When I wrote about the Dilpazier Aslam affair at the Guardian (July 24 post) in which a news trainee was sacked after Scott Burgess revealed on the Daily Ablution that he was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir, I commented that the real scandal was that the paper had known about Aslam’s membership all the time but had only acted out of embarrassment once this was disclosed. This was because the paper’s ‘Background Briefing’ on the affair had written:

‘Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party, drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.’

My understanding now is that the situation was not so clear-cut. After he was hired, Aslam mentioned his membership of HuT to the executive who had hired him. Astonishing as this may seem, that executive had no idea what kind of organisation HuT was. The executive is now leaving the paper as a result.

As for Aslam having told ‘several colleagues and some senior editors’, my understanding is that – even more astonishingly -- the colleagues he told also didn’t have a clue about what HuT was, while the ones who did have a clue weren’t told. Some did raise some concerns, apparently, but the executive who had hired him assured them that had had checked it all out and there wasn’t a problem.

If this is true, then it puts the paper in a rather different light. On this account, it is not true that the paper as a whole was untroubled by Aslam’s affiliation until it was exposed. I understand that, on the contrary, many were utterly horrified when they found out. It also implies a level of chaotic disorganisation and general ignorance which some may find incredible. I do not. It happens.

None of this detracts from the central point of this affair. Whatever may or may not have been known about Aslam’s membership of HuT -- and several intriguing questions about this whole affair are still unanswered -- it remains the case that someone subscribing to its wholly unacceptable platform could find a berth at the Guardian which was perfectly comfortable about publishing his views. And that was because they fitted into its own general view of the world. The horror when it discovered that these views emanated from a HuT member was undoubtedly genuine, because they are genuinely horrified by HuT. And what that surely tells us is that the Guardian really doesn’t grasp that its view of the world is as extreme and unacceptable as it is.

Is this true?

'About a month before the July 7 bombings in London, British authorities balked at giving U.S. officials permission to apprehend a man now believed to have ties to the bombers, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

'Haroon Rashid Aswat, 30, of Indian heritage, is currently in custody in Zambia, U.S. and Zambian officials told CNN.U.S. authorities wanted to capture Aswat, who was then in South Africa, and question him about a 1999 plot to establish a "jihad training camp" in Bly, Oregon.

'According to the sources, U.S. officials had located Aswat in South Africa weeks before the July 7 attacks that killed 52 bus and subway travelers and the four bombers. U.S. authorities had asked South Africa if they could take Aswat into custody. South Africa relayed the request to Britain, but authorities there balked because he was a British citizen, the sources said. While the debate was ongoing, Aswat slipped away.'

An excellent article by Bruce Thornton on Victor Davis Hanson's site amplifies VDH's remarks (see post below). Echoing also the comments by Patrick Sookhdeo in the Spectator (see yesterday's post), he states that the jihadis are operating squarely within mainstream Islamic tradition:

'How else do we make sense of the continued widespread support for homicide bombings and Al Qaeda visible in poll after poll of Muslims worldwide? Even so-called “moderates” and Westernized Muslims can't help letting slip their true beliefs even as they try to spin the latest terrorist murder. Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a senior member of the Muslim Association of Britain and a Hamas member who is frequently featured on the BBC, has made clear his support for Palestinian Arab murder of Israelis, his belief that Islamic religious law (sharia) should not be compromised to coexist with liberal democracy, his admiration of the Taliban, and his desire to see Israel destroyed.

'Inayat Bunglawala, another “moderate” spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, has been all over CNN since the bombings in London. In a recent BBC4 interview, this is how he “condemned” homicide bombings: “Let me make clear then, once and for all, we condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are, human lives everywhere are of equal value, whether they are British, American, Iraqi, or Palestinian. Jewish lives are not worth more than Palestinian lives, all are worth equal, and it's been quite nauseating over the past week to see how Israel and its highly-placed supporters in the media have been trying to make political capital out of last week's atrocities against Londoners. It is shameful on them and shameful upon those who are trying to help Israel improving its PR image after the brutalities it commits against the Palestinian people.”

'Here is a classic example of so-called “moderate” double-talk. Notice how Jews are left out of the list of “human lives” that have “equal value.” Notice how the statement “Jewish lives are not worth more than Palestinian lives” is not followed by the logical corollary, “Palestinian lives are not worth more than Jewish lives.” And finally, notice the usual hysterical smokescreen of alleged Israeli “brutalities” to shift the focus away from Muslim murder of innocents by concentrating on its supposed causes.

'In fact, the obsession with the Palestinians is the smoking gun that reveals the jihadist sentiments of double-talking “moderates.” Consider how many British Muslims, supposedly opposed to homicide bombings, praised Hamas founder Sheikh Yassim, who engineered the murder of over 500 Israelis in furtherance of his organization's long-term goal to destroy Israel. After the Israeli Defense Forces killed him, a memorial service was held in London, an event attended by “moderates” like Muslim Council Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who call'ed Yassim a “renowned Islamic scholar,” an estimation shared by Inayat Bunglawala. Think about the implications: respected, Westernized “moderate” Muslims praise a terrorist murderer as an “Islamic scholar,” and we are supposed to believe that “fanatics” have “hijacked” and “distorted” Islam?

'Or consider Dr. Yusuf Karadawi, a British Muslim theologian the mayor of London has praised as a “moderate.” Of course, on cue he will recite the usual “condemnations” of terrorism, but always with his fingers crossed. Once more, Israel is the key to discerning the true beliefs of the “moderate.” Dr. Karadawi has stated that there are no civilians in Israel, that using children as homicide bombers is acceptable, and that the terrorists in Iraq murdering Americans, Brits, and Iraqis are “valiant.” The Muslim Council of Britain has described this apologist for murder as a “distinguished Muslim scholar, a voice of reason and understanding.”

'The “moderates'” praise of those who murder Jews and want to destroy Israel is not surprising once the proper context of jihad is restored. The return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland has always been the key to understanding the modern jihad and its favorite tactic, the terrorist murder of innocents, which began long before Israel even existed. No event more testified to the weakness of Islam than the creation of Israel, for unlike the other nations crafted by England and France after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, Israel is a nation of former dhimmi, a people once conquered by Islamic armies and forced in every aspect of their daily lives to show their humiliation and subordination to Islam and Muslims. And the Jews who created Israel were Western to boot, their nation one embodying Western political principles and ideals antithetical to Islamic religious law. Thus Israel stands as a double affront to the Islamic world-view: a once conquered, debased people throwing off the shackles of dhimmitude and outstripping by every indicator of success and well-being the Islamic nations surrounding them, not to mention three times defeating larger Arab armies in battle. If Israel survives, what then of the Islamic religious world-view that sees the House of Islam as the divinely sanctioned ruler of the world?

'Thus the modern jihad that seeks to reverse the contraction of the House of Islam and so fulfill the mandate of Allah must begin with Israel, and it is in that struggle between Jew and Arab that the battle-lines of jihad are most clear. And that's why the “moderate” spokesmen for Islam in the West cannot let go of the Palestinian obsession: not because fellow Muslims are suffering, for many more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims in Jordan, in Sudan, and in Syria than the Israelis have killed while trying to defend themselves. No, the smokescreen of “Palestinian national aspirations” conceals the true fight: the jihad against the West, the civilization that for centuries trembled in fear at Muslim armies, and the spiritually debased peoples whom Allah has destined for conquest and subordination to the House of Islam.'

Thornton makes another point, however, which appears to undermine the Bush/Sharansky doctrione that democracy is the key to peace. Comparisons with fascism or communism, he says, miss the point:

'Both of those ideologies were anti-Christian: fascism was a species of debased Romantic neo-paganism, and communism was blatantly atheist. As such, both ran counter to the powerful Judeo-Christian forces that shaped European and Russian civilization, and so could not satisfy for long the spiritual yearnings of the people, yearnings denied their traditional expressions. Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.

