Boy, are they mad! The anti-war crowd are wetting themselves over President Bush’s speech because of the number of times he made a link between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, said Mr Bush was trying to 'exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq'.

What she presumably meant is that there is no evidence that Saddam was involved in 9/11. True. President Bush, however, did not say that he was. He merely said in effect that that Saddam was part of the Islamic terror war with achieved its milestone atrocity on 9/11. As he said:

‘The troops here and across the world are fighting a global war on terror. This war reached our shores on September 11, 2001’.

But the anti-war crowd is apparently shocked and horrified that the President made any link at all between Iraq and Islamic terror. Because for them it is an article of faith that there never was any such link and that the President, who always said there was, had lied. In fact, the evidence suggests that is the anti-war crowd which has done the lying.

The New York Times has been particularly outraged at the President’s speech. It was the NYT, however, which erroneously reported the 9/11 Commission as saying there were ‘no ties’ between Saddam and al Qaeda -- whereas in fact that report had said there had been a number of contacts between the two, although there was no evidence of an operational relationship.

On June 25 2004, the NYT briefly re-entered the land of reality when it spectacularly reversed itself. In a front page story, it said:

'Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq. American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization...The new document, which appears to have circulated only since April, was provided to The New York Times several weeks ago...

[my emphasis]...

'The task force concluded that the document "appeared authentic," and that it "corroborates and expands on previous reporting" about contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan, according to the task force's analysis...The document, which asserts that Mr. bin Laden "was approached by our side," states that Mr. bin Laden previously "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative," but was now willing to meet in Sudan, and that "presidential approval" was granted to the Iraqi security service to proceed....this view ends with Mr. bin Laden's departure from Sudan. At that point, Iraqi intelligence officers began "seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location," the document states...The Iraqi document itself states that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."'

Yet now the NYT appears to have forgotten what it itself reported. It has reverted to its membership of the ranks of the Big Lie crowd who maintain with the fervour of religious certainty that not only was there no link between Saddam and 9/11 but there was no link between Saddam and terror at all prior to the war in Iraq. Only subsequently, it is claimed, has Iraq become a magnet for jihadists; far from combating global terror, President Bush has actually created it. An example of this egregious fallacy was provided in today’s Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash who wrote:

‘…as the United States' own September 11 commission subsequently concluded, Saddam's regime had no connection with the 9/11 attacks. Iraq was not then a recruiting sergeant or training ground for jihadist terrorists. [my emphasis] Now it is. The US-led invasion, and Washington's grievous mishandling of the subsequent occupation, have made it so.’

Now Dr Garton Ash is a highly respected scholar. He is a clever man. He reads his sources carefully. He knows the value of evidence. Readers of the Guardian will therefore trust what he says to be true. So how can he have either ignored or dismissed the following:

*Item: an interview with the interim Iraqi Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi:

'Allawi: 'We know that this [the war in Iraq] is an extension to what has happened in New York. And — the war have been taken out to Iraq by the same terrorists. Saddam was a potential friend and partner and natural ally of terrorism. 'Brokaw: Prime Minister, I’m surprised that you would make the connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. The 9/11 commission in America says there is no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and those terrorists of al-Qaida. 'Allawi: No. I believe very strongly that Saddam had relations with al-Qaida. And these relations started in Sudan. We know Saddam had relationships with a lot of terrorists and international terrorism. Now, whether he is directly connected to the September — atrocities or not, I can’t — vouch for this. But definitely I know he has connections with extremism and terrorists.'

(See post, July 5 2004)

*Item: a report sent by the US defence official Douglas Feith to the Senate Intelligence Committee. This report says that Osama bin Laden and Saddam had a relationship that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda… Reporting from a well placed source disclosed that bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sept.-Oct. 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti.

And then later, from the same source:

'The Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, met privately with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996. Tikriti used an Iraqi delegation traveling to Khartoum to discuss bilateral cooperation as his "cover" for his own entry into Sudan to meet with bin Laden and Hassan al-Turabi. The Iraqi intelligence chief and two other IIS officers met at bin Laden's farm and discussed bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance in: a) making letter and parcel bombs; b) making bombs which could be placed on aircraft and detonated by changes in barometric pressure; and c) making false passport [sic]. Bin Laden specifically requested that [Brigadier Salim al-Ahmed], Iraqi intelligence's premier explosives maker--especially skilled in making car bombs--remain with him in Sudan. The Iraqi intelligence chief instructed Salim to remain in Sudan with bin Laden as long as required'.

And also:

'During a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative] said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000, two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related [Chemical and Biological Weapons] training beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training'.

(See post, Nov 17 2003)

*Item: The Sunday Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, Saddam's biographer, got hold of a top secret memo made available by Iraq's interim government which explicitly linked Saddam's regime to Mohammed Atta, the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Written to Saddam by the former head of Iraq's intelligence service, it contained the following incendiary passage:

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

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

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

(See post Dec 15 2003)

*Item: an article by Stephen Hayes, author of The Connection, about the evidence of links between Saddam and al Qaeda. He came up with new disclosures following the identification from captured documents of one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as a Lt Colonel in Saddam's feared security force, the Fedayeen Saddam. An Iraqi of that name was known to have been present at al Qaeda planning meeting for 9/11. Now of course, it is possible that this could have been a quite different Iraqi who just happened to have the same name. But then consider the story Hayes unfolded:

'Six days after September 11, Shakir was captured in Doha, Qatar. He had in his possession contact information for several senior al Qaeda terrorists: Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who helped mix the chemicals for the first World Trade Center attack and was given safe haven upon his return to Baghdad; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, otherwise known as Abu Hajer al Iraqi, described by one top al Qaeda detainee as Osama bin Laden's "best friend."

'Despite all of this, Shakir was released. On October 21, 2001, he boarded a plane for Baghdad, via Amman, Jordan. He never made the connection. Shakir was detained by Jordanian intelligence. Immediately following his capture, according to U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on Shakir, the Iraqi government began exerting pressure on the Jordanians to release him. Some U.S. intelligence officials--primarily at the CIA--believed that Iraq's demand for Shakir's release was pro forma, no different from the requests governments regularly make on behalf of citizens detained by foreign governments. But others, pointing to the flurry of phone calls and personal appeals from the Iraqi government to the Jordanians, disagreed. This panicked reaction, they said, reflected an interest in Shakir at the highest levels of Saddam Hussein's regime.

'CIA officials who interviewed Shakir in Jordan reported that he was generally uncooperative. But even in refusing to talk, he provided some important information: The interrogators concluded that his evasive answers reflected counter-interrogation techniques so sophisticated that he had probably learned them from a government intelligence service. Shakir's Iraqi nationality, his contacts with the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia, the keen interest of Baghdad in his case, and now the appearance of his name on the rolls of Fedayeen officers--all this makes the Iraqi intelligence service the most likely source of his training.

'The Jordanians, convinced that Shakir worked for Iraqi intelligence, went to the CIA with a bold proposal: Let's flip him. That is, the Jordanians would allow Shakir to return to Iraq on condition that he agree to report back on the activities of Iraqi intelligence. And, in one of the most egregious mistakes by U.S. intelligence after September 11, the CIA agreed to Shakir's release. He posted a modest bail and returned to Iraq. He hasn't been heard from since.'

(See post, June 1 2004)

*Item: Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview:

‘First of all, on the question of whether or not there was any kind of a relationship, there clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials. It involves a senior official, a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service going to the Sudan before bin Laden ever went to Afghanistan to train them in bomb-making, helping teach them how to forge documents. Mr. Zarqawi, who's in Baghdad today, is an al-Qaida associate who took refuge in Baghdad, found sanctuary and safe harbor there before we ever launched into Iraq. There's a Mr. Yasin, who was a World Trade Center bomber in '93, who fled to Iraq after that and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the '93 attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary. There's clearly been a relationship.

‘Look at the Zarqawi case. Here's a man who's Jordanian by birth. He's described as an al-Qaida associate. He ran training camps in Afghanistan back before we went to war in Afghanistan. After we went in and hit his training camp, he fled to Baghdad. Found safe harbor and sanctuary in Baghdad in May of 2002. He arrived with about two dozen other supporters of his, members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was Zawahiri's organization. He's the number two to bin Laden, which was merged with al-Qaida interchangeably. Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaida, same-same. They're all now part of one organization. They merged some years ago. So Zarqawi living in Baghdad. We arranged for information to be passed on his presence in Baghdad to the Iraqis through a third-party intelligence service. They did that twice. There's no question but what Saddam Hussein really was there. He was allowed to operate out of Baghdad. He ran the poisons factory in northern Iraq out of Baghdad, which became a safe harbor for Ansar al-Islam??? as well as al-Qaida fleeing Afghanistan. There clearly was a relationship there that stretched back over that period of time to at least May of '02, a year before we launched into Iraq. He is the worst offender. He's probably killed more Iraqis than any other man in Iraq today. He is probably the leading terrorist still operating in Iraq today.”

‘BORGER: Now some say that he corresponded with al-Qaida only after Saddam was deposed.

‘Vice Pres. CHENEY: That's not true. He had been involved working side by side, as described by the CIA, with al-Qaida over the years. This is an old established relationship. He's the man who killed our man Foley in Jordan, an AID official, during this period of time. To suggest that there's no connection between Zarqawi, no relationship if you will, and Iraq just simply is not true.’

(See post of June 18 2004)

As I have noted on innumerable occasions, none of this evidence is cast-iron. But there is so much of it, it is simply not credible that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda, even if he was not personally involved in 9/11. And as for his links with other terror outfits, this is indisputable. Saddam’s Iraq was the principal training ground for Islamic terrorism.

The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognising reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe – and increasingly, it seems, of America – with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home.

Canon Andrew White, until recently Director of the Peace Centre at Coventry Cathedral, is the Church of England's principal peace-maker in the Middle East. He probably knows more about that troubled region than any other churchman alive, he has unrivalled contacts on all sides and he was the first (and so far, only) prominent churchman to sound the alarm about the revival of replacement theology (see posts below) and the resurgence of anti-Jewish hatred within the church. Here is his response to the Anglican Consultative Council debacle:

'It is not very often that I pay heed to newspaper editorials, but last Thursday's Daily Telegraph editorial summed up perfectly the Anglican Peace and Justice network's recommendation to the ACC to encourage that provinces disinvest from Israel. The Telegraph editorial summed it up with the words "Sanctimonious Claptrap" and that is exactly what it was. Never has this group even paid attention to the fact that the former Archbishop of Canterbury was the very person who commenced the religious track of the peace process -- a process that is still functioning. A few weeks ago Lord Carey himself launched three new centres in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. 'These centres are not slinging negative slogans at each other but are working hard at trying to find a lasting peace with justice. They are taking seriously the new opportunities that arise with Israel's disengagement from Gaza and part of the West Bank in a matter of days. It is these Israelis and Palestinians that we should support. Those who are taking real risks for peace. 'I spend much of my life in Israel and Palestine. Every month I sit with those committed to working for peace on both sides of the divide. I know the pain and hurt of both communities. I know it is not possible to undermine [sic] the pain and suffering of the Palestinians and know too the pain and fear living under the threat of terrorism that the Israelis have experienced. 'Making peace is hard work. It is not for the faint-hearted and it always requires working with both sides. If this group is really about peace why did they not even bother to go and see anybody from the Israeli Government? Or are they like so many other so called peace groups who only talk to those they like? That such a group should function in the name of the Anglican Church is a tragedy and that the ACC should pass this resolution is an even greater tragedy. As far as the Government of Israel is concerned the work that Lord Carey courageously began happens in the name of the Anglican Church. All that has been happening since the signing of the first Alexandria Declaration for Peace in the Holy Land is now at risk. 'Making peace is not quick or easy work. The Israeli Palestinian conflict has been going on for years. Despite the difficulties in the progress toward peace at long last things are moving in the right directions. If the leader of the Palestinian Authority Abu Mazin was prepared to sit down last week with Ariel Sharon, why was this group not prepared to meet with the Government of Israel? All too often delegations come out for a few days and write definitive reports. I have spent years in the land and even now do not understand many of its complexities. 'This is not a prophetic action but the corporate action of a group of people who are too scared to take seriously the challenge to be true peace makers. This action will be seen as being not only anti Zionist but also anti-Semitic and I know for certain I will never be party to such action.'

At least here is one senior cleric with the moral courage and decency to confront the evil that has arisen within Anglicanism.

A reader writes in with a snapshot of non-Muslim attitudes in Britain:

'I feel compelled to write to you again regarding what has become an increasingly desperate situation involving vicious anti-Israel campaigning in my home city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Around one year ago, representatives from the Durham branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign began campaigning every Saturday afternoon in Newcastle city centre to “Free Palestine”. This included various posters and leaflets stating “End Israeli Apartheid”, “End the Israeli Occupation” and “The Wall Must Fall”.

'After watching for several weeks with much dismay, I confronted one of these campaigners and asked why they were promoting such false propaganda. I suggested that words such as “occupation” and “apartheid” grossly ignored all of the acts of violence perpetrated against Israel, completely ignored the fact that Palestine has rejected a two-state solution on every occasion that was offered to it and dangerously paints Israel as an aggressive, expansionist state. More importantly, I said, their false propaganda was contributing to rising anti-Semitism in the UK.

'Their response shocked me: they weren’t surprised anti-Semitism was rising; it was the Jews' own fault (a popular libel), Israel was a Nazi-like state, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were merely military organisations fighting against oppression and the Israeli army deliberately murders Palestinian children. When I asked if they had ever read the Hamas charter or any of Hamas’ public rhetoric calling for the destruction of Israel, these people said such comments were largely fabricated by the Zionist press who attempted to falsely paint freedom fighters as terrorists to justify their own killings.

'If this wasn’t bad enough, I watched in utter dismay every weekend as more and more people signed their petition, and what started as a stand staffed by 2 or 3 individuals grew to become a large group of campaigners. Around three months ago, a second campaign desk was set up every Saturday on Northumberland Street (Newcastle’s busiest shopping street) outside Marks & Spencer with a large poster stating “Marks & Spencer support Israeli state-sponsored terrorism against Palestine”. A second board depicted Ariel Sharon with the slogan “World's Number One Terrorist” and leaflets calling for a boycott of Marks & Spencer and any other Israeli produce were being distributed.

'However, worse was to come last Saturday (25th). A third set of campaigners paraded through the city with a large cardboard illustration of a forklift truck with the words “Caterkiller” denouncing the fact that Caterpillar supply trucks to the Israeli army to bulldozer 50,000 people from their homes. Their banner depicted the classic sinister, hook-nosed Jew as driver with skull-shaped smoke emerging from the trucks' exhaust. My partner was handed a leaflet from these people. The amount of lies, libels and defamations are horrifying, with the leaflet stating, amongst other things, that Israel deliberately steals Palestinian land and water, and deliberately murders (bulldozes) peace activists.

'This is nothing more than a defamatory smear campaign, racist in its undertones and responsible for the mass distribution of misinformation to the British public.'

Another tremendous -- and utterly salutary -- article by Herb Meyer, a former Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence during the Reagan administration and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, provides a sobering and urgent warning that we are at a possibly lethal tipping point in Iraq and the wider defence against terror. Meyer warns that this war may be about to be lost -- at home and abroad:

'In just the last week, a ferocious national debate has erupted over the war. Your political enemies have launched a public-relations offensive to convince Americans that we are losing in Iraq. You and members of your administration are responding by arguing that despite the visible setbacks, such as all those horrific bombings in and around Baghdad, the war in Iraq is going well. The truth lies somewhere in between.

'In some ways the war really is going well. For example, the new Iraqi government is making a remarkable amount of progress every day, reconstruction projects are forging ahead, and the Iraqi security forces are starting to make their presence felt throughout the country. But in other ways, the war isn’t going very well. The level of physical security remains abysmal, and it isn’t just those car-bombs and drive-by shootings; it’s been more than two years since we overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, and we still haven’t secured the road to Baghdad International Airport. The honest assessment, which neither your enemies nor your supporters want to publicly offer, is that we are still in the middle of the war – which means it could go either way.'

It's now a race against time, says Meyer, to stabilise Iraq before public support - which is alarmingly eroding -- starts to haemorrhage away altogether. So President Bush has to do what he has so far been unable or unwilling to acknowledge. He has to fight harder:

'First, you need to fight harder in Iraq. You keep saying that you are giving our generals all the troops they want. With all respect, sir, this couldn’t possibly be true. In the history of the world there has never been a general who thought he had enough troops. If your generals are telling you they have all the troops they want to finish the job in Iraq, either the generals are idiots – or they have gotten the word that asking for more troops will end their careers. Sit down with your generals privately – just you and them -- and find out how many troops they really think they need. If they still insist they don’t want more troops on the ground in Iraq, then get yourself a new bunch of generals. If they tell you they need another 250,000 soldiers and Marines – then fly them over from Korea, Germany or wherever they are stationed just as fast as possible. If we haven’t got them to send – then order a draft. One way or another, put enough troops on the ground in Iraq to secure that country -- fast. And while you’re at it, give the orders to either take out the governments of Syria and Iran or to hit them with so much force that they quit playing footsie with al Queda and the Baathists, because we cannot win in Iraq so long as Syria and Iran are providing support and sanctuary. In short, do whatever is necessary, and do it now.

'Second – and in my judgment, even more important -- you need to fight harder in Washington. To explain why this will help win the war in Iraq, let me tell you about how one of your predecessors acted domestically in a way that had a huge foreign impact. Shortly after President Reagan took office, our country’s 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike. Reagan ordered them back to work, and when they refused he did the one thing neither the controllers nor anyone else ever imagined he would do: he fired them all.

'The ensuing political explosion is well known, but what isn’t well known is what effect the President’s decision had on the Soviet Union’s leaders. It terrified them, because they realized that in Ronald Reagan they were confronting a President who was willing to put all his chips on the table and go for broke no matter what might be the political consequences. I had access to a lot of top-secret intelligence in those days, and I can tell you that during the next few years there were several very dangerous things the Kremlin wanted to do, but refrained from doing purely out of fear over how President Reagan would respond. (You needn’t take my word for all this. After the Cold War ended quite a few of Gorbachev’s now-unemployed foreign-policy advisers earned some pocket-money on the European and American lecture circuits, and they all made this point. If you hadn’t heard this story before, it’s because the episode reflected so well on President Reagan our press didn’t trouble to report it.)

'With all respect, sir, your performance in Washington has been too weak. You are letting Congress get away with stiffing John Bolton, you cut a compromise in the Senate that got a few judges confirmed but that left the Democrats in a position to filibuster whichever future nominees they choose, you haven’t vetoed a single bill despite all the budget-busting pork that is mortgaging our children’s future, and while you are out giving speeches to Rotary Clubs about how to save Social Security, your proposal to privatize a portion of future payments is being strangled in its crib by the Democrats. Whatever may be the domestic effects of all this, the foreign effects are catastrophic. The terrorists in Iraq, their leaders who are hiding in caves, the mullahs in Teheran, the creep in Damascus and the nut in North Korea – they all see what is happening to your programs and your people, and the judgment they are reaching is this: if you aren’t willing to fight to the death in Washington, you aren’t willing to fight to the death in Iraq.'

