An illuminating article in Socialist Worker, the organ of the Trotskyite SWP, provides graphic further confirmation of the view that those who are busy congratulating themselves over the defeat of the AUT boycott had better wake up fast and smell the coffee. Under a headline boasting

'AUT boycott debate that has put Palestine back on the map'

it crows:

'The decision dramatically highlighted Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. That remains a gain, despite the boycott decision being overturned at a recalled conference last week. Although media coverage in Europe and the US was hostile to the boycott, the presumption behind the original vote, that Israel oppresses the Palestinians, went more or less unchallenged.'

Even more illuminatingly, it goes on to gloat about

'a key political change that has taken place in the AUT. That reflects the fact that it has become a proper trade union as international competition has turned university professors and lecturers into another section of the world working class. Last year’s strike transformed the union and recruited predominantly young and temporary staff. Many of the new members are part of the anti-war movement, part of the anti-G8 forces and so on. These radicalised people joined forces with the left at the April conference to pass the pro-boycott motions in the teeth of opposition from the union executive.'

In other words, the AUT has been infiltrated and subverted by a union within a union, nicely priming it for its proposed merger with the already radicalised NATFHE. As a result, SW looks forward with eager anticipation to the next stage of the campaign, which will take the form of blacklisting academics. And it can do this, apparently, without consulting its members at all:

'Activists within the AUT now need to consider what to do next. We need to urge our executive to “grey list” Judea and Samaria University because it is an illegal institution in an illegal settlement and academics are legally bound by the Geneva Convention and a ruling by the International Court of Justice not to work with it.We do not have to call a conference to do this. The executive has the power and the duty to do it.“Grey listing” is a boycott tactic long used by the AUT in which institutional relations are suspended whilst contacts between individual academics may continue. Dialogue with Palestine is now conference policy. We can use this to bring Palestinian academics and teachers to Britain to build awareness of Palestine and of a campaign for a boycott of Israel along the lines of the boycott campaign against South African apartheid. The left and the opposition to oppression have been strengthened by the campaign for boycott, and the AUT has actually gained members.'

What is the AUT going to do about this?

Political correctness is turning lethal. Stockport Council is now using resource packs provided by the Muslim Council of Britain to teach schoolchildren about Islam, an initiative which is to be extended across the nation. According to the Stockport Express, councillors think this will promote 'multi-racial [sic] harmony'. Councillor John Pantall, executive member for 'diversity strategy', said:

'If we can get to pupils at an early age we hope they can grow up understanding other cultures and religions and without prejudice. There is a great deal of ignorance about major faiths, resulting in dangerous and destructive myths. The use of the new materials will help develop understanding and encourage community cohesion throughout Stockport. This is part of having a forward thinking education department and prevention of a problem rather than cure.'

Defeating prejudice and encouraging community cohesion, eh? Let us remind ourselves about some of the Muslim Council of Britain's contributions to education and cultural harmony.

*It offered condolences to the family of the leading Hamas mass murderer Abdul Aziz al Rantissi after he was killed by the Israelis, and described the founder and chief strategist of that genocidal outfit Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as 'the renowned Islamic scholar'.

*Its Secretary-General whips up anti-Israel hatred by branding it as a Nazi state and accusing it of 'murderous leadership', 'Zionist brutality' and the 'ethnic cleansing of Palestine'.

*It brands as an 'Islamophobe' anyone who even uses the term 'Islamic violence'.

*It issued a veiled threat to former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, who wrote a robust criticism of Islam, that he might suffer the same fate as Salman Rushdie who was subjected to a death-dealing fatwa over The Satanic Verses.

*It boycotted the ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz because it claimed it was not ‘racially inclusive ‘and did not commemorate the 'victims of the Palestinian conflict'.

*It was one of the organisers of a recent demonstration in London at which demonstators chanted: 'Kill, kill USA', 'Kill, kill George Bush', 'Bomb, bomb New York'and 'Your so-called democracy will fall under the sword of Allah. The day of judgment is coming.'

Yet these are the people who are, in the words of the 'diversity' councillor for Stockport, to be enlisted to help defeat prejudice and ignorance in our schools. What kind of country is this where elected councillors have become panders for the peddlers of hatred and murderous prejudice, and are enabling them to turn the minds of our children? Where are the public protests? Where are the letters to MPs, the stories and outraged editorials in our newspapers? Where is there the slightest indication that anyone grasps what is going on here?

Well-placed concerns from academia have reached me that more than confirm my view (reported in my May 9 post) that the overturning of the AUT boycott was merely a temporary setback in the racist campaign that is now about to redouble and refine its efforts to vilify, libel and inflict harm upon Israel.

The AUT motion defeating the union’s boycott was carefully worded to provide the basis for a more devious but no less virulent second-wave attack. It stated:

‘Council therefore resolves: 1. that international policy must be based on consistent principle, openly debated and democratically confirmed 2 . that the European and international affairs sub-committee of the national executive update such a policy for debate at the next meeting of council 3. that in the light of this, existing policy relating to boycotts of Israeli universities should be set aside 4 to reiterate its long term position in regard to the occupation 5 to mandate the executive to work with NATFHE and the TUC to establish an investigative commission charged with examining how best to implement this policy and provide practical solidarity to Palestinian and Israeli trade unionists struggling to maintain academic freedom, undertake research and teach students whilst arguing for Israel's compliance with UN resolutions, with a view to reporting back to the next council’

(my emphasis).

This last paragraph is the significant one. The policy which this ‘investigative commission’ is now to work out how to arm with the most potent of weapons is a policy based on hatred of Israel and the virulently false view of its history and present circumstances, the viewpoint that characterises the majority of academics and the TUC. Significantly, the AUT is now committed to work with Palestinian trade unions, which support a boycott, as well as with NATFHE, its erstwhile rival but now the union that is about to swallow the AUT whole in the proposed merger between the two of them. NATFHE’s hatred of Israel is documented on my previous post, along with the colourful career of its leader Paul Mackney, the far-left rabble-rouser and poster-boy for the forthcoming workers’ revolution in Britain and who is poised to become the leader of Britain’s united unionised professoriat.

Over the bank holiday weekend, NATFHE’s conference was due to debate its own motions to join the AUT boycott. The boycott’s defeat caused NATFHE to rule these motions out of order. However, NATFHE is already signed up to a total boycott of Israel through its affiliation to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign which calls for such a move, as can be seen on this website.

Withdrawal of the NATFHE motions, like the AUT’s ‘investigative commission’, should therefore be recognised as merely a tactical regrouping in a continuing war. On that commission, NATFHE can now work out with the AUT and TUC how to inflict the maximum damage upon Israel — taking maximum advantage of the combination of naivety and malice that characterises the lamentable collection of the supine, the gullible and the fellow-travellers of anti-Israel hatred who comprise Britain’s academic elite. The result is likely to be something very much worse than the AUT’s limited boycott. And since — as I understand it — NATFHE’s internal regional structure does not give grass-roots members much opportunity to challenge the diktats of the union’s nomenklatura, there will be much less opportunity for the kind of revolt that consigned the AUT boycott to the bin.

What has not been recognised by those who have the interests of Israel at heart is that — as I have said before, and this cannot be emphasised enough — the AUT boycott was defeated on the wrong argument. Led by the Engage group, the campaign opposed the boycott merely on the grounds of free speech. It did not oppose it on the most important grounds, that the intellectual delegitimisation of Israel within the universities is based on racist calumnies, lies, libels and distortions.

The Engage crowd led the campaign because the mainstream Jewish community was, as ever, nowhere to be seen. But Engage are closely associated with the soft-Trotskyite groupuscule Workers Liberty, a successor of the Socialist Alliance (itself a former alliance of the old International Marxist Group and Socialist Workers’ Party) and whose attitude to Israel — as can be seen on its website — is summed up by this slogan:

‘Israel out of the Occupied Territories! For a Palestinian state with the same rights as Israel! For a socialist Israel and a socialist Palestine in a socialist federation of the Middle East!’

Workers Liberty wants two states, Israel and Palestine, but it does not campaign against the Palestinian calls for the ethnic cleansing or genocide of the Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state, or the 50-year Arab war of extermination against Israel. The only aggressor in its universe appears to be Israel; the Arabs merely play the role of hapless victims. As a result, as one participant observed, despite a passionate speech by an Engage member calling on the AUT actively to fight antisemitism, the range of views among the anti-boycotters at the AUT meeting merely ranged from Peace Now (Israel is the oppressor, end the occupation immediately, repudiate the settlements) to total boycott and end the state of Israel.

These are the people who the hopelessly passive Jewish community congratulated for their defeat of the AUT boycott. The Jewish community in Britain, and academics of integrity who may not have followed the politicking that is going on within their own ranks, need urgently to wake up from their lethally complacent torpor. This war is far from over.

An utterly horrifying picture of life in Iran is painted by Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi on FrontPageMagazine.com. It shows that at every level the regime is simply a menace to humanity, both inside and outside the country. Here’s part of the conclusion:

‘The extent of Iranian corruption is difficult to comprehend in the Western world. It is something so endemic and so entrenched in all societal strata that it can be described as an uninterruptible chain which starts with the President, continues through the functionaries and public servants at all levels and ends with the police officers who patrol the streets… Iran as a nation is today sending the world a message of self-destruction and annihilation. Death is constantly brought about by stoning, public executions, floggings, and massive drug addiction and diseases such as HIV. Death is also promoted through the political and financial support offered by the Islamist regime to the suicide bombers of Hamas and Hizbollah. The construction of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb, is actively pursued by the Islamic Republic, which wouldn’t hesitate to use it to annihilate Israel. The West has hesitated far too long to face the situation in Iran; inertia and appeasement have contributed not only to the constant deterioration of the living conditions of Iranians, but also to the weakening of security of not only neighbouring countries, but also the West, which is the ultimate target of the mullahs’ Islamist fury.’

The writer calls for regime change to counter the culture of nihilism, brought about by Iranians inside and outside the country. The trouble is that this has been talked up for a long time now, particularly by the Americans, but despite propitious developments in the region including the ‘Cedar revolution’ the ayatollahs are still in power and time is running out very fast. The key question grows ever more pressing: is the US going to allow this Iranian regime finally to develop nuclear weapons, or is it going to stop them by military means? The silence is ominous.

The battle was won, but the war is still being lost -- and the way the battle was won is the reason why the war is still being lost. Yes, overturning the AUT boycott was a significant victory. But without wishing to detract from the huge effort made by all in the anti-boycott campaign, only some of them were campaigning on the right grounds. The reason why the boycott was defeated by such a large majority was because most academics were outraged by one thing alone -- the palpable threat to academic freedom of speech and the McCarthyite nature of the exercise. This is certainly a worthy cause for which to go into battle, and the boycott was indeed wholly objectionable for this reason alone.

But this should not have been the only argument. The boycott was monstrous for an even more important reason -- that the viewpoint on which it was based was untrue, consisting of lies, libels and historical ignorance of the first order, racially prejudiced to a venomous degree and part of the campaign of hatred, delegitimisation and incitement against the Jews of Israel which is lending succour to those who wish to destroy them. The problem -- no, the obscenity -- is that many if not most of those academics voting against the boycott probably agree with these lies about Israel. They share the view that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians. They subscribe to the moral inversion which views genocidal aspirations more sympathetically than Israel's self-defence. They go along with the lie that this self-defence is actually unprovoked aggression. They parrot the fiction that the 'occupation' and the settlements are illegal. In short, these academics are the problem no less than the bocotters. They have helped foster the climate of hatred, bigotry and lies towards Israel that is now the default position on British campuses. They have created the swamp from which the pestilence of the boycott has sprung.

To repeat -- by no means all the academics who overturned the boycott fall into this camp. But given the poisonous climate on campus, and the arguments that have actually been made, it's a fair bet that many if not most of them do. Take the altercation last night on BBC TV's Newsnight between the original begetter of the boycott, Steven Rose, (who unfortunately is my colleague on Radio Four's The Moral Maze, but that's a whole different headache) and the leader of the anti-boycott postion Jon Pike. Rose did his usual thing -- the man really believes that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is worse than apartheid South Africa, just about the only one of his wild assertions that was in fact rebutted by Pike (Rose even managed to make Kirsty Wark appear sympathetic to Israel, a truly notable achievement). But Pike also said he would personally refuse to visit the college in Ariel at the centre of the boycott call, and left viewers in no doubt about his general distatse for Israel's behaviour. In other words, the argument was not about the vicious anti-Jewish hatred behind the boycott but boiled down merely to an argument about the proper tactics to be employed in bringing noxious Israel to heel.

This deeply distasteful position was on display today in the Financial Times's editorial (the FT has become the Guardian for capitalists). This welcomed the ovberturning of the boycott on the grounds that it was the wrong way to opose Israel, and went on to say:

'There are plenty of other countries also accused of heinous oppression of their peoples - including genocide - such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Burma. Yet the union has no boycotts for them: Israel is its only target other than Colombia. Meanwhile it bizarrely supports the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, defending a country not noted for its upholding of academic freedom.'

So to the FT, Israel is in the same genocidal league as the tyrannies of the world. It regards Israel as abhorrent, and more or less said so. Thus the climate of hatred is still being whipped up even by those who were apparently on the side of the angels over the Steven Rose/Sue Blackwell putsch. After the vote, Blackwell declared with predictable melodrama and appropriately totalitarian resonance that 'the struggle would continue'. Indeed; the forces of darkness may have had a setback, but they will regroup and redouble their campaign of hatred and lies, doubtless with the full support of some at least who opposed them on tactical grounds. This horror has a long way still to go.

As the AUT prepared to vote today on its boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities in Israel, BBC Radio Four's Today programme was doing its bit to influence the vote in favour of the boycott. At 0724, when AUT delegates would have been preparing to attend the meeting,James Reynolds broadcast an entirely one-sided and loaded item. Reynolds had gone to the College of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. The link between Bar-Ilan and this college is one of the reasons given for the boycott.

Today presenter John Humphrys set the tone by tendentiously introducing the item with a statement that the college was in an 'illegally occupied settlement on Arab land'. Wrong: whatever one thinks about the rightness of these settlements -- and I do not approve of them -- they are not illegal, and nor is the Israeli presence on what most fairly should be described as a legal 'no-man's land', a presence which is sanctioned under international law as a legitimate defensive action against an enemy which has never renounced its annihilatory intentions.

Reynolds -- after the near-obligatory BBC sneer at the settlers' 'well-tended lawns' (code: these damned Israelis actually water their lawns while the Palestinians are dying from dehydration) then presented the college as a hot-bed of Jewish religious and political extremism, with opposition to the Gaza pull-out (so Sharon is a moderate, eh, Mr Reynolds? Er, pass), posters for a talk by Benjamin Netanyahu (no!) and even religious students praying (NO!!!). Then he gave us some soundbites of a lecturer making a reasonable point that no-one was boycotting Palestinian universiites that produced human bombs and some snarling students who said the boycotters could go and jump in the lake, before telling us in tones of mordant triumph that the Israelis were now going to turn the college into a university -- presumably out of spite against the AUT -- and thus cement their illegal rule over the West Bank.

Not a word about the fact that more than 300 students at this college are Arabs, and that the Arab mayors of local towns have enthusiastically welcomed the opportunities it gives their students, as illustrated by this college press release which features the following letter in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv:

' "We are delighted to congratulate the Academic College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel on the occasion of the commencement of registration for the coming academic year 5766 - 2006. The hundreds of students from Arab settlements, who form part of the thousands of students who study at the College in the Faculties of Engineering, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the School of Health are testimony to the College's achievements in advancing higher education, which narrows social-economic gaps and which contributes to bringing harmony between the different sectors of Israeli society.