'The jihadist enemy, on the other hand, is operating on principles and values squarely in the tradition of Islam, and thus unlike fascism and communism is expressing a spiritual need and an orthodox religious mandate: to fulfill by force the will of Allah that all the world be subject to Islam and an Islamic state, the caliphate, ruled by sharia, Islamic religious law.'

Well, yes, this is true as far as it goes. But the democracy argument is based on the belief that the desire for human freedom is universal, transcending all creeds. On this basis, the desire of the average Muslim for freedom is no less because their religion happens to preach submission. Clearly, the tension between the innate desire for freedom on the one hand and the powerful attachment to the religion of submission on the other sets up enormous conflicts, which we are beginning to see being played out within the Muslim world. And we don't know whether an accommodation can ever be reached. But we must surely give those struggling to reconcile these particular spiritual needs with the desire for freedom every encouragement and support, because it is upon such an accommodation that the fate of the world may depend.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the much needed point that the attacks on the US, Spain and now London exposed the catastrophic mistake made by America and Europe in assuming that the war against Israel was sui generis, a localised conflict in which the Jews who they thought had created the problem could be left to stew in their own juice:

'Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their “unfair” foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy of some sort. Typical after the London bombing is the ubiquitous Muslim spokesman who when asked to condemn terrorism, starts out by deploring such killing, assuring that it has nothing to do with Islam, yet then ending by inserting the infamous “but” — as he closes with references about the West Bank, Israel, and all sorts of mitigating factors. Almost no secular Middle Easterners or religious officials write or state flatly, “Islamic terrorism is murder, pure and simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.”

'Second, thinking that the jihadists will target only Israel eventually leads to emboldened attacks on the United States. Assuming America is the only target assures terrorism against Europe. Civilizations will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together. It is that simple — and past time for Europe and the United States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating this plague of Islamic fascism. Third, Islamicists are selective in their attacks and hatred. So far global jihad avoids two billion Indians and Chinese, despite the fact that their countries are far tougher on Muslims than is the United States or Europe. In other words, the Islamicists target those whom they think they can intimidate and blackmail.

'Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies, alliances of convenience with dictatorships, triangulation with Middle Eastern patrons of terror, blaming the Jews — civilization has tried all that. It is time to relearn the lessons from the Cold War, when we saw millions of noble Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Czechs as enslaved under autocracy and a hateful ideology, and in need of democracy before they could confront the Communist terror in their midst. But until the Wall fell, we did not send billions in aid to their Eastern European dictatorships nor travel freely to Prague or Warsaw nor admit millions of Communist-ruled Bulgarians and Albanians onto our shores.'

Undoubtedly, jihadi terror has been fed by the feeble appeasement over the years by governments too craven to grasp what they were actually up against. And the most lethal example of all is the way in which they left Israel to swing in the wind, thus sending the clearest possible signal that the scope for manipulating and disarming the free world in the pursuit of jihadi objectives was infinite. Thus from the first plane hijackings in the sixties, the ratchet of terror was relentlessly turned in lock-step with the pusillanimous and morally compromised response to that terror by Britain, Europe and pre-9/11 America. Only when we recognise that Israel is in the front line of the attack on the free world, and that we must all pull together in resisting Israel's attackers in the same way that we resist the terror that targets London, Madrid, France, Germany or New York, will we start to be effective in the defence of the free world.

The unfortunate Mr Menezes, who was shot dead by police who mistook him for a human bomb, is being marketed as the latest martyr for the self-haters of the free world:

'JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES 7.1.78-22.7.05

Murdered by the police at Stockwell station
Friday 22 July 2005

The Menezes family call upon the people of London to join them
remembering Jean Charles.

Friday 29 July...Vigil at Parliament Square
Please bring Brazilian and Peace Flags

Followed byInter-faith memorial service...Westminster Cathedral

The service will include readings from friends and family of Jean and includes a live link to Jean Charles funeral in Brazil.

There will also be readings from Bianca Jagger and Tariq Ramadan.
Tube: Victoria/St James' Park. Buses 11, 24, 148, 507, 211.

ALL WELCOME

For more information please contact
Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign'

Tremendous, totally authoritative and hugely important article by Patrick Sookhdeo in the Spectator which simply eviscerates the claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Dr Sookhdeo, who is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, presents a set of historical and theological facts that demonstrate, on the contrary, that for the past 1400 years Islam has been a religion of war.

Acknowledging that, as with other religions, it is possible to pick out of Muslim holy texts both war-like bits and peace-loving bits, he makes the knock-out point that that wherever contradictions are found, the rules of the religion dictate that the later-dated text abrogates the earlier one. And the later text is the war-like text.

‘So the mantra “Islam is peace” is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace. From 622 onwards it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful co-existence, particularly in the colonial period, when the theology of war was not dominant. For today’s radical Muslims — just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical Islam — it would be truer to say “Islam is war”...

‘Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?...

‘What happens after this stage depends on which of the two main religious traditions among Pakistani-background British Muslims gains the ascendancy. The Barelwi majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their Muslim societies, and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well. Islamism is now the dominant voice in contemporary Islam, and has become the seedbed of the radical movements.

‘Muslims must stop this self-deception. They must with honesty recognise the violence that has existed in their history in the same way that Christians have had to do, for Christianity has a very dark past. Some Muslims have, with great courage, begun to do this.’

Read it all.

Reverberations from my previous two posts continue. They have attracted passionate support and opposition from across the political spectrum. One reader who disagrees has set out some particularly cogent arguments, which I reproduce here:

‘As for your substantive arguments, particularly the ones you've advanced in this latest post, it's true that you've consistently argued over the years for Israel to leave the territories because it should not be in the position of ruling over another (hostile) people. However, you've just as consistently argued, especially since the start of the 2002 intifada, for the firmest possible opposition to terrorism, against rewarding, trusting and doing deals with terror-supporting political parties, and, most importantly, for democracy, and against legitimizing terrorist groups like Hamas through the ballot box. You've argued powerfully that if the Palestinian people vote for terror groups, than that makes them supporters of a terrorist entity, not of a potential legitimate state.

‘Yet now, you're saying that because you think the Palestinians and their Arab allies will never change their position, Israel should cut its losses in order to "regroup, consolidate and repair itself". In doing this, you ignore the issue of handing Hamas exactly the sort of victory that Israel handed Hezbollah by their rapid exit from South Lebanon, the action that probably more than any other fuelled the Palestinians in taking to the 2002 intifada. Hamas are at this time already organizing the victory parades they are going to hold in Gaza after the disengagement. Can you doubt the huge surge in their recruitment that will follow?

‘I think in saying that the Arab states will never accept Israel, you are resorting to exactly the same trope as when the left and other useful idiots say that the Arab states are never going to be democracies. While there appears to be little short term prospect of it, the moves in Iraq and especially Lebanon were the first tiny steps. By weakening and giving up on the project of bring democracy to the Middle East, you hand victories not just to Hamas and Syria, but to the paymasters of Hamas, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Come to that, if this is the argument driving you, you might as well say that radical Islamists established in London are never going to accept a
non-Islamic state, so we might as well back off into consolidating ourselves in the white suburbs and highlands, and cede Newham and Tower Hamlets to them right now.

‘Sharansky resigned from the Sharon government over precisely the issue of giving up Gaza in return for nothing. Abbas has manifestly failed to deliver on the road map, the absolutely crucial element of which was the move towards democracy by the disarming of terror gangs-- those of Fatah as well as those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That's not paving the path to peace. Without democracy, there will be no peace. Ceding any territory to the terrorists just makes it easy for them to recruit and sustain their murderers better. Oh, and by the way, the settlers in Gaza in fact settled no man's land. It wasn't anybody else's land.’