He is so right. Read it all.

This is the kind of thing that has poisoned western public opinion about Israel. As NGO Monitor reports, the charity War on Want is churning out the most vicious untruths and libels:

'WoW routinely uses hate rhetoric such as "apartheid", "slavery", and "a heavyweight beating a child" in its assault against Israel, while accusing Israeli leaders of attempting to simulate the aftermath of a natural disaster for Palestinians. Repeating terms used routinely by the radical Palestinian NGO network regarding refugee claims and calls on Israeli citizens to refuse military service, War on Want's program seeks to undermine the survival of the State of Israel and its right to defend itself.

'Like the other elements in the movement to demonize Israel, War on Want's latest campaign focuses on the security barrier, which it calls "the world's biggest prison". WoW's incitement makes no mention of the terrorism that has killed over 1000 Israelis (mostly civilians), and which highlights the moral rationale of this defensive response.

'Following the standard pattern, War on Want repeats the messages of other members in the extremist NGO network, such as the Democracy and Workers' Rights Center, the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC), PNGO, BADIL, Electronic Intifada, www.stopthewall.org, etc.

'On the basis of these "sources" alone, WoW's alleges that Israel's security barrier "is destroying the possibility of a Palestinian state, because Palestinian land is being divided into ghettos." Other false allegations include electrification of the barrier, "with watchtowers and sniper positions every few hundred metres." In several instances their website unsettlingly features a photo of a Swastika inside the Star of David, reflecting the fundamentally immoral comparison of Israeli self-defense with the Nazi Holocaust. In a similar assault, WoW blames Israel for a lack of sufficient healthcare facilities in Palestinian towns, going on to proclaim that "the Wall is part of an on-going attempt to make life unendurable for Palestinians."

'Highlighting its fraudulent abuse of the "charity" banner, War on Want acts as if the concept of human rights does not apply to Israelis. Instead, this assault justifies terror and brutality, claiming that the violence "is a result of Palestinian anger and desperation at the situation they have suffered." The campaign presents figures on Palestinian casualties, while failing to mention Israeli victims of Palestinian terror. And War on Want adopts traditional antisemitic libels (such as "poisoning the wells") in repeating allegations that the Israel Defense Forces targets Palestinian water sources "as a form of collective punishment". Similarly, in WoW's distorted image, Israel alone is to blame for the "seemingly endless downward spiral of violence".'

I refer in the previous post below to a parallel universe that has been created. NGO-land has now become an apparently co-ordinated network of hatred towards Israel, with charities working together to demonise and delegitimise it and campaigning for it to be treated as a pariah state by the world. Much of the language used by WoW is taken from the radical Palestinian NGO network. The radical politicisation of this entire NGO sector owes much to the Durban conference 2001 which, as NGO Monitor has previously pointed out, was organised as a conspiracy against the Jews in the following way:

'A UN resolution began the process leading to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held at Durban in September 2001. Interested non-governmental organizations to be represented by observers, in accordance with UN Economic and Social Council resolution 1996/31 were also invited to attend as observers.

'A regional conference in Tehran, intended to produce a composite Declaration against Racism and a Plan of Action, preceded the conference. Israel, along with Jewish NGOs, were excluded and, in their absence, Israel was accused of committing holocausts and being anti-Semitic. There was no public condemnation of the exclusion of Israel or the Jewish groups by any of the international NGOs. During the World Conference, large numbers of NGOs organized a parallel NGO Forum (sometimes confused with the Conference) that, in turn, succeeded in overshadowing the formal proceedings. This was due to the large amount of media attention the NGOs were able to generate. The NGO Forum produced what is known as "The NGO Declaration," which, while not an official conference document, assumed a high international profile and was signed by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

'The NGO declaration at the Durban conference, written in highly politicized language, reflected a concerted effort to undermine Israel. Article 164 states targeted victims of Israel's brand of apartheid and ethnic cleansing methods have been in particular children, women and refugees. Article 425 announces a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state...the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel. Furthermore, Article 426 talks of condemnation of those states who are supporting, aiding and abetting the Israeli apartheid state and its perpetration of racist crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing, acts of genocide.

'The constant comparisons with South Africa and apartheid are fundamentally flawed. Israel grants full legal and civic equality to its Arab minority. The status of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is subject to a final settlement and the issue of a Palestinian state is a matter of intense diplomatic energy and sensitive negotiation. Moreover, the Israeli army has a clear policy of avoiding civilian casualties. A fact of the war on terror is the concentration of suicide bomb-making factories in densely-populated areas. Moreover, the Palestinians have also shown a willingness to put small children directly in the line of fire. These reasons help explain the tragic number of Palestinian children and women killed. In cases where Israeli soldiers have shown excesses, they have stood trial and were removed from their positions. The NGO Forum omitted to mention any of these facts, and this pattern is seen in the NGO community repeatedly.'

This is why the charities are now all pumping out these monstrous untruths. Far from alleviating poverty or injustice, they have become quite simply a collective force for evil in the world -- an organised conspiracy of hatred, prejudice and lies. Their influence is immeasurable; the harm they are doing unquantifiable.

The silence over their outrageous activities is deafening. The mainstream media are content to accept them on face value -- because most journalists, alas, share these prejudices, not least because the NGOs are pumping out this stuff and the NGOs are considered to be, by contrast with 'lying' politicians, pillars of integrity and altruism. Hence their vast influence at a time of public cynicism about politicians. The NGOs have become, in effect, our fifth estate.

There is another factor behind this process, at least in Britain. Charities are supposed not to engage in political activity. But in recent years, this restriction has been softened -- in part because, as the Charity Commission's guidance note puts it:

'...charities are well placed to carry out this role because of... the high levels of public trust and confidence they command'.

As a result, campaigning by charities is now encouraged:

'Organisations established for exclusively charitable purposes may carry out campaigning and political activities to the extent outlined below, provided that the activities pursued are a legitimate means of furthering those purposes.'

(my emphasis).

That last caveat is why WoW, for example, feels obliged to state that its diatribes against Israel, which would appear to have nothing to do with the charity's mission of alleviating poverty, are all about the causes of Palestinian poverty.

But that argument is wholly bogus. Palestinian poverty is caused by many factors, at the top of which must come the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, followed closely by the self-inflicted wound of being conscripts in the half-century war of terror against Israel. And here's the rub for these rotten, corrupt NGOs. Because the Charity Commission's guidance also warns that

'the trustees must weigh the possible benefits for their charity and beneficiaries, against any possible reputational or other risks'

In other words, if a charity is doing something that might endanger its reputation, for example by providing such a distorted picture of the causes of Palestinian poverty as to constitute a libellous incitement of hatred against the Jewish people, it would be in trouble. Any complaint made against it on these lines would be looked at by the Charity Commission and if there was enough evidence they might launch a formal investigation.

The Jewish community should now get its act together and assemble precisely such evidence against these NGOs, and hold them formally to account for destroying their own reputations for fairness and objectivity by polluting public discourse with hatred and lies.

A report in the Jerusalem Post provides further evidence of the visceral theological anti-Jewish hatred of Canon Naim Ateek, the Palestinian cleric who is honoured as a ‘peacemaker’ in the Anglican Peace and Justice Network report (see posts below) and who is lionised among Anglican clerics in Britain and the US. As the Post makes clear, although liberals excoriate evangelical Christians for a profound theological animus against the Jews, it is liberal Christians who lap up Ateek’s every word. His influence in turning the Christian world against Israel cannot be overstated. Yet Ateek, president of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, is a Jew-hater out of medieval central casting:

‘Ateek is regarded as a "peacemaker" in the US even as he recycles the deicide charge against the Jews and directs the hostility it arouses against the Jewish state. For example, in December 2000, Ateek wrote that Palestinian Christmas celebrations were "marred by the destructive powers of the modern-day "Herods" who are represented in the Israeli government." In his 2001 Easter Message, Ateek wrote: "The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull." And in a February 2001 sermon, Ateek likened the Israeli occupation to the boulder sealing Christ's tomb. With these three images, Ateek has figuratively blamed Israel for trying to kill the infant Jesus, crucifying Jesus the prophet and blocking the resurrection of Christ the Savior. The use of such images is not the language of peacemaking, but part of an inexcusable effort to breathe new life into Christian theological hostility toward Jews and focus its vile energy on the Jewish state...

‘Through its Global Ministries Board, an institution it shares with another Protestant denomination, the Disciples of Christ, the UCC [the United Church of Christ which is considering three anti-Israel motions at its synod next month] broadcasts Ateek's message to Christians in the US by reprinting many of its anti-Israel press releases on the Internet and thereby giving credibility to pro-Palestinian propaganda. In 2003, Ateek was invited to speak to the UCC's General Synod, where he compared modern-day Israel to ancient Rome, which of course, killed Jesus and oppressed his followers. His speech, posted on the UCC's Web site, includes the following passage: "Most Palestinians today are born under occupation as Jesus was. In his day it was the oppressive Roman occupation. Today it is the oppressive Israeli occupation."’

Ateek has fused the political cause of Palestinianism with medieval supercessionism to produce a ‘liberation theology’ which rewrites Scripture to cast the Palestinians as Jesus and the Jews as the Romans so that Israel’s defence against Arab mass murder is represented as deicide. And guess what – the heirs to the perpetrators of the original deicide libel have taken up this re-run of the oldest hatred with undimmed enthusiasm. A history which ended in tragedy is being repeated – as tragedy.

All of a sudden, divestment has become the new craze, the must-do accessory for the terrorists-as-victims crowd. The Methodists’ conference will this week hear calls to follow the Anglicans in divesting from companies supporting Israel’s ‘illegal occupation of Palestine’. War on Want is launching ‘a new Palestine campaign in order to call for sanctions on Israel, oppose the construction of the separation wall and boycott Caterpillar who supply bulldozers to the Israeli military.’ In the US the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal church are considering following the Presbyterian example into divestment. As NGO Monitor points out, this is a strategy that was sanctioned by the profoundly Judeophobic Durban conference which took place a few days before 9/11:

‘The NGOs involved in the 2001 Durban conference articulated the strategy of using boycotts and divestment campaigns to de-legitimize Israel. Many of the NGOs using the rhetoric of human rights and humanitarian aid have pursued different forms of boycotts. In this process, their reports on Israel policy are increasingly aimed at justifying the individual boycotts that support the wider effort. For example, HRW's allegations regarding Israeli military activities in Gaza (November 2004) provided the springboard for subsequent participation in the boycott campaign focusing on the Caterpillar Corporation. Amnesty International has also used its public relations and political organization to press Caterpillar to end sales to Israel . In Britain, many of the major NGOs, such as "Christian Aid" and "War on Want" contributed directly and indirectly in creating the foundation used in the attempt to justify the academic boycott. And the numerous Palestinian NGOs that are often financed by European governments and church groups provided the language and faulty rationales that propelled the AUT boycott and the church divestment campaigns.’

It’s a truly fantastic situation where bodies that purport to be committed to the highest ideals of religious morality and social justice, so much so that they are considered immune from the kind of sceptical interrogation applied to any other public bodies, have actually turned themselves into accessories to mass murder, Judeophobia and the revival of the blood libel in modern garb. They now form a monstrous parallel universe, a profound threat to the values of the entire civilised world that they are doing so much to corrupt and undermine by their assault upon the Jews.

It is a defining moment. With last Friday’s vote by the Anglican Consultative Council to ‘commend’ divestment from companies supporting Israel’s polices, based on a travesty of a report on Israel by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network, the Anglican church has descended into the moral abyss.

The APJN report is full of the most inflammatory lies, libels and distortions about Israel — and the fact that the amended resolution that was finally passed only welcomed part of it (a weaselly caveat to provide deniability) does not alter the fact that it provided the ammunition for a poisonous onslaught against Israel. The document uncritically reproduced the Arab propaganda version of Israel’s history and the present circumstances of the Middle East conflict, presenting the Arab perpetrators of genocidal mass murder as victims and their real victims as oppressors merely for trying to defend themselves. But then what can one expect of a report which concludes by referring to

‘the honor of meeting the President of the Palestinian Authority, the late Yasser Arafat, who so warmly welcomed us in what turned out to be one of his last days among us’

?

Statement after statement is pathologically twisted.

‘…there have been no significant positive steps towards the creation of the state of Palestine. On the contrary, the state of Israel has systematically and deliberately oppressed and dehumanised the people of Palestine…’

Far from dehumanisation and oppression, Israel has behaved with suicidal forbearance towards the Arabs of the territories, as demonstrated last week when a woman returning to hospital in Beersheba for treatment tried to blow up the hospital, intending specifically to murder as many children as possible.

Yet the report does not present Israel's actions as a defence against mass murder but instead represents them as oppressive and dehumanising.:

‘We note the continuing policies of illegal home demolitions, detentions, checkpoints, identity card systems and the presence of the Israeli military that make any kind of normal life impossible.’

It thus presents Israel’s military actions as a deliberate policy of oppression, whereas in fact the only reason that normal life is impossible is that the Arabs of the territories are intent on ending as many Israeli lives as possible.

It refers to the occupation of ‘Palestinian land’. But the West Bank and Gaza are not Palestinian land. They are strictly speaking no-man’s land — which was illegally occupied by Egypt and Jordan in 1948-50. The report says the Arabs were removed from their ‘historic lands’ — by which it means Israel. But this is a rewriting of history. Judea, Samaria and Galilee are the historic lands of the Jews, not of the Arabs who subsequently drove them out. Many of these Arabs' forbears only came to Palestine in the early years of the 20th century from other Arab lands because they were attracted by the prosperity being created in that previously sparsely populated and inhospitable country by the Jews who were returning to their historic homeland.

It describes the security barrier as an ‘apartheid/segregation’ wall and compares the territories to the ‘bantustans of South Africa’. But the only reason the barrier was erected was to defend Israelis from the systematic mass murder perpetrated by Arabs from the territories. The comparison with apartheid, where the majority was kept down by the minority on racial grounds, is false and libellous.

It egregiously misrepresents history, attacking Israel for ignoring UN resolutions without referring to the Arabs’ refusal to honour those bits of those resolutions which require them to end their aggression against Israel. Outrageously, it asserts:

‘there is little will on behalf of the Israeli government to recognize the rights of the Palestinians to a sovereign state to be created in the West Bank—which includes East Jerusalem—and Gaza.’

But the Arabs were offered a state in the territories in 1938, 1947, 1967 and 2000 but refused it every time and tried instead to wipe out the Jews. Never have they rescinded their aim of ethnic cleansing and destruction of Israel.

The report not only makes no mention of this, nor of the incitement of hatred of Israel and the Jews worldwide with which the Arab world is brainwashed; instead, it directly associates itself with those aims by endorsing the right of settlement for ‘refugees’ which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state.

The venom of its anti-Jewish feeling bursts out all too plainly when it compares ‘the concrete walls of Palestine’ to ‘the barbed-wire fence of the Buchenwald camp’. Thus the Anglicans compare Jews to Nazis for a measure aimed to prevent themselves from being murdered.
This profound and vicious anti-Jewish animus is not surprising given the two men the report singles out for praise who are deeply associated with replacement theology, the anti-Jewish doctrine that seeks to delegitimise the Jews in the eyes of God. It ‘salutes’ the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El-Assal, who is influential throughout the Anglican communion. Among many anti-Jewish statements Bishop Riah has claimed of Palestinian Christians:

‘We are the true Israel… no-one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew…He is the father of the faithful.’

It also honours Canon Naim Ateek as a ‘peacemaker’. Yet Ateek’s book, 'Justice and Only Justice', inverts history, defames the Jews and sanitises Arab violence. Modern anti-Semitism gets precisely one paragraph; Zionism is portrayed not as the despairing response to the ineradicable anti-Semitism of the world, but as an aggressive colonial adventure. Courageous Jews are those who confess to ‘moral suicide’ and who say that Judaism should survive without a state; real anti-Semitism, says Ateek, is found within the Jewish community in its treatment of the Palestinians. He uses the Bible to de-legitimise the Jewish state by misrepresenting the Jews’ relationship with God. Through tendentious history and the hijacking of scripture, Ateek vilifies the Jews as oppressors and warmakers and tells them, in effect, that their salvation lies in abandoning their state and scattering to the four winds.

The report enthuses that Ateek founded Sabeel,

‘an ecumenical organization based in Jerusalem that witnesses for a non-violent, just resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.’

Sabeel’s own call for divestment starts with a lie, which gives a taste of its own venom:

‘The State of Israel was established in 1948 on 78% of historic Palestine leading to the displacement of most of its Palestinian inhabitants, who became refugees.’

‘Historic Palestine’, the administrative name given to the territory administered by the British Mandate which after World War 1 was charged with establishing within it a restored Jewish national home, comprised what is now Jordan, Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Almost immediately, however, Britain gave some three quarters of this territory to the Hashemite dynasty, creating what is now known as Jordan. Of the remaining land, the Jews ware allocated a small portion. With the ceasefire lines drawn up in 1949 after the Arabs tried to destroy the fledgling Jewish state, Israel was left with only 17.5% of Mandate Palestine. The Arabs had the rest. It was still not enough for them; the Jews had to be driven out from their own homeland altogether, a project which continues to this day – and which the Anglicans now support.

Far from displacing the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel, most of them either fled or sold their property to the Jews. So when the report goes on to say

‘APJN was touched to visit Naim’s boyhood home from which his family was expelled by the new State of Israel. An Israeli bank now sits on the site of the former home. APJN stopped and picnicked at a nearby park to reflect on the injustice done, not only to Naim’s family, but to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were also expelled from their villages’

this is another distortion of history.

In short, this document represents nothing less than an incitement to hatred against Israel and the Jews.

At the meeting, two voices were raised against it. The Very Rev John Moses, the Dean of St Paul's objected to the resolution, questioned the credentials of those who prepared the report and suggested that it was biased and would inflame Christian - Jewish tensions in the UK and would not help the peace process.

The second was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, who proposed two amendments that softened the tone -- and he explicitly stated that this was not a call for disinvestment. Other Anglicans would appear to disagree. The American Presbyterian Church, which has been making divestment noises, is taking this resolution as a green light to go ahead. The enemies of Israel, life and justice worldwide will be taking huge encouragement from this resolution – for which Dr Williams, having amended it as a cosmetic exercise, duly voted.

There are, however, many decent Christians who are horrified and aghast. One such writes:

‘Some six months ago, I read the undergraduate maunderings of the "Peace and Justice Network" on the Arab-Israeli conflict with its proposals for disinvestment in Israel. It was immature, wholly unresearched and one-sided, the kind of thing, indeed, that might emerge from any Student Union. I thought that it would be kicked into the long grass when wiser heads prevailed at the Anglican Church's international advisory body's meeting. Unfortunately, though not altogether unsurprisingly, this did not happen. Instead, the resolution was couched in careful committee-speak, putting the smallest of figleaves over its left wing posturing. Well, I don’t think the church can have it both ways. It is either a body for transcendence or for agitprop. The church, I fear, will continue to make itself more and more irrelevant. I am taking the only action of which you will take the slightest notice. I shall be stopping my £500 a year contribution to my parish church with immediate effect.’