Kasem Hallil Issa Sami
Odeh Fiak

Mayor of Tira Mayor of Kfar Kassem
Mayor of Jaljulia"

'With the object of advancing academic education in the Arab sector registration has commenced for the pre-academic preparatory programme for graduates of high schools in the Arab settlements, sponsored and financed by the Committee for Planning and Budgeting of the Council for Higher Education. The College of Judea and Samaria an independent college, it has over 300 Arab students from Tira, Jaljulia and Kfar Kassem. The Mayors of Tira and Ariel want to turn it into a full university so that it can expand and also take students from the Terriories. There have already been visiting delegations, the last one -50 students from Bir Zeit University.'

The BBC might as well have had a block vote at today's AUT conference. So much for its supposed objectivity, which once again stands exposed as a charade.

At the American Thinker Herb Meyer, who was Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan administration, has written a lucid and exceptionally worrying analysis of the malaise in American intelligence gathering and the hopeless inadequacy of the measures being taken to put it right. What is required above all at such a time as this is talent -- lots of it. Instead, the curse of managerialism has struck, submerging the CIA under an infrastructure of bureaucracy that will surely asphyxiate any talent that happens to be lurking underneath:

'... after two presidential commissions and a half-dozen Congressional inquiries, the Administration and Congress decided to create a new position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), to sit on top of the DCI. He will be supported by a Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and an associate director who will serve as chief-of-staff. But since the new DNI and his two aides would be suspended in mid-air, so to speak, several positions that had been in the DCI’s office have now been shifted to the DNI’s office. These include a Deputy Director for Management, another Deputy Director for Collection, a third for Analysis, and a fourth to be in charge of “customer service.” (This last one sounds like a job more appropriate for an executive at a cell-phone provider than for one at an intelligence service. What’s the poor guy supposed to do – run around Washington assuring that key consumers of intelligence are happy and not thinking of switching their accounts to another country’s intelligence service?) It’s envisaged that up to 1,000 officials will be required to support this new bureaucracy, and rather than locate the DNI and all these people at CIA headquarters – from which most of the 1,000 officials required for the new bureaucracy will be taken – they will be housed at Bolling Air Force Base, just outside Washington DC, until permanent headquarters can be established somewhere else.'

As Meyer tells it, the history of American intelligence gathering is one of blithering incompetence by Congress punctuated by spasmodic interludes of outstanding brilliance -- such as the war-time Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- when inspired intelligence chiefs got their act together and recruited operatives of conspicuous ability. From the mid 1980s, however

'... the CIA was managed by bureaucrats whose objective simply was to not cause trouble, and our country itself went on a holiday from history that ended catastrophically on September 11, 2001...In the aftermath of 9-11, we had a chance to build a new intelligence service that looked like the OSS. Instead, we are building one that looks like General Motors... Judging from all the telephone calls and emails flying around right now among intelligence veterans, the mood is one of disappointment and genuine concern. A common thread in all these conversations is that – alas -- it will take another horrific attack before the political will is there to create the kind of light, fast, razor-sharp intelligence service we used to have and now need. Perhaps. Or perhaps Washington has become so muscle-bound and partisan that even should Dallas, Chicago or another of our great cities become a pile of radioactive rubble its only response will be yet another Presidential commission which probably will conclude once again that “structure” was the problem -- and will recommend that we create a Director of Inter-Galactic Intelligence, to sit atop the Director of National Intelligence, who sits atop the Director of Central Intelligence.'

Is this the way the west will end, not with a bang but a bureaucrat?

Great piece by Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway. Here's a sample:

'To this day, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has "never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of "charities," he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal...

'Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination.'

This article has been published in the journal 'Care of the Critically Ill'. It is worth remembering next time an enemy of civilisation screams about the oppression of the Palestinians by 'Nazi' Israel.

'It was 3 am on a Saturday morning in April 2002 when my pager went off. Trauma call report to emergency room was the impersonal message. I struggled out of bed and left the house. The roads were wonderfully empty, a consequence of the early hour and the Sabbath. In Jerusalem, Saturdays still retain that religious aura and most shops remain closed. Buses don't run and by late morning, the streets are usually full of pedestrians on their way to synagogue or just taking a stroll. It only took me a few minutes to arrive at Hadassah hospital where I work as the lead trauma surgeon. I was met by the senior nurse in the emergency room. Hello Professor, we have a 25 year old male, gunshot wound to the abdomen but the wound is 12 days old . I start to examine my patient whilst thinking 12 days? Who waits 12 days with a wound like this? The patient is in a bad way. He is in septic shock and decompensating in front of me. Prepare theatre, we need to go now I say to the resident. They are already waiting for us he replies and with a wry smile he adds, do you know who this is Prof? The patient's face is not familiar and I shrug. This is Hassan, from the Church of the Nativity. Hassan was a member of Hamas and was wanted by Israel for masterminding a double suicide bus bombing in Jerusalem earlier in the year.

'A few weeks ago, after a crippling wave of suicide bombings in which hundreds of Israelis had been killed and injured, the Israel Defence Forces had launched attacks on the terrorist infrastructure inside the disputed territories of the West Bank. A group of armed Palestinian terrorists had stormed the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, taking the monks there hostage and setting up for a last stand. The Israeli forces refused to be drawn into a situation which would likely have destroyed the Church and so a stalemate ensued. Hassan had been part of the group storming the Church and had taken a bullet in the initial fracas but his colleagues had refused to
allow him out for 12 days. Only now had he been released and here he was in my Emergency department.

'I shrugged again, let's sort him out now and worry about that later and off we went. In theatre we found multiple small bowel lacerations, subcutaneous spread of small bowel contents as well as infestation with maggots. After surgery he was transferred to intensive care where he remained critical and after a short period it was deemed necessary to perform a tracheostomy. Laws on consent are different in Israel and doctors must take all reasonable steps to ensure that the family agree to any treatment not deemed immediately necessary. With this in mind we embarked on what turned out to be a 10 day quest to gain consent. The Israeli social worker contacted her Palestinian counterpart and much leg work was performed by all involved. This stage of the quest was not without risk and several covert meetings were required in dangerous locations. Full credit to both social workers for the individual risks that they were prepared to take.

'Eventually, we received a hand written letter with the appropriate consent and the tracheostomy was carried out. Hassan spent 3 months on ITU, underwent 10 operations and was eventually discharged home after 11 and a half months in hospital. His medical bill was paid by the Friends of Hadassah a Jewish charity group which collects donations from Jews all over the world.

'Hassan's case is by no means unique. About a quarter of our patients are Arab and a significant number of these are from the Palestinian areas. Inevitably, we get terrorists brought in as well. We treat everyone as equal and patients are triaged according to clinical need. Although this approach seems to be the only one that is ethical, there are some unique conundrums thrown up by situations like this. Hassan was on ITU with victims of his bus bombings and some of the relatives found that hard to deal with. (Remarkably, other relatives seemed to harbour no ill feeling at all.) During his 3 months on the unit, we had many times when we were short of
beds, usually due to another suicide bombing. Were we going to deny a victim of terror an ITU bed because that bed already had a terrorist in it? What about after he recovers? Do we arrest him and put him in prison? What happens if he goes back to mastermind another bus bombing? After Hassan was out of immediate danger, some colleagues used to ask me why we couldn't transfer him back to a Palestinian Authority hospital for further care. The truth is that I really felt that the procedures he had undergone had been so complex and his course so stormy that he would be better served remaining under the care of the team that operated on him during his admission, so he stayed.

'Hassan still comes for review at my clinic and is doing very well. The Israeli secret service now feels that he poses a minimal risk to Israeli civilians and as such have dropped the charges against him.

'Were we right to put so much effort and resource into one life when that person had murdered so many of our civilians? Would the Palestinians or even the Arab world do the same for a wounded Israeli? Our experience with shootings, kidnappings and lynchings suggests otherwise. Would other nations, if placed today in a similar state of war, afford such care to their enemies? Let s hope they never have to find out. As far as we are concerned, medicine is about the people who need to be treated regardless of race or religion. As doctors, we must just get on with the job in hand and leave justice to the judges'.

'Avraham Rivkind, Professor of Trauma Surgery, Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem. Israel

Dan Ellis
Specialist Registrar in Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care, London'

Newsweek's bogus story about the alleged desecration of the Koran has received vast media coverage. Yet there has been only the most perfunctory and muted coverage of a demonstration in London last Friday by Muslims protesting at this supposed desecration -- a demonstration in which protesters burnt an effigy of Tony Blair on a crucifix along with the Union and American flags. Clearly, for these people the concept of disrespect for a religion does not extend to Christianity.

This vicious hypocrisy was by no means the worst of it. For this was an orgy of hate-mongering and incitement to violence, insurrection and murder. As the Evening Standard -- one of the very few papers to have carried a detailed account of this appalling event -- reported:

'Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush". A small detail of police watched as they shouted: "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head." Demonstrators in Grosvenor Square, some with their faces covered with scarves, waved placards which included the message: "Desecrate today and see another 9/11 tomorrow." '

One protester shouted that he would

'cleanse [us] from the face of this earth'

and that our

'so-called democracy will fall under the sword of Allah... No matter how much you rape and pillage us and invade our land we will always be here'

. Another shouted:

'Your so-called democracy will fall under the sword of Allah. The day of judgment is coming."'

What in heaven's name is wrong with this country? With a war declared against the west by Islamists, here was a mob of their fanatical supporters breaking the law by inciting to violence, treason and mass murder on the streets of London with the authorities looking passively on! Surreal, or what? Has this country really got a death wish?

Two further points stand out. Taking part in this display of treasonous incitement were people who had been detained in Guantanamo and are now at large. And among the organisers of this revealing hate-fest were the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Parliamentary Association of the UK -- organisations which we are told represent 'moderation' and, in the case of the MCB at least, vilifies anyone who dares talk about 'Islamist violence'. Now we can see what this actually means -- and how the police, government and prosecuting authorities have decided to respond to this declaration of war on our society by looking the other way.

Apologies for the glitch in cyberspace yesterday evening and this morning, which meant this website was down for several hours.

David Pryce-Jones has written a tremendous article about the AUT boycott which places it in the historical concept of psychological warfare, or PW:

'What is required is a master idea, and people to propagandize in words clever enough for the general public to accept it as the truth. The master idea in this case is simplicity itself: Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, is an absolute evil, Palestinian nationalism is an absolute virtue. To establish this, the Jews must be shown to be wicked and wrong in every matter great and small, so that the Palestinians appear victims through no fault of their own, innocent people in special need of redress and rescue. With skill and persistence, the Palestinians and their Arab supporters have built up a worldwide PW lobby with helpers in the United Nations, the European Union, the Red Cross, the churches, the universities, and so on. One step at a time, they are subverting the legitimacy of Israel. Their multiple voices and pressures have persuaded the worldwide Left to believe that Israel is a state that ought to be dismantled forthwith. At the very least, they sap Israeli will to survive, and fortify Palestinian will to prefer armed struggle to the necessary compromises of peace.'

The Palestinian 'master idea', he says, is rooted in the Cold War when in the wake of Israel's victory in 1967 the Soviet union started to compare Israel with Nazi Germany -- and the rest of the left duly followed suit. Smearing Jews as Nazis has a wider lineage still, with General Sir Edward Spears, Churchill's wartime representative in the Levant, and the historian A. J. Toynbee repugnantly thus labelling Jews who tried to flee to Palestine to escape the Holocaust. Their modern successors who employ similar PW smears against Israel include José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Edward Said, to name but a few. And this list of infamy also includes today, as it did in earlier times, Jews who try to appease the monster of prejudice by lining up alongside it:

'Felix Jacoby, for instance, a historian at Kiel University in Germany, opened his 1933 lecture course by declaring that he had voted for Hitler since 1927, and could only compare him to the emperor Augustus. Dr. Hans-Joachim Schoeps even tried to form a movement of Jews for Hitler (though other Jews replied with the grim joke that his real slogan was Raus mit Uns, or "Out with Us").

'The same psychopathology is at work in Israel today. By and large, Israeli intellectuals have succumbed to Palestinian PW, and do whatever they can to weaken the will for a national existence. Appealing for mobilization against Israel in a Raus mit Uns spirit, they speak at international conferences and publish in chic outlets as though they believe with the Palestinians that the Zionist state is a misconceived project to be brought to an end as soon as possible.'

Most chillingly, Pryce-jones points out that in the Nazi era, PW tactics such as boycotts were a precursor of what was to come:

'The burning of books and the boycott of Jewish businesses organized by Hitler and Goebbels are models of PW designed to rally supporters and intimidate enemies. The approaching violence was evident, and so was what Einstein at the time called the "psychic illness of the masses"...in their way the AUT boycotters are helping to confirm the primacy of the Palestinian cause in today's political sphere. Under cover of that cause, irrationality toward Israel is diffusing into irrationality about Jews generally, sweeping one country after another. Palestinian psychological warfare has already created conditions for a fresh eruption of the psychic illness of the masses.'

That psychopathology is exactly what we are witnessing. Pryce-Jones, a distinguished scholar and a decent and civilised man who understands the lessons of history, has pinpointed what is taking place and issued the gravest of warnings. Who will take note?

Alan Dershowitz, demonised on account of his fine book The Case for Israel by the unlovely trio of Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Alexander Cockburn, writes an excoriating article about this trio which lifts the lid on the wicked lies they tell and the way they have succeeded in polluting public debate for many years:

'The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that the writer didn’t actually write the work, that it is plagiarized, that it is a hoax and a fraud. Cockburn publicizes these “findings,” and then a cadre of fellow travelers bombard the Internet with so many attacks on the target that these attacks jump to the top of Google. Because no one has thus far exposed the pattern, each attack may seem plausible on first impression. But when the pattern is examined and exposed, the entire enterprise becomes clear for what it is: a clear attempt to chill pro-Israel advocacy on university campuses by a form of literary McCarthyism.'

Do read it all.

One of the many untold stories about the defence of the west, it seems to me, is the war within the west that has been waged by the CIA. Over and over again I hear accounts of the campaign of disinformation, lies and political point-scoring emanating from disaffected CIA operatives that has fuelled the anti-war movement. Indeed, the evidence has been all around us ever since the Iraq war started, as a steady stream of books and articles has gushed from an apparently endless line of former spooks, all placing the Bush administration in the worst possible light.

There was once a time when, if such a procession of CIA operatives had produced such an obvious politically motivated campaign, the media would have been crawling over every word of these utterances in excitement and outrage at such a blatant attempt to subvert a democratic government by a covert agenda that was so clearly running within the secret world. That was when journalists regarded the intelligence world as suspect by definition, since the game it played was deception, and the CIA was regarded as the antichrist. Yet now the CIA's anti-Bush propaganda has been swallowed by the media without so much as a murmur, let alone a checked fact or two, let alone any adverse comment or questions being asked about what the hell was going on here. Everything produced by these superannuated spooks has been viewed as holy writ, sanctified and guaranteed by the very aura of clandestine ops that would once have rung every alarm bell going. And that, of course, is because these ex-spooks (can a spook ever really be ex?) are delivering exactly what the hacks want to hear: apparently authoritative 'evidence' that the war was a catastrophe, Bush is a calamity and everything being done by his administration continues to be stupid, evil or both.