To which I would say this. Because of the dire existential threat Israel faces, and the campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation which has been going on in the west in order finally to turn that existential threat into reality, my views about disengagement have taken second place to the defence of Israel against prejudice, hatred and lies — including the lie that the occupation is illegal. Nevertheless, I have thought from the start that settling the territories was wrong, both morally and militarily, and have also supported disengagement from the start (see my Prospect article). And yes, I also happen to take the hardest of hard lines against appeasing terrorism. But I believe that there is no inconsistency in my position. Here’s why.

The argument that leaving Gaza is to appease Arab terror is a fundamental misunderstanding. This is because it rests on the premise that the Palestinians want the Israelis to leave Gaza and the West Bank because what they want is a state of their own in these territories.

To accept this is to accept the false premise behind Israeli peaceniks, muddled people of goodwill and the many enemies of Israel alike, that this conflict is all about a Palestinian state. If this were so then I probably would not support disengagement because one should never give terrorists what they want.

But it is not what they want. They want to destroy Israel. They do not want a state of Palestine to sit peacefully alongside Israel. We know this because they have been offered it many times, only to reject it. And they have said so, over and over again, that nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state will do. As far as their own national aspirations are concerned, the state upon which Palestinian terrorism originally had its eyes was Jordan — hardly surprising, since Jordan comprises most of what was originally known as Palestine at the time of the British Mandate. It was only after Jordan wiped the floor with the Palestinians in Black September that their demand shifted to the West Bank and Gaza. And why was that? Because they saw what Israel failed to see — that Israel had walked straight into a trap.

Israel believed — for both good and bad reasons — that it should settle those territories, gained in a war of self-defence and legitimately retained because that war never ended. The Palestinians understood that this gave them their greatest weapon. Since they could not win a conventional war against Israel, they would wage a different type of war through terrorism. Thus they would squeeze Israel in a pincer movement comprising not just terrorising its population but demoralising it by forcing it to take actions which they knew would tear the morally scrupulous Jews apart — and in the process posing as victims in order to delegitimise Israel in the eyes of the gullible and morally compromised west by painting it as a colonial oppressor. Israel was thus caught in a trap. Yes, the territories are no man’s land, and the occupation and the settlements are not illegal. But no man’s land still contains millions of Arabs. Yes, many of them are only there because the Arab states have kept them there as artificial ‘refugees’. But so what? To swallow them is to change and destroy Israel — demographically, morally and psychically. To drive them out is unthinkable.

Disengagement is Israel’s first step towards breaking out of this trap. It is not appeasement because it is not giving the Palestinians what they want. On the contrary, it is giving them what they do not want. They do not want freedom from ‘occupation’ to rule themselves in the territories, not least because that would destroy the platform from which they have recruited terrorists and bamboozled the world with their wholly artificial cause. So what they don’t want they must have. Whatever celebrations the Arabs plan in Gaza when the Israelis leave, however much they dress it up as a retreat under fire — and they are already doing their damnedest in that direction, and no doubt there will be more — they will then have to get on with running themselves in Gaza. No more excuses.

But opponents say the Arabs will be rejoicing at Israel’s exit from Gaza because then they will be able to realise their aim of using this territory to redouble their attacks. Disengagement will create 'Hamastan', with even more rocket attacks on Israel. This is certainly a fearsome possibility. But this would probably have happened anyway. The truth about the ‘occupation’ is that Gaza has been allowed to spiral out of control for years. If, however, after disengagement it does attack Israel, then Israel will fight it — but this time without having the constraint of Israeli civilians playing the role of hostages, and this time from the moral high ground of being attacked without any provocative ‘occupation’.

There is also the intriguing issue of Egypt. As we know, Egypt’s peace with Israel has been ambiguous, to say the least. Nevertheless, the one thing it surely does not want is Hamastan or al Qaeda on its doorstep. It may well be therefore that it is finally forced to cooperate with Israel in stopping the supply of arms — particularly since Israel will be removing the fig-leaf of its presence inside the territory.

It is said that disengagement will send the same disastrous signals of flight and weakness as Israel’s retreat from Lebanon, which was a major cause of the ensuing terror. Well, maybe that was so — although I rather think the perceived weakness that fuelled the terror emanated from the appeasement of that terror under Oslo. But in any event, as we can see from jihadi terror across the world, anything and everything is used to recruit for the death cult, including any actions the free world takes to defend itself. Thus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the liberation of East Timor, every single thing Israel does to protect itself such as the security barrier, the road blocks or the strikes against terrorist leaders, all are said to be recruiting sergeants for terror. Does that mean all these actions are wrong? Of course not. They may well be right and necessary but nevertheless in the short term exacerbate the security problem because they are used to ramp up the murderous grievances still further. That is precisely the fiendish calculation of terror, to force victims into a choice between doing what is necessary, which hardens the grievance that recruits more to the terrorist cause, or not doing what is necessary, which in the longer term means defeat.

Hamas has gained popularity not because of the disengagement but because of the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. This is why Sharansky’s basic argument, that the key is to force the PA to construct the institutions of a free society, is fundamentally sound. The problem is when he applies that argument to oppose disengagement. In his book The Case for Democracy, he writes:

‘I was opposed to Sharon’s disengagement plan because I did not accept the premise that there was no Palestinian partner and no hope for peace’.

But there is no Palestinian partner for peace for the forseeable future, and will not be until and unless there is pressure on them from the international community, particularly the US and the EU which along with Israel continue to subsidise the Palestinian police state. To this end, Sharansky is right to say that aid and recognition should be made conditional on Palestinian democratic reform. But he wants that process to happen before there is any question of withdrawal from the territories. Yet even in the unlikely event that the free world adopted the Sharansky strategy, democratisation — if it were to happen at all — would take a very long time. If it is right to get out of Gaza, it is right to do so on Israel's own terms and not dangle it as a carrot to encourage the Palestinians to institute free elections, a free press and the rule of law.

What Sharon is saying instead to the Arabs is this. You want a state? Fine. So do we want this for you. We’ve tried to negotiate its boundaries with you and got only war in return. You’ve had innumerable chances over the past 50 years, and now enough is enough. You won’t negotiate its boundaries? We’ll make them for you. You insist on murdering us? Very well, if you make it impossible for us to live together than we must separate ourselves from you. If ever you change your minds and decide to live with us rather than try to exterminate us, you’ll find us ready to extend a hand of friendship. Until then, we will remove our people from harm’s way, build our security barrier and turn our backs on you. And if you then hit us, we will hit you as hard as we would hit any other people who wage war upon us — but this time we will not be labouring under our current constraints.

In other words, disengagement is the very opposite of appeasement. It is an end to the manipulation, to the pretence that has fooled the world that the Arabs of the territories are now or for the forseeable future capable of acting in good faith as interlocutors for a just and peaceful settlement. It is a pulling up of the drawbridge — no less terrible and perilous for Israel for that, but a necessary move in dire circumstances in which every option is a rotten one.

Given this strategy of separation and the iron logic that has driven Likud — Likud! — to take such a step, the incendiary charge that this is akin to the Nazi/Arab policy of making the land Judenfrei is not only obscene but stupid. The charge that this is akin to giving in to the demands of Islamic fundamentalists in Britain doesn’t hold water either, because their agenda is totally non-negotiable. Between Israel and the Palestinians there is something to negotiate about, as there has been since the Peel Commission first recommended partition of the land in 1937 — ie, a two-state solution. The fact that the Palestinians refuse to do so but make war instead does not alter that fact. With the Islamists, it is not that there is no-one yet to negotiate with but that there will never be anything to negotiate.