The Anglican communion has lost its way. Its own flock must now try to rescue it from the moral pit into which it has fallen.

An article by David Meir-Levi picks its way through the myths that are believed about Israel’s ‘occupation’ and the reality. It explodes the myth that the quarrel is about a state for the ‘Palestinians’; the only reason why the Arabs of the territories do not have a state of their own is because although they were repeatedly offered it by both the international community and Israel itself, they repeatedly blocked it. As he writes:

‘In high-handed defiance of the UN partition plan, they launched a war of aggression which, by their own public rhetoric, was to be a war of annihilation. Their intent was not the correction of some border dispute or the reclamation of some turf lost in an earlier battle. Their vociferously ballyhooed intention was the destruction of the newly created State of Israel, and the genocide of its 605,000 Jews. Much to their chagrin, they lost. And in losing, they lost much of the territory which the UN had designated for the state of Palestine. However, the remainder of what was to have been Palestine (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) never became the State of Palestine. Rather, Egypt maintained illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip, and Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank, both in high-handed defiance of international law and UN resolutions 181 and 194. There was no Arab or Palestinian protest over this. ‘To add to the Arabs’ chagrin, they were faced in 1949 with an Israeli offer of peace. In exchange for a formal peace treaty, Israel would return much of the land conquered in the war and allow the repatriation of some substantive portion of the Arab refugees created by the war (Rhodes Armistice talks, February – July, 1949). Had the Arab nations been willing to accept the UN partition plan, or had they been willing to accept the Israeli peace offer, not only would there have been a State of Palestine since 1949, but there would never have been an Arab refugee problem. But the Arab response was NO PEACE. The refugees will return to their homes only when they can fly the flag of Palestine over the corpses of the Jews. Better our Palestinian brethren should rot in squalid refugee camps than that we should acknowledge a non-Arab state in our midst. As in 1937, Arab leadership rejected the possibility of a Palestinian state in favor of continued aggression against Israel. It was not the creation of the State of Israel that caused the refugee and other subsequent problems; it was the war of annihilation waged by the Arab states that snuffed out the second opportunity for the creation of a Palestinian state.’

The article explodes the myth of Palestinian identity; the Arabs who lived in what is now Israel and the West Bank arrived in huge number only because the Jews were developing waste land which they had bought, not stolen, from the Arabs and creating prosperity; these Arabs never thought of themselves as Palestinians at all — the term was reserved for the Jews — but as Arabs from a single Arab nation. As the article states:

‘In a March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhse’in said: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.’

This is the truth which the useful idiots of the west completely fail to grasp — that the whole ‘Palestinian state’ grievance is a cynical fabrication, used by genocidal Arab regimes as a proxy for a conventional war of annihilation against Israel which they know they cannot win. This is, as it has always been, a war waged by the Arab states against the existence of Israel, in flagrant contravention since 1948 of the will of the world community. The Arabs of the territories have been used as pawns in this strategy, kept by the Arab states as displaced persons and brainwashed with demented lies about the Jews and incitement to murder them. The bodies of the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza have literally been turned into the smart bombs of the Arab League’s arsenal.

Much of the animosity directed against Israel in the UK is fuelled by total ignorance of this history, and the utterly false belief promoted by Arab propaganda that there is such a thing as a Palestinian people whose land this was and which was stolen from them by the Jews to appease the conscience of Europe after the Holocaust. Meir-Levi’s article is a necessary antidote to that malevolent ignorance.

Another incisive piece by Gerard Baker in the Times notes the fact that in both America, where President Bush’s ratings are in free fall and he can’t even secure the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, and in Europe, where the revolt against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ market capitalism is in full flood and Tony Blair, despite triangulating in the face of this as the face of gritty realism, has nevertheless just seen off the electoral forces of conservatism at home for the third time in a row, the left is resurgent. As Baker notes, the characteristics of this left revival are anti-globalisation and visceral anti-Americanism – with the main target of their ire and scorn America’s mission to spread democracy. As Baker writes:

‘In the Middle East the left finds it much easier to side with the mullahs and the jihadists, the persecutors of women and the torturers of dissidents. America’s flaws at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed by the Left’s political and intellectual leaders as morally indistinguishable from (or perhaps worse than) anything the Islamists and Arab despots have got up to.

'To be fair, not all on the Left have taken their stand on the side of reaction. But the trends in political debate in the West are strikingly clear. We are well on the way to an inversion of the classic Left-Right divide. These days if you’re in favour of policies designed to promote global economic integration, policies that have led hundreds of millions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the misery of grinding poverty, and have significantly lifted the standard of living of workers in the West too; if you support change to topple tyrannical regimes and give some hope to people who have suffered in fledgling democracies, you’re now more likely to be considered a conservative. What, exactly, is Left?’

As I have remarked before, it seems to me that one of the deeper reasons for the left’s pathological hatred of President Bush is that, in his foreign policy it is he who is acting as a liberal interventionist and it is the left who stand exposed as reactionary supporters of murderous and tyrannical ‘stability’. It is the same in domestic policy, where it is the left who take the reactionary position of going along with socially destructive trends that make victims out of the vulnerable. British Tories haven’t understood this at all — which is why they are still impersonating a slow train crash, from which it seems tactful to avert one's gaze.

In contrast to the almost total media indifference in the UK to the attempt by Wafa al-Biss to blow up the Soroka clinic at Beersheba hospital that was due to treat her — an incident which was too inconvenient for the British media to highlight, since it punctured the myths it peddles that Mahmoud Abbas genuinely wants an end to terror and the fault for the current impasse lies as ever with the aggressive Israelis— it is a Palestinian doctor who has told the truth loud and clear. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is an obstetrician and gynaecologist from the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, who has worked at the Soroka clinic for eight years. He writes in the Jerusalem Post:

‘I conduct research at the hospital's Genetic Institute, and Soroka has become my home away from home. I have built warm and professional relations with my colleagues in the obstetrics and gynecology department and other units. I make a point, whenever I'm at the hospital, of visiting Palestinian patients. I also schedule appointments for other Gaza residents, and even bring medication from Soroka to needy patients in the Strip. I have nothing but praise for the doctors, nurses and other medical staff at Soroka Hospital. They show compassion, sympathy and kindness. I was therefore extremely shocked and upset to hear that Wafa Biss, from the Jabalya refugee camp, was wired with explosives to blow herself up at Soroka, a place where she had been treated with kindness and mercy. ‘On the very day that she planned to detonate her bomb, two Palestinians in critical condition were waiting in Gaza to be taken for urgent treatment at Soroka. Wafa was sent to kill the very people in Israel who are healing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. What if Israeli hospitals now decide to bar Palestinians seeking treatment? How would those who sent Biss feel if their own relatives, in need of medical care in Israel, are refused treatment? As for Biss herself, she should have been a messenger for peace among her people, and should have been bringing flowers and appreciation to the Soroka doctors for healing her burns. Instead she targeted the very people who treated her with such compassion.

‘Israeli hospitals extend humanitarian treatment to Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. These efforts continued when all other cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis came to a halt during the most recent intifada. To plan an operation of this kind against a hospital is an act of evil. Children, women, patients, doctors and nurses were the target. Is this a reward for kindness? Is this an advertisement for Islam, a religion which respects and sanctifies human life? This is aggression and a violation of humanity. What are we going to say if Israel now clamps down on Palestinian patients seeking medical treatment inside Israel? All of us know that we are suffering from restrictions and acts of collective punishment imposed by the Israelis. We now risk imposing additional suffering on Palestinians in need of medical care.

‘Soroka is a hospital that has opened its doors to treat Palestinians without discrimination, offering the best care available. I want to tell my friends and colleagues at Soroka that all the Gaza residents I have spoken to have expressed their condemnation of this evil and brainless act. At a time when we badly need to build bridges of trust and tolerance, Soroka is the only door left open when other hospitals are closed to Gaza residents. We should all denounce any attempts to attack hospitals and harm their patients. The Biss family members have, themselves, issued a statement condemning the use of their daughter. I hope that despite this incident Soroka Hospital will continue to be an oasis of peace and coexistence. That is the correct message to defeat the enemies of peace.’

As the Church of England considers today whether to disinvest from companies ‘supporting the occupation’ on account of the Israelis’ brutality towards the Palestinians, maybe someone should read out the remarks of Dr Abuelaish to the meeting. Would it shame them? Would they even bring themselves to acknowledge that Israel routinely provides medical treatment to those who are trying to destroy it ‘without discrimination’? I doubt it: like the BBC, the church is far too busy lining up in support of those who perpetrate such ‘evil and brainless’ acts and condemning their victims instead.

Yet more moral illiteracy over Israel from the BBC. Reporting on the talks between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, Matthew Price writes:

‘The Palestinians told the Israelis that they want freedom of movement in and out of Gaza. They want air and sea ports re-opened. They also want Israel to release their prisoners. And they want key Palestinian towns handed back to their control. Israel said that was fine, but first all Palestinian attacks against Israel must stop. And the devil is in that little word "all". Many analysts will tell you that Israel is placing unrealistic conditions on the Palestinian leadership. While Israel's prime minister insists the problem starts and ends with Palestinian terrorism, the Palestinians see it differently. They say the attacks against Israel are a result of almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian lands. So "all" may be a pretty tall order. After the meeting, Israel put a positive spin on the day. The Palestinians were clearly desperately upset. Israel had again set the conditions for any movement on some crucial issues.’

The assumptions in this passage are breathtaking. Israel is painted as unreasonable because it insists that ‘all’ attacks by the Palestinians must stop before it makes any concessions. Price’s assumption is that the reasonable position would be for Israel to make concessions even while the Palestinians are making repeated attempts to murder its citizens; it would be reasonable, apparently, in these circumstances to make these concessions to the leader who is refusing to halt the attacks or the incitement that is driving it. And the reason Price thinks like this is that he appears to endorse — at the very least makes no attempt to refute — the Palestinian lie that ‘the attacks against Israel are a result of almost 40 years of occupation of Palestinian lands’. Since the Arab attempt to ethnically cleanse the Jews from the ancient homeland which was restored to them after centuries of Arab colonisation has been going on since the early 20th century, including numerous wars of which the current war of terror is but the latest, the endorse such a propaganda lie requires either malevolent prejudice or ignorance of the very highest order. Take your pick. Either way, the BBC has become a force for spreading darkness in the world.

A riveting seminar held yesterday by the Centre for Policy Studies in London on the subject of breaking the poverty cycle threw up some startling insights into social disintegration in Britain. The first notable contribution was made by the family researcher Jill Kirby. Observing that incentives for work and marriage — the two most important components of socialisation — had sharply diminished while benefits were being channelled principally into workless families, she made the telling if shocking point that while the very wealthiest could afford to have lots of children, the very poorest could not now afford not to have lots of children — while middle income couples are getting squeezed out of having children altogether.

The second revelation, by the economist Professor Bob Rowthorn, was the absolutely staggering size of the financial incentive for parents to separate. A couple on average earnings are taxed to the tune of £7,600 per year; but if the same couple live apart, they receive £400 in benefits. That’s an astounding £8,000 incentive for parents to split up — and yet the disintegration of the family, with the number of lone parents tripling over the past thirty years, is the single most important factor behind our culture of incivility, disorder and crime.

The third notable contribution was from Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, one of the most deprived areas in Britain. Field, who has spent his life campaigning for the poor, understands the most important point of all — that the poverty from which his constituents suffer so grievously is principally moral, spiritual and emotional. Discussing the complete collapse of civility and respectability which has taken place, Field suggested that seven major factors had contributed to the collapse of decent behaviour.

The first was the collapse of religion, the greatest force that had shaped the British character. The second was the disappearance of the strict rules of discipline enforced by British factories which had dispensed rough justice and thus tamed and civilised their workers. Third was the disappearance of manufacturing industry under Mrs Thatcher and the consequent wiping out of the ethos of work in areas where employment had collapsed. Fourth (this provoked some controversy) was that education had enabled potential community leaders to move away, thus denuding those communities of leadership. Fifth was the loss of the sense of duty to others, the ethical glue that inspired idealism and kept societies together. Sixth was the nationalisation of what should have been collective endeavour not under state control, such as pensions. And seventh was the welfare system, not the cause but the magnifier of other problems, not least because it had come to promote the raising of children in ways that were not in their best interests.

The fourth interesting contribution came from Ron Haskins of the American Brookings Institute, who played an important role in bringing in the great welfare reform bill that has got lone mothers off welfare. He told what was in its own terms a huge success story — a complete turnaround from the previous culture of dependency, in which lone mothers had moved out of poverty in huge numbers by being pushed out to work. However, although he did not agree with this analysis at all, there is a major flaw in this American welfare reform. For it was always aimed to do two things — get welfare mothers out to work and encourage more women to marry. But while it has succeeded triumphantly in the former, it has not had much success in the latter aim. Haskins says they’re working on the marriage component and it’s just taking a bit longer to get right.

But it seems to me that this is identifying the wrong problem. The main issue is not lone mothers on welfare. It’s the fact that they are lone mothers in the first place. The root problem is not welfare dependency; it’s fatherless families. For even if all these lone mothers are working, their children will still be at a severe disadvantage in many walks of life because they have no committed fathers. Many of these women, says Haskins, say they want to marry but the available men are hopeless prospects. Haskins says he agrees with them and comes close to saying that the men must therefore be written off.

This is tantamount to accepting a new social order consisting of a matriarchate at the bottom of the social ladder, with female-headed broken families instituted as a way of life on the basis that everything’s ok if mom is working. Well, it’s very much not ok. The core problem to be addressed is the exile of men from the family. The overriding task is not to get lone mothers out to work. It is to recalibrate these women’s interests so that marriage becomes once again to their advantage and having children outside marriage becomes very much not to their advantage. That means, among other things, concentrating on providing work in the first instance for men; and it means providing help for young unmarried mothers to enable them to become responsible mothers rather than setting up a system of incentives, as we have done in the UK, which makes a baby appear to be a passport to an independent life.

The US has had notable success in bringing down teen pregnancy because it saw this as a moral and cultural issue. The disintegration of the family —as Frank Field suggests — is similarly a moral and cultural issue first and foremost and must be tackled as such. Welfare economics, although obviously important, is a secondary factor, a symptom rather than the cause. The collapse of social order is a spiritual sickness, and it is the poverty of the human psyche which now needs urgent attention.

Dr Judea Pearl, father of the murdered Daniel Pearl who was beheaded by Islamic jihadists, has sent me the remarkable piece of writing that I reproduce below. It was the introduction to a book published in 1919, 'History of Zionism 1600-1919' by Nahum Sokolow, and was written by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, whose eponymous Declaration in 1917 committed Britain to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. In today's hateful climate, its relevance and poignancy speak for themselves.

'INTRODUCTION By the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, M. P.

'Whether it be helpful for one who is not a Jew, either by race or religion, to say even the briefest word by way of introduction to a book on Zionism is, in my own opinion, doubtful. But my friend, M. Nahum Sokolow, tells me that I long ago gave him reason to expect that, when the time came, I would render him this small measure of assistance; and if he attaches value to it, I cannot allow my personal doubts as to its value to stand in his way.

'The only qualification I possess is that I have always been greatly interested in the Jewish question, and that in the early years of this century, when anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe was in an active stage, I did my best to support a scheme devised by Mr.Chamberlain, then Colonial Secretary, for creating a Jewish settlement in East Africa, under the British flag. There it was hoped that Jews fleeing from persecution might found a community where, in harmony with their own religion, development on traditional lines might (we thought) peacefully proceed without external interruption, and free from any fears of violence.

'The scheme was certainly well-intentioned, and had, I think, many merits. But it had one serious defect. It was not Zionism. It attempted to find a home for men of Jewish religion and Jewish race in a region far removed from the country where that race was nurtured and that religion came into being. Conversations I held with Mr. Weizmann in January, 1906, convinced me that history could not thus be ignored, and that if a home was to be found for the Jewish people, homeless now for nearly nineteen hundred years, it was vain to seek it anywhere but in Palestine.

'But why, it may be asked, is local sentiment to be more considered in the case of the Jew than (say) in that of the Christian or the Buddhist? All historic religions rouse feelings which cluster round the places made memorable by the words and deeds, the lives and deaths, of those who brought them into being. Doubtless these feelings should always be treated with respect; but no one suggests that the regions where these venerable sites are to be found should, of set purpose and with much anxious contrivance, be colonized by the spiritual descendants of those who originally made them famous. If the centuries have brought no change of ownership or occupancy we are well content. But if it be otherwise, we make no effort to reverse the course of history. None suggest that we should plant Buddhist colonies in India, the ancient home of Buddhism, or renew in favor of Christendom the crusading adventures of our medieval ancestors. Yet, if this be wisdom when we are dealing with Buddhism and Christianity, why, it may be asked, is it not also wisdom when we are dealing with Judaism and the Jews?

'The answer is, that the cases are not parallel. The position of the Jews is unique. For them race, religion and country are inter-related, as they are inter-related in the case of no other race, no other religion, and no other country on earth. In no other case are the believers in one of the greatest religions of the world to be found (speaking broadly) only among the members of a single small people; in the case of no other religion is its past development so intimately bound up with the long political history of a petty territory wedged in between States more powerful far than it could ever be; in the case of no other religion are its aspirations and hopes expressed in language and imagery so utterly dependent for their meaning on the conviction that only from this one land, only through this one history, only by this one people, is full religious knowledge to spread through all the world. By a strange and most unhappy fate it is this people of all others which, retaining the full its racial self-consciousness, has been severed from its home, has wandered into all lands, and has nowhere been able to create for itself an organized social commonwealth. Only Zionism -- so at least Zionists believe -- can provide some mitigation of this great tragedy.

'Doubtless there are difficulties, doubtless there are objections -- great difficulties, very real objections. And it is, I suspect, among the Jews themselves that these are most acutely felt. Yet no one can reasonably doubt that if, as I believe, Zionism can be developed into a working scheme, the benefit it would bring to the Jewish people, especially perhaps to that section of it which most deserves our pity, would be great and lasting. It is not merely that large numbers of them would thus find a refuge from religious and social persecution; but that they would bear corporate responsibilities, and enjoy corporate opportunities of a kind which, from the nature of the case, they can never possess as citizens of any non-Jewish state.

'It is charged against them by their critics that they now employ their great gifts to exploit for personal ends a civilization which they have not created, in communities they do little to maintain. The accusation thus formulated is manifestly false. But it is no doubt true that in large parts of Europe their loyalty to the State in which they dwell is (to put it mildly) feeble compared with their loyalty to their religion and their race. How indeed could it be otherwise? In none of the regions of which I speak have they been given the advantage of equal citizenship, in some they have been given no right of citizenship at all. Great suffering is the inevitable result; but not suffering alone. Other evils follow which aggravate the original mischief. Constant oppression with occasional outbursts of violent persecution, are apt either to crush their victims, or to develop in them self-protecting qualities which do not always assume an attractive shape.