In the light of all this, it is fascinating to read a claim by Dr Jack Wheeler, who is described on his website as a 'professional adventurer' and 'geopolitical strategist' with links to the intelligence world. Despite this somewhat dodgy-sounding CV, his speculation about the Newsweek toilet debacle fits with what's been going on when he claims that Newsweek's Michael Isikoff was suckered by his source:

'We don’t know his name, but it’s pretty sure he’s a CIA Rogue Weasel.You read about the Rogue Weasels at Langley back in October last year in The CIA in Deep Qaaqaa. You learned that Langley has long been a left-wing warren, infested with folks so far on the left they would embarrass Teddy Kennedy. Since then, CIA Director Porter Goss has fired or pushed to quit scores of them.

'The Weasels hate Bush and want him to fail. One of them, now ex-CIA, desirous of damaging Bush’s progress with democratizing the Moslem world, who could plausibly claim access to classified information about interrogation at Gitmo and whom Isikoff had used as a source before, foisted KoranToilet on Isikoff.

'So where’s the silver lining? It’s that the Weasels have poisoned their well. No reputable journalist is going to believe any of them from now on. Isikoff will never publicly disclose his source’s identity. But all his colleagues in the MSM world know how he got burned. The Left has damaged one of their most powerful ways to influence the media: Langley lefties whispering super-secret tips into journalists’ ears. The Weasels are going to have a lot harder time peddling anti-Bush, anti-America lies. That’s a silver lining worth a riot in Pakistan.'

Well, that may or may not be true. What remains worrying, however, is that despite the efforts of new CIA head Porter Goss, some sources believe the CIA tanker has not yet been turned round. For the underlying reason for all the leaked propaganda is surely that for many years the CIA has been a slow train crash. It is said that it was demotivated and demoralised by deep personnel cuts. Maybe; my guess is that the cause of the rot goes rather deeper than that. Whatever the reasons, the fact is that it failed to analyse properly the information it was receiving, and thus failed to understand the full extent and nature of the danger posed by both the global jihad and Saddam Hussein and the connections between the two.

The Bush administration seems to believe that a new bureaucratic structure will solve the CIA's endemic problems. The signs are, however, that nothing is really changing -- or if it is, it is proceeding at a glacial pace. Given the key function of the main intelligence-gathering arm of the principal defender of the west, this is to say the least alarming. And there is no shortage of recipients for the anti-west messages which continue to be disseminated by spooks with an outsize chip on their shoulder. Those inclined to dismsiss the Newsweek debacle as a one-off error which tells us nothing about the underlying attitudes of that magazine might care to ponder this revelation that it has been publishing anti-American covers on its foreign editions which it concealed from its home market:

'For instance, while a Japanese edition of Newsweek dated Feb. 2 published a cover story featuring an American flag in a trash can under the headline, "The day America died," and the international edition featured a photo of President Bush with the headline, "America Leads ... But Is Anyone Following?," the U.S. edition cover story was an "Oscar Confidential" featuring Hilary Swank, Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio.The cover story in the foreign editions, titled, "Dream on, America," about what Newsweek characterized as "the world's rejection of the American way of life," did not run in the U.S. edition of the magazine.'

The role of the media in the war within the west is another story which has yet to be told.

So now the pretence is stripped away. In London on Saturday, an unappetising collection of leftists and Islamists -- including 'Gorgeous' George Galloway, the Mosley of Mesopotamia whose career has been given such a welcome fillip by the US Senate -- called for the destruction of Israel. As the Jerusalem Post reports, there was no more pretence that the issue is the 'occupation' of the territories, or the security barrier, or the 'oppression' of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They want Israel utterly destroyed.

So Andrew Birgin of the Stop the War Coalition called for

'no more Israel'

which was inflicting worse repression on the Palestinians than the South Africans under apartheid. Can people really be so stupid and ignorant, about both Israel and South Africa, as to believe this? (Yes they can).

The Palestinian representative to the UK, Husam Zomlot, said:

'The right of return is non-negotiable! Apartheid no more!"

. We look forward to this principled opponent of apartheid denouncing the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Palestine advocated by the Palestine National Covenant.

Galloway declared:

'It's about time that the British government made some reparations for the Balfour declaration,'

thus pointing his verbal knife straight at Israel's jugular, while Tony Benn called George Bush and Ariel Sharon the '

two most dangerous men in the world

' and said

'if this process continues, there will be possibly some sort of a world war'

-- which considering that we in the west are currently defending ourselves from a world war being waged by a series of genocidal fanatics backed by genocidal tyrants leaves one not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

And to cmplete this galere of enemies of civilisation and useful idiots were those pillars of truth, justice and academic integrity, Sue Blackwell of AUT boycott infamy and Paul Mackney, the general secretary of NATFHE which is about to swallow the AUT so that the enite cohort of unionised higher scholarship can feel warm inside to be represented by someone who voices sentiments like these:

'Palestinian refugee camps are like open air prisons. The Israeli army frequently invades them. There will be no peace in the Middle East until there is justice for the Palestinian people.'

What an advertisement for this once great country. Londonistan, capital of hatred, ignorance and prejudice in the free world.

Dr Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds university in Jerusalem and Dr. Menachem Magidor, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have signed a joint declaration against academic boycotts on the basis that 'co-operation based on mutual respect' is

'a far better means of achieving common goals in the Middle East'

. This admirable joint effort in defence of academic freedom of speech, which is being threatened by the AUT's proposed boycott of selected Israeli universities, conceals the fact that Dr Nusseibeh -- who deserves credit for the moderate stance he has taken towards Israel -- nevertheless does not object to the boycott on the grounds that its premise is a disgusting and racist libel against Israel but merely that it is bad tactics, since he would wish to use his contacts with Israeli academics to encourage even more of them to undermine the Israel government's attempts to defend the Jewish state from the annihilation promised in the Palestine National Covenant and in demented anti-Jewish rants by PA-controlled preachers (see earlier post below). Whether the Hebrew University really regards this as 'achieving common goals in the Middle East' is open to question.

On BBC Radio Four's Today programme this morning (0749), there was a 'debate' on the AUT boycott between Dr Nusseibeh and Sue Blackwell, its originator. Here was actually the true example of 'achieving common goals in the Middle East'. Both of them agreed that the basic problem was the Israeli occupation, and that the Israeli government had to be prevented from oppressing the Palestinians. The only difference between them was over the tactics to be used. Blackwell wanted to punish Israeli academics to engineer a change in Israel's behaviour; Nusseibeh wanted to 'reward' them if they supported the Palestinian cause.

The Today presenter, Jim Naughtie, sat back during this love-in, attempting to intervene only when Blackwell started ranting about a 'racist' conference at Haifa university. There wasn't a peep of protest when Blackwell asserted that

'people have to make a stand against oppression which has gone on for centuries'.

Excuse me? Israel was founded in 1948, yet Blackwell appears to think the Jews have been oppressing the Palestinians 'for centuries'. (So much for her claim that the boycott is to redress the wrongs of the 'occupation' which started, er, in 1967. Of course, there was indeed oppression in this land for centuries -- oppression of the Jews, who were ethnically cleansed from their own country and then persecuted and massacred in the region until they regained their homeland.)

Blackwell was not challenged on this preposterous assertion because the premise of the item was that Israel was the bad guy. This was a given for the two participants and their BBC hosts. The BBC shares the view common to the two 'debaters', that Israel is the problem and the only issue is over the tactics to deal with it.

That's why this line-up undoubtedly corresponded to the BBC's idea of balance -- two people on opposing sides of a question. The problem is the BBC asked the wrong question. Instead of debating the question 'Is the AUT boycott fair and just?' it debated instead the question 'Is the boycott the best way of hitting Israel?' The only issue thought to be at stake from the boycott was academic freeedom, whereas the real issue is the culture of lies and libels against Israel that has taken hold of the universities -- the very culture to which the BBC so egregiously subscribes, and which transforms its role from objective invigilator of a disputed issue to wholly prejudiced and disgraceful partisan.

The BBC continues to dig itself yet deeper into the pit of ignorance and prejudice into which it fell over the description on From Our Own Correspondent of Palestinian on Palestinian violence as 'Old Testament-style brutality' (see earlier posts below). A couple of readers have now received this apologia from Tarik Kafala, Middle East Editor, BBC News website:

'The piece to which you refer originated from the BBC radio programme “From our own Correspondent” on which correspondents are encouraged to write and broadcast in a more personal and impressionistic style than they do in news reports. This is made clear on the web page where we say/ "Personal reflections by BBC correspondents around the world"/ underneath the programme title. We do not believe there is anything in the content or tenor of the piece that is anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli.

'In our view there is little to support Melanie Phillips’ point that the report suggests that “when Arabs commit violence they become Jews”. We do not agree that “Old Testament-style brutality” is synonymous in any way with “Jewish-style brutality”. It is our understanding that the religious tradition of which the Old Testament is a pillar is common to the three main monotheistic faiths. We do not believe that the writer, Tim Butcher, intended to make the association that Melanie Phillips makes. Nor do we see how the text that we published lends itself to this interpretation.

'We understand “Old Testament-style brutality” to refer to a form of justice or retribution that is harsh and unforgiving, as in the phrase “an eye for an eye”. In this case, perhaps stretching the metaphor a little, Tim Butcher understands it also to mean a form of justice in which the aggrieved party is invited to help carry out the sentence.

'The report also clearly outlines the protection that the Israeli state offers to Palestinians who have co-operated with its security services and the relatively high standard of living they enjoy. The report makes no attempt to skate over who carries out the brutal “justice”, and who is the victim of it. If there is any stated or implicit criticism in the report it is of the Palestinians who execute alleged collaborators after summary trials.'

This reply beggars belief. To suggest that the Old Testament is the religious authority for Islam and Christianity just as it is for Judaism is simply staggering. The authoritative religious texts for these two religions are the Koran and New Testament respectively. The fact that they are also Abrahamic faiths, in that they are variants upon the core narrative of Judaism, does not alter the fact that the Old Testament is the defining religious text of Judaism alone, and that 'Old Testament-style brutality' is a jibe against Jews alone, used grotesquely in this case to describe Arab violence. The reason this wildly inappropriate usage was made is undoubtedly because, in the mind of the author, violence appears to be associated solely with the Jewish holy book. It would be considered preposterous to refer to any violence, for example, as 'Koran-style violence', despite the injunctions in that text to violence against the infidel.

Compounding this distortion, the BBC apologist then erroneously associates the Old Testament with vengeance by bringing up that old chestnut of 'an eye for an eye'. The assumption that this means tit-for-tat retribution is a classic of anti-Jewish prejudice and is based on a literal reading of the English translation of the Hebrew -- which is the opposite of the interpretation that the religion teaches, that the phrase means proportionality and monetary compensation as the response to violent deeds and not the 'harsh and unforgiving retribution' of life for life.

Taking these official responses together with the original remark, the BBC's attitude might be characterised thus: when Arabs attack each other, such violence is described as a characteristic unique to Jewish religious tradition, but when this is exposed as a preposterous and slanderous lie, the Jews are promptly stripped of the uniqueness of their entire religious tradition.

This is what might be called a no-win situation for the Jews. But the real loser here is the BBC, whose ingrained prejudice against the Jewish people appears to deepen by the day.

A powerful and timely piece by Bruce Thornton on Victor Hanson's site highlights the all-too-obvious death wish by the west:

'Just look at Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, a truly Orwellian reversal of history in which the fanatical jihadists are depicted as tolerant and civilized, the Christian believers are caricatured as either venal hypocrites or psychopaths, and the only good Europeans are those who have lost their faith. The mentality that would spend over a hundred million dollars on this historical lie is that of a psychological dhimmi, the non-Moslem who concedes Islam's superiority and hence right to rule him. That is, the world-view of those for whom appetite and pleasure are the highest goods, flabby tolerance is the camouflage of moral exhaustion, and respect for the culture of the "other" is merely an expression of disbelief in the value of one's own...

'Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece — the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut,, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada -- who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?'

Our culture has put everything into reverse -- knowledge, logic, historical truth, morality - because its inhabitants have either set out deliberately to destroy it, or are too fearful to take a stand, or are too stuffed by the transient pleasures of consumerism and hedonism to care. Whichever way you cut it, it's cultural suicide. As I've written before, the onslaught against the west is taking place from within as well as from without, and victory for the forces of light over darkness will only occur if they first win the war here at home.

A post on the Belmont Club website, 'Three weddings and a Funeral', attempts to bring together Geoge Galloway's 15 minutes of fame, the unconstitutional manoeuvres of the Canadian Paul Martin government, the Newsweek toilet debacle and the massacre in Uzbekistan to form a conclusion about the war on terror. The first three are all examples of the way in which the 'once magisterial left' has descended to shrill and cheap defensive tactical manoeuvres, while US support for the tyrant of Uzbekistan shows that the real danger to freedom and democracy comes not from the left 'but from the temptation to betray principles for tactical gain'. Hmmnn. I agree with the last bit, but I'm not sure I'd so cheerfully dismiss the role of the shrill and cheap left in the ongoing threat to our way of life. however, the following passage skewers them in particularly joyous fashion:

'The Newsweek affair was, in its way, a demonstration of how the mighty have fallen. The Koran-flushing story can only be understood in the context of the media's unexpected failure to play is accustomed role in the shaping the agenda on the War on Terror, the debate over the United Nations and above all, the 2004 elections. Watching Newsweek build a vaporous story and getting caught out is like seeing a once great prize-fighter resorting to eye-gouging, headbutting and ear-biting on his inevitable slide down into the undercard. Like Galloway and Martin, the Newsweek performance is one of ferocity, but ferocity in decline. There was a time when the Left was represented by the Jaures and the Jean Paul Sartres. Franco Molina once wrote a line for a Para general in the Battle of Algiers: 'Why is it that the Sartres are all born on the other side?" The Left could afford to speak down to its critics. But if Solina had waited a few decades more he would have seen them replaced by George Galloway, Michael Moore, Robert Fisk and Ward Churchill, who now await only the arrival of Bozo the Clown to become the Five Amigos.'

Glorious.

David Meir-Levi writes a useful account of the history of the Arab 'refugee' problem, which sets out salient facts that are largely unknown in Britain and Europe and which show how monstrous it is to demonise Israel for a problem which was created by the Arabs. Here's a taster:

'The State of Israel was created in a peaceful and legal process by the United Nations. The UN partition plan (resolution #181, November 29, 1947) created two states: the State of Israel for the Jews, and the State of Palestine for the Arabs. The Arab refugees were people who fled because of the war that the Arab states started. The rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly outnumbered the Jews initiated the war with simultaneous invasions of the newly created State of Israel on three fronts. Nascent Israel begged for peace and offered friendship and cooperation to its neighbors. The Arabs rejected this offer and answered it with a war of annihilation against the Jews, which fortunately failed. To this day, the Arab states and the Palestinians refer to the failure of their aggression and the survival of Israel as the Nakhba – the catastrophe. Had there been no Arab aggression, no war, no invasion by Arab armies whose intent was avowedly genocidal, not only would there have been no Arab refugees, but there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.