There is a similarity between what is going on in Israel and our appeasement society, but it is a very different one. Those who have turned Jerusalem orange to stop disengagement are performing the same function for Israel at a time of great national danger as those in Britain and the US who have turned on their governments over the war in Iraq.

The point about disengagement is that it is not being done for the benefit of the Arabs. It is being done for the benefit of the Jews. Between the rock and the hard place, it is the rock. The orange protesters should get real.

A number of people have reacted in dismay to my post below. They make some very fair points, and so I will amplify my previous remarks. I agree with them when they say that the vast majority of settlers are not messianic zealots, as Gershon Baskin implies, but are ordinary Israelis who have lived in Gaza for a number of more mundane reasons. I agree with them when they say that this vast majority are not bent on civil war. I agree with them when they say that the main reason for the feeling in Israel against disengagement is not 'messianism' but the conviction that to leave Gaza without getting anything in return is an act of recklessness. And I agree with them when they say that the issue is not that the Israelis don't want to live in peace with their neighbours but the Arabs don't want to live in peace with Israel.

I agree with all of this. In so far as Baskin implied the opposite, I disagree. But the point of his passionate despair seemed to me to be that Israel had to leave Gaza and most of the disputed territories because it is wrong for the Jews to rule another people -- even though that was not their intention, and even though the only reason Israel is in those territories at all is because their inhabitants remain in a state of war against it.

And that is what I agree with. Whatever the original arguments for settling the territories -- some, on grounds of security, were more reasonable than others -- that is what this exercise has meant in practice. I am under no illusions that disengagement will bring peace. But I want Israel to be better able to defend itself, and a war of attrition in territory which is not even part of Israel seems to me instead to be the way eventually to destroy it from within.

As for leaving without getting anything in return, I'd say wake up and smell the coffee -- there isn't going to be anything in return for the foreseeable future. There is no peaceful Arab interlocutor who wants to live side by side with Israel. So Israel would wait forever for The Moment. And so it would be ruling an unwilling people forever. And I think that because this is wrong in itself, it would eventually tear Israel apart.

That is why I think Israel is right to leave Gaza now, and should go further and leave more of the territories too, in order to regroup, consolidate and repair itself morally and militarily. I fully accept that this is an agonising decision. I fully accept that it is fraught with the greatest of dangers. But Israel is, as it has always been, between the very hardest or rocks and hard places. And the bottom line is that this desperately dangerous act of disengagement is made very much more dangerous if Israel's population is not strong and united but is in a state of uproar against it. That is why I think that Baskin -- for all the caveats about some of his attitudes -- is fundamentally right.

Gershon Baskin says it all:

'Zionism is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.

'The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.

'The future appears ominous. Over the past months I have watched the streets of Israel and, in particular Jerusalem, turn orange. As the streets, the trees and the fashion has adopted this new symbol I have found myself confronted with the very strong visual image of a people I do not recognize.

'How could these people – with their messianic vision and value system that justifies treating the "other" as less equal than Jews – and I be part of the same nation? We have the same roots, we share a common heritage, we come from the same places, yet there has been a split; for some time they and their kind have been very different from me and my kind.'

The disengagement appears to have brought the moral crisis that has engulfed Israel out into the open. The terrible danger, of course, is that this weakens Israel still further at a time when the Arab enemies who wish to annihilate it are seizing their moment and redoubling their attacks. The orangistas are thus handing Hamas victory on a plate. This hysteria is suicidal. The country should pull itself together to back the disengagement, and put an end to the disgusting, Holocaust-denying equation being made between the resettlement of Jews from places where settlement was always a moral and strategic error -- a disengagement fraught with extreme danger which is being undertaken in order to safeguard the Jewish state -- and the pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews by those who wished them dead.

A country can survive a threat from without -- but not if it is simultaneously tearing itself apart.

Rollicking fisking by Scott Burgess of Hizb ut Guardian's apologia for jihadigate and its denunciation of him for exposing the scandal. Here's a taste, which starts by quoting from the Guardian background article on the affair which mysteriously was penned by an anonymous 'staff reporter':

' "Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian for its stance on the environment, its columnists such as Polly Toynbee, and its recent intervention in the US presidential election campaign."

'I wonder how they know when I moved to London - I don't think I've ever mentioned it here. The intent of painting me as a recent arrival to these shores seems to be to emphasise my American-ness, with all of its negative (to Guardianistas) connotations. In fact, I moved here over 6 years ago. To call my presence "recent" is akin to referring to the "recent" opening of the Millennium Dome; i.e., ridiculous.

'"Spends his time indoors"? Can someone explain to me what this is supposed to mean? As for the balance of the paragraph, I plead guilty with pride and without reservation - although I might append the phrase "as well as its blatant misstatements of fact". "He pitched into Mr Aslam, who as it happened, beat him to the traineeship on the Guardian."

'This is where the fun really begins. "As it happened," I did indeed "apply" for the traineeship - as a means of providing ironic entertainment to my readership (thanks very much Jackie D. of Samizdata, for your spirited and welcome defence). My "application" succeeded very well in its goal, becoming a running Ablution joke. Honestly. Given that I "spend my time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian" (as I was doing long before my spurious "application") how can anonymous really expect people to think that I was serious?

'Actually, I should thank the Guardian for being so impressed with my investigative skills. In their view, I went from never having heard of Mr. Aslam to my discovery, two days later, of exactly which trainee position he was occupying. Perhaps the Guardian has room for a reporter of such ability - I understand they have a slot open. [NB - the last sentence is intended ironically.]'

You read it here first (March 17 post) -- Condi Rice is a wrong'un. She has just visited Israel ostensibly to calm a deteriorating situation caused by the Islamic Jihad suicide bombing outside a Netanya shopping mall on July 12, which killed five Israelis, and relentless bombardments of Gaza and western Negev communities by Hamas which killed 22-year-old Dana Galkovitch in Netiv Ha'asara inside the green line. Instead, she praised the people who the US says it expects to put a stop to such terror but have refused to do so. The Jerusalem Post is rightly aghast:

'Though PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's foreign minister has candidly reneged on the PA's road map commitments to confiscate weapons and explosives in the hands of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and those elements within his own Fatah movement aligned with the rejectionists, Rice nevertheless complimented the Palestinian leadership for taking "important steps" against terrorism. Such praise strikes the wrong tone.

'What "steps" she was referring to was left to the imagination: Perhaps Abbas's goal of incorporating terrorists under the rubric of the PA's security forces; perhaps it was the belated, uneven, largely ineffective, and now apparently suspended efforts by PA Interior Minister Nasser Youssef to end Palestinian lawlessness – not for Israel's sake, but for the Palestinians themselves.

'Whatever the "steps" and with just 21 days to disengagement remaining, Abbas's aversion to taking on the rejectionists helped make Saturday night's murder of husband and wife Dov and Rachel Kol, who had gone to Gush Katif to visit family in Ganei Tal, possible. The attack also left the area's intrepid civilian security coordinator, Ami Shaked, and a young couple, also visiting for Shabbat, wounded. It took many hours for Abbas to even bother to condemn the attack – not as immoral but as counterproductive.

'Further catastrophe was averted – no thanks to the Palestinian Authority – on Friday night, when the IDF caught a would-be suicide bomber from Abbas's own Fatah movement on his way to blow up a crowded Tel Aviv nightspot. The terrorist, wearing a five-kilogram explosives belt packed with nails, infiltrated from Gaza's perimeter fence near Kibbutz Nir-Am. Another infiltrator – married to a woman from Jaffa and thus enjoying unimpeded access inside Israel – was tasked with delivering the bomber to his target.

