not to tolerate it is racist.This crazy and sinister thinking, which makes victims out of law-breakers and bigots out of the true victims of crime, has become the orthodoxy throughout the public services, including the police. Once the thin blue line defending a society’s fundamental values, the police have now grotesquely turned into a weapon against them.

Rather than upholding justice and order, they have become the enforcement arm of a culture which thinks that prejudice and discrimination are the worst crimes that can be committed. For PC Plod, now read Politically Correct Plod.

The rot set in after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, when the police cravenly accepted the politically malevolent verdict of the Macpherson report that the whole police service was institutionally racist. Absorbing this gross libel made the police service institutionally demoralised. Already weakened by a collective loss of nerve over earlier corruption scandals and miscarriages of justice, it set about purging itself not only of racism but of all politically incorrect thinking.

At the same time, it tried to raise its game by taking on a senior officer class with social science degrees. But because the universities had become the intellectual crucible of political correctness, these senior officers arrived programmed by idiotic and lazy thinking. Sound policemen further down the ranks were thus led by senior officers with no practical experience and heads full of ideological junk. Worse still, the only way to gain promotion was to go along with this betrayal of policing values and common sense. The outcome was ‘diversity training’, which made self-designated victim groups such as women, gays or travellers virtually untouchable. Eradicating prejudice became a major preoccupation. Instead of hating all crime, the police now targeted hate crime.

This led to the Metropolitan Police Diversity Directorate’s Orwellian diktat urging the public to report to the police anyone who had committed a thought crime -- abusing people because of their faith, race, religion or disability or because they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual. It led to the Met's posters on the London Tube, offensively suggesting that men reading them might be contemplating violence against women and warning them they will be pursued even if the woman does not make a statement — ignoring the fact that domestic violence is equally committed by women.

It led to the absurd decision by the new Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to change the Met’s logo — at huge expense — not only to stress its inclusiveness but also to remove the italic script in which it was written, on the grounds that this discriminated against short-sighted people.

Enforcing approved attitudes like this — however ludicrous — is as inefficient as it is frightening. It necessitates the creation of burgeoning bureaucracies to promulgate and service the whole diversity obsession. A surreal aspect of the Fenland travellers’ initiative was the emergence into the public spotlight of one Sergeant Vic Galpin, ‘hate crime manager’ of Cambridgeshire police. Why on earth should the police need a hate crime manager? Pursuing hate crime is bad enough; but why does it have to be ‘managed’? Would the police have a ‘murder manager’? Of course not; it would be the head of the murder squad. People are getting robbed and violent crime is rising on streets abandoned by the police to the gangs because we are told there are not enough officers to go out on patrol. Yet somehow there is enough money to pay for a hate crime manager.

Bogus values produce bogus employment. Throughout the public sector, ‘diversity’ has created whole empires of ludicrous jobs at public expense. The current issue of the BBC’s house journal Ariel, for example, devotes an entire page to Jonathan Man, described as ‘diversity assistant, radio drama’. He wants to see ’10 per cent gays and lesbians on air…and British Chinese faces too’. As he asks: ‘As a British Chinese gay man, where are the faces and voices that represent me?’

Where indeed. No doubt we would all wish to see more gay Chinese faces on BBC television, and no doubt we would all applaud this principled use of license-fee payers’ money. The fact that many playwrights now refuse to write plays for the BBC because they are required to include not only the required quota of Chinese gay characters but other racial, sexual and differently-abled individuals — thus wrecking all creativity— is of course neither here nor there.

How reassuring it is that while the BBC is making some 5000 staff redundant, and the police moan that they don’t have the manpower to put more officers on the beat, they can still find the cash to fund a diversity assistant and a hate crime manager. How comforting that these public servants have got their priorities so right — and that those who want them instead to do bizarre things like preventing crime or making quality TV programmes are merely bigots and reactionaries, to be scorned, smeared and simply ignored.

The horrifying death of Terri Schiavo clearly raises the most profound issues about the calamitous decline of western society. Despite the fact that the US is normally ten years or more ahead of Britain in cultural trends, this time America has only now been dragged into the moral swamp in which Britain has been drowning ever since the Law Lords gave permission to starve Tony Bland to death in 1993. Britain's brutal utilitarian contempt for the integrity of human life has been accelerated by the almost complete rout of the Church of England which, instead of upholding the authority of Christian doctrine, has feebly flapped its hands at cultural change and genuflected to the moral relativism which has steadily corroded the values of an entire society. In the US, by contrast, the rude health of the American churches has acted as a bulwark against the most murderous trends of the culture wars. But no longer. Mrs Schiavo was starved and dehydrated to death with much of the country apparently either nodding in approval that she was being 'allowed to die' or excoriating those like President Bush who tried to halt this slide into barbarism as religious fundamentalist nutcases (Andrew Sullivan, with his obsession with 'theocratic' Republicanism, being a notable case in point).

Just like in Britain, therefore, bien-pensant opinion in America has now effectively redefined life itself. If someone is alive and not dying, but nevertheless displays no identifiable cognition, they are now considered to be no longer a living human being. In other words, it is no longer the state of being alive that we recognise as having a primary claim on our human sympathy, but the quality of that life. So vast is our contemporary solipsism and self-regard, so all encompassing is our sanctification of sensation, feeling and self-awareness, that we no longer acknowledge the intrinsic and absolute respect owed to life itself. Thus a person who is not dying is said to be 'allowed to die'; thus a person who is living is deliberately killed, with the language being murdered along with the individual in order to pretend that living is really dying and a live human being is actually a 'vegetable'.

Our western culture has thus been utterly brutalised. The bedrock of our civilisation, the absolute respect we afford each other because all human life is equal, has been destroyed. Those who are aghast at this pre-modern brutishness find themselves vilified as obscurantist throwbacks. The judiciary, one of our erstwhile bulwarks against any descent into tyranny, has turned into the enforcer of a post-modern deconstruction of personhood. As psychiatrist William Anderson writes in the Weekly Standard:

'What is to be learned? (1) Hard cases make bad law, but wrong ideas propelled by formidable legal talent may prevail over decency and common sense. (2) The judiciary, at every level, appears to have assumed an arrogant lack of accountability to legislatures and to elementary concepts of right and wrong. 3) Courts that reject laws as unconstitutional if they mandate undesired results are a growing danger to fundamental principles of popular sovereignty and separation of powers.'

All bets are now off. With our common humanity thus now lethally compromised, the way is open for other categories of human life to be progressively declared deficient or undesirable and therefore expendable. We have entered a new age of barbarism.