'Israel offered to return land it had acquired in defending itself against the Arab aggression in exchange for a formal peace. It made this offer during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in 1949. The Arab rulers refused. Had Israel’s offer been accepted, there could have been prompt and just resolution to all the problems that have afflicted the region since. The only problem that wouldn’t have been resolved to the satisfaction of the Arabs was their desire to obliterate the state of Israel. After their victory, Israel passed a law that allowed Arab refugees to re-settle in Israel provided they would sign a form in which they renounced violence, swore allegiance to the state of Israel, and became peaceful productive citizens. During the decades of this law’s tenure, more than 150,000 Arab refugees have taken advantage of it to resume productive lives in Israel.

'It should be completely obvious to any reasonable and fair-minded observer of this history, therefore, that it was not the creation of the State of Israel that caused the Arab refugee problem, nor was it Israel that obstructed its solution. On the contrary, the Arab refugee problem was the direct result of the aggression of the Arab states, and their refusal after failing to obliterate Israel to sign a formal peace, or to take care of the refugees who remained outside Israel’s borders.'

Do read it all.

For those who think that a) Mahmoud Abbas is genuine in his commitment to rid the Palestinian Authority of incitement against the Jews b) that although Hamas are genocidal fanatics the PA is 'moderate' c) that the war against Israel has nothing to do with the global jihad and d) that the global jihad has nothing to do with Britain, the following sermon broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV on May 13 might provide a salutary corrective:

'With the establishment of the state of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers.

'You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations. Ask Britain what it did to the Jews in the early sixth century. What did they do to the Jews? They expelled them, tortured them, and prevented them from entering Britain for more than 300 years. All this was because of what the Jews did in Britain. Ask France what it did to the Jews. They tortured them, expelled them, and burned their Talmud, because of the civil strife the Jews wanted to spark in France, in the days of Louis XIX. Ask Portugal what it did to the Jews. Ask Czarists Russia, which welcomed the Jews, who plotted to kill the Czar - so he massacred them. But don't ask Germany what it did to the Jews. It was the Jews who provoked Nazism to wage war against the entire world, when the Jews, using the Zionist movement, got other countries to wage an economic war on Germany and to boycott German merchandise. They provoked Russia, Britain, France, and Italy. This enraged the Germans toward the Jews, leading to the events of those days, which the Jews commemorating today.

'But they are committing worse deeds than those done to them in the Nazi war. Yes, perhaps some of them were killed and some burned, but they are inflating this in order to win over the of the media and gain the world's sympathy. The worst crimes in history were committed against the Jews, yet these crimes are no worse than what the Jews are doing in Palestine. What was done to the Jews was a crime, but isn't what the Jews are doing today in the land of Palestine not a crime?!

'Look at modern history. Where has Great Britain gone? Where has Czarist Russia gone? Where has France gone - France, which almost ruled the entire world? Where is Nazi Germany, which massacred millions and ruled the world? Where did all these superpowers go? He who made them disappear will make America disappear too, God willing. He who made Russia disappear overnight is capable of making America disappear and fall, Allah willing.

'We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relived of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.'

And this from the body that would have us believe that all it wants is a state of its own to live in peace with Israel.

A great piece by Christopher Hitchens skewers the moral bankruptcy of the language used by the New York Times when it talks about the 'insurgency' in Iraq:

'I don't think the New York Times ever referred to those who devastated its hometown's downtown as "insurgents." But it does employ this title every day for the gang headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With pedantic exactitude, and unless anyone should miss the point, this man has named his organization "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" and sought (and apparently received) Osama Bin Laden's permission for the franchise...

'A letter from Zarqawi to Bin Laden more than a year ago, intercepted by Kurdish intelligence and since then well-authenticated, spoke of Shiism as a repulsive heresy and the ignition of a Sunni-Shiite civil war as the best and easiest way to thwart the Crusader-Zionist coalition. The actions since then have precisely followed the design, but the design has been forgotten by the journal of record....

'In my ears, "insurgent" is a bit like "rebel" or even "revolutionary." There's nothing axiomatically pejorative about it, and some passages of history have made it a term of honor. At a minimum, though, it must mean "rising up." These fascists and hirelings are not rising up, they are stamping back down. It's time for respectable outlets to drop the word, to call things by their right names (Baathist or Bin Ladenist or jihadist would all do in this case), and to stop inventing mysteries where none exist.'

But of course, as Hitchens implies, the reason why the NYT does not call the terror in Iraq by its proper name is because it is not seen for what it is -- the regional fulcrum of the global jihad against free societies -- but is viewed instead through the distorting prism of opposition to the toppling of Saddam, that morally compromised position at the dark heart of the madness that has all but consumed public debate in the west.

President Bush's eponymous doctrine holds that the realpolitik of the past, under which America supported a local genocidal tyrant as long as he was 'our' genocidal tyrant, was a major factor behind the development of terrorist networks that threaten the free world. The Bush doctrine proposed instead a new governing principle: that America would only support third world leaders who were genuinely attempting to create the institutions of a free society, because only free societies could be allies in the mighty task of suppressing the appetite of tyrants and fanatics for global conquest. So why are America and the UK propping up the appalling tyranny in Uzbekistan, where demonstrators thought to number in the thousands have been slaughtered in the last few days? As the Telegraph reports:

'Much of the blame for the present crisis rests on the shoulders of the United States, Britain and European powers who since September 2001 have refused to support democracy and instead propped up dictatorships in Central Asia...emocratic change in the region. Instead, the Pentagon established close relations with Uzbekistan in 1998, funding and training Uzbek troops to deal with Islamic extremists.

'The CIA and MI6 followed suit, helping to train and re-organise the Uzbek security services which are notorious for torture. After September 2001 the US leased military bases from Mr Karimov while Uzbekistan became one of 10 countries where the CIA has ''rendered'' dozens of al-Qa'eda suspects in the full knowledge that they would be abused.

'US diplomats and some of their British colleagues, such as Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Tashkent, fought a losing battle with the Pentagon and the intelligence services, urging them to push for reforms.Instead, more aid was showered on the Uzbek military and secret service. The harsh words the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, used to condemn the Uzbek regime on Sunday were almost exactly the same that Mr Murray, who was forced to resign, used in his reports to the Foreign Office in 2002.'

It's no use arguing that the Uzbek regime is a key ally in the war against terror. The whole point of the Bush doctrine is that relying on a psychopath to control other psychopaths is a Faustian pact which almost inevitably results in complicity in the slaughter of innocents and the perpetuation of the very global terror that such an alliance was intended to combat.

A doctrine that is only selectively applied is not a doctrine at all. It is humbug.

A reader complained to the BBC about the reference to 'Old Testament-style brutality', as reported in the post below. The reply indicates the depths of ignorance and unconscious prejudice about the Jewish people at the BBC, and the sheer incomprehension of the problem with its own attitudes. This is what it said:

'The piece concerned is, I think, a transcript of an item in a recent edition of From Our Own Correspondent, and so you'll need to direct your complaint to BBC News.

'Pondering the article itself, it's clear that the reference to "Old
Testament-style" brutality was not intended to suggest that those
behaving brutally were Jewish - I certainly didn't read it that way
myself - nor was there any anti-Semitism in the article itself. The Old Testament does, of course, contain many references to brutal behaviour by non-Jews as well as Jews, and I certainly felt that the reference was simply pointing to an earlier period of history that is traditionally seen as more savage than the present day - despite the sad evidence that we actually live in savage times nowadays.'

The first point is disingenuous. Of course the piece did not suggest that the people carrying out the brutality were actually Jews; it was after all a story about Arab on Arab violence. The brutality was nevertheless characterised as 'Old Testament', indicating that this behaviour was associated with Jewish codes of behaviour -- even though it was perpetrated by Arabs.

To deny this association by claiming that the Old Testament contains 'many references to brutal behaviour by non-Jews as well as Jews' is risible. The Old Testament is the moral code-book of the Jews and such references invariably refer to the laws laid down within it by the 'Jewish God' who, in this prejudiced view, is said to be vengeful and to have ordained behaviour to suit. Indeed, the BBC official's absurd argument is utterly undercut by the last line of the Butcher item, which made it clear that he was talking about Jewish-style savagery:

'But does not the Old Testament say something about the sins of the father being visited on his offspring?'

Clearly, Butcher did not mean that non-Jews were included as the targets of this particular alleged doctrine. The idea that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children is a staple of anti-Jewish prejudice which is a given in western culture -- and indeed lies beneath the fundamental blood libel against the Jews, that the sin of Christ's crucifixion which was falsely pinned upon the Jews was to be visited upon their descendants for all time.

The really dismaying thing is that this assumption itself -- despite being a given in our culture -- is utterly false. Like so many of these supposedly brutal 'Old Testament' doctrines with which the Jewish religion has been tarred over the centuries, it is the very opposite of what is meant. 'Visiting the sins of the parents on the children' means simply that parents' behaviour will have an impact on their children. Far from children being put to death on account of their parents' misdeeds, the Old Testament forbids it:

'Parents shall not be put to death for children nor shall children be put to death for parents. A person shall be put to death only for his own crime.'

-- Deuteronomy 24:16.

The Old Testament is indeed full of brutal and savage actions. It is also full of misdeeds by Jews. But its doctrines are the blueprint for a civilised society based on justice, proportionality and, above all, a reverence for the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual. Those who talk about Old Testament brutality, or witter on meaninglessly about the 'savagery' of that period, are painfully ignorant and uninformed. They merely recycle unthinkingly the distortions and misrepresentations of the Old Testament and the ensuing libels and prejudices against the Jews handed down over centuries by Christian cultures.

The BBC's mission was once to educate the nation and bring enlightenment to the masses. Alas, given the lamentable ignorance of its own staff, it is spreading darkness instead.

In this story on the BBC website, Tim Butcher writes about the fate of Palestinians who are accused of collaborating with Israel. Towards the end of the story, he talks about the treatment meted out by Palestinians to one such suspected collaborator:

‘In front of a large crowd, Muhammad Mansour was beaten, shot at close range in the side of the head and then the mother of one of the men he betrayed was then called forward to stab his lifeless corpse and pluck out his eyes.’

Appalling stuff. But then Butcher says this:

‘It was a display of Old Testament-style brutality and I wondered if it might one day be applied to the villagers of Dahaniya. Many of them, like the 17-year-old Mohammed, are the sons or grandsons of Arabs who collaborated, so perhaps they would be let off. But does not the Old Testament say something about the sins of the father being visited on his offspring?’

Come again? ‘Old Testament-style brutality’? But this was Palestinian violence towards Palestinians. Yet to Butcher, it appears that when Arabs commit violence they turn into Jews! Is this because the BBC – which was so taken with this thought that it used it for a sub-head on the story in bold type -- really does think that only Jews do brutality, while the Arabs can only ever be its victims?

A story in the Times the other day claimed:

‘The triple measles, mumps and rubella injection does not increase the risk of Crohn’s disease, a study has shown. It has been suggested that the controversial vaccine raises the risk of Crohn’s — chronic inflammation of the intestine — as well as autism. The supposed link with autism has been the subject of many studies and has been rejected by the vast majority of experts. But a possible link with Crohn’s has not been studied, leading to some confusion among parents deciding if their child should have the MMR jab. Now Valerie Seagroatt, a statistician, has looked at rates of Crohn’s disease after the triple vaccine was introduced in Britain in 1988. Writing in the British Medical Journal, she concludes: “The introduction of MMR vaccine, replacing the single measles vaccine, was not associated with an increase in Crohn’s disease.”’

The study in question was published in the British Medical Journal. But now two rapid responses to this study show how misleading it was. The first startling point is that Andrew Wakefield, the gastro-enterologist at the centre of the MMR controversy, never claimed that MMR did cause Crohn’s. He claimed instead that it caused a completely new kind of bowel disease. So Seagott’s introduction which says:

‘It has been hypothesised that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine) increases the risk of autism and Crohn's disease’

is entirely misleading, and her attempt to investigate such a link quite irrelevant.

The other response points out that Seagrott states:

‘"I restricted the analysis to emergency admissions as these were probably less susceptible to changes in thresholds for admission and clinical practice than elective admissions"’

to which the correspondent witheringly responds:

‘This method pretty much guarantees that data relating to any ASD child, including PDD diagnosed child with Crohn's disease was not included in the study. The likelihood of anything for any of these children being diagnosed during an emergency admission is less than that of a somewhat small snowflake in a somewhat much larger hell fire. It can take four people to hold some of these children down just to take a blood test. The one problem parents of these children have had is that they have not been able to get proper diagnoses of their children's ailments. The failure of paediatric medicine and the NHS in this context is a common cause of complaint. Many complain they can get no treatment of any kind from the NHS for their children and that is particularly for those children with the most distressing disintegrative disorders.

’In the circumstances the statement that emergency admissions 'were probably less susceptible to changes in thresholds for admission and clinical practice' has to be questioned. On what science is such an assumption based? Where are the references. How was this assumption validated? Most importantly, why was this assumption made in the first place when anyone familiar with the issues over MMR caused autism-like and other conditions would know immediately it was invalid. This new paper is a good example of why it is necessary to be wary of people stepping outside their usual areas of expertise to hold forth on topics which may not be as close to their fields as might be desirable.’

Once again, an attack on Wakefield raises more questions than it answers.

Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Brighton college, issued a call to arms the other day when he told a conference that independent schools had to get up off their knees before the government and start fighting it instead:

‘Independent schools should be setting their own agenda, not merely reacting to the Government, said Dr Seldon, who has written biographies of John Major and Tony Blair. They should be represented by a body akin to the CBI or the TUC and led by a figure with a national profile whose voice would be heard as regularly on the media as that of Chris Woodhead, the former head of Ofsted. They should set up their own college for training the heads and teachers of the future. And they should devise their own exams to replace A-levels.’

This last point seems to me to be crucial if education in Britain is ever to be rescued. The situation is now beyond disaster, as Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, acknowledged when he told the conference that

‘…A-levels no longer differentiated between good candidates and exceptional ones. "They don't test the ability to think, analyse or reason - they don't tell us what we want to know," he said. "The introduction of bite-size modules has led to predictable questions, prescribed answers and a mentality of 'learn, examine and forget'. Able candidates have lost the opportunity to demonstrate their originality and creativity. The failure of A-levels is a tragedy."’

State education is almost certainly now beyond redemption in itself. Whatever governments try to do to education while it is under state control, standards will be sabotaged either by ideological administrations or ideological educationists or, as at present, both. The only way to stop education sliding off the cliff altogether is to restore a system in which both the pedagogy and the examinations are under the control of educationists who remain true to the principles of a liberal education, or education for its own sake, and to the fundamental notion of transmitting both this nation’s culture and the tenets of western civilisation down through the generations. At present, because of our homogeneous exam system and the stranglehold of state-funded universities, the independent schools are despite their best efforts being sucked inexorably into the vortex of educational decline. Only if they break free will they be able not only to rescue individual children but also to bear witness to what education really should mean.

Yet further evidence of our education meltdown is provided in a Sunday Telegraph story which says:

‘Examiners marking an English test taken by 600,000 14-year-olds have been told not to deduct marks for incorrect spelling on the main writing paper, worth nearly a third of the overall marks. The rule, issued by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, means that pupils could spell every word wrongly in the most significant piece of writing that they are required to do and yet still receive full marks. Ministers are particularly concerned about exam results this year, having failed to achieve their 2004 target of 75 per cent of 14-year-olds reaching the level expected in English. Just 71 per cent reached the standard, despite a multi-million pound Government strategy aimed at improving lessons in secondary schools.’