'All told, 92 infiltration attempts into Israel from Gaza have been thwarted by security forces since the beginning of 2005. Friday night's effort was the first successful penetration from inside Gaza in seven months. In this context, Rice's admiration for the "steps" Abbas has taken to curb Palestinian terrorism rings hollow. And yet Rice went on to compound her stance with an even more incongruous avowal: "When the Israelis withdraw from Gaza, it cannot be sealed or isolated, with the Palestinian people holed in ... We are committed to the connectivity of Gaza and the West Bank."

'This sort of statement is grating for two reasons. First, because it implies that Israel is, presumably out of spite or indifference, arbitrarily impeding Palestinian movements when all such movements have immediate security implications. Second, because at just the moment when Israel is simultaneously under terrorist attack and tearing itself apart over dismantling settlements, Washington still seems to feel a need to search for some Palestinian demand it can endorse while publicly berating Israel. This is called "evenhandedness," something that Rice's predecessor early in the Bush administration vowed would not continue under President George W. Bush, and yet remains a recurring touchstone of American policy.'

So much for the Bush doctrine.

Michael Ledeen has explored the reasons why Tony Blair may have omitted Iraq and Israel from his list of countries that have suffered from terrorism. He puts it down in part to the related Britsh phenomena of multiculturalism, a history of Arab appeasement and the astonishing indifference to the recent creation of ‘Londonistan’. But there’s something else:

‘The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.

'This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington. Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.

'All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.’

Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post makes a strong if bitter point:

‘Had Israeli police shot dead an innocent foreigner on one of its buses or trains, confirming the kill with a barrage of bullets at close range in a mistaken effort to thwart a bombing, the UN would probably have been sitting in emergency session by late afternoon to unanimously denounce the Jewish state. By evening, 12 hours had passed since the shooting, but the BBC still hadn't interviewed a grieving family, no one had called for British universities to be boycotted, Chelsea and Arsenal soccer clubs hadn't been ordered to play their matches in Cyprus, and The Guardian hadn't yet called British policy against its Pakistani population "genocide."

‘As for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who is in overall control of transport in the city, including the train where the man was shot, and who strongly defended the shoot-to-kill policy as a legitimate way to prevent suicide bombings, he was not yet facing war crimes charges – as Livingstone himself has demanded Israeli political leaders should be. Instead on Friday, Polly Toynbee, leading commentator for The Guardian, wrote that the terrorists were "deranged," "savage" and "demented" "killers" who "murder in the name of God." This is a far cry from the habitual manner in which The Guardian and others describe the suicide killers of Israelis as "fighters" and "activists."'

Gross also makes the striking point that the Israelis do not shoot their suicide bombers – they disarm them, as happened in fact last Friday when, at the very time British police were committing their fatal error at Stockwell station, the IDF caught and disarmed a terrorist from Fatah already inside Israel en route to carrying out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Gross is right to say that the Israelis receive no credit for this. But I doubt whether he is right to say that the reports in the British press that the Israelis had advised the British police to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the brain were a lie. It all depends on where the suspected bomber is at the time. As an article in the New York Times reports, the crucial point is that the Israelis are able to disarm their human bombs because they have prior intelligence:

‘Among the differences in the situations faced by the two countries, perhaps the most significant is intelligence. Israel occupies the West Bank and its army and officials of the Shin Bet counterterrorism agency patrol it constantly. They have mapped every building and built a network of informants and collaborators. Many Israeli officers speak Arabic, and they often receive a warning before a bomber tries to attack.

‘Boaz Ganor, a counterterrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, an Israeli policy research center, said, "The key is intelligence, to know when they're coming." The last option is offense, he said, because when confronted with a suicide bomber in a crowded area, "you have to act" before the bomber can detonate the explosive. The risk of "false positives," however, is enormous, he said, as in the British case.’

They key to the debacle at Stockwell, as I said in my Daily Mail article today, is the catastrophic dearth of British intelligence on the British Islamic terror networks. Once a suspected human bomb gets into a crowded area of likely targets, there is no option but to kill him. But the aim should be to intercept him before he ever gets to that position. That can only be done by extensive and accurate intelligence – the one thing Israel has and Britain, as we are now painfully being made all too aware, does not.

An insightful piece of reportage in Christian Science Monitor goes some way towards answering the question ‘why do they do it?’:

‘Abu Osama's faith deepened early. Watching his Pakistani immigrant father struggle to support his family of seven, he sought strength in Islam. "I began praying and studying when I was 16, and since then I've been like this," he says, pointing to his long, curling beard. Abu Osama first spoke publicly eight years ago; he has since won ardent followers.

‘Last fall, addressing a meeting of scores of British radicals, he sighed: "At the moment in Britain there is no jihad." Faces fell around the hall. "Yet!" he exclaimed suddenly, to approving murmurs. The jihad would soon come, Abu Osama predicted, and he urged his listeners to embrace its arrival. On 7/7, the jihad came. The suicide bombers were aged 18 to 30 - the same age as Abu Osama's cohorts. By portraying militancy as the ultimate expression of piety, Abu Osama and preachers like him are leading young Muslims down the path toward violence.

‘"Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you'll want to convert," says Dublin-born convert Khalid Kelly, who soaks up Abu Osama's sidewalk sermon. "But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle." Armed struggle was the last thing on Mr. Kelly's mind until his conversion several years ago. "I was your average Irish drunkard, partying and so on," he says. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a nurse, for brewing his own alcohol, Kelly found Islam in prison - an increasingly common arena for Muslim conversion and radicalization.

‘After his return to Britain in 2002, Kelly quickly became a disciple of Bakri, a radical Syrian-born cleric based in Britain, who is most widely known for celebrating 9/11, and more recently, blaming 7/7 on British foreign policy. Through Bakri's circle, which is now largely underground, Kelly met Abu Osama. Now, they gravitate toward obscure mosques that nurture homegrown extremists.

‘"The imam here" - Kelly nods at the mosque - "said, 'Pray for the victory of the mujahideen in all the world.' He's talking about Osama bin Laden, but he can't say that." Hard-line mosques are an intoxicating arena for disillusioned young Muslims, Britain's fastest-growing, poorest, and worst-educated minority. "The pull to Islam in general is not bad," says Malik. "It gives [young people] a sense of identity and spirituality that is important to their lives." However, the perceived persecution of Muslims worldwide can imbue their faith with a politics of resentment; they see the world divided into two opposing groups: Muslims and others. "The world begins to appear black and white," Malik says.’

Irwin Stelzer tears into Britain’s useless attitude to the war being waged against the west:

‘British culture now dictates a confused response to terrorists. Start with the unwillingness of the majority of the British people to recognize that they are indeed in a war. The flak-jacketed, heavily armed men and women lining my road to Heathrow last week were cops, not troops. America is at war, Britain is playing cops and criminals… The entire panoply of legal procedures that prevent detention, deportation, and arrest of Muslim clerics calling for the blood of Britain's infidels is available to the as-many-as 3,000 terrorists whom the authorities estimate live in Britain, many trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or with actual battle experience in Iraq. Whatever rights U.K. law doesn't confer are available to the fledgling jihadists as a result of Blair's decision to sign on to Europe's Human Rights Act. Britain makes available to terrorists and preachers of mayhem, often at government expense, an entire industry of human rights lawyers and support groups... So British policy remains: easy entry for potential terrorists; benefits for them while they are in the country; and relative safety from deportation and detention as enemy combatants. Little wonder that Britain's security services say another strike, more lethal than the one last Thursday, is a virtual certainty.’

As Stelzer says Tony Blair — for whom he has previously held a pretty steady candle — goes along with all this, plus the deadly poison of multiculturalism, to this very day. So much so, in fact, that even after the London bombings the response is to avoid a backlash that may upset the Muslims even more. Thus Britain is paralysed, the bungling will continue and its people will remain unprotected.