'The Jews have never been crushed. Neither cruelty nor contempt, neither unequal laws nor illegal oppression, have ever broken their spirit, or shattered their unconquerable hopes. But it may well be true that, where they have been compelled to live among their neighbors as if these were their enemies, they have obtain obtained,
and sometimes deserved, the reputation of being undesirable citizens. Nor is this surprising. If you oblige many men to be money-lenders, some will assuredly be usurers. If you treat an important section of the community as outcasts, they will hardly shine as patriots. Thus does intolerance blindly labor to create the justification for its own excesses.

'It seems evident that, for these and other reasons, Zionism will mitigate the lot and elevate the status of no negligible fraction of the Jewish race. Those who go to Palestine will not be like those who now migrate to London or New York. They will not be animated merely by the desire to lead in happier surroundings the kind of life they formerly led in Eastern Europe. They will go in order to join a civil community which completely harmonizes with their historical and religious sentiments; a community bound to be land it inhabits by something deeper even than custom; a community, whose members will suffer from no divided loyalty, nor any temptation to hate the laws under which they are forced to live. To them the material gain should be great; but surely the spiritual gain will be greater still.

'But these, it will be said, are not the only Jews whose welfare we
have to consider. Granting, if only for argument's sake, that Zionism will confer a benefit on them, will it not inflict an injury upon others who, though Jews by descent, and often by religion, desire wholly to identify themselves with the life of the country wherein they have made their home. Among these are to be found some of the most gifted members of a gifted race. Their ranks contain (at least, so I think) more than their proportionate share of the worlds supply of men distinguished in science and philosophy, literature and art, medicine, politics and laws. (Of finance and business I need say nothing.)

'Now there is no doubt that many of this class look with a certain
measure of suspicion and even dislike upon the Zionist movement. They fear that it will adversely affect their position in the country of their adoption. The great majority of them have no desire to settle in Palestine. Even supposing a Zionist community were established, they would not join it. But they seem to think (if I understand them rightly) that so soon as such a community came into being, men of Jewish blood, still more men of Jewish religion, would be regarded by unkindly critics as out of place elsewhere. Their ancient home having been restored to them, they would be expected to
reside there.

'I cannot share these fears. I do not deny that, in some countries
where legal equality is firmly established, Jews may still be regarded with a certain measure of prejudice. But this prejudice, where it exists, is not due to Zionism, nor will Zionism embitter it. The tendency should surely be the other way. Everything which assimilates the national and international status of the Jews to that of other races ought to mitigate what remains of ancient antipathies; and evidently this assimilation would be promoted by giving them that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home.

'On this aspect of the subject I need perhaps say no more. The future of Zionism depends on deeper causes than these. That it will settle the 'Jewish questions' I dare not hope. But that it will tend to promote that mutual sympathy and comprehension which is the only sure basis of toleration I firmly believe. Few, I think, of M. Sokolow's readers, be they Jew or be they Christian, will rise from the perusal of the impressive story which he has told so fully and so well, without feeling that Zionism differs in kind from ordinary philanthropic efforts and that it appeals to different motives. If it succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support.'

A reader has sent me the following account of a recent visit to the Middle East. It is a perspective almost unknown within the councils of the Church of England (see post below) because it is true:

'I recently visited Israel and the West Bank to see for myself what is going on there - as much as I could. I met numerous Israelis and Palestinians, and talked in great depth to them. My visit to the West Bank only went to confirm many of the things that you write about in your columns. It is a heartbreaking situation. What I heard confirms the view that many Palestinians are truly not working for peace, but for the ultimate demise of Israel. They harbour not humanitarian concern towards the people of Israel, but a bitter sense of grievance and vengeance in their hearts. 'I was bombarded with stories of the Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. I was careful to offer no viewpoint myself as I just wanted to listen - and what I heard I knew to be often a distortion of the truth. Had I been a European journalist, I would have returned to write of the anguish of the Palestinians and the dreadful wrongs done to them by Israel. It is only because of my contacts with Israelis of all political views that I was able to balance what I heard on the West Bank. 'On one occasion there was an Israeli in our group visiting the West Bank. She told someone that she was Israeli, much to the dismay of our Palestinian guide, who said that her life was now at risk (the militant groups are beyond any control - even of the Palestinian Authority Police). 'What we read in the UK press is a distortion of the situation in the Middle East. Israelis and Palestinians are unfortunate pawns in the political manoevering of larger interest groups worldwide. Now that I have had such close experience of the situation, I am at a loss to understand the posturing of so many in the UK when it comes to offering views on a place they've never even visited. 'I also visited checkpoints and spoke closely with Israeli soldiers about their daily life there. Far from choosing to humiliate Palestinians, they walk the incredibly hard line between protecting themselves and their country from murder, and offering compassion to those with whom they deal. One friend, a soldier, told me only on Monday how they had found bottles containing bombs in two boys' bags coming through the checkpoint. On questioning, the boys said they had been intending to throw the bombs into the army truck which would later come, full of soldiers, to relieve the checkpoint shift. He told me how it feels to be threatened constantly, and constantly afraid, and yet to hold back, not to vent one's natural anger at this. 'Of course we can feel compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians (and they are suffering: for many of them, daily life is hellish) - but this should never mean we misdirect blame for their situation, nor should it mean we act to harm Israel in any way.'

Tomorrow, a report is to be debated by the Anglican Consultative Council calling on the Church of England to disinvest from companies which support Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories. Virtually to a man (and woman) the CofE’s hierarchy have completely swallowed the lies and libels of Palestinian propaganda. The visceral hatred of Israel felt by these churchmen is matched only by their stupendous ignorance of Israel’s history and present circumstances. The astounding moral inversion of right and wrong, truth and lies, murderer and victim in their thinking about Israel has been fed by three principal factors: the systematic and malevolent distortion of Israel’s history pumped out by Christian aid agencies; pilgrimages to the Christian holy places which are almost all in Arab areas, so that British pilgrims who know nothing about Israel or the Jews spend the whole trip in the company of Palestinian tour guides, hotel staff and so forth and scarcely speak to any Israelis and thus return to Britain full of hatred for Israel and the Jews; and the very close friendship between many in the CofE hierarchy and radical Palestinian Christian clerics such as Bishop Riah of Jerusalem, who have spent years attempting to provide a theological justification for writing Jews out of Israel’s historical script altogether.

As a result, as I reported in the Spectator three years ago, the Cof E’s astonishing ignorance of the history of Jewish nationhood in Judea, Samaria and Galilee gives off a strong whiff of supercessionist replacement theology, the doctrine going back to the early church fathers which stated that all God’s promises to the Jews -- including the land of Israel -– were forfeit because the Jews had denied the divinity of Christ, a doctrine which lay behind centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred until the Holocaust drove it underground.

This is the disgusting context in which tomorrow’s debate must be set. The Telegraph notes:

‘The report calls on the Church to put moral pressure on firms deemed to be supporting controversial Israeli policies such as the security fence or the clearing of Palestinian homes. Its authors believe that, as a last resort, the Church should disinvest its holdings in companies that prove unresponsive. Some would also like the Church to boycott goods produced in the Israeli settlements in the South Bank. These range from flowers and dates to parts for electronic equipment.

'The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, the Rt Rev Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal, said that the adoption of the report would send a strong signal to Israel and raise awareness. "It is not the amount of money that is important," said the bishop, who was host to the network when it visited the region last year. "It is a symbolic way of speaking for those who, for example, have had their homes demolished." He said the Church had significant funds invested in companies such as the Caterpillar group, which manufactured the bulldozers used in clearance projects in Israel. He warned the council against watering down the "mild" recommendations of the report when it is debated on Friday, saying that it would undermine the Church's credibility.’

On the contrary – it is only if the church accepts this travesty of a report that it will lose what remains of its credibility as a moral force.

In these dark times, it is heartening to find a principled Christian who is publicly protesting about this. On his website, Peter Glover writes:

‘Is there, I wonder, a better way for the modern Anglican Church to embarrass itself once more in terms of its international credibility and moral standing before the world? Off-hand I cannot think of one… If your home and family were continually threatened with murderous violence from angry neighbours who would see your point of view, hated you, demanded your land for themselves, and wanted to drive you and your loved ones 'into the sea', would you not think of building a fence to protect them? I would be out with the hammer and nails today.

’Now I realise fully that this is a caricature of the broader Palestinian position, many Palestinians just want a peace and a Palestinian state (which I support) on the land they already possess. But so to is this report a caricature of the true justice of the Palestinian problem. Remember, that Yasser Arafat was offered, by Ehud Barak, just about everything that fulfilled Palestinians aspirations at a Camp David meeting just a few years ago - and he walked away from the peace table. The Palestinian leader, not Israel, chose, at that high point when peace could well have been achieved, to continue the cycle of unremitting violence.

’The Anglican report reveals wholehearted prejudice against Israel which is typical of the Western liberal mindset and academic elites. While its findings do not bear close scrutiny it adopts the tone of the moral high ground. In truth however, the report is full of what this morning's Daily Telegraph op-ed rightly called 'sanctimonious claptrap'. Sadly, this is becoming the hallmark of the Anglican hierarchy. .. The Anglican Church is considering following the same highly controversial path trodden by the Presbyterian Church (USA) last year. But even the rather feeble Lord George Carey has warned that such a move would be "disastrous" for peace efforts in the region and another "knife in the back" for the Israelis.

’I am a Christian. I am also a Licensed Reader in the Anglican Church. Yet I have no compunction in talking about the amoral, often immoral, un-biblical liberal idiocy that motivates the rotting heart of modern Anglicanism, at least in the liberal heartland of the house of bishops. Let us not worry about God's insistence upon equity and justice and let's cut instead to the root of the Anglican problem: bigoted, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias. Idiocy born of blind leftwing, socialist ideology.’

The Christian church has played an absolutely central role in the long history of Jewish persecution. The Catholic church has publicly recanted its hatred of the Jews and painfully tried to make amends for its role in the Nazi Holocaust. The Church of England has never done so but instead has swept the issue under the carpet. Now we are seeing the immoral legacy of this unfinished business. Instead of supporting the Jews against those who use terror, hatred and lies to deny them the right to live in their own restored nation state, the Church of England is singling out the Jews as the one people in the world who do not have the right to defend themselves from being murdered.

I know there are many other decent Christians who are equally appalled. Now is the time for them to make their voices heard loud and clear against this moral corruption that has overtaken their church.

If Israel broke the ‘truce’ with the Palestinians by one unprovoked act of aggression, the media would be heaving with righteous denunciations. Yet Israel is currently enduring a spate of murderous attacks following the easing of restrictions and the removal of checkpoints by the Israeli army after international pressure --with virtual silence from the media. WorldNet Daily reports:

‘A series of Palestinian attacks and attempted attacks over the past 48 hours have left two dead and several injured, as the violence here continues to reach the highest levels yet since the signing in February of a cease-fire agreement between Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Islamic Jihad terrorists opened fire today on an Israeli vehicle in the West Bank, killing Yevgeny Raider, 27-year, and wounding, Andre Zeidan, 16… Hours earlier, the Israeli Defense Forces thwarted a suicide bombing when soldiers caught a young woman Wafa Samir Ibrahim, aged 20, wearing explosives strapped to her underwear at a northern Gaza Strip crossing. Ibrahim had a permit that allowed her into Israeli territory for "humanitarian assistance." Yesterday, an Israeli soldier was killed and two others wounded when two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at an IDF post on the Egypt-Gaza border. Following that incident, a 15-year-old Palestinian boy was arrested at a Gaza checkpoint with five pipe bombs. ‘The continued violence comes in spite of a cease-fire agreement announced in Egypt Feb. 8 by Sharon and Abbas. A list of Palestinian attacks and attempts just the past two weeks, obtained by WND, includes: 56 rockets and mortar shells fired at Jewish communities in Gaza, 48 shooting attacks at Israeli civilians and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, 26 Molotov cocktails thrown at Israelis, the arrests of five terrorists who planned suicide attacks in Jerusalem, and two attempted infiltrations and attacks against Gaza Jewish settlements. Security sources also report the continued smuggling of heavy weaponry from Egypt into Gaza's Rafah region. Since February, there have been approximately 30 incidents of Palestinian smuggling from Egypt's Sinai region, with weapons transported including approximately 1,000 rifles, dozens of RPG launchers, about 150 handguns, five anti-aircraft shoulder missiles and tens of thousands of bullets. A senior Israeli security source told WND: "The cease-fire is over. Officials are afraid to announce it, but look around, it's obvious."'

Now let’s look more closely at that attempted human bomb atrocity by Wafa Samir Ibrahim Al-Bas. She was entering Israel via one of the Gaza strip crossings because she was to receive medical treatment at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. She showed her appreciation of this humanitarian gesture by donning a 10 kilograms (22 pounds) explosive suicide belt with the intention of blowing up the hospital that was to treat her -- and as the Jerusalem Post reported, wanted specifically to murder as many children as possible.

Now let us recall some of the crimes of Israel in the eyes of the British and European media. Israel oppresses the Palestinians by making it difficult for them at the checkpoints and crossings; Israel shows no compassion to the Palestinians; Israel is only attacked by the Palestinians because of the way it treats them. The human wrongs promoter Amnesty International, in its travesty of a report accused Israel of war crimes including ‘obstruction of medical assistance’.

Yet this woman was not only to be treated at an Israeli hospital but had been treated there before– as are countless numbers of other Palestinians, every day. This murderous act, in the very place that was to treat her, was her response. So much for murder being a response to ill-treatment. That and that alone is why Palestinians are held up and subjected to various apparent indignities at the checkpoints and the crossings – because sometimes they pretend to require humanitarian assistance in order to kill as many Jews as possible. In the circumstances, it is astounding that Israel routinely treats Palestinians from the territories in its hospitals. Any other country would regard them as enemy combatants. Israel sees them as human beings – and is then vilified by the British and European media and human wrongs industry as war criminals for its pains.

Furthermore Ha’aretz reports:

‘The Shin Bet received a tip that Fatah was planning to send Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, of the Jabalya refugee camp, on a suicide mission via one of the Gaza Strip crossings. Israel gave the Palestinian Authority and Chairman Mahmoud Abbas detailed information of the plan, Shin Bet sources said, but the PA did nothing.’

This is further evidence of Abbas’s complicity in the ongoing jihad. Yet this has not been reported in Britain. Indeed, hardly any of any of this escalating jihad has been reported – and when it has, it has been distorted. As the Middle East commentator Tom Gross observes:

‘Today Reuters reports the whole incident as "Israel says" - even though the would-be suicide bomber (Wafa al-Bas, 21) told the media herself in a jailhouse interview yesterday afternoon that the target was Beersheba hospital. The interview was broadcast on Israeli television news, but not on most international networks that were not interested in using the footage…

‘On air, most BBC world news bulletins today have begun their reports with the news that "Israel has arrested Palestinians" without mentioning that those arrested were members of Islamic Jihad linked to the murder of two Israelis in the last two days, and were in the process of planning future attacks. Online, the BBC separates its bomber story from its report of Israel's "crackdown" in the West Bank that followed it - as if Israeli security policy is unrelated to a continued terrorist threat. And the BBC glosses over the details of Islamic Jihad murders in the previous two days.

‘In the Financial Times, Harvey Morris, an experienced reporter in the region, leads his story with the shooting of an Israeli by Islamic Jihad, but mentions the attempted bombing so obliquely at the end that it almost disappears (and does not mention that the target was a hospital). Media outlets continue to describe the obligation for the Palestinian Authority to disarm terror groups as nothing more than an "Israeli demand". For example, the American UPI (United Press International) report on yesterday's Palestinian violence, says: "Ariel Sharon never seems to tire demanding a complete cessation of terrorism, violence and incitement, dismantling terrorist organizations and collecting their weapons."'

Nor is this violence the only matter of pressing concern in the Middle East over which media silence is having a lethally distorting effect on public opinion. As Tom Gross also observes, opposition to the disengagement is being presented as emanating solely from religious zealot settlers, ignoring the fact that opposition is coming from a far wider range of opinion including many on the left of Israeli politics. Gross provides some examples of this cross section:

‘Former Labor Party Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, currently not a Knesset Member but leader of the left-wing Yahad/Meretz Party:

"If the disengagement does not lead to an immediate permanent status arrangement, it will bring a catastrophe upon both Israelis and Palestinians... It is liable to bring a renewal of violence [that] is liable to bring down the moderate Palestinian leadership... There is a concrete danger that following the disengagement, the violence will greatly increase in [Judea and Samaria] in order to achieve the same thing [i.e., withdrawal] as was achieved in Gaza... A retreat from Gaza with nothing in return and with no agreement will strengthen Hamas."

Former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is on the left-wing of the Labor Party:

"A unilateral retreat perpetuates Israel's image as a country that runs away under pressure... In Fatah and Hamas, they will assume that they must prepare for their third intifada - this time in [Judea and Samaria / the West Bank]... If we continue these unilateral steps, we will find ourselves establishing an enemy Palestinian state."

Former General Security Service chief Ami Ayalon:

"The captain of the disengagement can be compared to the captain of a ship who takes it from port to a very stormy sea, without knowing at all where he wants to lead it. And possibly even worse: He knows where he wants to lead it, but is hiding the information from his crew... Retreat without getting anything in return is liable to be interpreted by some of the Palestinians as surrender. The plan is likely to strengthen extremist forces in the Palestinians society... There is a high chance that shortly after the disengagement, the violence will be renewed. 2006 is liable to be a year of another round of violence."

Former Air Force Commander Gen. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu:

"There is no chance that the disengagement will guarantee long-term stability. The plan as it stands can only lead to a renewal of terrorism... If there is no quick progress from the disengagement to a comprehensive retreat, [this will lead to] the one-state solution - bringing to an end of the Zionist dream, and the Jewish State will be lost."

Former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Uzi Dayan:

"Retreat from Nisanit, Dugit and Elei Sinai is a double mistake: Security-wise, it unnecessarily brings the Kassam rocket threat closer to Ashkelon, and diplomatically, it creates a dangerous precedent of unilateral withdrawal to the 1967 lines, which strengthens the PA demands to return to the June 4, 1967 lines."

Former IDF Chief of Intelligence Gen. Shlomo Gazit:

"It is reasonable to assume that within a short time, we will face mortar shelling and Kassams from [Samaria and Judea]. These rockets and shells will hit Kfar Saba and maybe even reach Netanya."

Former Mossad head Ephraim HaLevy:

"After the disengagement, Israel will face a diplomatic crisis the likes of which we have not known for years."
Former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit:

"The disengagement plan sabotages itself, creating a situation of instability. The plan does not create the necessary minimum of balance that would enable long-term coexistence... Immediately after the disengagement, Israel will find itself on a crash path with the United States."