So the way the government is addressing the lamentable failure of schools to get pupils to reach a required level of spelling is to give them full marks anyway even if they misspell every word.

Words for the next spelling test: gerrymander, cheat, cynicism, betrayal, cultural suicide.

Here is yet another example of apparently appalling police incompetence, this time resulting in a murder taking place despite clear warning signals which were repeatedly ignored. As the Telegraph reports, Tania Moore was terrorised by her former boyfriend Mark Duyche after she broke off their engagagment. The list of attacks and threats was horrifying:

'Miss Moore's car was vandalised and a male friend told his house would be burned down. A text message to her read: "My girlfriend wants to see your head on a platter, like the beef on the table tonight". On June 2, with a £2,000 loan from Helen Smith, he paid his associates to attack her.

'The assault left Miss Moore in hospital, but it was not just the physical injuries taking their toll.Once, with her nerves shattered, Miss Moore went to stay in London. She began receiving messages about what shops she was in and the clothes she had bought.

'"Someone must have been shadowing her," said Mrs Moore. "She was petrified." On New Year's Eve 2003, in a packed pub, Dyche threatened to kill her. Two months later - four weeks before her death - he attacked her, shaping his fingers like a gun as he left. Both incidents were reported to police.'

To no avail. According to her mother, the police failed fully to investigate the attack on her daughter, failed to investigate her complaints of harrassment and failed even to open a bundle of threatening text messages she handed over to them. The result was that Ms Moore was murdered.

Now, far too late, Derbyshire police say they are going through their failure with 'brutal honesty'. It will be salutary to see how high up this brutal honesty penetrates and whether anyone responsible for this shambles of a police service is actually held accountable and pays a price. And when will the police service overall start asking itself with brutal honesty why such lethal incompetence has become its dominant professional motif?

On FrontPage.com Steven Zak has a useful piece illustrating the similarities between the language of hatred being employed by the far left, the far right and white supremacists. Here's a flavour:

'“They charge us with anti-Semitism – i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America.” - Pat Buchanan

'“Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now...The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish...with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11....” - Alexander Cockburn (columnist and editor of far-left magazine “Counterpunch”)

'“But if you care to lay out the clear and copious evidence of ... Israel's obvious foreknowledge of the attacks of 9/11, then you are automatically labeled ‘anti-Semitic,’ probably the most hateful and onerous title that can be conferred on a human being.” - David Duke (referring to a theory popularized by Antiwar.com’s Dennis “Justin” Raimondo)

'“Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 percent control. That's why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there's no critical look at the policies the U.S. (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.” - Noam Chomsky

'“I have no plan whatever for challenging ‘the Jews’ for what's done in their name. At the same time, I understand the...unnaturally bloated Jewish influence in American cultural affairs and political life (particularly relating to the Middle East) ....” - Bradley Smith (Holocaust “revisionist”)

'“Revisionists are not at all irrational hateful people but scholars who offer legitimate criticisms of the Holocaust story.” - David Duke.'

'“Indeed, it is the charge of anti-Semitism itself that is toxic.” - Pat Buchanan.

The Stalin/Ribbentrop pact had nothing on this lot.

A few weeks ago, I published a post on this site which quoted a reader's impressions of a climate of hatred of Israel at Aberystwyth university. Other readers from the university have now written to me to protest that this impression was unfounded. In the interests of fairness, I have amended the original post and reproduce below an abridged version of some of the alternative views which I have received.

'While I share concerns about uncritical representations of Israel in contemporary academia; I feel urged to tell you that I cannot share the author’s view about academic practices in the Department of International Politics at which I am a student. Furthermore, I deeply deplore the unfounded allegations and personal insults put forth in the letter.

'Having attended the same lecture series as the author I remember that the lecturer was very clear in highlighting that the purpose of the lecture on the Middle East conflict was to provide us with the Palestinian perspective which is necessary to understand Hamas’s worldview. At no moment, violence, terrorism or anti-Semitism was condoned. At no moment Hamas’s worldview was presented as the “truth”.

'I also wonder on what grounds our department can be seen to promote “lies, propaganda and the worst sort of prejudice”. My experience of this department is totally different. Being an international student myself, I felt welcomed from the very first day onwards. Our lectures have always made a very cosmopolitan impression on me, striving to instil critical and independent thought in us, highlighting values of cosmopolitanism, human rights and emancipation. At no single moment I could detect the promotion of anti-Semitic or other discriminatory opinions and beliefs.

'Having also attended the “Stop the Wall” evening, I need to inform you that at no moment there was any talk of a “solution to Zionist
oppression”. While I remember that someone in the audience did ask a critical question concerning the positive, security functions of the wall (which I found totally legitimate and relevant), it is incorrect to claim that this question was dismissed as “Zionist scum” on behalf of the organizers. A departmental lecturer attending the evening, even stressed the importance of acknowledging Israeli security needs.

'In particular, I am outraged by the description of the Guild
President-elect, who is a very close friend to mine. Having known her for three years, I feel strongly urged to inform you that I know only very few people who are more concerned about discrimination and exclusion than her. Nobody who knows her well could find the slightest ground of seeing her as a “racist, anti-Semitic individual”. Indeed, I am sure she would not hesitate a minute in condemning both racism and anti-Semitism in the highest terms. Furthermore, she is one of the most friendly, welcoming, caring, open-minded, cosmopolitan and out-reaching persons I know, a character trait reflected in her many friendships to students from all over the world.'

And this:

'AberAmnesty is certainly not anti-semitic nor is it racist in any way. We work for one thing, the promotion of Universal Human Rights. It is true that we have campaigned against the illegal wall in Palestinian Territories, we do not believe that it provides the Israeli populationwith security, in many parts it stops the Palestinian population from attending schools, fetching their water, working in their fields and it degrades their dignity. However to write, talk and campaign against these severe abuses of human rights is certainly not anti-semitic, indeed we are supported in our campaign by many Jewish people, in Israel and beyond. Our campaign which was focused on these issues alone and reflected human rights abuses on both sides of the conflict. We made special effort, because of the sensitive nature of the issue, to make sure that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian human rights abusers got off lightly. We are concerned for the security and freedom of both nations and campaign for a resolution to the conflict through peaceful means that endows each with their human rights defined in International Law and International Custom. I cannot stress strongly enough how much we detest racist and inflamming language and assure you that neither Bec Corn nor any of our members denounced anyone as 'zionist scum'. Bec Corn campaigned for her presidency on issues of wider involvement with the guild, better student servies and intends to make Aber Guild a more cosmopolitan, understanding Guild where all sorts of cultures are catered for. It was a public forum and a large number of people were in attendance from both sides of the divide...

'The lecture with the Israeli diplomat took place earlier this year i know because I was in attendance and after he delived his speech there was an appropriate and helthy discussion on the future of the conflict, the wall and a two state solution. This lecture had little to do with the Department of Politics it was organised by the Global Politics Society a union society which organises debates and lectures on current affairs.'

Readers of this site will know that I defend Israel against the lies about it that are daily promulgated by its enemies. Nevertheless, when it does something wrong it should be held to account. A story that has been running this week in the Jerusalem Post fills me with the utmost horror:

'Medical experiments with the lofty aim of improving clinical treatment have been performed in public hospitals around the country on demented, elderly, infant or child patients without them or their guardians giving the required informed consent...The scandalous violations were most flagrant in geriatric, rehabilitation and psychiatric hospitals, where patients are the most incapacitated and unable to look out for their own interests. For example, at the Harzfeld Rehabilitation Hospital, a 101-year-old woman and a 91-year-old woman included in a medical trial signed consent forms without a relative or a legal guardian having signed the form.

'Records showed that in other Harzfeld experiments, seven patients – some of them older than 90 – "signed" consent forms with only their inked fingerprint even though their medical records showed they suffered from serious cognitive deficits (dementia), thus raising the possibility that their fingerprints were taken against their will.

'At Wolfson and Sheba hospitals, a medication not approved for use in any country was tried on infants and toddlers. The experiment required piercing the eardrums of the children, which poses a "small risk for loss of hearing and a large hole in the eardrum." Despite these potential risks, the hospitals' Helsinki committees approved the trials without bringing them to the ministry for approval.

'Kaplan Hospital researchers took urine samples from patients via suprapubic aspiration – painfully drawing it out of the bladder through a needle over the pubic bone – for one of its clinical trials after receiving permission from its Helsinki committee alone.

'It did so even though the application to the hospital Helsinki committee noted that suprapubic aspiration is used only in exceptional circumstances when urine can not be removed conventionally. Such an invasive procedure requires the hospital to apply for permission from the ministry's Supreme Helsinki Committee, but this was not done.'

This is deeply shocking. Medical experiments without consent are unarguably unethical. To conduct such experiments on the most vulnerable patients who for various reasons are incapable of giving that consent is appalling. It violates a fundamental moral code. What's more, this was not a rogue incident. Thousands of people were used in this way in Israeli hospitals. What can explain such a terrible lapse, such a betrayal of ethical codes that are known to doctors throughout the civilised world? And of course, what makes this all the more shocking, what gives it such a ghastly edge, is that it has been happening in Israel of all places, the one country in the world which one would have expected to be particularly sensitive to the singularly dreadful historical resonance of such experimentation.

Not surprisingly, Israelis are said to have been shocked by this revelation. The only good thing about this is that it has been discovered by the State Comptroller, who has severely faulted Israel's health ministry for negligence and carelessness. But this is by no means enough. As Professor Jacques Michel, retired director of Hadassah Hospital, is reported to have said:

'Those doctors who violate the Helsinki Declaration guidelines should be punished. They should have their medical licenses suspended or taken away. Anyone who performs a medical experiment on someone who doesn't or is unable to give his informed consent should be tried for physical assault.'

The rules are apparently now being tightened up. This does not answer the question which demands to be asked: what does this revelation say about the moral health of Israel's culture?

A number of people have rightly been expressing huge concern about the eruption of violent sectarian politics in Britain with George Galloway's Respect party winning in Bethnal Green and Bow. Galloway is a later-day Oswald Mosley, the mirror image of the neo-fascists of the BNP in playing upon and fomenting the irrational paranoia and prejudice of a group that believes itself to be singularly oppressed, in this case the Muslim community which voted en bloc in its perceived particular interests. A reader has sent me the following observations about his impressions of the Respect campaign in Birmingham Sparkbrook, where it won an alarming second place:

'In Birmingham one of the Respect candidates gained second place with over ten thousand votes, just behind Labour. I think what we are witnessing is the communalisation of British politics. The cry that Respect votes were votes against the war is a demonstrably false one. Liberal Democrats offered the best alternative for those who wanted to register a protest against the war. What they did not offer, however, was an Islamist prospectus. In Birmingham much play was made of the situation in Kashmir (most of the Muslim electorate in the Sparkbrook constituency is Kashmiri), and from reading the literature and talking to the activists I gauged that the underlying theme of the campaign was ‘Vote for us to put one in the eye for the infidel Americans, vote for us to bash the Jews, vote for us to kick the Hindus’.

'The implications for Hindus, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and the whole of ‘multi-ethnic’, plural-faith Britain as a result of the communalisation of British politics will be grave. Communal politics and sectarianism depends on the creation of religious hatreds and divides, the assertion and invocation of continual self-pity and victim hood, the construction of hated, conspiring enemies. In a city with a rich ethnic and religious mix like Birmingham, this prospect is a frightening one.

'Respect has become, ipso facto, the Muslim Political Party of Great Britain. In its task of preaching Jihad-lite to the masses it has a great partner in the Socialist Workers Party whose political ideology and extremism needs no elaboration. Rabble rousing, whipping up hysteria, paranoia and communal feeling is the order of the day for this party, and as such it is the fulfilment of much of the Islamist ideological programme: perpetual victim hood, perpetual struggle against the ever-present persecution and conspiracy, perpetual linkage of Muslims lives in Britain to internationalist Islamic causes. In an age in which fascist parties of the right seek straw men and fellow bigots to lock horns with and play on the fears of white working class voters, this is all we need.

'If a political party arose that campaigned in Golders Green solely on the basis of appealing to Jewish religiosity, if a Sikh political party targeted Southall on the basis of playing to the basest fears of Sikhs, or a Hindu political party did the same in Leicester, we would call this for what it is: narrow minded, intrinsically intolerant, chauvinist, exclusivist and demagogic, ultimately detrimental to the fabric of the settlement of our society. But in the case of Respect, tied up in the leftist projection of victim hood, the implications and dangers of this communalism have not been noted fully, indeed, amongst many of the Guardian reading class, they have been applauded and encouraged. It goes further than George Galloway and Bethnal Green, it goes to the heart of the malaise in ‘multi-cultural’ Britain today; the hysteria of modern religion based identity politics and this new form of politics insinuation into mainstream political discourse, a discourse that utilises and mimics the language of ‘multiculturalism’, but is absolutely inimical to whatever good we can salvage from that term (perhaps, a redeemable sense of wanting society to function in plurality, with respect and tolerance); and uses this poorly conceived ideology to bash, berate and beat society with, all the while furthering a base form of sectarianism.

'It is alright if you live in Hampstead and don’t have to face the consequences of these disturbing trends. When you live in cities and towns where religious and ethnic harmony depends on a tempered climate of respect and an opposition to religious based identity politics that formulate and create ideologies of opposition and phantoms of oppression and enemies, the consequences are going to be more than just a headline in the Guardian or Independent one morning.'

Politicians seem to be divided between those who wish to ignore and those who wish to appease this monster of religious and political extremism that is now threatening our social fabric,our liberal values and our democracy. Neither of these pusillanimous reactions is remotely appropriate. This has to be confronted head-on. It is no use talking vaguely, as some are doing, about providing common values and ideals so everyone can knit together. What we are looking at here is the cynical harnessing and manipulation of profound irrationality, ignorance and paranoia to form a revolutionary force. This lethal development is based on lies, prejudice and an intention to harm this society which have to be exposed as such and then fought and defeated with all the cultural, political and legal weapons at our disposal if we are to stop the increasingly frightening Balkanisation of Britain.

Judging from the world-wide outrage over the Association of University Teachers’ boycott of selected Israeli universities, it may well be that before very long it is lifted. But I am indebted to an assiduous reader for pointing out that what seems to have been forgotten is that the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, with which the AUT plans to merge, instituted its own much broader boycott of Israel three years ago, as it announced in this statement. This urged that

‘all UK institutions of Higher & Further Education be urged immediately to review - with a view to severing - any academic links they may have with Israel’

. As justification, the NATFHE spewed up one ignorant, prejudiced and venomous distortion about Israel after another.Thus it

•declared

‘Israel on balance has been the main aggressor in respect of the Palestinian population at large

’;

•compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, and in the war against Israel inverted aggressor and victim simply because Israel was a functioning state while the Palestinians had no state:

'Given that the Israelis have a functioning state, whose prosperity and security are underwritten by the world's only remaining superpower, and the Palestinians have no state, are economically impoverished and with their civil institutions and security structures, imperfect though these are, harassed and in recent weeks utterly crushed by the Israelis'

;

•sidestepped altogether the question ‘

Why pick on the Israel / Palestine conflict?