The Guardian has now fired its trainee journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, after news reports picked up the disclosure by Daily Ablution blogger Scott Burgess that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir whose website — according to the BBC — ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’. The firing is the first (albeit small) British mainstream media scalp taken by the blogosphere, whose vital role in policing and holding to account unaccountable mainstream media has now at last begun to have an effect in Britain and well as in the US.

This has provoked screams of fury from within al Guardian, where some members of staff at least are still clearly in the Aslam camp. An anonymous ‘staff reporter’ writes:

‘Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the 'blogosphere' can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.’

Ah yes, ‘rightwing’ – the knee-jerk Guardian insult, which it employs as a synonym for ‘evil’, and which it automatically applies to anyone who upholds fundamental notions of truth and the difference between right and wrong. Thus the paper masks the uncomfortable fact that it saw nothing wrong in the views expressed by this member of a party which ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’ and thought they sat perfectly comfortably on its pages.

Yesterday, the Guardian ran a story about its firing of Aslam, as well as an entry in its Corrections and Clarifications column. But these items obscure the real scandal of this affair. Corrections and Clarifications tells us:

‘At the end of an article headed We rock the boat, page 21 (Comment), July 13, we identified the author Dilpazier Aslam as a Guardian trainee journalist but did not say that he was a member of the political party Hizb ut Tahrir. The Guardian accepts that Mr Aslam’s membership of the party should have been explicitly mentioned...’

What this coy rubric implies but does not spell out is that the Guardian knew that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir before the blogosphere got hold of the story. This is confirmed in a brief paragraph buried on yet another Guardian web article on the affair, this time in a ‘background briefing’ published yesterday. After a lot of sanctimonious guff about promoting diversity, this admits that although Aslam did not mention his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir on his application form:

‘Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party, drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.’

And yet

‘On July 12 - the day it was announced that the July 7 London bombs had been placed by young British Muslims from west Yorkshire - Aslam was asked to write a piece for the comment page.’

So Aslam was not fired because the Guardian thought -- as it said in its statement -- that his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir was ‘incompatible with his continued employment by the company’. It had been perfectly happy, it seems, for its trainee to be a member of this organisation – as long as no-one else knew about it. It was only when this fact became known that he was fired – presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

So who were the ‘several colleagues and some senior editors’ who did know and yet chose to do nothing about it? What price the Guardian's anti-fascist credentials, when it is happy to be in bed with an anti-Jewish organisation that promotes religious fascism -- at least until this relationship is exposed? And what does this tell us about the Guardian and the role it is playing at a time of national emergency?

The Times reports:

‘An Indian man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001. ‘Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. His lawyer has claimed, however, that the confession was “forcefully taken” and that Afroze was tortured by Indian police.

‘Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.’

I did a double-take when I read this. One of the central claims by the appeasenik crowd is that Britain would never have been an al Qaeda target had it not joined the US in its war on terror, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. It was always obvious to anyone with eyes to see that Britain was always a target along with the rest of the free world. But the only reference to an actual plot against Britain on 9/11, as far as I am aware, was made in Rohan Gunaratna’s book Inside al Qaeda. Now, in a small story on page 12 of the Times, we are told that a man has been convicted of an al Qaeda conspiracy to hit Britain on 9/11. Shouldn’t this be a major story?

*Update: a reader has pointed out to me that the Daily Mail ran a story on Afroze's arrest for this plot on December 7 2001.

A poll carried out for the Daily Telegraph has underscored the fact that a terrifying number of Muslims in Britain support terrorist attacks. The vast majority of British Muslims oppose them, but six per cent say they were ‘fully justified’. As the political analyst Professor Anthony King observes:

‘Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do. Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent. A substantial majority, 56 per cent, say that, whether or not they sympathise with the bombers, they can at least understand why some people might want to behave in this way.’

The survey also found that nearly one British Muslim in five feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all:

‘If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country… YouGov asked respondents how they feel about Western society and how, if at all, they feel Muslims should adapt to it. A majority, 56 per cent, believe "Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end".

'However, nearly a third of British Muslims, 32 per cent, are far more censorious, believing that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims should only seek to bring about change by non-violent means but one per cent, about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence.’

These findings are deeply alarming. Such numbers supporting terrorism and expressing hatred for this country and a desire to destroy it are simply insupportable. Britain has a major social and security crisis on its hands which it has yet to properly acknowledge, let alone confront.

According to representatives of the Muslim community in Britain, there is one way to end the suicide bombing threat. Surrender. As the Evening Standard reported:

‘Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq... 7/7, 21/7, and God knows what will happen afterwards, our lives are in real danger and it would seem, so long as we are in Iraq and so long as we are contributing to injustices around the world, we will continue to be in real danger. Tony Blair has to come out of his state of denial and listen to what the experts have been saying, that our involvement in Iraq is stupid." His comments were echoed by the marketing manager for The Muslim Weekly newspaper.

‘Shahid Butt said he believed the threat to Britain would reduce if it pulled its troops out of Iraq. He said: "At the end of the day, these things [violent incidents] are going to happen if current British foreign policy continues. There's a lot of rage, there's a lot of anger in the Muslim community. We have got to get out of Iraq, it is the crux of the matter. I believe if Tony Blair and George Bush left Iraq and stopped propping up dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world, the threat rate to Britain would come down to nearly zero."

‘Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, also called on the Government to take responsibility for creating the "political environment" in which these attacks have happened. He said: "Now we know this wasn't a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it's urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life."'

I’d say this was a clear threat to Britain from these people, that unless we come out of Iraq there will be more attacks. Bombs on the tubes and buses, threats from community leaders -- Britain is currently under sustained attack by word as well as deed, in a pincer movement designed to break our resolve.

Meanwhile, at least 83 people died in an al Qaeda attack on Egypt when bombs ripped apart three hotels at Sharm el Sheikh, the popular Egyptian tourist resort — thus helping prove, if those who believe Iraq was a cause of the London attacks are paying any attention, that we are dealing with a fascistic agenda which changes its grievance of choice with every country that it targets, precisely to sow confusion and division among gullible populations. The fact is that Islamofascists have declared war on everyone who stands in the way of the revival of the global Islamic Caliphate, and everyone who defends themselves against this holy war of conquest — whether they are in Australia, Indonesia, Chechnya, Israel, Iraq, the US or Britain — is presented therefore as an aggressor and used to recruit still more into this cult of murderous lunacy. The only alternative for those under such attack, however, is surrender. That is why those in Britain who endorse the morally twisted and cynically selective logic of the Iraq connection — such as the wretched BBC — are behaving like traitors to their country in a time of war.

The gay pressure group Outrage has claimed that its leaders have received death threats from Islamic extremists:

‘Peter Tatchell, the leader of OutRage; Brett Lock its campaign co-ordinator; and Aaron Saeed, the organization's spokesperson on Muslim affairs, have been warned they will be murdered, Tatchell said Monday. In a statement Tatchell said that they have been told they are on a "hit list" and are going to be "beheaded" and "chopped up", in accordance with "Islamic law". ‘The threats apparently began soon after OutRage stepped up its campaign in defense of LGBT Muslims, including gay Muslims fleeing attempted "honor killings" in Algeria, Iran Palestine and in the UK. Tatchell said that since early April, Islamic fundamentalists have made various attempts to track his movements - posing as journalists, police officers and representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain.’

Tatchell is prone to making somewhat wild statements, but in the circumstances this should not be ignored. Although I have my differences with the gay rights lobby, such a threat to gay people is all too real. All of us who are targeted by this terror must now stand shoulder to shoulder in the great fight to defend our society against it.