The media’s failure to report this wide spectrum against disengagement has the effect of minimising the extraordinary risks being taken by this enterprise, the true nature and extent therefore of the controversy and the full significance of this event.

Nor is it reporting the implosion of Abbas’s regime itself under attack from the gunmen he has so obdurately refused to disarm. David Bedein paints a picture of growing anarchy and chaos as Abbas steadily loses control:

‘These days, militants from Abbas’s own party threaten the chairman, his aides and virtually anybody who fails to cooperate. In muted but clear tones, the PA newspapers report daily the attacks by Fatah, often bolstered by security officers, against PA officials, their families and security installations. PA officials have been fleeing or plan to leave the West Bank for Jordan and other Arab states. The most popular Palestinian daily, Al Quds [1], has been jammed with ads by travel agencies, a remarkable development considering the poverty of most Palestinians, their lack of passports and other restrictions. The ads are for the Palestinian elite, who are looking to escape the dangers of living in Palestinian cities. Indeed, the assessment by many is that the PA could collapse by late 2005 as the split within the ruling Fatah movement widens. PA security services have been unable to stem the increasing violence in the streets of Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Fatah factions have been engaged in gun battles in Ramallah, the center of Palestinian government, while police have largely stood by or even joined in…

‘The PA has acknowledged that many police and security officers spend their time playing criminals rather than cops. The official PA media have reported the involvement of security officers in gun battles in Ramallah on June 12. The media also reported the killing of three people in the Gaza Strip on the same day. On June 11, about 40 gunmen attacked PA security headquarters in Gaza City and waged a three-hour gun battle with officers in the facility. Later, Fatah operatives opened fire near the home of a senior Palestinian commander, Brig. Gen. Rashid Abu Shback. Moreover, several explosions in bomb-making laboratories were reported in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis. In the Jabalya refugee camp, a PA police officer was abducted. The media did not report the arrest or prosecution of suspects.’

Needless to say, the Palestinians are blaming Israel for their own mayhem. It cannot be long before their parrots in the British media do so too.

Israel’s suicide tendency shows no sign of being deflected. An article on WorldNetDaily reports that assorted Israeli leftists had been advising Mahmoud Abbas on how to advance the Palestinian cause, extract American concessions and apply pressure on Israel for his meeting with President Bush last month:

‘On Monday, following a session at Abbas' Ramallah compound with a delegation of 400 international opposition leaders, dovish Israeli politicians Ephraim Sneh, Yossi Beilin, Amram Mitzna and about 20 others met with the Palestinian leader… "Beilin told Abbas to understand that America isn't in a position to pressure Sharon until after the Gaza disengagement is carried out. That Sharon for now pretty much has a free pass. But he suggested that Abbas make it clear that after the withdrawal, Bush needs to press for a continuation of the political process and talks. That disengagement can't just be the end of it," the source said.

'Beilin then advised Abbas on how to extract American concessions, said the source. "He told Abbas that Bush feels a little guilty about the Iraq campaign and is under pressure because of it, so Bush needs to compensate by helping the Palestinians." Sneh, a prominent Labor politician, advised Abbas "that because the Bush doctrine is all about democracy, Abbas needs to stress that he was elected democratically. Abbas should say he deserves sympathy and credibility from the U.S. because he is a 'democratically' elected leader, after Israel, the only one." The source said Sneh attended the meeting after arriving in Israel less than an hour before. "He rushed straight to Abbas after landing at the airport a half hour earlier."'

That’s Abbas, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority — the same authority whose Environment Minister, Yousef Abu Safieh, has claimed in the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Shark al-Awsat that Israel is deliberately dispersing cancerous materials to kill Palestinians. As Micah Halpern reports:

‘And what is the Israeli poison of choice? What cancerous material is Israel dispersing throughout, forcing upon, the Palestinian Authority? Sweet and Low! Yes, that diabolical sugar substitute, the darling of dieters since it came on the market, Sweet and Low. And how is Israel going about with this plan to poison the Palestinian population? By manufacturing soft drinks made with this sugar substitute expressly for distribution within the Palestinian Authority... Abu Safieh had more evidence to prove his thesis. He also said that the Egyptians confiscated two Israeli truckloads of toys that were highly radioactive. The trucks were en route, he said, to Palestinian children.’

Abbas, of course, refuses to dismantle the Palestinian infrastructure of terror and instead has recruited Hamas operatives into the PA. Inexorably, Hamas’s genocidal terrorism is being sanitised. Not only does the west turn a blind eye to this merging of Hamas and the PA, but because it is winning elections the west does not say the obvious, that democracy consists of more than elections and an elected Hamas operative is merely an elected terrorist, but it draws the morally obtuse conclusion that electability means the terrorism can be ignored. When British diplomats were discovered to be talking to Hamas mayors (see earlier post) Foreign Secretary Jack Straw drew a (specious) distinction between leaders and led and declared that there should be no talks with the Hamas leadership until the organization abandoned violence and recognized Israel. But now we learn from Ha’aretz that the EU has turned the ratchet of appeasement another notch:

‘…the EU informed the U.S. administration of a substantial shift in its contacts with Hamas. The EU decision, which surprised the Americans, allows low-level European diplomats - below the rank of ambassador - to conduct talks with Hamas representatives who are running in the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. government and the EU… Hamas officials said Thursday that the group is talking to EU diplomats despite the Europeans' official designation of Hamas as terrorists, and that the contacts have recently intensified. "Every 10 days to two weeks we have at least one meeting with a European diplomat," said Mohammed Ghazal, a senior Hamas representative in the West Bank said. "No one can deal with the Arab countries without dealing with the Islamic movements, and no one can ignore Hamas when it comes to the Palestinian cause and Palestinian politics." Ghazal said most of the contacts in the West Bank and Gaza were with lower-level EU diplomats, but that higher-level contacts between the EU and Hamas were taking place abroad. He did not elaborate.’

Not surprisingly, Israel has protested at this encouragement of genocidal terror. No doubt the Israeli fifth columnists, on the other hand, would cheer.

A new twist to the impending prosecution of Oriana Fallaci for incitement to religious hatred (see post below). The man who prompted the prosecution, Adel Smith, President of the Union of Italian Muslims, has himself been convicted of defaming the Catholic church:

'Adel Smith, President of the Union of Italian Muslims, was sentenced by the Padua court to 6 months in prison, converted to a fine (over 6,000 euro), for the crime of defaming religion. On January 4, 2003, Adel Smith, during a TV program broadcast live on the Paduan channel 'Serenissima Tv' made accusations against the Catholic church defining it as "criminal association" and against Pope John Paul II, defined as "a foreign man who heads the church" and "able double-crosser. [...] I declared undeniable modern historic facts: for this reason I do not regret my declarations. It seems to me that the sentence is political. I am very curious to know what those think who yesterday invoked the freedom of judgment and criticism today: is it so for me too?" Smith said he will appeal against the sentence and if necessary will resort to European courts "until he is acquitted." "I am confident and sure that at the end I will have justice." '

The answer to Smith's question is yes. His conviction is oppressive. He should have the freedom to speak -- the very freedom he seeks to remove from Oriana Fallaci. Freedom of speech for one means freedom of speech for all -- precisely the lesson he seems not to grasp, wanting freedom for himself but not for others.

This is precisely what happens when a country introduces laws banning debate about religion -- every religious believer becomes a potential criminal, faith group is set against faith group, group hatred does not diminish but grows, and freedom of expression goes down the tubes.

The second Jewish cemetery* has been desecrated in Britain within a period of around 72 hours. The Community Security Trust reports that last Sunday it was discovered that some 100 gravestones were pushed over and damaged in West Ham Jewish Cemetery. Two inverted swastikas were drawn onto four headstones, the door of the Rothschild family mausoleum was smashed and antisemitic pro-Nazi graffiti was daubed at the entrance of the mausoleum. This follows the desecration of at least 96 graves in Rainsough Jewish Cemetery in Prestwich, north Manchester, which was discovered last Thursday. Earlier this year Jewish graves in Aldershot municipal cemetery in Hampshire were attacked with swastikas and SS signs painted on 12 gravestones.

Dismayingly, this is becoming a commonplace ocurrence.

* Update: a third Jewish cemetery was desecrated this week at Rainham, Essex.

A correspondent attended a recent conference at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, which was discussing the question 'Is Islam a threat to the west?' He writes:

'The good news, in case you're worried about losing the clash of civilizations, is that the assembled experts answered the question with a resounding "no!" The bad news that there still exists a dire threat to the West. It's posed by America.'

Hardly surprising, since the star of the show was Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic scholar who was refused entry to the US by Homeland Security and of whom Daniel Pipes has written, as I recorded in a previous post (December 1 2004):

• ‘He has praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi. Mr. Turabi in turn called Mr. Ramadan the "future of Islam." • Mr. Ramadan was banned from entering France in 1996 on suspicion of having links with an Algerian Islamist who had recently initiated a terrorist campaign in Paris. • Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian indicted for Al-Qaeda activities, had "routine contacts" with Mr. Ramadan, according to a Spanish judge (Baltasar Garzón) in 1999. • Djamel Beghal, leader of a group accused of planning to attack the American embassy in Paris, stated in his 2001 trial that he had studied with Mr. Ramadan. • Along with nearly all Islamists, Mr. Ramadan has denied that there is "any certain proof" that Bin Laden was behind 9/11. • He publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of 9/11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions," minimizing them to the point of near-endorsement. And here are other reasons, dug up by Jean-Charles Brisard, a former French intelligence officer doing work for some of the 9/11 families, as reported in Le Parisien: • Intelligence agencies suspect that Mr. Ramadan (along with his brother Hani) coordinated a meeting at the Hôtel Penta in Geneva for Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy head of Al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, now in a Minnesota prison. • Mr. Ramadan's address appears in a register of Al Taqwa Bank, an organization the State Department accuses of supporting Islamist terrorism.’

Ramadan believes that Islam should replace western civilisation. He wants western culture Islamicised, gradually excising all references to Christianity and Judaism altogether. He has been accused of outright prejudice against Jews. One writer has said of him: ‘His problem is not the modernization of Islam, but the Islamification of modernity’ (‘Esprit et Vie,’ February 17, 2000).'

Just the sort of splendid chap over whom Chatham House would drool.

'Michael Jackson's lawyer said the singer will no longer share his bed with young boys'

. (BBC)

Uh huh. So that's all just hunky-dory, then.

The shape of things to come. As Robert Spencer reports, Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist forced to live in hiding because of her denunciation of Islam in her book The Rage and the Pride, is now to be put on trial for defaming Islam:

‘The complaint comes from Adel Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, who was never charged with defaming Christianity after he referred to a crucifix as a “miniature cadaver” during his 2003 efforts to have depictions of Christ on the Cross removed from Italian schools… His new suit against Fallaci is hardly less frivolous, but Smith was able to find a judge willing to play along. Judge Armando Grasso of the Italian city of Bergamo ruled in a preliminary hearing that Fallaci’s latest book, La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason), contained eighteen statements “unequivocally offensive to Islam and Muslims,” and that therefore she must be tried. He was working from a list compiled by Smith, who complained that Fallaci has “propagated hate against Islam and Muslims, distorting real historical facts and inventing others, lying, offending, and defaming Muslims around the world.” Smith exulted at Grasso’s decision: “It is the first time a judge has ordered a trial for defamation of the Islamic faith. But this isn’t just about defamation. We would also like (the court) to recognize that this is an incitement to religious hatred.” Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli was unhappy with Grasso’s decision. “In Europe,” he declared, “we are seeing the birth of a movement that is looking to silence those who don’t follow a single mindset, within which it is forbidden to speak ill of Islam….In Fallaci’s book there is very strong criticism but not defamation.” '

As I wrote in the Daily Mail yesterday (see Articles), the British government has launched its third attempt to bring in a law against incitement to religious hatred, which is intended to have exactly the same effect — to silence necessary criticism of Islam. Instead of being a society whose traditions enable it to expose and fight clerical fascism, the British state will thus become the tool of clerical fascism — where even to pronounce the tem invites a jail sentence. Europe has already caved in. Everything now depends on whether a few brave and far-sighted parliamentarians can halt this British slide into tyranny in its tracks.

Many apologies for the technical problems with the website today which obstructed access once again for several hours.

Avi Dichter, former head of Israel’s security service Shin Bet, has delivered a far more upbeat — if still sobering — assessment of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza than the apocalyptic prediction by the former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon of a third terror war, and the widespread view among hawks that the withdrawal will be seen by the Arabs as a fatal sign of weakness. As Ha’aretz reported:

‘The disengagement is not tantamount to running away, as he sees it, "Even though there won't be a single Palestinian who will not present it as though they expelled us from Gaza the way Hezbollah expelled us from Lebanon. But we know the truth about how the tahadiyeh [a lull in violence] was achieved. In Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], their infrastructures have been hit in a very significant way. Hamas-Samaria hasn't produced a major terror attack since September 2003. [Islamic] Jihad has also been through a difficult period. In Gaza, a real limit has been put in place on their freedom of movement. For Muhammad Def, to be a wanted man is one thing. But for people like Mahmoud al-Zahar [political leader of Hamas] it is a completely different story. They saw that when they fired a Qassam, we came in as far as Jabalya. They realized that this format would arouse the population against them and at their own initiative they informed the Palestinian Authority of the tahadiyeh." Purely from the security point of view, he says, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is no different from the withdrawal from southern Lebanon. "The threat of the Qassams doesn't change between the current situation and the situation after the disengagement. On the contrary. Today, when you go into Beit Hanun to deal with a Qassam, you get mortars in Gush Katif. After the withdrawal, the `carpet of targets' that will be at the Palestinians' disposal will shrink drastically. It will be easier to work against the Qassams after the withdrawal, when we aren't endangering the inhabitants of the Gush." '

Clearly, with such a mammoth and dangerous undertaking there are bound to be conflicting views among military and intelligence top brass. And the imponderables — such as the scale of settler resistance —are legion. But for my money. Dichter’s analysis is credible. He is more controversial, however, when he talks about what is in his view the really dangerous territory — the West Bank, where he reveals real differences of opinion with the Israeli army:

‘The army is also talking about a disengagement from the territory, not only from the four Jewish settlements. As the Shin Bet sees it, this is an unreasonable risk in today's conditions. If we don't act in the Jenin area, a vacuum will be created there and chances are that the terror organizations will come in and not the PA security apparatus. As far as the terror organizations are concerned, the combination of the information that will be flowing from the Gaza Strip and the possibilities inherent in the West Bank are everything they could desire. We have to be cautious about doing anything hasty in the West Bank." '

Of course, to the British and Europeans — and maybe, given how flaky the Bush administration has become, to the US too — any such Israeli consolidation in the West Bank will be seen not for what it is, a strategic defence move, but an act of needless provocation and aggression.

From today’s Telegraph:

‘Police admitted yesterday that they had missed opportunities to arrest the former boyfriend of the murdered mother-to-be Hayley Richards in the days before her death. The 23-year-old restaurant waitress, who was three months' pregnant, dialled 999 alleging that her Portuguese ex-boyfriend, Hugo Quintas, now the prime suspect, had attacked her on June 5. She told police that although she was not injured, she was pregnant and frightened. On Saturday, six days after her call, Miss Richards was found dead in her home in Trowbridge, Wilts. Police disclosed last night that her throat had been cut and she had suffered stab wounds. Officers were hunting for a knife or similar sharp instrument. Quintas, also 23, is believed to have flown to Portugal. The search for him was continuing last night. Wiltshire Police said there had been two potential opportunities in which Quintas might have been arrested. But the officers involved, who had spoken to him about other matters, had not been aware that he was wanted on suspicion of an alleged assault. Assistant Chief Constable Peter Vaughan said: "There were potential opportunities for other officers, not directly involved in this investigation, to arrest Hugo Quintas, which were not taken. This is a cause of concern, which requires further investigation." '

The Guardian reports that not only is Tony Blair hiring David Bennett, a former management consultant from McKinsey's, to run his policy unit, but is taking this man's advice on the role of the Cabinet Secretary, heaven help us, before appointing the next incumbent to the post. When the history of Tony Blair's administration is finally written, maybe someone will finally put together the fact that virtually every public service it touched descended into chaos, incompetence and maladministration with the fact that the role of the civil service in running the country was increasingly out-sourced to management consultants -- and that just possibly this is the reason why the adminstration of Britain ran into the ground during this time. As the Guardian records:

'Mr Bennett, who has a 20-year association with McKinsey - dubbed the "Jesuits of capitalism" - is expected to press civil servants to become more entrepreneurial and push through an electronic revolution in the delivery of all services. He backs the McKinsey slogan that "everything can be measured, and what gets measured gets managed".'

That should surely read 'what gets measured gets mismanaged'. For this idiotic slogan sums up what has gone wrong with the delivery of our public services. It is their reduction to 'measurement' and 'management' that has all but done for them. Reducing them to this kind of managerial formula has meant that either the wrong thing get measured, or the right thing gets measured in the wrong way, or most important of all the really crucial things cannot be measured at all and are thus either ignored or destroyed. How do you measure the care that needs to be given to an elderly sufferer from Parkinson's dying on a hospital ward? How do you measure the disintegration of education standards when the 'measurements' of examination grades have been so corrupted? How do you measure the value of independence to professionalism in any discipline?

The fact is that the essence of public service, which is all about disinterestedness, trust, service, the public interest and so forth cannot be measured. To try to do so is the equivalent of extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. It is simply a form of quackery, a scam dressed up in jargon to give the appearance of some kind of quasi-scientific approach and keep a lot of people in extremely lucrative employment while the country's services are brought to their knees. Managerialism is the curse of our age, and management consultants are our modern shamans. The idea that the role of the Cabinet Secretary is to be reshaped by such a person sounds the final death knell of the British civil service, once an institution that was the envy of the world.

The website was down for several hours today because of a technical gremlin. Apologies.

From the Oxford University newspaper Cherwell:

'A student at Balliol College was arrested and detained in custody for a night after he verbally abused a police horse early on Monday morning. Sam Brown, a third year English student, had his fingerprints taken and was released with a fine of £80 following the incident which took place on Cornmarket Street. Brown was fined for "causing harassment, harm or distress", after he repeatedly called the officer’s horse "gay". Brown and his friends, including former Balliol JCR President Daniel Konrad-Cooper had emerged from the Cellar Bar and were surprised to encounter two mounted policemen. Brown inquired, "How do you feel about your horse being gay?" of one of the policemen, stating that his colleague’s was clearly not gay.

'After repeated comments on the sexuality of his horse, and despite warnings from the policeman about his behaviour, Brown’s offer of an apology to the horse was rejected and he was handcuffed and taken by the officers to the police station...A spokesman for Thames Valley Police confirmed Brown’s arrest and detention, and stated that the point of the action taken by police "shows that we will not tolerate drunken behaviour which causes alarm or distress"...The spokesman also said that the “homophobic comments” were not only offensive to the policeman and his horse

[my emphasis],

but any members of the general public in the area.'