’ which indeed gets to the heart of its use of double standards;

•went so far as to acknowledge that ‘

No doubt the Palestinian Authority is far from perfect

’ but then made excuses for mass murder:

‘It must be recognised that the recent desperate actions of the suicide bombers come after more than 10 years, since the first intifada, of teenagers pitting themselves against the Israeli tanks and soldiers on their own streets armed only with stones, during which time the overwhelming number of casualties were young Palestinians - a pattern which continues to this day’

;

•only felt able to mumble ‘

we think not

’ when asked if this position wasn't encouraging antisemitism, but clearly wasn’t very sure — the nearest it approached to an honest statement in this whole farrago.

It expressed no outrage, of course, over the annihilatory wars, programme for genocide and ethnic cleansing and campaign of mass murder carried out by the Arabs against the Jews of Israel for the past half-century and against which Israel merely seeks to defend itself. In other words, this was the usual monstrous travesty of what has been happening in the Middle East, promulgated by people who are entrusted with the education of our young.

At one point, it claimed: ‘

NATFHE is not anti-Israel

’. Yet its statement appeared on the website of the Trade Union Friends of Palestine, each page of which is illustrated by a map. Look carefully at that map. It supposedly is an outline of ‘Palestine’. But it actually includes the State of Israel, which on this map — as is the case with all Palestinian maps and insignia — is not acknowledged as existing at all but instead is subsumed into ‘Palestine’. And as with all Palestinian maps, the meaning is clear. Israel, in the view of the TUFP, has no right to exist and the aim is to destroy it and colonise the Jewish state by a Palestinian one.

NATFHE is affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Its website (whose logo consists of the same map of ‘Palestine’ which eradicates and supersedes Israel) sports a picture of the NATFHE general secretary, Paul Mackney, making a speech at a conference held by the PSC and the TUFP on March 1 2003. Alongside this picture is the text of a conference statement which raves about Israel’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ and its inhuman treatment of the Palestinians, and declares for good measure: ‘

We believe that there is no equivalence between the actions of the occupying power, the Israeli state, and the Palestinian people whose lands are occupied

.’ By which it appears to mean that the mass murder of Israelis is ok, while Israeli self-defence against such mass murder is not.

A year later, however, NATFHE was clearly feeling a little bruised by unfavourable press comment about its boycott. At its annual conference in May 2003, a statement by General Secretary Mackney coyly referred to a

‘

…considerable amount of media interest in what has been referred to and discussed simplistically as a policy of ‘boycott’; we have taken the opportunity to explain that the policy has never been one of straightforward boycott, but that we believe UK institutions should maintain links with institutions and projects which help build a positive relationship between Israel and Palestine, contribute to the peace process or help build civil society in Palestine. In the light of changing circumstances the NEC on 2 May, decided that NATFHE should move on from the policy of ‘reviewing links’ enunciated in the April 2002 resolution, and to inform branches of this change of strategy.’

This 'change of strategy, however, amounted to little more than a tad less transparency about its obnoxious and continuing policy, since at the same time it

‘agreed to affiliate to the Trade Union Friends of Palestine and Palestine Solidarity Campaign’

which support a general boycott of Israeli goods.

NATFHE’s General Secretary Mackney himself deserves rather close attention. For he appears to be a radical political agitator of the first rank. He is a leading stop-the-war activist, who at the anti-Bush rally in November 2003 was introduced as ‘

one of the general secretaries who has been an absolute stalwart supporter of this movement

’. Note this wording. He was introduced not as an individual anti-Bush activist, but in his capacity as a paid official representing his union on that platform. NATFHE was therefore directly associated with the rabble-rousing extremism (and demonstrable idiocy) of his speech in which he said:

‘We're here to give Bush the push!... This is not a victory for democracy, its a victory for hypocrisy! This was not a war of liberation but a war of occupation! This was not to free Iraqi soil, but to get control of oil! Bush doesn't care about restoration, he wants privatisation with the contracts parceled out to his "project for new America" friends!’

What is a teachers' leader doing associating teachers with such extremism? Are NATFHE members entirely happy about this? Did they even know?

Moreover, it turns out that Mackney is not just any old anti-Bush activist. In February 2003, he used a Stop the War Coalition press conference to call for workers’ strikes against the war:

‘It is not appropriate for us today to issue a specific call to industrial action." But the day war started could see "massive protests in every industry against it", he warned. "Unless Blair changes course Blair will fall on this," he said.’

As it turned out, there were no such strikes. But Mackney’s posturing reveals that here is a serious throwback to those far-off days when the workers united would never be defeated. Indeed, the most extreme far-left groupuscules appear to regard him as a grand revolutionary fromage. Workers’ Power, described as the British Section of the Fifth International, referred to him as one of the three leading anti-war trade union organisers:

‘That is why we need to pile the pressure onto the anti-war union leaders, like Paul Mackney of Natfhe and Bob Crow of the RMT and Mick Rix of Aslef, to make a clear and unambiguous call to strike against the war. These men have called for strikes. But they have also insisted that their unions cannot call them. The TUC, said Mackney, on 22 March, should be organising strike action. But it isn't - and at this stage it won't.’

While Marxist.com hailed Mackney — who was recently elected to the TUC council with the third largest vote cast — as one of the new breed of radical left trade union leaders who would reshape mass industrial and political organisations into ‘

organs of militant struggle and social change

’.

No greater compliment, clearly, could there be. And this colossus of militancy is now heading to become the union leader who is to represent all our custodians of higher and further teaching and learning. To repeat – the AUT plans to merge with the NATFHE to make one union for all teachers in the universities and institutions of further education. So the world of elevated scholarship is to be represented by a man who is one of the key revolutionary socialist agitators in Britain, a ranting demagogue who has no scruple in associating the universities directly with an attempt to bring the country out on strike as a political attack on the governments of Britain and America, and who has spearheaded in the Israel boycott a vicious, ignorant and prejudiced assault on academic freedom of expression and the monstrous victimisation of those who are fighting an attempt to exterminate them – and victimised precisely because they are fighting it.

If I were a member of the AUT, I would not just be trying to overturn its disgusting Israel boycott. I would be trying to stop this merger, before the common rooms of academe become the battlegrounds of a not-yet-defunct and still highly toxic class war.

There is an interview with me in today's Independent, which you might like to read here.

On the other hand, you might prefer to give it a miss...

Various bloggers -- Stephen Pollard and Harry at his eponymous Place have written of their deep concern about the victory by George Galloway over Labour's Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow and the rise in the British National Party vote in various constituencies; while Oliver Kamm has previously described Galloway's Respect party, which is a Socialist Workers' Party/radical Islamist front, as a fascist party which shares with the BNP -- despite the latter's hatred of Muslims -- the same espousal of fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence.

All very true. Yet the Bethnal Green result has to be seen in its proper context; after all, Oona King was herself a despicable politician who, let us not forget, said of America : 'It's a f***ing f***ed-up power man, it's a fundamentalist Christian power if we're not careful. It's terrifying' and in a Guardian article compared Palestinians in Gaza to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. This woman was in the Labour party, which is surely even more worrying in some respects than the Galloway phenomenon.

Nevertheless, the Galloway victory is in itself deeply dismaying. As Stephen Pollard comments, it shows that the Muslim community, which is numerous in that constituency and has swept the renegade former Labour MP back to power, has signed itself up to dangerous political and religious extremism as embodied by the Respect coalition. Equally alarmingly, it votes en bloc. At the same time, the odious extremism at the other end of the spectrum, in the shape of the BNP vote elsewhere, has also strengthened.

Without wishing to exaggerate the significance of these marginal developments, they are straws in an exceedingly ill wind and should cause no small alarm. Galloway has earned widespread ridicule and opprobrium for his cringing to Saddam Hussein. Yet his views are surely only a more extreme version of the anti-war vote cast by millions at this election whose position, if acted upon, would also have been to have kept Saddam in power, and whose virulent anti-Americanism is merely a few notches on the ratchet down from Galloway's own wild rhetoric. In other words, the Galloway victory is a symptom of the tide of irrationality and hatred which has overwhelmed our mainstream culture.

It is not such a large step from that mainstream irrationality and hatred to fascism. That is why, since the Iraq issue first emerged, we have seen the phenomenon of conservative audiences applauding Trotskyite agitators denouncing President Bush as a greater war criminal than Saddam Hussein and urging action against the 'rogue state' of Israel. That is why the fight in Bethnal Green and Bow was between the unspeakable within the Labour party and the even more unspeakable which had been thrown out of the Labour party. That is why we now have in Britain the fascism of the far left and militant Islam shaping up against the fascism of the far right. Unless this climate of irrationality and hatred, both political and religious, is firmly addressed this ugliness will spread and our already buckling democracy will splinter into warring fragments as our civilisation progressively implodes.

This extraordinary general election has resulted in the extraordinary self-cancelling outcome of not one lame duck leader but two.

The Prime Ministerial victor is mortally damaged by the personal vote of no confidence expressed by the savage reduction in his majority. He is now in hock to both his head-banging left who will prevent him from getting his pet projects through Parliament, and to Gordon Brown, to whom he will almost certainly yield the premiership much sooner than 'at the end of a full term', whatever that ever meant, and you may rest assured that he will be mercilessly harried by the media every day until he does.

Michael Howard, meanwhile, has defied entreaties and advice to stay on as party leader in order to avoid precisely what will almost certainly now happen as a result of his decision to quit: a return of the fratricidal -- and possibly this time, terminal -- strife between the fatuously drawn opposing camps of 'traditionalists'and 'modernisers', aka tax-cutters v big spenders, or 'phobes' v fantasists.

Reality check: the only reason Howard was elected leader in the first place was because there was absolutely no-one else who was remotely competent to take on the poisoned chalice, a fact which is no less true today even if the chalice is thought to be finally being detoxified (second big mistake -- it's not. The Tories' strong showing was caused in large measure by negative voting against Blair, not support for their, ahem, 'vision' of the future of Britain, for which we are all still eagerly awaiting the first sighting). The new young bloods are just that, brand new and so wet behind the ears that the electorate they are now to be expected to form in order to produce yet another party leader will resemble nothing so much as a school assembly, of which the much-touted older young bloods of David Cameron and George Osborne are merely head prefects.

The Tories' problem could not be more fundamental. It is not that they have the wrong leader. It is that they do not know any longer what conservatism is or what their party is for, except gaining power. That is because they have conspicuously failed to understand what has happened to Britain and the west since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have not grasped that this is a culture hell-bent on committing social suicide and that it is their historic mission to defend and save it by articulating what it should look like instead. Instead, some of them are queueng up to help shove it off the edge of the cliff themselves.

Mr Blair -- poor Mr Blair -- thinks he knows what he wants power for, but in the end all it boils down to is to transform society and create utopia on earth simply by being Not The Evil Conservatve Party and therefore the Moral High Ground Which Spreads Harmony Where There Was Dissent Which Will No Longer Be Brooked; and try as he may to seize every available lever of power himself and create more and more enforcers to bypass the Whitehall machine and enforcers to whip the enforcers into line (hello Mr Blunkett), he finds to his utter bewilderment and dismay that everything still goes pear-shaped and people hate him more than ever.

As for the LibDems, what can one say except that they and Brian Sedgemore deserve each other, and the fact that people voted for them in such great numbers merely demonstrates the extent to which this country may already have reached the point of no return in the infantilism stakes.

I'm afraid there's a long way down still to go before this society starts to go up again; and maybe we never will.

In Mary Ann Sieghart's Times article yesterday about her visit to the conservatively-minded rural hamlet of Chipping Sodbury to take the election temperature, she records en passant the following:

'The vicar of Badminton, the Rev Christopher Mulholland, who hunts with Beaufort, has joined us in the pub. Reputed to be the Prince of Wales’s favourite priest, he met Michael Howard at the Prince’s wedding and was not impressed. “I shook his hand and wished him well and he barely acknowledged me. He was as cold as a bloody fish counter.”

'Maybe that explains his anti-Semitic comment when a BLT sandwich arrived. The waitress asked who it was for and the vicar said: “Well, it’s certainly not for Michael Howard! I always say I couldn’t trust a man who has not tasted pork.” '

The authentic voice of polite, genteel, and now utterly respectable and mainstream English Jew-hatred -- and from a vicar of the Church of England, which never loses an opportunity to vilify and demonise Israel.

Further to my post below, Andrea Levin warns that the media are once again turning a blind eye to the incitement to hatred of Jews being promulgated by the Palestinian Authority. Although there have been some broadcasts on television and radio conveying gentler, conciliatory themes of peace, the balance is still towards hatred:

'Cartoons in the official Al Hayat Al Jadeeda newspaper continue to offer readers images of ghoulish Israeli soldiers and, on April 10, a spider-like Star of David menacing the Muslim Dome of the Rock. This is the same publication that ran on its front page a color photo of the terrorist who took the lives of five Israelis in Tel Aviv on February 25 - and called him a martyr.

'None of the monitoring groups report change in the key areas of religious and educational indoctrination. Mosques, which have been one of the worst channels of venom against Jews and Israel, continue to incite, most recently stoking fears that Jewish radicals would attack Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount. The incendiary sermons were in turn aired on PA television. The extensive official Israeli measures taken to protect Muslim shrines and Muslim lives were entirely unmentioned.

'Likewise Palestinian schoolbooks remain a vehicle for teaching that Israel is illegitimate and will rightly to be replaced by Palestine. No map in any book identifies the state of Israel within any boundary. Only Palestine appears, encompassing all of Israel, while Israel's cities, geographic sites and water resources are said to be features of Palestine....

'On April 16, WAFA, the PLO News Agency, issued a story claiming Israel had installed what it termed a "radial spy machine at Rafah border point." According to WAFA, the screening device would cause "horrible side affects on their health (sic)." Doctor Joma'a al-Saqa from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza warned that the device "may cause a very dangerous diseases Thrombocytopenic, Sterility, Congenital anomalies, Cancer, Leukemia and Mental retardation (sic)." A day later, having been challenged about its ludicrous claims regarding a device that is not, in fact, a dangerous X-ray apparatus, WAFA modified its story to denounce Israel instead for employing "the controversial naked spy machine" that supposedly violates the modesty of individuals passing through Rafah.

'Israel has regularly been subjected to bizarre allegations of damaging Palestinian health, including charges of distributing poisoned candy, poisoning water, using poison gas and depleted uranium, and so on. Such absurd charges are in keeping with the dark anti-Israel mythologies of the schools, mosques, media and political class — and all explain in major part the failure of the Palestinian body politic to reconcile itself to Israel's existence.'

The mainstream media are silent on all this because it doesn't fit with the only story line in their minds -- that Abbas is a dove-like man of peace while Israel is not a victim but an aggressive conqueror whose grip on the Palestinians has to be prised away. The big lie thus repels the truth, and the media continue to play their lethal role in the ongoing Middle East tragedy.

Mahmoud Abbas, as we all know, is supposed to be a new Palestian broom, renouncing the violent ways of his predecessor Arafat for a statesmanlike approach. So when we learned he was the author of a thesis denying the Holocaust, we were supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. When he said it would take time for him to deal with the murderers of Hamas and other violent groups, we were supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. When he chose not to fight them or arrest them but to turn them into PA policemen instead, we were supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. When a human bomb murdered yet more Israelis in Tel Aviv in February, Abbas arrested two men and we were supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt. And when he undertook to stop the PA-sponsored incitement to kill Jews, we were supposed to applaud and were told this was sufficient evidence to suppress our doubt. There would be no more demented paranoia about Jewish conspiracies.

Now we read the following on Israel National News:

'The PA’s state television has been accusing Israel of poisoning Palestinians with radiation. Gaza TV reported on Saturday, April 30, that Israeli machines killed a 55-year-old Palestinian woman who apparently died of a heart attack after being searched with an American-made device.