Amir Taheri relates the horrendous toll in France sustained by that country’s historic appeasement of Islamic terror, and issues a timely warning to Britain:

‘As Britain tries to absorb the shock of 7/7, some voices are urging what would amount to the appeasement of the terrorists. Experience, however, shows that the appeaser becomes a more attractive target for the terrorists. The appeased terrorist concludes that, having won a battle, he should press for victory in his war against a weakened adversary. Appeasing terrorists was tried by French president Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s, and made France the most-targeted Western country for a decade...

‘France is not alone in having tried appeasement and failed. Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Saudi Arabia and more recently Spain have had similar experiences. The British should know that any appeasement of terrorists could put them in an even greater danger.’

Taheri is worried about Britain’s resolve. He’s right to be so.

The following transcript of remarks by the impressive Austalian Prime Minister John Howard in London today provides a devastating riposte to the 'Iraq is the cause of London terrorism' brigade:

PRIME MIN. HOWARD: 'Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

'Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

'And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

'Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

'When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

'When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

'Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.'

PRIME MIN. BLAIR: 'And I agree 100 percent with that'. (Laughter.)

Since the London bombings, the Guardian has paraded on its comment pages a sickening number of apologists for terror, taking that paper into a new dimension altogether of treachery in time of war. Today it publishes an article by Professor Norman Geras denouncing such reactions. In a shortened version of a post on his eponymous Normblog, Geras writes:

‘The "We told you so" crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London. How do they know this, these clever people? For what they need to know is not just that Iraq was one of a number of influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary, motivating cause for the London bombings. If it was only an influencing motivational cause among others, and if, more particularly, another such motivational cause was supplied by the military intervention in Afghanistan, then it's not the case that the London bombings wouldn't have happened but for the Iraq war.

‘Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.

‘There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share. Because we believe in and value these, we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with is precisely it. We have to challenge their excuses without let-up.’

In his full piece on Normblog, Geras further amplifies the extreme political selectivity of the root-causers:

‘These are people for whom the crime of 9/11 did not constitute an act of war meriting a military response, people whose preferred course of action was to leave the Taliban in situ ruling that country and al-Qaida with the freedom to continue organizing there. This rather does help to establish what is one of the main objects of the present post, namely that the root-causers are very selective about the root causes they're willing to recognize as relevant; and, attached as they are to an ethico-political outlook that has lately been (let us just say) indulgent towards anti-democratic forces, they particularly favour root causes originating in the vicinity of Washington DC.

‘To shift part of the blame for the London killings and maimings on to Blair and Bush - and also Parliament and Congress, and everyone who supported the war in all the coalition-of-the-willing countries - you not only have to guess at the Iraq war having been operative and decisive in the motivations of the actual bombers, you not only have to overlook anything that might have been right about that war, like seeing off one of the most brutal and murderous dictators of the last few decades, you further have to reckon that what was wrong about the war not merely caused the anger of those bombers but made their response, in some sort, morally appropriate rather than (what it in fact was) criminally excessive.’

No doubt tomorrow it will be business as usual at al Guardian.

In the Times, Dr Theodore Dalrymple articulates the profound unease I have felt at the decision by the General Medical Council to strike off the medical register Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician whose apparent statistical error which formed part of his expert evidence in court was said to have helped convict a number of women of killing their babies, convictions which were later overturned. Dalrymple writes:

‘Professor Meadow did not wrongly convict anyone — only the courts could have done that. And if his statistical reasoning was so obviously and disgracefully wrong, why was he able for so long, according to the GMC, to persist in his errors, uninterrupted by defence experts and lawyers? (I leave aside the question of what part his statistical evidence actually played in the original convictions.) An error that is obvious once it has been pointed out may not be so very obvious before it is pointed out... Evidential value is not proof, however, and anyone who thought it were would be failing to understand the nature of proof in a criminal trial. The expert does not speak, and the jury convict or acquit accordingly; or if it does, the fault lies not with the expert, but with the court.

‘A society that is intolerant of error will soon become intolerant of truth, for truth rarely emerges except by the testing of error. In this connection, it is probably not irrelevant to note that Professor Meadow was a disseminator of an unwelcome and disturbing truth: that parents may sometimes maltreat their own children in bizarre ways, and those children, therefore, need to be protected from them. Although I am not a paediatrician, I can testify from personal clinical experience that parents are capable of doing things to their own children that, had I not had incontrovertible evidence, I should scarcely have credited as being possible. And all paediatricians in this country are familiar with the kind of cases that Professor Meadow described.’

Meadow has been made a scapegoat for a system which was at fault but which has got off scot-free. It was up to the defence to cross-examine Meadow and expose any flaws in his evidence. It failed to do so – and yet Meadow has now been struck off the medical register. Why? He committed no medical error or misconduct against his patients. At worst, he stumbled into an arena - statistics – on which he was not a specialist, and as a result made an error. The whole point of a trial, however, is that evidence should be tested to destruction. It wasn’t. So why has the medical profession treated this as a hanging offence for one of its own?

The most likely answer, as Dalrymple also suggests, is that the GMC was anxious to fall into line with the witch-hunt which developed after the convictions of these mothers were overturned. A sacrifice was demanded, and the GMC duly obliged. As a result, doctors will be far less willing to give evidence as expert witnesses, and in general there will be less chance that in cases of suspected child maltreatment, justice will be done.

Last night, I got a chance to interrogate Dr Azzam Tamimi, the Hamas supporter and advocate of human bomb terror in Israel (see earlier posts), on BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze. You can listen to it here.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been all over the airwaves in the past 24 hours. He says he does not support suicide bombers; but then he provides a detailed justification of this terrorism on the grounds that the terrorists are ‘oppressed’ by the people they murder. He blames the west for ‘double standards’ around the world which drive young Muslim men to turn themselves into human bombs.

Three guesses which particular country is in his sights. At a press conference yesterday, he said:

'Given that the Palestinians don't have jet fighters, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In that unfair balance, that's what people use. When talking about the imbalance of forces, I will gladly welcome leading members of the Israeli government if they come here even though they have done horrendous things which border on crimes against humanity in a way they have indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades’.

He repeatedly draws a moral equivalence between genocidal Arab terrorism against Israel with its attempts to defend itself against it. He wept over the London bombings but implies that the Jews in Israel are fair game for slaughter. He also compared Likud to Hamas, saying:

'I think the Israeli hardliners around Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same coin, they need each other to drum up support.'

Hamas terrorists are regularly killing and attempting to kill Israelis. This is what the Hamas Covenant says:

'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.' (Preamble) 'The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.' (Article 6)

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out:' O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him'. (Article 7)

'The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.' (Article 11)

'Palestine is an Islamic land...Since this is the case, the
Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem
wherever he may be.' (Article 13)

'The enemies have been scheming for a long time...and have
accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money,
they took control of the world media...With their money they stirred
revolutions in various parts of the globe...They stood behind the
French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the
revolutions we hear about...With their money they formed secret organizations - such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions - which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies
and carry out Zionist interests... They stood behind World War I ... and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the
world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains...There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it.' (Article 22)

‘Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.’ (Article 13)

Given that these are the genocidal aims of Hamas, to say that the Israeli Likud party needs Hamas is a sick and bigoted travesty which is almost beyond belief.

Even more disgustingly, Livingstone claimed it was wrong to question the bona fides of young Muslim men when ‘Jewish boys’ who enlisted in the Israeli army were welcomed back into Britain:

'If a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate," he said. "But for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think: I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist. And I think it is this that has infected the attitude about how we deal with these problems.'

Apart from the disgusting equation of the systematic mass murder of Israelis with their attempt to defend themselves against annihilation, he suggested that ‘Jewish boys’ from Britain were helping to oppress the Palestinians. Leave aside the small fact that ‘Jewish boys’ from anywhere only serve in the Israel Defence Force if they are Israeli, and the resulting slur about divided loyalty that this remark implied, this association makes ‘Jewish boys’ in Britain fair game for Muslim boys who will doubtless be further enraged by these lies and libels.