Further to my post below about Dr Fatemi, Michael Ledeen draws attention to the plight of a stupendously brave Iranian political prisoner, Akbar Ganji, who has put his life at risk by calling for a general boycott of the 'make believe elections' for the presidency, scheduled for the 17th of the month, and urging the Iranian people to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. Ledeen comments:

'You will not have read about this brave man in your daily newspaper, or seen his face on your evening news broadcast, nor will you have heard about him from the Department of State — which has a considerable bureaucracy devoted to the advancement of human rights — nor from the White House, nor from the self-promoting entrepreneurs of the likes of Human Rights Watch or the intellectuals and elected representatives who call for President Bush to "talk to" the mullahs in order to "resolve our disagreements." Nor has anyone heard much about the public appeal from the Women's Movement of Iran for a demonstration at Tehran University this coming Sunday — a declaration signed by 27 organizations. But the Iranian people know what is happening, and they are trying, once again, to call our attention to their plight. A "Food Hunger Strike Committee" has been formed in Tehran, calling for a boycott of the elections, and for the release of political prisoners. The committee has declared election day a fast day for the people of Iran. Elsewhere, the country's largest student group, the Office of Student Unity, branded the elections "devoid of any significance," and called for the people to abstain.'

We should be leaping to support these people because their fight is our fight. Yet from Britain, Europe and the US, there is scarcely a peep. The best it gets is that Condoleezza Rice talks about the Iranian 'election' in quote marks. Big deal. The Iranian dissidents are begging us to lend our weight to their struggle. Just what is holding us back?

A striking piece in the Telegraph by Leo McKinstry exposes the madness which appears to have overcome the Metropolitan Police as the result of its obsession with race and gender. The piece was triggered by a recent case in which three officers were investigated - and one of them suspended - after they were said to have made offensive anti-Muslim remarks in front of a female Asian officer during a race-awareness training course. After months of inquiry, the three were finally cleared of any wrong-doing, and the investigating officer, Tarique Ghaffur, said he ‘found it incredible that this matter was taken up’.

But there was, alas, nothing incredible about this at all given the institutional nervous breakdown in the Met over the issue of ‘diversity’ ever since it was tarred and feathered as ‘institutionally racist’ by the institutionally cretinous McPherson report. As McKinstry observes:

‘One sorry result of this neurosis about discrimination is the creation of a vast bureaucracy, which does nothing but waste resources. The Met is now awash with race units and equality action plans, all geared towards heightening the climate of grievance. So within the shambolic organisation there is a consultation, diversity and outreach unit; a diversity directorate that includes six separate diversity teams covering everything from age to sexual orientation; a diversity champion; an equal opportunities and diversity board; a positive action team; a lesbian, gay and transgender advisory group and a cultural and communities unit.

‘Today's senior London coppers might not be much use in defeating criminality, but they are superb at organising meetings and generating reports. They can talk like the most fluent pseudo-Marxist academic about "contextualised learning on race" and act like the most politically correct Blairite civil servant in demanding that "performance in respect of race and diversity be measured through a corporate measurement framework" or seeking to "facilitate the change process through the establishment of the development and organisation improvement team (DOIT)". Increasingly the Met resembles one of those extremist Left-wing councils of the 1980s.’

In those days, we all breathed a sigh of relief that at least those loony tune councillors couldn’t get control of the police. Who would ever have imagined that within twenty years, the looniest tunes would be played by the police themselves.

A vitally important message was delivered in London yesterday by Dr. Ali Fatemi, a key player in the referendum movement now underway in Iran to overturn the theocratic despotism which runs the country. Dr. Fatemi is editor of iranvajahan.net, a site for in-depth analysis and commentary on Iran, and a professor of economics at the Business School at the American University in Paris.

In his view, Britain and Europe are missing the big story about Iran. The free world is (rightly) very concerned about Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorism and the part it is playing in the Arab/Islamist war against Israel. But what the world should realise is that the one and only thing which is a precondition for the eradication of those three evils is the overthrow of the terrorist regime that runs the country and its replacement by democracy.

The good news, says Dr Fatemi, is that the country is demanding just such a regime change. Students have issued a declaration from jail demanding a liberal democracy and the rule of law; they want a separation between mosque and state, adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the emancipation of women and other similar good things. More and more Iranians are saying this kind of thing openly, which is an extraordinary development given the terror under which they live. The weakness of the regime is palpable. But it will not yield unless the world puts pressure on it to do so. And yet, shamefully and stupidly, the world is ignoring these courageous souls who are pressing for an end to the tyranny that governs their own lives and threatens the rest of the world.

The free world does not have to invade Iran to effect regime change, says Dr Fatemi. All that needs to happen is for it to openly support and encourage the Iranian dissidents, and to tell the mullahs that unless Iran reforms itself it will be excluded from the community of nations, with trade sanctions and exclusion from international organisations. If in addition they were made an offer they couldn’t refuse of safe passage to a country of their choice, he says they would take it.

The alternative to this velvet revolution, he says, is a violent overthrow of the regime which, apart from the immediate carnage would probably in the short term throw up another despotism. In the long term, he says, the Iranians will have their democracy; the forces of reform are now simply too overwhelming and unstoppable. One way or another, they will eventually overthrow the theocracy and institute a free society. The only question is whether this will be achieved peacefully or bloodily. And that is a choice for which the free world bears a considerable responsibility.

Francis Beckett, the reporter who wrote the TES story on the NATFHE conference on which I commented in my post below on June 6, has written me the following comment which in the interests of fairness I am happy to post up here:

'I wrote the TES stuff you quoted, and was on the press table for the whole debate. I know my report was subbed to pieces, but it still made it clear that everyone in the room was in favour of the merger not because they'd been brainwashed by a Stalinist leadership, but because they thought it would give them a more influential voice. It made clear that two thirds of the conference did NOT think the thing had been done top down, and it also quoted the reply given to this charge. This charge was quite was untrue - I've seen the evidence.

'They want a merger to give them a stronger voice - and you can hardly blame them. Their members in further education earn less than schoolteachers, and many FE colleges refuse to pay even the low wages agreed nationally - and get away with it. That's why they want a merger with another union - not for any of the squalid motives you attribute to them.

'It's your right to disagree, and theirs to disagree with you. But I'm surprised to see you distorting what I wrote in good faith, to serve your own political purposes.'

In the light of these comments I returned to the TES story (subscription only, alas) but could not for the life of me see any reference to a statement that 'that two thirds of the conference did NOT think the thing had been done top down' or that 'it also quoted the reply given to this charge.' In response to my further query, Francis Beckett sent me the following statements from his published story to support his charge of distortion:

'"Some members, while supporting the merger, wanted more time to debate the proposed constitution." "There was still a clear majority in favour of pressing ahead without making further changes to the constitution." "Sally Hunt, general secretary of the AUT, ..........said: 'I cannot go back to my members and my council and ask for further amendments to this document. It would be cheating you to tretend that I could.'" "Mick Jardine, from the executive, said: "The concessions offered by both sides have produced a document which is as good as it can be made." '

Now here's what I said on the matter in my original post:

'...Delegates voted to support the merger with just one no vote and one abstention — a voting achievement which might just have something to do with the plangent complaint voiced by Craig Lewis of Deeside College, Flintshire, who said: "The members of the union have been kept at arms length from these negotiations. The key question is what kind of a union we end up with. We don't need a union controlled from above, with information drip-fed to members." And this from former NATFHE president Tina Downes, who said: "It's been a top-down process. The branches have not had a go at it. We all want to be in the same union, but we may have to be a little patient." The report also tells us that no-one at the conference believed ordinary members of either union would vote against the merger. So it would seem to be a done deal. The members who have been kept at arm’s length will dutifully behave like turkeys voting for Christmas...'

Readers can decide for themselves whether the charge of distortion is true or not.

Even though I and others predicted as much, the brazen contempt for democracy being displayed by the EU as its leaders and apparatchiks work out exactly how to impose the 'dead parrot' constitution against the declared will of the people is simply staggering. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said that the government wants to go ahead with those parts of the treaty for which there is 'cross-party support'. And Tony Blair has insisted that the constitution still offers a 'perfectly sensible' way forward and that parts of it should be salvaged --ie, imposed by stealth. He is thought to be trying to persuade France and Germany to drop their attempt to revive the constitution itself from the dead, in return for an understanding that as much of it as possible will be rammed though without asking the voters.

In the Times, Anthony Browne graphically spells out how the Brussels bureaucracy is already doing just that, and has been doing so ever since the constitution was written in the first place:

'European officials started working on many of the constitution’s innovations as soon as it was written, insisting that they should not wait until it was ratified. In some cases the work has no legal basis and is dubbed preparatory; in others, a special legal basis has been developed [my emphasis] so that policies could be specially implemented even before the constitution is approved.

'The new developments include a European diplomatic service, a European president, a European foreign minister, a European space policy, a European defence agency, the implementation of the new European charter of fundamental rights by a European fundamental rights agency, and the scrapping of the national veto on immigration and asylum. EU officials are already setting up the offices of Europe’s first permanent president, an appointed post established by the constitution to replace the rotating six-month presidency, which is held by Europe’s elected heads of government.“There is an awful lot of work to set it up: the office and all the support teams,” an official said. “We can’t just leave it to the last moment.”

'The EU is forging ahead with a European diplomatic service, officially called an External Action Service, with EU embassies and ambassadors in every country to project EU foreign policy and issue EU visas. The service, which some governments hope will replace national diplomatic services, will answer to the European foreign minister, a post created by the constitution, but to which Javier Solana, the EU’s current head of foreign policy, has already been appointed. Officials have been told by member governments to start laying the groundwork for the European diplomatic service. One official said the work was continuing: “We are in limbo, but we are carrying on. What else can you do right now?” A British government spokesman said, however: “The external action service does not exist. The only thing happening is preparatory work, and it will not come into being without a treaty.”

'The European Defence Agency, established in the constitution to co-ordinate arms production, started operating a year ago, with a British chief executive, Nick Whitney. In order to start before the constitution came into force, EU heads of government agreed a special legal basis for it in 2004 under existing treaties. A spokeswoman said: “We carry on, we already have a legal basis. It doesn’t affect us. If the constitution is ratified, it will just re establish our legal basis.” The constitution gives the EU its first space policy, and officials met in Luxembourg yesterday to agree how to fully implement it by the end of the year. A Commission spokesman said: “The Commission is involved, but we are not making a new Common Agricultural Policy, it is different.” Although the constitution abolishes the national veto on immigration and asylum, national governments agreed last December that the issue was so urgent that they should implement it before the constitution was approved.The constitution gives legal force for the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, but the European Commission has said that it will implement it across all EU legislation.'

Who can be surprised? The whole purpose of the EU is to ride roughshod over democracy and replace it by an unaccountable bureaucratic entity which replaces the nation state and governs the people on the basis that only a select nomenklatura possesses the necessary vision for the future. Jean Monnet, the machiavellian genius who masterminded the European dream,was explicit that this project would abolish the sovereignty of nations for precisely that purpose.

It is not enough to resist the EU constitution. Britain has to leave the EU. The EU is the front line of attack upon democracy and the nation state. The obdurate refusal to face up to this blindingly obvious fact is the single most important reason why the Conservative party is in the process of marginalising itself out of existence -- and why British democracy itself is currently sliding off the cliff.

The New York Times says that the Bush administration is not talking to Hamas after all:

'The Bush administration, rebuffing the suggestions of some European officials, will continue to refuse to have contact with the militant group Hamas and its leaders even if some of those leaders win elections in Palestinian areas, a senior administration official said Monday.The official said that a ban on contacts with Hamas was required because the group was listed by the United States as a terrorist organization, and that the United States would not follow a practice of some European countries of engaging with the group's political wing even if it also had an armed wing carrying out attacks on civilians."The president has said that Hamas is on the terrorism list, and it's there for a reason," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We don't recognize that you have changed your behavior just because a group is running candidates as well as suicide bombers."

It looks from this as if the administration has been pulled back from its previously reported drift towards appeasement of terror and the cracking of the Bush doctrine (see June 6 post below). There are folk inside the administration who are constantly trying to push it in that direction. From the NYT story, it would appear that today at least, Britain and France are once again left isolated on the wrong side of history in the Middle East, as was ever the case and no doubt ever shall be. But their influence is still toxic, and their capacity to destabilise the US and continue to fan the flames of genocidal terror still considerable.

The story also contained an element of hope:

'The senior administration official said there were signs in the last few days that Palestinian-Israeli talks on turning over infrastructure to the Palestinians in Gaza and parts of the West Bank were proceeding at a better pace than previously.'

We'll see. It's going to be an interesting summer.

From the Daily Telegraph a few days ago:

'Police have been told not to foil illegal fox hunts when the hunting season begins because of health and safety regulations. 'Guidance drawn up by police chiefs instructs officers to take the most cautious approach when investigating reports of illegal hunts for fear that they might injure themselves. They have been told not to go near hounds or horses and not to confiscate dead animals as evidence in case of injury or infection. Officers are also told to carry out risk assessments before embarking on an investigation; to ask farmers for permission to go on their land; and not to use police helicopters in case they "cause alarm to horses".

The BBC reported a genuine scoop on the Today programme (0732) this morning. In the wake of last month's victory by Hamas in the local election, reporter James Reynolds went to see the new acting mayor -- only to bump into two medium-ranking British diplomats leaving a meeting with said Hamas apparatchik. Thus the BBC stumbled across Britain's dirty little secret -- that despite the fact that it has declared Hamas to be a proscribed terrorist organisation, it has quietly started to treat it as a legitimate political party and deal with its representatives.

It is Britain, along with France, that is apparently behind the decision by the Bush administration to abandon the Bush doctrine and talk to Hamas. Later on the programme (0810) Foreign Secretary Jack Straw produced a set of ludicrous justifications for the fact that British diplomats had now had two such meetings with Hamas mayors. Having first waxed eloquent about the lengths to which he personally had gone to proscribe Hamas until and unless it foreswore both its violence and its charter committed to the annihilation of Israel, Straw than said it was 'de rigueur' for diplomats to make contact with elected mayors -- but on both occasions, these diplomats had made clear to the Hamas men with whom they were demonstrably dealing that they would not deal with the Hamas organisation until it had foresworn its charter, violence etc.

In other words, these Hamas mayors are somehow not connected to the Hamas terror factory. This is clearly beyond risible. Hamas is a terrorist organisation. Even the EU has accepted that it is an indivisible terrorist entity, and that any pretence that its terrorist activities are somehow nothing to do with its infrastructure of social support for Palestinians is wholly spurious. After all, that infastructure sustains and nurtures the infrastructure of terror -- the indoctrination, the fund-raising, the mad Islamist sermons preaching holy war against the west, the recruitment of jihadi bombers, and so on. Hamas is a jihadi terror organisation, period. The decision by Britain and the US to treat with it is spineless and shameful and wholly counter-productive for the defence of the civilised world.

The report by James Reynolds made the ostensibly reasonable point that the Hamas election victories had created a 'dilemma'for the outside world. Nevertheless, he did nothing to challenge -- and even appeared to endorse -- the notion that the delivery of services such as sewage or electricity somehow divides these Hamas men from the Hamas men carrying out the carnage against Israelis. To repeat -- if people vote for men whose ideology is all about promoting jihad terror, then those people too have to be regarded as a terrorist entity. Not to do so is to accept the corrupted terms of discourse employed by the terrorists precisely to achieve what Britain and the US now seem set on allowing them to achieve -- the international legitimisation of terror through the most hypocritical of blind eyes.

For once, the Israelis managed to put up a competent, reasonable, articulate spokesman to make the very proper case that the core problem was that Palestinian society had not been democratised. As he said, given a choice between the corrupt and venal Palestinian authority and the Islamists, it was not surprising that Palestinian voters had plumped for the Islamists. What was needed was a proper democratic choice ofering them a party that stood for proper democratic institutions and the rule of law.

The BBC's ineffable prejudice finally burst through, however, when the Today presenter claimed that Sheikh Yassin, Hamas's 'spiritual leader' who, she said with her voice rising to an outraged crescendo, 'you assassinated', had said he would recognise Israel within the 1967 borders 'which is what Israel wants'. Oh dear. As the Israeli spokesman replied, the full transcript of Yassin's remarks showed that he had graciously said he would accept Israel's existence 'until 2007' and then even more graciously 'until 2017', after which it would be genocide as usual.

But hey, they've been elected now, so we can all ignore the genocide and concentrate on the sewage instead.

As has been pointed out in previous posts, something is going very badly wrong with the Bush administration. First, the President fawned over Mahmoud Abbas even though he has done nothing to eradicate the infrastructure of Palestinian terror and incitement. Now, we learn that the US is preparing to deal with Hamas, despite its being on its own list of proscribed terror organisations. As Ha’aretz reports:

‘The Bush administration is showing signs of easing its hard-line approach toward Hamas, in response to the militant group's rising political clout in the Palestinian territories and appeals for flexibility from European allies, officials and diplomats said. The White House acceded to Hamas running candidates in Palestinian elections, even though it has refused to disarm and Washington lists it as a major terrorist organization. ‘Officials said they may be open to contacts with some Hamas political affiliates and left open the possibility of dealing with the group if it gave up weapons and ended violence, in contrast to past calls for its total dismantlement. U.S. officials and diplomats cast any shift as pragmatic: Hamas-funded social services are popular with many Palestinians; it is winning local races and was expected to make a strong showing in newly postponed parliamentary elections, and some Hamas-backed politicians and affiliates are seen as moderates.

’The shift also follows a behind-the-scenes push by European allies, including Britain and France, for Washington to drop its call to dismantle Hamas completely. European officials warned Washington that doing so would be a "disaster" for Palestinians who benefit from Hamas aid, sources said."There is now a realization that they (Hamas) do have a role to play ... that if you can bring them into the political fold, then you'll be marginalizing the military elements of those groups," said a European diplomat.’

Reality check — this is the same appeasement of terror that so disastrously legitimised Arafat, who was embraced by the so-called civilised world because he was the spokesman for the Palestinians. The correct response should have been to say that while the Palestinians were represented by a terrorist they were not entitled to be treated as negotiating partners and would not be until and unless they turned into a democracy. The rise and rise of Palestinian terror was a direct result of the world’s embrace of Arafat. This was supposed to be the key lesson of the Bush doctrine, that the civilised world does not treat with terror, period; and that any regime that wants to be included in the family of nations must first embrace democracy and turn itself into a free society governed by the rule of law. Yet here are the Americans busy tearing up their own doctrine and preparing to grant respectful status to a body whose aim is the destruction of Israel, the genocide of the Jews and holy war upon the west. Ha’aretz reports:

‘The shift also follows a behind-the-scenes push by European allies, including Britain and France, for Washington to drop its call to dismantle Hamas completely. European officials warned Washington that doing so would be a "disaster" for Palestinians who benefit from Hamas aid, sources said.'