'That story was depicted in the print media with a cartoon that in western countries would be condemned as anti-Semitic propaganda: A hand with a Star of David on its sleeve holds up a red colored machine called “Rafah crossing”, emitting waves that are called “death and illness”. The cartoon appeared in a newspaper, Al-Hayat-Al-Jadeeda, a paper owned and controlled by the Fatah faction of the PLO, headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

'Moreover, the official news agency of the PA, claimed on Thursday that Israel deliberately killed “an aged woman” with an American made “radiation machine”. The Palestinian Authority itself, announced last Tuesday that it was closing the Rafah (Rafiah) crossing to protect Palestinians against “Israeli use of a radiation device for searching Palestinian travelers.” Israeli security officials have said that the device is nothing more than an American-made machine that uses “holographic technology to screen passengers for weapons and explosives.”

'According to Michael Widlansky of IMRA (Independent Media Review Analysis), a think-tank that surveys the Arab press, Abbas is continuing a long-running PA campaign, led by Arafat and his wife Suha, to discredit Israel by claiming that Israel uses “radio-active weapons” against Palestinians, including “uranium artillery shells”, “uranium bullets”, and “poison gas”.

'Widlansky asserts that under Abbas, the Palestinian media have actually stepped up the use of incendiary mosque speeches broadcast on Palestinian radio and television where both Israel and Americah are regularly attacked as well as increased use of code words in Arabic such as “resistance operations” to describe attacks on Israelis. Incitement against Israel is not the sole prerogative of the PA media, however. Abbas’ administration has also done virtually nothing to stem an alarming rise in anti-Israel hatred spewing out of campuses in the PA administered areas of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.'

We also read this, from Palestinian Media Watch on May 3:

'An advertisement sending birthday greetings to Saddam Hussein was published yesterday in the official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper, Al Hayat Al Jadida... The following is the text of the birthday greeting in the PA daily:

'Headline: "Blessings to the leader of the masses, Saddam Hussein the faithful, the legal President of the Iraqi Republic on the occasion of his 68th birthday. Two members of the leadership of the Fatah Movement, Bader Tewfik Hassan "Abu Yunis" and Fuzi Kamel Shahrur, express to the leader of the nation and her warrior knight Saddam Hussein, the president of the Iraqi Republic best wishes on the occasion of his 68th birthday, and bless all of the faithful among the Iraqi and Arab nations, who support and defend justice. We wish him long life for the sake of Iraq and to free the Arab nation from the enslavement of foreign imperialism. Oh, the glory of victory, with the help of Allah." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 1, 2005]'

And this, from the same source on May 1:

'PA TV last week rebroadcast a religious program maligning Christians and Jews. Christians are accused of forsaking Jesus’s teaching of love, while the Jews are said to have “worshipped gold... falsified the Torah [of Moses]... made business of the Torah and became rich.”'

And this, on April 28:

'The Palestinian Authority (PA) reported this week on the "escape" from prison of the two terrorists they had arrested after the Tel Aviv suicide bombing in February. This "escape" is yet another indication that Mahmoud Abbas is using the same strategies of duplicity that were used by the Arafat regime. Arresting terrorists immediately after bombings, only to quietly report their "escape" after the bombing was no longer a news item, was an effective tool used by Arafat. Because of this approach, the West praised him as a terror fighter, while he was praised at home as a terror supporter.'

For how much longer are we supposed to give Mahmoud Abbas the benefit of the doubt?

Let's not all fall off our chairs just yet, but this headline in the Guardian over an article by Sir Max Hastings, of all people, made me do a triple take:

'Perhaps the neocons got it right in the Middle East We should not be blinded by liberal prejudice when assessing Bush'

Wow! Things must really be bad (ie, good) for Hastings to be swerving off his tank-tracks like this. Sir Max, let us not forget, has been hurling thunderbolts and pouring torrents of bile and vituperation over the Iraq endeavour from the start. Yet now even he is being given pause for thought:

'A friend who visited the White House recently described the president's buoyant account of his Iraqi crusade, which highlighted the fact that a national government has been formed. Some progress is claimed towards normalisation in Shia and Kurdish regions. Syrian withdrawal gives Lebanon a chance of making something of democracy. Washington asserts that it is involving itself more than ever in the Middle East peace process.

'None of these claims should be dismissed out of hand. The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president's commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons' methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it.

'Such scepticism, however, should not prevent us from stepping back to reassess the progress of the Bush project, and satisfy ourselves that mere prejudice is not blinding us to the possibility that western liberals are wrong; that the Republicans' grand strategy is getting somewhere.'

'

Mere prejudice

?' Good heavens, old chap, whoever could possibly think such a thing? '

Our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail

'? Don't you just love that little weaselly 'may'? Surely 'may tip over' is a typo which should have read 'have tipped over'? And how good of him to be so even-handed, even if it has taken two years -- and even if it doesn't quite make it to the end of the piece where there are the usual swipes at 'Palestinian subjection' and 'simplistic' neocons. Nevertheless, compared to what has come before from this particular armchair general, it is a model of rational discussion -- from someone who is beginning to grasp that he may just have been stranded on the wrong side of history.

For those who wish to understand the full impact of the successful putsch mounted by the counter-culture upon our society -- to the extent that the counter-culture has become the culture -- Roger Kimball's books, 'Tenured Radicals' and 'The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America' are must-reads. Now in New Criterion Kimball asks whether American culture has begun to recover from that assault, as suggested in a new book by Brian C. Anderson, 'South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias' which cites as evidence the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News, the new visibility of conservative publishers, and the spread right-of-centre weblogs. Anderson talks about this change in the cultural climate in an interesting interview here.

Kimball thinks such optimism is overdone because the institutions that were the crucible for the deconstruction of the west, the universities, are proving to be its last redoubt. Radicalism on campus is so entrenched that it is now taken for granted. As he says:

'The chief issue is this: should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens—or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question “‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.” Since the 1960s, however, colleges and universities have more and more been home to what Lionel Trilling called the “adversary culture of the intellectuals.” The goal was less reflection than rejection. The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much of what was wrong with the twentieth century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” Nowadays, “workshop” has been largely replaced by the word “studies.” Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies: these are not the names of academic disciplines but political grievances. They exist not to further liberal education but to nurture the feckless antinomianism that Jacques Barzun dubbed “directionless quibble.” '

The wells of academe having been thus poisoned, the erstwhile custodians of truth have mutated into the promulgators of lies and the indemnifiers of incitement of various kinds. Kimball wonders how this can possibly have happened. He concludes that it derives from the repudiation of the unspoken middle ground of public life in which people voluntarily discipline their behaviour in deference to concepts such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste. The destruction of this compact with society has ushered in on the one hand excessive regulation and on the other unlimited licence.

His remedy is in the first instance to bring this calamity to light and hold the perpetrators publicly to account:

'If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.'

All this is true, and applies in spades to British universities. Indeed, the situation in Britain is even worse because there have been no equivalent challenges here to this hegemony of intellectual corruption. The bias in the media, the disintegration of the family, the lethal drift towards drug legalisation, the corruption of science over global warming, the brutalisation of aesthetics, the demonisation of men, the collapse of education standards -- none of these twisted and disastrous developments can begin to be remedied unless and until the universities are restored to moral health.

But how to do that is the question. What we have not had in Britain, and so desperately need, is alternative intellectual institutions to break the grip of our existing ones. The publishing world, for example, routinely censors ideas it is determined should not see the light of day. We need journals, publishing houses, think-tanks -- big ones -- that can get these ideas into the public domain from which at present they are so ruthlessly excluded. It was done in the United States. Why can't it be done here?

On the website Harry's Place, Alan Johnson gets the appeasenik tendency bang to rights. He pours blistering scorn on what he calls the Single Transferable Article about Iraq, or STAI:

'There are three simple steps to writing the STAI. Step 1: bracket out every single positive development in Iraq. That’s right, just ignore every one. Pretend they have not happened. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and hum loudly. After all it’s not your job to set out a real-world policy for Iraq. Step 2: play up every single error, set-back, crime, and cock-up you can find. Step 3: treat every set-back as the fault of Bush and Blair and ‘the war’ [admitting you are inwardly glad when an outrage occurs in Iraq because you think it is a poke in the eye for Bush is optional: only Yasmin has taken that option so far].

'The STAI reduces the political complexity of Iraq to a simple story of cowboys, poodles and freedom fighters. Mood music for your real interest: the attack on Bush-Blair. [Definition of irony: columnistas who daily ‘sex up’ Iraq in this way complaining about spin! In truth they have been the most disciplined on-message spinners, dicing and slicing Iraq to fit their ‘project’]...

'If you have little time there is a quick way to spot an STAI. The STAI has a symptomatic silence about one date: January 30 2005. Gary Younge offers a typical example in today’s Guardian. He offers dates galore! We have May'' 1997, Summer 2002, February 15 2003, June 10 2004, as well as ‘2001, after the bombing of Serbia’, and even ‘last summer in Tuscany’. And, of course, May 5 2005, when all good left-liberals will vote for ‘the Iraqi poor’ and ‘give Tony Blair a bloody nose’ Younge gives us all dates bar one: January 30 2005, the day eight and a half million Iraqis, most very poor, voted for a democratic future after thirty years of totalitarianism, war and misery, and danced with joy, purple fingers held aloft in pride. You see the STAI doesn’t do January 30 2005. It would spoil a good story.'

Great stuff. But then Johnson goes and ruins it by fingering the neocons as the spoiler in the fight against the neanderthal left and right. He does so by abusing and misrepresenting them in much the same way as do the neanderthals he has so roundly criticised. After all, to say

'The Neocons do not understand the pivotal role of civil society. We social democrats do'

is breathtaking, since the neocon project is all about renewing civil society and repairing the lethal damage done to it by the left. It got started by people on the left as a reaction to what they saw as the betrayal of the poor by Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society', which threw money at the disadvantaged only to mire them deeper in moral, spiritual and economic poverty -- and took an axe to civil society in the process.

The essence of neo-conservatism is that it called time on so-called social democracy (aka the left) for grotesquely and lethally failing and abandoning the very people it claimed to be in politics to help. In foreign affairs, it took its cue from Senator 'Scoop' Jackson who similarly exposed the hypocrisy and moral turpitude of his own side in failing properly to confront Soviet communism.

Neo-conservatism is the movement which cast a beady eye at progressive politics and cried that the emperor had no clothes. That is what the grand-daddy of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, meant when he famously quipped that a neocon was a 'liberal mugged by reality'. It is the neocons who are today's progressives, exposing the left's pretensions to that soubriquet as a hypocritical and sanctimonious sham that has done real damage both to the most vulnerable and to the moral foundations of free societies both at home and abroad.

That is precisely why Johnson is so very sensitive about the neocons; it is why he cannot acknowledge the connection between the Iraq project he supports and neocon thinking; and it is why on this latter topic -- contrary to his splendid tirade over Iraq -- he could not be more wrong.

One of the great unaddressed issues in this general election has been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Plenty has been written about him in respect of his feud with Tony Blair, how he rode to the rescue of Labour's election campaign and how Blair has now apparently become his prisoner. The widespread assumption is that he will become Prime Minister during the next Parliament when Blair steps down, a prospect which doubtless will encourage many to vote Labour because, just as they despise Blair, they love Brown.

This is because, by contrast with Blair, Brown is seen as a substantial intellect, a man of principle rooted in the granite of Scottish Presbyterianism, a solid homme serieux unlike the fey fantasist next door. And most crucial of all, they also think that he is responsible for the success of the British economy. Never mind that his first act was to make the Bank of England independent, thus ensuring that he could never radically destabilise the economy; the public seem content to agree with his own estimation that he is responsible for Britain's low interest rates and low inflation.

The most remarkable aspect of this is that the Conservative party also appears to believe in this mythology. For despite occasional rumbles about impending 'black holes' and Brown's reckless largesse with the public purse, the Tories' economic package is merely a paler imitation. While they have gone all-out to blacken Blair's character, Brown has been all but off-limits during the campaign, suggesting that despite themselves the Tories believe the spin that the Brown chancellorship has indeed been a great success.

But it has not. And now The Business has produced an absolutely excoriating analysis of its failure, and the dangerous legacy that Brown has bequeathed us. Here's a flavour:

'Eight years later the economy and business are beginning to buckle under the weight of extra tax and regulation and Britain is fast slipping down every league table of international competitiveness; yet, with the exception of a significant reform to the National Health Service (NHS) which allows a small but growing number of operations to be contracted out to private hospitals, almost nothing has changed in the public sector - even though it has been in receipt of an unprecedented avalanche of taxpayers' cash. Mr Blair's reformist agenda has stalled because he allowed his collectivist Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to take control of domestic policy and block any significant change in the post-1945 welfare state consensus.

'The result was predictable. Far from being the envy of the world, Britain's unreformed schools, hospitals, universities, welfare benefits, social services and police forces continue to fall behind those of other rich and not so rich countries, despite the massive injection of taxpayers' money. Crime, especially violent crime and yobbery, is out of control in substantial swathes of the country, making the lives of ordinary, decent people - the sort it should be Labour's priority to protect - a misery. Hundreds of thousands of children - mainly from the poorest families - still leave Britain's schools lacking even the basics of education, often incapable of reading even a fast-food menu. Social mobility is receding despite all the ministerial waffle about spreading opportunity. An unreformed welfare state continues to suck greater numbers into a feckless underclass whose defining characteristics are crime, the black economy, lifelong welfare dependency, indifference - even hostility - to education and idleness. The UK's once-great universities are sinking fast, slipping further behind their American counterparts every year. Britain's armed forces, the world's finest, have been slashed to the bone despite Mr Blair's penchant for deploying them across the globe. The transport system remains a disgrace for the fourth richest nation in the world. And, to cap it all, an all-mighty savings and pension crisis is brewing.

'Billions of pounds of taxpayers' hard-earned cash have been squandered. Instead of bringing better homes, schools and hospitals to those who most need them - the poor and socially deprived - the main winners from the Blair government's spending binge have been a new left-wing, politically-correct, highly-paid, functionally useless public-sector bourgeoisie which - together with human rights lawyers - has emerged as the New Establishment in Blair's Britain.'

There's much more in this article that simply scorches the page. I don't agree with all of it, particularly where it denounces Blair for lying over Iraq. But its analysis of the Brown legacy is spot on. Brown gave the macro-economy to the Bank to run, while he got on with manipulating and ruining the fabric of the nation. The problem is, however, that all the 'new left-wing, politically-correct, highly-paid, functionally useless public-sector bourgeoisie' have votes. Brown has effectively gerrymandered the nation by making unprecedented numbers dependent on work or welfare -- a fact that the Tories have conspicuously failed to address because they want their votes, too.

The Business calls for tactical voting to get Labour out. It is possible that, despite the polls, enough people will do precisely this -- along with Labour voters staying at home in disgust -- to produce the result that many seem to want, a hung parliament. If this does come about, the ensuing paralysis will surely be an apposite commentary on the unhappy state of affairs we have reached where no party seems to deserve to govern us. But if Labour win another large majority, it will be in large measure because turkeys will have voted for Christmas.