"There is now a realization that they (Hamas) do have a role to play ... that if you can bring them into the political fold, then you'll be marginalizing the military elements of those groups," said a European diplomat…A senior administration official said: "We're not acquiescing. We do not deal with ... terrorists." But he added: "How do you pursue this without limiting democratic choices?"

For heaven’s sake — these are not democratic choices. If Hamas wins elections, that will not turn it into a democracy. Democracy is about more than winning elections. It is about establishing the institutions of a free society. Without that, the whole thing is a meaningless charade. If the people vote into power a regime committed to the genocide of the Jews and holy war against the west, then those people have to be considered a terrorist entity themselves and treated as such. As for the idea that by bringing Hamas into the political fold the military element will be marginalised, what planet are these people living on? Ever heard of Sinn Fein/IRA and the fools they have made of the British government who subscribed to precisely this fallacy and who have now produced a mafia state in Northern Ireland in which gangsterism has driven out the rule of law?

What exactly is going on in Washington?

In the Jerusalem Post, Max Singer makes a point that has long seemed to me to be absolutely central to the campaign to delegitimise Israel. It is painfully apparent to anyone who attempts to set out the facts about the Arab war against Israel that whatever evidence is brought forward is dismissed – because of the widespread belief that the Jews stole the land of Israel from the Palestinians. So no matter how many Israelis are murdered, or how nefarious is the Palestinian Authority in concealing its real intention to destroy Israel, people brush it all aside because they think Israel stole the land from the Palestinians.
This is, of course, historically illiterate. There was never an Arab country called Palestine. For about 400 years the Jews had sovereignty in what is now Israel and the West Bank, despite losing parts of it to foreign conquest, until they were finally driven out in 135 CE. It was the Romans who renamed Judea Palaestina to expunge all traces of the Jews. The land of Israel was stolen from the Jews, first by the Romans and then by the Arabs. Jews did not conquer Arabs; Arabs conquered Jews. Jews did not ethnically cleanse Arabs from the land; Arabs ethnically cleansed Jews. Even so, a continuous Jewish presence remained in Palestine. Israel was not created in 1948, but restored. As Singer writes:

‘The disputed land, we should remember, became available in 1920 when its former sovereign, the defeated Ottoman Empire, was removed. The League of Nations heard the dispute between the Jews, represented by the Balfour Declaration of Great Britain, and the Arabs living in the land, represented by other Arab countries. Aware that the Jews had ruled the land in ancient times, had no other homeland, and were displacing no existing state, the League decided that the Jewish people should be invited to settle the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as its homeland. The Arabs, including the Palestinians, never accepted this decision - which has never been rescinded. Some argue that the League of Nations decision was a "colonial" decision and should not stand against the right of self-determination. But the League decision was the binding legal authority in 1922 and all Jews who came to the land after that date to build a state came on the basis of that authority. And the many Arabs who moved to the land after 1922 came knowing that it had been legally designated as the future Jewish homeland. While this may not be the end of the story it is an essential beginning.

‘Israel's rights are not perfect or exclusive, but they are certainly strong enough so that it does not come to the table as a "thief of Palestinian land." The Palestinians' claims may be strong enough to justify giving them some of the land they want. But since the Palestinians have never been rulers of the land, it could not have been stolen from them. Palestinians, therefore, are claimants, not the victims of theft. Their behavior should be judged as the acts of a claimant seeking land to which he thinks he is entitled, not as the acts of a dispossessed owner.’

All very true. The problem is, however, that this argument is simply not being aired. The Israelis, who of course have the most direct interest in ensuring that the facts about their own history are made known, refuse to do so. They refuse even to acknowledge the argument that lies behind the libels – that Israel has no right to exist because the Jews stole the land from the Arabs – because they say no other country is singled out in this way by having its right to exist called into question and that to answer the charge is to give legitimacy to the question.

Which has got to be one of the most stupid and self-defeating positions ever. Turning a cloth ear to this libel has allowed ignorance to be colonised by the propaganda of hatred and extermination. While Israel is on its high horse, it hasn’t noticed that someone has cut it off at the knees.

Members of the Association of University Teachers, who will be voting this coming autumn on the AUT’s proposed merger with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education to create the world’s largest post-16 teaching union, might do well to study the report in this week’s Times Educational Supplement of NATFHE’s annual conference last weekend, which suggests that their future union bedfellows subscribe to the Jacques Chirac/Bashir Assad model of democracy. Delegates voted to support the merger with just one no vote and one abstention — a voting achievement which might just have something to do with the plangent complaint voiced by Craig Lewis of Deeside College, Flintshire, who said:

‘The members of the union have been kept at arms length from these negotiations. The key question is what kind of a union we end up with. We don't need a union controlled from above, with information drip-fed to members.’

And this from former NATFHE president Tina Downes, who said:

‘It's been a top-down process. The branches have not had a go at it. We all want to be in the same union, but we may have to be a little patient.’

The report also tells us that no-one at the conference believed ordinary members of either union would vote against the merger. So it would seem to be a done deal. The members who have been kept at arm’s length will dutifully behave like turkeys voting for Christmas. For although NATFHE’s leader, revolutionary poster-boy Paul Mackney, promised that

‘A single union will be much more effective in the face of employer intransigence over pay and much more influential in dialogue with government over education policy’,

what can AUT members actually look forward to? Well, strikes, for a start. As Mackney told the conference, unless new pay scales were paid

‘there will be a national strike in colleges’

. But just how will striking FE lecturers enable AUT university lecturers to be more effective in negotiating with different sets of employers over their different – and better -- pay, terms and conditions?

As for ‘influence over education policy’, AUT members can look forward to Mackney’s intention to

* end the independent peer-reviewed research assessment quality review which rates Universities for the quality of research and recommends funding accordingly

* treat all institutions from adult basic literacy institutions to
leading research universities as basically the same institutions

* campaign on a far-left political agenda reflecting, for instance, the subtle and nuanced position Mackney displayed on the Iraq war demo when he articulated the cerebral view

‘We're here to give Bush the push’

and signing up of course to the campaign for the total boycott of Israel to which his union is affiliated -- no doubt making generous exceptions for Israelis who denounce their own country in proper Stalinist style.

In his conference speech, Mackney claimed that

‘AUT members are just as ready as we are to resist Charles Clarke's brave new world of house arrest for those who fail to keep up with their top-up fee repayments and orange-uniforms for any protesting pensioner caught sheltering under the hood of a duffel coat.’

AUT members will no doubt be marvelling at their good fortune that they are about to come under the control of a union leader who already knows what they think without even asking them! It might just occur to one or two of them that there is an enormous issue here that needs somewhat more urgent attention than employer intransigence over pay or top-up fees. It is the issue of democracy -- their own democracy, which appears to be about to be erased by a merger that is a done deal without any proper information, and no possibility of amending an agreement to which they are being obediently corralled like sheep and which will deliver them up to a union whose internal structure emasculates members’ own voices so that any objections they may wish to make to the strikes, political grandstanding or imposition of identicality on institutions that are very different from each other will never be heard.

If I were an AUT member, I would wish to stop this anti-democratic juggernaut in its tracks.

Remember the Iraqi WMD which didn’t exist and so we were taken to war on a lie? Well, here’s a rum thing — some of that non-existent WMD was removed secretly from non-existent sites. According to this story, it was non-existently removed from no fewer than 109 non-existent Iraqi sites. According to acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos:

‘…analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. "Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents," he said. The report said 3,380 valves, 107 pumps, and more than 7.8 miles of pipes were known to have been located at the 39 chemical sites. A third of the chemical items removed came from the Qaa Qaa industrial complex south of Baghdad which the report said "was among the sites possessing the highest number of dual-use production equipment," whose fate is now unknown." Significant quantities of missing material were also located at the Fallujah II and Fallujah III facilities north of the city, which was besieged last year.
‘Before the first Gulf War in 1991, those facilities played a major part in the production of precursors for Iraq's chemical warfare program. The percentages of missing biological equipment from 12 sites were much smaller — no higher than 10 percent. The report said 37 of 405 fermenters ranging in size from 2 gallons to 1,250 gallons had been removed. Those could be used to produce pharmaceuticals and vaccines as well as biological warfare agents such as anthrax. The largest percentages of missing items were at the 58 missile facilities, which include some of the key production sites for both solid and liquid propellant missiles, the report said. For example, 289 of the 340 pieces of equipment to produce missiles — about 85 percent — had been removed, it said. At the Kadhimiyah and Al Samoud factory sites in suburban Baghdad, where the report said airframes and engines for liquid propellant missiles were manufactured and final assembly was carried out, "all equipment and missile components have been removed." '

Now, why should equipment have been systematically removed from so many sites? Could it possibly have been because the Iraqis didn’t want anyone to find it? And why would they not have wanted anyone to find it other than that they weren’t supposed to have it? But hey, the stuff never existed.

Tom Gross reports in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only, but available at www.tomgrossmedia.com at the end of June) the remarkable fact that the most prestigious newspaper in France, Le Monde, has been found guilty by a court of antisemitism -- and the no less remarkable fact that no-one in France appears to care. The Versailles court of appeal last week found the paper guilty of 'racist defamation' when it ruled that a comment piece it published in 2002, "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer," had whipped up anti-Semitic opinion. The authors, sociologist Edgar Morin, lecturer Daniele Sallenave and MEP Sami Nair, along with Le Monde's publisher, Jean-Marie Colombani, were ordered to pay symbolic damages of one euro to a human-rights group and to the Franco-Israeli Association, while Le Monde was also ordered to publish a condemnation of the article -- which as of yesterday it had not yet done, and the ruling had had virtually no coverage elsewhere in France. Gross observes:

'"Israel-Palestine: The Cancer" was a nasty piece of work, replete with lies, slanders and myths about "the chosen people," "the Jenin massacre," describing the Jews as "a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others," "imposing their unmerciful rule," and so on. Yet it is was no worse than thousands of other news reports, editorials, commentaries, letters, cartoons and headlines published throughout Europe in recent years, in the guise of legitimate and reasoned discussion of Israeli policies.

'The libels and distortions about Israel in some British media are by now fairly well known: the Guardian's equation of Israel and al Qaeda; the Evening Standard's equation of Israel and the Taliban; the report by the BBC's Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, on how "the Israelis stole Christmas." Most notorious of all is the Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, who specializes in such observations as his comment that, "If ever a sword was thrust into a military alliance of East and West, the Israelis wielded that dagger," and who implies that the White House has fallen into the hands of the Jews: "The Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cohens . . . [the] very sinister people hovering around Bush."

'The invective against Israel elsewhere in Europe is less well known. In Spain, for example, on June 4, 2001 (three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a disco, and wounded over 100 others, all in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire), the liberal daily Cambio 16 published a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (with a hook nose he does not have), wearing a skull cap (which he does not usually wear), sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: "At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect."

'The week before, on May 23, El Pais (the "New York Times of Spain") published a cartoon of an allegorical figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black moustache, flying through the air toward Sharon's upper lip. The caption read: "Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler's moustache on Ariel Sharon."

'Two days later, on May 25, the Catalan daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon showing an imposing building, with a sign outside reading "Museo del Holocausto Judio" (Museum of the Jewish Holocaust), and next to it another building under construction, with a large sign reading "Futuro Museo del Holocausto Palestino" (Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust).

'Greece's largest newspaper, the leftist daily Eleftherotypia, has run several such cartoons. In April 2002, on its front cover, under the title "Holocaust II," an Israeli soldier was depicted as a Nazi officer and a Palestinian civilian as a Jewish death camp inmate. In September 2002, another cartoon in Eleftherotypia showed an Israeli soldier with a Jewish star telling a Nazi officer next to him "Arafat is not a person the Reich can talk to anymore." The Nazi officer responds "Why? Is he a Jew?"

'In Italy, in October 2001, the Web site of one of the country's most respected newspapers, La Repubblica, published the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," in its entirety, without providing any historical explanation. It did suggest, however, that the work would help readers understand why the U.S. had taken military action in Afghanistan.

'In April 2002, the Italian liberal daily La Stampa ran a front-page cartoon showing an Israeli tank, emblazoned with a Jewish star, pointing a large gun at the baby Jesus in a manger, while the baby pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again, do they?" In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher. Sweden's largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, ran a caricature of a Hassidic Jew accusing anyone who criticized Israel of anti-Semitism. Another leading Swedish paper, Aftonbladet, used the headline "The Crucifixion of Arafat."

And on, and on.

I have to say, nevertheless, that I am uneasy about a court judgment like this. Holding up antisemites to public pillory is indeed essential, and something I very much wish would happen in this country. The fact that it does not is in itself a dismal commentary on the extent to which the vilification and delegitimisation of Israel is regarded as acceptable and is not recognised as the expression of Jew-hatred -- because so many people agree with it.

But defamation is a very blunt instrument and a two-edged sword. Much depends on the highly subjective views of the judges hearing such a case, and such a law can easily be used by people wishing to shut down legitimate debate. Moreover, antisemitism is endemic in English and European literature, and no-one suggests this should be censored. Nevertheless, it is clearly a significant and welcome development that at least some public officials in France are prepared to publicly identify this virulent poison for what it is -- and a further source of shame, and all too revealing, that this itself has been subjected to a near media blackout.

Two tremendous articles pinpoint the profound sickness of the west in turning upon itself over its defence against the war being waged against it rather than turning on its attackers. The first, by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, savages the Guantanamo self-flagellation. Pointing out that among the thousands of interrogations carried out there the number of proven abuses of either prisoners or Korans has been less than miniscule, he slates the abjectness of the west and the rampant hypocrisy of the Islamic world:

'On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.

'Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.

'Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.'

Meanwhile, Victor David Hanson explores the exceedingly strange war the west is waging, in which

'we have not sought to defeat and humiliate the enemy as much as wean a people from the thrall of Islamic autocracy. That is our challenge, and explains our exasperating strategy of half-measures and apologies — and the inability to articulate exactly whom we are fighting and why.'

The result is an incoherent war being waged on the mechanism used to attack the west -- terror -- while displaying a suicidal forbearance towards the ideology of Islamic fascism that sponsors the terror in the first place. Meanwhile, the enemy is pressing home its advantages: the failure by the west to hold the sponsors of terrror to account, the oil weapon, and the moral equivalence and pacifism of the west:

'Europeans march with posters showing scenes from Abu Ghraib, not of the beheading of Daniel Pearl or the murder of Margaret Hassan. They do not wish, much less expect, al Qaeda to win, but they still find psychic satisfaction in seeing the world's sole superpower tied down, as if it were the glory days of the Vietnam protests all over again. How else can we explain why Amnesty International claims that Guantanamo — specialized ethnic foods, available Korans, and international observers — is comparable to a Soviet Gulag where millions once perished? So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West.'

This is, of course, where the Islamists first came in with their assessment of the west's decadence and its likely absence of any stomach for a fight. America surprised them; but the war being waged with escalating ferocity within the west by its decadent elites, along with some alarming moral and intellectual confusion within the Bush administration (see posts below) -- and, most crucially, a fundamental fear of confronting the religious ideology that is driving this monster -- could yet be our undoing.

The most significant proximate cause of global terrorism is the way in which, instead of acknowledging Palestinian terrorists as a threat to the civilised order and dealing with them appropriately, the world treated Yassir Arafat instead as a nascent statesman, invited him to address the UN and thus began the descent of international relations into the hell of moral equivalence which blew up in its face on 9/11. Now we read in the Jerusalem Post that NATO is granting observer status to the Palestinians:

'"This is a very important decision as for many years European countries have only heard the Israeli voice in these groupings. For peace to become a reality and agreements to be fully implemented, we need to be able to tell our side of the story too," said Hassan Khreisheh, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian body and one of the two Palestinian delegates.'

Let us pinch ourselves.

NATO, which describes itself as an organisation representing democratic states of Europe and North America, is the principal defence structure for the free world against tyranny, terror and war. The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror. Their founding covenant commits them to the destruction of Israel. They have been told to put their house in order and have so far failed and even refused to do so. Far from destroying the infrastructure of terror, they are taking Hamas terrorists into their administration. As Efraim Karsh has noted, the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas -- the man greeted so warmly by President Bush last week -- marked Israel Independence Day by describing the proclamation of the state of Israel in 1948 as

'an unprecedented historic crime and vowed his unwavering refusal to ever "accept this injustice." "On that day, a crime was committed against a people, who were uprooted from their land and whose existence was destroyed and who were forced to flee to all areas of the world," he said. "The refugees have a full right to fulfill the right of return. We strongly object to the possibility they would become citizens of the countries they live in." Abbas's remarks came as Palestinians commemorated the nakba by staging rallies and demonstrations throughout the West Bank and Gaza to demand the right of return for all refugees to their original homes inside Israel. Accompanied by a virulent anti-Israel media campaign, the events reached their peak at midday, when sirens were sounded throughout the Palestinian controlled territories and people observed a minute of silence to mourn Israel's creation. In some areas, gunmen opened fire into the air as a sign of mourning.'

Abbas runs a regime whose officially approved Palestinian Authority preacher, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris, said on officially approved PA TV on May 13:

'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 relieved 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.'

What are Tony Blair and President Bush doing in allowing NATO to give such people observer status? How can a despotic body that promotes ethnic cleansing, terror and religious war possibly be given observer status on the defence organisation of the free world? How can we possibly take seriously the Bush doctrine when first the President says what he did to Abbas (see post below) and then sits back while NATO further rewards terror in this way? What price now the defence of the west?

'The first step in a radical change to the way that every child is taught to read was announced yesterday by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. She set up an independent review of "the role of synthetic phonics" in teaching reading, which will lead to a fundamental re-writing of the national literacy strategy introduced by the Government seven years ago.

'The change, which will require children to be taught the sounds and letters of the alphabet within the first 16 weeks of school, will be introduced in September next year.Teachers will be told to stop encouraging children to memorise words by their shape and guess at them by their context, as the national literacy strategy recommends. Instead, they will return to the traditional method of teaching reading that was abandoned in the 1960s in favour of such approaches as "look and say", which required children to treat words as ideograms, and "real books", which expected them to learn reading by osmosis.'

(Telegraph)

'Just when it seemed that the Turner Prize had exhausted its capacity to shock, along came the biggest bombshell of all yesterday: a woman who paints flowers is favourite to win this year. Gillian Carnegie, a 34-year-old Londoner, has already achieved some notoriety for her paintings of her own bottom, which looked almost exactly like a woman's bottom, give or take the odd brush stroke. One of these paintings, entitled Mabel, was exhibited in Tate Britain's 2003 show Days Like These, an exhibition hailed by critics as the beginning of a "New Gentleness" in British art. Apparently, this meant that artists were beginning to wield paintbrushes again rather than video cameras or bottles of pickling solution.'

(Telegraph)

Last March, George Galloway went to Bangladesh to drum up support for his Tower Hamlets parliamentary campaign. While there, he gave a revealing interview in the University of Dhaka to Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha, in which he boasted of the alliance between the left and radical Islamism:

‘M.B.H.S.: You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?