Great news. Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the Muslim editor of the Bangladeshi newspaper The Weekly Blitz who was thrown into jail in Bangladesh 17 months ago for speaking out in favour of Israel (see my post last month), has been freed. One of the two people who campaigned for him, Dr Richard Benkin, has issued a press release which says this:

'Earlier today, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the Muslim journalist jailed after publishing articles that urged his nation of Bangladesh to recognize Israel, advocated interfaith dialogue, and condemned terrorism and the growing power of radical Islamists in the non-Arab Muslim world, was released at about 7pm Dhaka time.

'Throughout 2003, Choudhury wrote articles countering the biased news about Israel and the Jews, interviewed Israeli professor and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ada Aharoni, and helped Zionist Richard Benkin publish material in the Bangladeshi press. All of this sparked debate and discussion where there had been none before. But as he was about to leave for an historic address in Tel Aviv, Choudhury was taken away by police.

'Not charged at first, though accused of the catch-all “spying for Israel,” Choudhury was repeatedly denied bail even beyond the limits of Bangladeshi law. Police raided his home and office, seizing computers and files; followed by a mob that sacked the premises with impunity. His brother was beaten and twice had to flee Dhaka; and his family was threatened and brought to the brink of financial ruin. Eventually, he was charged with sedition, a capital offense, though the government admitted in its own investigation that there was no real evidence for the charge.

'But things started to change early in April when US Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL) got involved, calling a meeting between himself, Benkin, and new Bangladeshi Ambassador Shamsher Chowdhury. Kirk proved a solid advocate for Choudhury and human rights, clearly enunciating the case for his freedom. Chowdhury was receptive and promised to press the matter with his government. All three men pledged to work together for justice. The ambassador proved to be a man of his word. Soon thereafter, Choudhury began receiving the needed health care previously denied him; and only three weeks after the meeting, he was freed. It was accomplished within the framework of Bangladeshi law and involved efforts by several high government officials.

'Choudhury himself is anything but bitter. Speaking with Benkin shortly after his release, Choudhury said “my 17 months in prison will have been worth it” if the government of Bangladesh helps return that nation to the principles of tolerance and democracy that are its heritage.'

This is really tremendous. It shows what effect a couple of determined individuals can have if they make their voices heard on behalf of truth and justice. And it should act as a spur to others in the west to raise their own voices in support of other courageous Muslim dissidents, who are risking their lives by advocating freedom, tolerance and truth-telling in societies where to do so can be a death warrant. Just like the Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, Muslim dissidents are in desperate need of our support if the tyrannies under which they suffer are to be broken. With the world behind them, it can be done.

The Jerusalem Post has published a disturbing story revealing links between the website of Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham university lecturer who is the principal architect of the AUT Israel boycott, and neo-Nazi websites:

'The Web site of Sue Blackwell, the Birmingham lecturer who presented motions calling for boycotts of Israeli universities, contains a recommended link to a Web site owned by an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi activist. Wendy Campbell, who owns the MarWen Media Web site, has promoted Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories discussing "unrivaled Jewish power," and maintains an additional Web site entitled "Exposing Israeli Apartheid," which is also linked by Blackwell.

'MarWen Media, which is linked directly from Blackwell's Web site, advocates the views of Kevin Macdonald, an anti-Semitic pro-Nazi author, who has claimed Jews are responsible for a "breeding program" to conquer other "races." Under the heading "Sue Blackwell's links on Israel and Palestine," Blackwell provides a link to the MarWen site, along with the following description: "MarWen Media offers the latest in groundbreaking documentaries, breaking through barriers and taboos that mainstream media – and even most alternative media do not venture."

'...Combining anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and vilification of Israel, Campbell writes: "It is no accident that Israeli 'security' is now the centerpiece of US foreign policy. How are the highly placed "friends of Israel" able to bamboozle so much of the world?" She peddles Holocaust denial, saying, "It's a staggering fact that in numerous 'free, Western democracies' (such as Germany, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and others) it's a crime to question the official Jewish death toll figures or the gas chamber story in the events now called The Holocaust. Penalties include fines and actual imprisonment! Holocaust heretic Ernst Zundel was deported from the US to Canada where he spent two years in solitary confinement. Now he sits in a German prison. Who's next?"

'MarWen Media offers a videotaped interview with Kevin MacDonald, accompanied by the following description: "Prof. Kevin MacDonald is the author of three groundbreaking books on Judaism, the most recent being The Culture of Critique. In it, MacDonald concludes that Jewish intellectual movements including Freudian psychology, Marxism (including other radical, Leftist politics), the Frankfurt School of Social Research, the New York intellectuals and others, including right-wing NeoConservatism, have all been designed to advance specifically Jewish interests – often at the expense of non-Jewish interests. MacDonald's incisive analyses offer an alternative view of western history and has the potential to change the course of major events still unfolding." MacDonald is a pseudo-intellectual white supremacist,who claims that Jews have been practicing a "breeding" program "masked" as a Jewish religious code, in a sinister bid to subjugate the world, and holds that Jews are responsible for an impending "race war" in the US.'

It is becoming ever clearer that Blackwell, who has denied that her website is linked to racist sites and has been photographed clothed in a garment made from the Palestinian flag, is at the highly disturbed end of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, as I have noted before, there is more generally considerable crossover between neo-Nazi, radical Islamist and ultra-left websites, thus creating the remarkable axis that now exists between the left and the neo-fascists. The language, imagery and sentiments they all use are often identical.

The point is that Blackwell is not an aberration. She may be somewhat unusual in walking around dressed in a flag, but the views she peddles and the disgusting alliance they represent, uniting Jew-haters from all extremes of the political spectrum, are now the academic orthodoxy. In other words, the academic climate in general is itself highly disturbed, having succumbed to obsessional hatred and irrationality towards Israel. And since the universities create the intellectual climate for a society, it is small wonder that Britain has now so completely lost its moral bearings.

A long article published in Ha’aretz by the former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy is very much worth reading. He makes three noteworthy points. The first is that he fears the Bush doctrine may push Saudi Arabia not towards a liberal democracy but towards a fundamentalist regime. In itself this is hardly a new point; and Israelis (with the exception of the newly departed Natan Sharansky) are endemically reluctant to believe that any Arabs are capable of democratic impulses. But Halevy pushes it one stage further. Apart from making the notable claim that the first President Bush stopped short of taking Baghdad in Gulf War 1 for fear of provoking just such an uprising in Saudi (so much for the ‘turkey-shoot’ popular revulsion theory) he surmises that, if such a ‘terrifying scenario’ comes to pass, the Americans will dramatically escalate their presence in the Middle East:

‘Few observers of the Middle East scene are actually taking a good hard look at the situation in Saudi Arabia and examining coolly the terrifying scenarios, one of which might ensue. Some believe that there is a real danger that extremist religious figures will seize power in Saudi Arabia and establish an "Al-Qaida state" in Riyadh. Others note that the national identification of large numbers of the country's population with the Saudi entity is feeble and that their main attachment is tribal or local-regional. Thus, a revolutionary situation might cause the disintegration of the state and the creation of parallel regimes in various regions of the kingdom.

’In a visit to the United States two weeks ago, I was told by several well-informed observers that should one of the more severe scenarios come to pass, the United States will have no choice but to deepen its presence in the Middle East. To that end, it will have to renew the draft, to ensure that there are enough forces to deal with developing situations in countries like Saudi Arabia.’

Of course, this has always been the risk — that encouraging democratic forces might produce some very alarming results. But I still hold to the view that — whatever nasty shocks there may be in the medium term, and there will undoubtedly be many — the human impulse to be free from tyranny and to prosper is universal, that this is why democracies do not start aggressive wars, and that among cultures where people have known no other state of being than cowering under one tyrannical strong man after another — including the mullahs — the spectacle of a free society in their midst releases the most lethal stranglehold of all: the belief that it cannot be done. That, of course, is why Iraq is so crucial and why the forces of darkness are sparing no effort to try to prevent it from becoming that free society. That is why Halevy is probably right to say that the Americans are in the Middle East for the very long haul.

Halevy’s second point is a surprising one. He thinks that Iran is being contained:

‘The international siege of Iran has lately become tighter and international opinion on the subject is, unusually, being led by the unlikely trio of Britain, France and Germany, with the public support of the United States. From many points of view, this is the most fascinating and significant experiment taking place today, as it is obvious that Iran is trying to extricate itself from this international pressure and is using various modes of deception to conceal the truth and trick those that are negotiating with it over its nuclear program. Iran cannot, ostensibly, allow itself to lose in this struggle, but at the same time the European leaders cannot allow themselves to be duped and be perceived as the village idiots. In any event, the United States will not follow in Europe's wake if it tries to escape to the fringes. Israel, for its part, could not hope for a better combination of players and circumstances in the political campaign that is under way in relation to Iran's nuclear project.

’The campaign against that project is taking place in regional conditions that are not convenient for Iran: Its Syrian partner is being led by a leader who is not very smart; Hezbollah, its forward arm in Lebanon, is under Security Council pressure to disarm; and the American military presence to the west in Iraq and to the east in Afghanistan is heightening the danger of regional isolation that Iran has long feared. On the other hand, of course, Iran is benefiting from the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, which forced Tehran to agree to a cease-fire following their eight-year war (1980-1988), which Iraq launched in September 1980. However, the consolation Iran felt at Saddam's fall is fading as it becomes clear to Tehran that the Shi'ite majority that holds power in Baghdad does not intend to defer to it.

’In the light of the accumulated weight of all the developments cited above, it is possible that the favorable surprise of the years ahead will be nothing less than the containment of Iran and the neutralization of the danger it poses to Israel - without Israel's having to consider whether to cope alone in the face of what it justly construes as the potential of a genuine existential threat.’

One hesitates to take issue with such an analyst, but his assumption that ‘European leaders cannot allow themselves to be duped and be perceived as the village idiots’ does not strike me as the most plausible assertion I have ever heard.

His third point is perhaps the most alarming. He claims that President Bush is committed to the road map and to pushing Israel in directions inimical to its security — with which Ariel Sharon is meekly going along. While noting that the road map indeed represents a fundamental departure from the Bush doctrine — as enunciated in the President’s speech shortly before he plunged down this path —he does not offer any explanation why the President has veered so wildly off his own course. There is only a hint that there are people in a hurry here — Bush to establish a Palestinian state before he leaves office in three years’ time, Sharon to leave his imprint on history.

But they are surely not the only people with an eye firmly on the clock. All abu Mazen has to do is make diplomatic noises, show willing — and wait for the American electoral cycle and the ineluctable process of human aging to shake the lethal kaleidoscope once again.

A reader has sent me the text of an altercation he has been having with the BBC over messages posted on its messageboards on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians. He complained that a poster was making comments about ‘apartheid Israel’ and ‘racist Israel’. In reply, the moderator told him:

‘Whilst we allow posters to provide their opinion on the policies of nations, we don't allow posters to generalise about whole nationalities as this sort of stereotyping can often cause offence’.

So to test it out, he posted up the following;

‘But they are defending themselves against the apartheid-seeking, racist Palestinians’

and

‘Indeed. So the apartheid-seeking, ethnic-cleansing Palestinians must be exposed for their policies.’

Both were removed. But the following was allowed to remain on the site:

‘It is easy to change facts!!! But the Israelis are obviously apartheid as they are doing ethnic cleansing with the Palestinian population. Peace will come when Israel comes to its reason and conscience, leaving the occupied territories as soon as possible, otherwise…’

This seemed to be a clear case of double standards. The moderator allowed the same generalisation about ‘Israelis’ as he had disallowed about ‘Palestinians’. In reply, the moderator said the following;

‘The distinction here lies between one post referring to a state (ie.
it's government and their policies) and another referring to a
population. If a user wishes to argue that Israel is a racist state based its government's policies, whether you agree with this opinion or not it is legitimate point for debate. To refer to Israelis as racists is a huge generalisation that cannot be justified and is likely to cause great offence to other messageboard users. As such, posts of this nature will be removed from the messageboards.’

The purported distinction is between official state policy and behaviour by populations. The moderator thus assumes that while Israel is capable of state policy, the Palestinians are not. While it is demonstrably true that the Palestinians are not yet a recognised state, it is demonstrably untrue that they do not have a state apparatus. The moderator totally ignores the fact that murderous prejudice and incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews have been regularly promulgated by Palestinian Authority-controlled media and religious leaders, that the eradication of Israel is implied in the omission of Israel altogether from the Middle East in official Palestinian maps, flags and insignia, and that the Palestine and Hamas covenants are committed to the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Jews.

In any event, the BBC moderator appears to have disregarded his own rules. The following post was subsequently allowed:

‘It is easy to play the victim, while the zionists are the victimizers. Israel has to leave the Palestinian territories right now, as Syria did in Lebanon. What goes around comes around!’

While the following post was removed:

‘It’s easy to be concerned when Islamists are the Terrorisers’.

Zionists, therefore, do not seem to fall within the definition of a population. Perhaps the BBC don’t think that Zionists can be people? Perhaps mindful of the demonstrable double standard, however, this time a different reason was given for deleting the post:

‘This is because the message seems designed specifically to anger, annoy or upset other messageboard users. Please don't continue to post messages with this intention’.

So to the BBC, to say that ‘zionists (sic) are the victimisers’ is not ‘designed specifically to anger, annoy or upset other messageboard users’, whereas to say ‘Islamists are the Terrorisers’ is.

‘Stereotyping that causes offence’ — or what?

Apparently, Russians who emigrated to Israel are now returning to Russia in a steady stream. This is what they are going back to:

‘The St. Petersburg Prosecutor’s Office has proclaimed that the infamous March petition demanding a ban on Jewish groups was not anti-Semitic, the Izvestia newspaper reported Friday. No complaints will be filed against the petition’s senders.

’In January 2005 a group of Russian MPs appealed to the state prosecution demanding a ban on all Jewish groups over claims of extremism. In March 500 well-known public figures joined the MPs, and the petition eventually received 5,000 signatures. However, prosecutors decided that the petition contained no essential elements of offence, Izvestia reports.

’After publishing the petition the Rus Pravoslavnaya (Orthodox Russia) and Za Russkoye Delo (For the Russian Cause) newspapers received a warning from prosecutors for extremism in March. One observer of the case, ethnographer and anthropologist Valentina Uzunova, told Izvestia that she could see ethnic hatred in the two papers’ publication.’

A journalist who travels frequently through eastern Europe told me recently that whenever he goes there, he is repeatedly asked: ‘What do you think we should do about the Jewish question?’ Now, he says, he wonders how long it will be before he is asked the same question in Britain.

A story in the Sunday Telegraph revealed the lengths to which the scientific journals are going to suppress any challenge to the global warming myth. Last December, Science published a paper by Dr Naomi Oreskes which analysed almost 1,000 papers on global warming and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed theory, while none directly dissented from it.

Her paper immediately drew criticism from academics who knew of many papers which challenged the theory. Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University and an expert on natural catastrophes, conducted his own analysis of the 1000 documents and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly. The Telegraph reports:

‘Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet". Dr Peiser insists that he has kept his findings strictly confidential. "It is simply not true that they have appeared elsewhere already," he said.'

But this was not a rogue decision:

‘Dr Peiser is not the only academic to have had work turned down which criticises the findings of Dr Oreskes's study. Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity. As with Dr Peiser's study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: "They said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish."

'Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important. He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field. As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail.’

Clearly, this whole thing is a mounting scientific scandal of the first magnitude. Yet such is the grip of this myth, it is still going by default. When will scientists of international repute and unimpeachable integrity publicly blow it out of the water?