‘Galloway: Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture. And whose only role in life is to consume
the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations. And the progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims. Otherwise we believe that we should all have to speak as Texan and eat McDonalds and be ruled by Bush and Blair. So on the very grave big issues of the day — issues of war, occupation, justice, opposition to globalization-the Muslims and the progressives are on the same side.

‘But they now do have some other differences and they are nonetheless important. These are the very big issues that divide progressive organizations and Muslims. But they are fewer than people imagine and the more they want work together as I am doing and have been for many years with Muslims organizations and sincere as well as devout Muslims the fewer the differences are and the less the gap there seems to be. It’s necessary because if we to use in English colloquialism: “If we don't hang together we will all hang separately”. Our enemies are very powerful and they are currently ruling the world and if we don't stop them they will finish both of us and they will be the new tyrants, new emperors of the world for a very long time to come if we don't stop them. So it's necessary to unite these two great forces.’

So there you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. The SWP-led anti-war left explicitly allies itself with the most anti-progressive, anti-western and totalitarian movements on the planet which have declared war on the free world and which aim to defeat every progressive value — democracy, liberty, pluralism — that there is. Thus Galloway does not celebrate the nascent freedom movement that emerged in Lebanon’s ‘Cedar Revolution’; instead, he supports the terror regime and its army that oppress the Lebanese:

‘And I include in the worldwide anti-war movement the absolutely epic magnificent demonstration in Beirut yesterday (8 March, 2005) called by Hizb’ullah and supported by the Arab Nationalist parties from the Sunni minority in Lebanon in which more than a million people marched to tell Israel, France and America to get out of Lebanon to stop trying to occupy Lebanon and to stand by Syria in it's hour of need as a country being threatened openly by the United States with invasion and occupation the same kind of treatment that Iraq suffered. So I think the anti-war movement was given a terrific boost in Beirut on that day. And I think that we should not fail to learn the lesson of that.’

In addition, Galloway does not merely ally himself with the enemies of this country:

‘

we stand up for the Muslims under attack by Bush and Blair’

but makes clear that he is the Member of Parliament for Bangladesh:

‘M.B.H.S: Would you take on the issues affective the people of Bangladesh such as: (a) Arsenic poisoning (b) India's water piracy on Bangladesh* (c) Wages of workers?

‘Galloway: Yes. I intend to be the champion not only of Bangladeshi people living in England but also the Bangladesh herself in the world and that means being a campaigner and I am a good campaigner, Masha'Allah. God gave me a good voice and good heart and I am still younger than Tony Blair. Insha'Allah a lot of life is left in me and I want to place it at the disposal of the Bangladeshis in London and abroad. The BNP, Awami League, Jamaat-E-Islami, Jatiya Party, the alternative parties all the political parties were on the same platform along with me and supported my campaign for election in the Tower Hamlet'.

So the Jamaat e Islami supported him, eh?

After the 2003 arrest in Rawalpindi of al Qaeda’s third in command Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Christian Science Monitor reported that the arrest exposed a link between Jamaat e Islami and al Qaeda:

'...senior officials here are starting to admit that they are finding growing links between the Jamaat and Al Qaeda terrorists on the run. "All of the activists and terrorists who have been apprehended in recent months have had links to the Jamaat-e-Islami, whether we have arrested them in Lahore or here or Karachi...." says Pakistan's Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisel Saleh Hayat. "They have been harboring them"."...The Jamaat has never condemned 9/11, and denies that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization. This is a group that believes 9/11 was carried out by Jews in America," says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani author on terror issues. "The really scary thing is that this is also the most moderate Islamic party in Pakistan." ‘

The really scary thing is that this is now what passes for ‘progressive’ politics in Britain.

In the light of the foiled double human bomb attack planned for Jerusalem today, Israel’s release of almost 400 Palestinian prisoners might appear to be the even more potent suicidal enterprise. As Ha’aretz reports:

‘The Islamic Jihad network from the Tul Karm and Jenin areas is said to be behind the planned attack. The same network was responsible for the February suicide bombing at the Stage nightclub in Tel Aviv that left five Israelis dead. In the wake of the Tel Aviv attack, Israel delayed the second round of prisoner releases. In the past, Israel has refused to release prisoners who have not served two-thirds of their terms, but 93 of the detainees had only completed a fraction of their sentences. Some of the prisoners released were charged for attempted shootings, preparing explosives and assisting attempted murder. More than a quarter of the prisoners are Hamas members, Army Radio reported. A total of 380 of the men are from the West Bank, the remaining 18 from the Gaza Strip.’

The release of the 400 completes Israel’s promise to release a total of 900 prisoners as a goodwill gesture. There cannot be many nations in the world who, when the enemy is still attacking them, would set a total of 900 enemy combatants free to continue to attack them as a goodwill gesture. Predictably, the Palestinians said this gesture was not enough.

The key point is this. Israel made an obligation and is standing by it. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, has done virtually nothing to meet his obligation — which is supposed to stand prior to anything Israel is required to do — to dismantle the Palestinian infrastructure of terror; and yet he is not being held to account.

Because he is not Arafat, because he wears a suit and speaks softly and talks about an end to the culture of violence, the west is happy to take him at face value. Big mistake.

On Sunday, he declared that the human bomb phenomenon was over. Not only did he get that wrong, as today’s news has demonstrated, but he backed it up, in characteristic terrorist fashion, by the threat that it would not be over if he didn’t get what he wanted. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

‘ "We have started to deal with the culture of violence," he said. "We stopped the culture of violence and the Palestinian people have started looking at it as something that should be condemned and it should stop." Asked on ABC whether the suicide bombing era had ended, he said: "I believe it is over." But he warned that if progress toward a peace agreement was not achieved in meetings with Sharon next month, "despair and loss of hope will come back and a return to the old ideas" of armed resistance.’

Ah, ‘despair and loss of hope’ – the excuse of the apologists for terror throughout the world. It is not despair that causes terror, but the fanatical religious hatred and incitement to murder which are still pouring out of Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. It is not loss of hope that causes terror but, on the contrary, the ever-present hope of victory which is kept alive by the infrastructure of terror that Abbas refuses to dismantle. As Frank Gaffney observes:

‘To the contrary, terrorist organizations are not being dismantled by Abbas. Instead, groups like Hamas with the avowed mission of destroying Israel are ascendant. They are winning local elections and taking full advantage of the "hudna" (temporary suspension of hostilities) to rebuild their offensive capabilities against Israel. Hamas and other terrorists are being integrated into Palestinian security forces, receiving valuable training and even arms from American and European personnel. In addition, burgeoning quantities of ever-more powerful weapons are being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt. Meanwhile, Palestinians are being encouraged by official imams whose sermons are broadcast on Abbas-controlled media to kill Jews and destroy America. For example, less than two weeks before Mr. Bush welcomed Abu Mazen to the White House, Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris claimed on Palestinian Authority TV that history showed the torture, exile and murder of Jews to be legitimate and the Muslim conquest of the United States inevitable.’

Yet here’s the really alarming thing. Far from treating Abbas for what he is, a more sophisticated form of terrorist, President Bush actually lionised him.

‘In the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Bush described Abbas as a "man of courage," explaining that he takes "great faith in not only [Abbas'] personal character, but the fact that he campaigned on a platform of peace — he said, 'Vote for me, I am for peace.' And the Palestinians voted overwhelmingly to support him."’

Can this be the same Bush who refuses to talk to terrorists, the same Bush who insists on holding people accountable for their actions, the same Bush who gave his name to the doctrine that there can be no deals or even negotiations unless houses are put in order and terrorist infrastructures dismantled and moves towards the rule of law, democracy and a free society are in evidence? ‘Campaigning for peace’ is patently a cop-out since every tyrant and two-bit dictator says he is ‘for peace’. The acid test is the dismantling of the factories of terror and hatred and the construction of the institutions of a free society. That is the rationale for regime change in the region; that is why the painful construction of a free society in Iraq is absolutely central; that is why the entire edifice of the defence of the west rests upon the relentless pressure on rogue states to become answerable to their people. Only if they stop terrorising their own populations will they stop terrorising the rest of the world.

Yet in the very heartland of terrorism, none of this has been done. Abbas may have been elected, but Palestinian society is still no more democratic or free than it was, and the Palestinian terror factories are still very much in business. To repeat: only a democracy brings peace. Police states+fanatical ideology=terror. The roots of terrorism will not be destroyed unless tyrannies turn into free societies. This is the very pivot of Bush’s foreign policy. And yet he appears to be making an exception for the Palestinians, whose conspicuous absence of democracy and equally conspicuous refusal to halt terror production is being indulged or brushed aside. It is not enough for unnamed administration sources to murmur that the President said hard things about Abbas’s failure behind the scenes. It’s the show that’s put on at the front of house that’s doing the damage.

And that damage was even greater than the display of egregious fawning in the White House Rose Garden. For as Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute has pointed out, not only did Bush fail to correct Abbas when he made demonstrably false claims about the provisions of road map, but Bush himself also said some extremely alarming things.Most worrying was his declaration to Abbas:

‘Changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed’

which directly contradicted his commitment to Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004:

‘It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’

This was a staggering reversal and a huge advance for the Palestinians. While Bush’s commitment to Sharon was vague and conditional, his statement to Mazen introduced an explosive new policy aim. As Satloff writes:

‘For years, Palestinians have wanted the United States publicly to accept the 1967 lines as the reference point for negotiations. In the arcane lexicon of Middle East diplomacy, by positing the1949 lines as the reference point, Bush granted the Palestinians more than they had asked for and effectively made the Palestinians a successor to the signatories of the armistice. In so doing, Bush inadvertently eroded the special status of UN Security Council Resolution 242, the central pillar of peace diplomacy since it was passed in 1967, which makes no reference to the armistice lines. Though this was surely not the administration's intent, it should come as no surprise if Palestinians now believe that Washington has legitimized opening what is commonly called "the 1949 file" and if they therefore start to make unprecedented demands -- or demands for compensation and concession -- based on the status quo of 1949.’

In the circumstances, Bush appears to have rewarded Abbas for continuing Palestinian terrorism and failing to move towards a free society. This was no doubt quite unintentional, but it has happened because, unlike his dealings elsewhere in the defence of the west, Bush’s whole approach to the Arab war on Israel has from the road map onwards been based on entirely the wrong premise. This is that the conflict is between Israel and the Palestinians, and it is a conflict based on a quarrel over sharing the same piece of land. Wrong. It is a conflict between Israel and the Arab world -- which for no more than the past three decades has chosen to hide its never-changing exterminatory intentions behind the fiction of Palestinian national identity -- and it is based not on an argument about sharing the land but rather on that Arab world’s refusal to share the land at all with a Jewish state and its desire to ethnically cleanse the Jews from the land altogether: an ambition which it has kept alive in large measure to distract the populations it tyrannises from rising up against the regimes that oppress them – which is why the development of free societies (pace Sharansky) is a precondition of peace in the Middle East.

Because of the falsity of Bush’s premise, however, it followed that Palestinian terrorism was no more than a kind of extraneous problem which had latched onto the original impasse, that Hamas was in a different universe from the PA, and that once Arafat was out of the way and replaced by someone who talked the language of non-violence the problem was on the way to being solved. Thus Abbas has to be not only given a chance to set the Palestinian house in order, but – just like in the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ – the evidence that he is failing to do so and that the Palestinians are negotiating with a gun pointed to Israel’s head cannot be acknowledged at all.

For different reasons – principally because human nature cannot survive unless it has hope -- the Israelis subscribe to similar delusions. Thus Sharon has done everything he can to boost Abbas, to strengthen his hand and give him a chance. But Mazen should not be boosted unless and until he commits the PA to democracy and puts an end to the incitement against Israel, which he could do more or less overnight.

In an interview with Ha’aretz, the controversial former Chief of the Israeli Defence Staff Moshe Ya'alon said that recent statements by Abbas showed that he

‘"…has not given up the right of return. And this is not a symbolic right of return, but the right of return as a claim to be realized. To return to the houses, to return to the villages. The implication of this is that there will not be a Jewish state here."

’Therefore, he said, the establishment of a Palestinian state will lead to war "at some stage," and such a war could be dangerous for Israel. The idea that a Palestinian state can be established by 2008, and will then produce stability, is "divorced from reality" and "dangerous," as any such state "will be a state that will try to undermine Israel." Asked about the current situation in the PA, Ya'alon responded: "For the Palestinians it is still convenient to maintain a gang-based reality rather than a state foundation. "When [the PA] permits Hamas to take part in the elections without abandoning its firearms, is that democracy? It's gangs. Armed gangs playing at pretend democracy," he said. "If Fatah continues to behave as it does now, Hamas will eventually take over the Gaza Strip," he added.

’Asked for his views on the general concept of two states for two peoples, he said: "In the present reality, I see difficulty in producing a stable situation of end-of-conflict within that paradigm." A two-state solution, he continued, is simply "not relevant. It is a story that the Western world tells with Western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, too, are sweeping it under the carpet."

Personally, I support the disengagement from Gaza — and would wish Israel to leave much of the West Bank too. This is because I think it is wrong for one people to rule over another if it wants to rule itself. It is wrong for the Jews — and bad for them too — to rule over the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza. If the Arabs wish to create a state of their own there, that’s fine by me — as long as they do not wish to create it in order to launch a more effective war of extermination against Israel. At present, however, there is no concrete sign that this is not what such a state would be used for; indeed, all the signs are that the aim of exterminating Israel is still very much alive, even though the tactics may have shifted. And I am under no illusions that disengagement is not hideously dangerous for Israel and the threat of increased terrorism as a result is very great, as is the risk of the creation of ‘Hamastan’ in Gaza. When people say that leaving Gaza with nothing to show for it is a dangerous sign of weakness, they are right. But waiting until there is something to show for it may mean waiting for ever. As ever, Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. But however great the threat of terrorism is, there is a worse threat for Israel:

'Asked whether he fears for Israel's existence, Ya'alon responded: "A combination of terrorism and demography, with question marks among us about the rightness of our way, are a recipe for a situation in which there will not be a Jewish state here in the end."'

Terrorism is not the worst of it. Loss of belief in ‘the rightness of our way’ is what would ultimately prove lethal to Israel’s continued existence. I fear that Ya’alon is correct, and that whatever happens the Arabs will continue to wage war upon Israel -- until that happy time when the peoples of the Arab world gain their own freedom from the tyrants who oppress them and use hatred of the Jews as their alibi. Until then, Israel needs to defend itself and will only be able to do so if it believes in ‘the rightness of our way’ — which includes, for the vast majority of Israelis, a state for the Palestinian Arabs. Yet such a state may be intended as a Trojan horse for Israel’s destruction. This is the dilemma in which Israel is trapped, and its enduring tragedy.

Fascinating analysis by John O'Sullivan of the likely Turkish fallout from the French referendum. Turkey is now extremely unlikely to be admitted into the EU, given the state of European public opinion. This, says O'Sullivan, will cause three extremely dangerous crises. Turkey will become more hostile to the US as well as to Europe, and it will attribute its rejection to European hostility to Islam, both of which will increase Islamist terrorism; and it will sharpen Europe's own identity crisis.

The way through this, says O'Sullivan, is Plan B: for the EU and US to form a a transatlantic free trade area which non-EU European countries including Turkey would be invited to join:

'Laid out in this way, such a Plan B inevitably sounds utopian. Many of its individual features, however, have been widely discussed for years. Indeed, a full-scale EU-U.S. free trade area almost came about a decade ago. At the time it was vetoed by the French. But Europeans might now see the value of a program for economic integration that does not involve free immigration -- but that would offer Turkey a solid substitute for EU membership, mollify the Islamic world, and build an long-term economic bridge to Russia, North Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.'

It's worth a try. But I fear it will not work, because Europe is the prize.

A reader observes, a propos the post below, that Netanyahu is a divisive and controversial political figure whose profile at the head of a pro-Israel charm offensive might be seen as more offensive than charm in certain quarters. It's a fair point, although Netanyahu's ability to put a case across -- and, crucially, his ability to understand the British psyche -- is a rare attribute in Israeli politics.

There is, of course, a totally unimpeachable person who could do this job brilliantly and with unassailable moral authority, and this is Israel's erstwhile minister Natan Sharansky. He is also currently out of a job. What a weapon it would be to set Sharansky, the survivor of the gulag who understands from the inside the umbilical connection between communism and Jew-hatred and has had personal experience of what David Pryce-Jones has called the psychological warfare tactics employed by totalitarian regimes, against the Marxists and Trotskyites who have hijacked progressive politics in Britain and are currently employing such tactics to delegitimise Israel and terrorise and intimidate British Jews.

As Israel's former minister for the diaspora, Sharansky toured British universities and well understands the mortal moral sickness that now grips them. Even when he was a minister, however, he was so low down the pecking order -- and the cause of trying to put Israel's case in Britain is so cavalierly underrated by the Israeli government -- that he did not have the kind of backing that is required to tackle this wholesale cultural malaise. The fact that he is now out of the government makes such an appointment sadly even more unlikely.

But what if there were a clamour from Britain for Sharansky to be appointed to such a role of educating the universities out of their profound ignorance and taking on the British heirs to his erstwhile jailers? Just as they once worked to get Sharansky out of Russia, what if British Jews now started working to get Sharansky into Britain? The campaign starts here.

At last someone has understood what the academic boycott actually means. As Ha’aretz reports, Benjamin Netanyahu has undertaken to fight not just the boycott but what lies behind it:

‘The attempt to boycott Israeli academia isn't a boycott of academia at all," Netanyahu said Tuesday. "It is an attempt to boycott the entire State of Israel… The repeal of the boycott last week is only a small victory in a battle that is not yet over. Everything must be done to foil any attempt to harm Israel and the Jewish people," Netanyahu said. "The campaign against the academic boycott is not only the concern of the academic community. This is an attempt to damage the State of Israel and its democratic character. Therefore, I have decided to stand by the institutions of higher learning and contribute whatever I can to the campaign," he added.’

Netanyahu should be urged to make this the start of an educational charm offensive by Israeli academics, politicians, writers and others, who should be brought to Britain to hold public meetings, lectures, discussions, lunches, dinners and so forth on campus in order to start tackling the root cause of the boycott poison — the astounding ignorance among academics and students of the history and present reality of the Middle East, the creation of Israel and the 50-year Arab war of extermination against it.

One of the problems is that Israel’s banana-politics culture of rampant cronyism, titanic ego-wars and general crass amateurishness — plus its head-in-the-sand fatalism that Britain and Europe are endemically and permanently prejudiced against the Jews and so it’s a waste of time even trying to put its case to them — has meant that for years it has simply abandoned the all-important European battlefield of ideas and allowed it to be sown instead with the dragons’ teeth of hatred. Israel’s Foreign Ministry in particular is worse then useless. Despite the fact that Netanyahu is the country’s finance minister, he should insist on taking personal charge of a far wider campaign to educate Britain and make ignorance history.