There was yet more. On Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0749), Livingstone said by way of explaining why Palestinian Arabs turned themselves into human bombs against Israelis that they did not have the vote. The implication was that Israel has prevented them from having the vote, and is therefore an apartheid state. But of course, the Arabs of the territories do not have a vote in Israel because the territories are not part of Israel; Livingstone would be the first to scream if Israel claimed them as such. If it’s the lack of a Palestinian state that he’s referring to, well, they have been offered that repeatedly and responded instead by murdering Jews. And in any event, they do have a vote – they used it to elect Mahmoud Abbas as their Prime Minister.

Livingstone, whose whole presentation was off the wall, was given the softest of treatments by the Today presenter who lobbed a couple of feeble counter-arguments at him but never challenged the gross distortions.

This man is no longer some far-left maverick. He is the Labour Mayor of London, brought back into the Labour fold by Tony Blair himself. His words, like countless articles and broadcasts by people who have treacherously sided with or made excuses for the enemies of this country and the west have without doubt, through the lies and libels they have perpetrated, helped foment the demented hysteria which sends Muslim boys into the arms of the cynical terror-puppeteers who turn them into human bombs. If the Prime Minister seriously wants to root out the causes of terror, he should expel Livingstone once more from the Labour party – and the Attorney-General should consider whether there is a case against him for incitement.

Meanwhile, alas, the torrent of poison about Israel has done its lethal work among the British mainstream. As Michael Gove reports in the Times:

‘Listening to Any Questions the other day, I was intrigued to hear one of the panelists refer to a fascinating website run by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organisation that translates news reports and speeches from the Arab world. MEMRI has provided a valuable insight into developments in Arab politics and religion, including illuminating translations of sermons, whose reliability no one has seriously contested. But on Friday night's show George Galloway kept interrupting his fellow-panelist to point out that people working for MEMRI were Israelis. A section of the audience laughed and applauded, as though this exposed MEMRI's work as unworthy of further attention.’

Israel, a nation that by and large tells the truth, has become a synonym for lies — as a result of the Big Lies about Israel that now circulate in the British bloodstream. To repeat: the demonisation of Israel and the Jews lie at the rotten core of the war against the west. It will not — cannot — be won until this is acknowledged, discussed and dealt with.

One desperately wants to give credit where credit is due. The British Muslim Forum has issued a fatwa against fanaticism and terrorism. That is a good start; it is the second such fatwa by British Muslims in the past few days, and thus a significant advance on the silence that came before.

But...

The text of this fatwa is slippery. It unequivocally condemns suicide bombings in London but does not unequivocally condemn them elsewhere, for example in Iraq or Israel:

‘Islam strictly, strongly and severely condemns the use of violence and the destruction of innocent lives. There is neither place nor justification in Islam for extremism, fanaticism or terrorism. Suicide bombings, which killed and injured innocent people in London, are HARAAM - vehemently prohibited in Islam, and those who committed these barbaric acts in London are criminals not martyrs. Such acts, as perpetrated in London, are crimes against all of humanity and contrary to the teachings of Islam.’

This leaves wide open the question of whether suicide bombings elsewhere are permitted. And if the religion does permit them elsewhere, then obviously it is not true that ‘There is neither place nor justification in Islam for extremism, fanaticism or terrorism. ‘

It condemns the ’destruction of innocent lives’ everywhere, but that begs the question of the meaning of ‘innocent’. This suspicion deepens when it adds:

‘The Holy Quran declares: “Whoever kills a human being… then it is as though he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a human life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.“ (Quran, Surah al-Maidah (5), verse 32) Islam’s position is clear and unequivocal: Murder of one soul is the murder of the whole of humanity; he who shows no respect for human life is an enemy of humanity.”’

But it is not unequivocal at all, because the verse that is quoted here contains another, absolutely crucial phrase which has been left out in this fatwa but which changes the meaning altogether:

‘That was why we laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, (my emphasis) shall be regarded as having killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind.

‘Our apostles brought them veritable proofs; yet many among them, even after that, did prodigious evil in the land. Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.’ (Sura 5:31)

In other words, where there is ‘villainy’ killing is expressly permitted; and since villainy can mean anything, and since Islamist extremists regard western or democratic influence as villainous, it follows that the slaughter of western or reformnist Muslim innocents is expressly permitted – because they are not regarded as innocent in the first place.

This sinister thinking is presumably why, as the Times reports today, a Muslim teacher in Dewsbury – which is where one of the London bombers came from -- who signed a fatwa against suicide bombings nevertheless advocates armed jihad and hatred and suspicion of the west and the country in which his pupils live:

‘While Tony Blair and leaders of Britain’s Muslims were condemning extremism at their Downing Street summit, Mufti Zubair Dudha explained why British foreign policy led directly to the 7/7 atrocities. Mr Dudha, 29, teaches primary school children, teenagers and young adults at his Islamic Tarbiyah academy in Dewsbury.

‘He condemned the London atrocities and signed the Sunni Muslim fatwa against suicide bombings, but he is also an advocate of jihad. In his foreword to a 1996 translation of a pamphlet by one of his mentors, entitled Jihaad, Mr Dudha wrote: “Today many of us are misled into believing that in our times jihad of the sword is not warranted. Most definitely physical jihad is, and will be needed to a large extent.”

‘Later he added: “Besides the jihad of the pen and tongue, the Muslim ummah [nation] cannot be exempted from physical jihad. No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruits and blessings of physical jihad for the course of Allah.” One chapter title in the book is: “Preparing for Jihad and obtaining warfare equipment is also compulsory...

‘In Dewsbury, students at Mr Dudha’s Islamic Tarbiyah Academy are taught that “the enemies of Allah” have schemed “to poison the thinking and minds of [Muslim] youth and to plant the spirit of unsteadiness and moral depravity in their lives”. Parents are told that they betray their children if they allow them to associate with non-Muslims.’

Does the government realise that these declarations seem not to be worth the paper they are written on?

Riveting piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht contends that the Islamic terrorism that has emerged in Europe is not a foreign import from Arab and Muslim lands but has become a home-grown European phenomenon:

'What was once unquestionably an import has gone native, mutated, and grown. Some of what the Europeans are now confronting -- and for the United States this is very bad news -- is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. "European Islam" appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe--the folks French scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce "extraordinary progress in civilization," a new "Andalusia" (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden's jihad--have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in "Londonistan" and elsewhere in Europe. Moderates surely represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe, but like their post-Christian European counterparts, they usually express their moderation in detachment from religious affairs.

'Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success. It explains why Muslim activists gain so much attention, be they arch-conservatives, like the devotees of the Tabligh movement in Britain and on the continent who espouse segregation in Europe, or "progressives," like the Switzerland-based intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who refuses forthrightly to declare the Muslim Holy Law null and void as a political testament for Muslims in a European democracy. The moderates have abandoned the field. They have become European. The militants, who perhaps should be seen as deviants from a largely successful process of secularization, are the only ones left ardently praying.

'For organizations like al Qaeda, this may mean that the future will be decisively European. From its earliest days, al Qaeda viewed Europe as an important launching platform for attacks against the United States and its interests. Now, Western counterterrorist forces, which have traditionally tried to track Middle Eastern missionaries in Europe, would be well advised to start searching for radical European Muslim missionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Some Europeans--and they are mostly French--have seen the future. Always ahead of his time, the French scholar Olivier Roy has written:

"When we consider the [Islamic] movements that embrace violence, we can see that they are not expressions of an outburst in the West of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in the Middle East. Most of the young Muslims radicalize in the West: They are "born-again Muslims." It's here that they are Islamicized. Almost all separate from their families and many have marriages with non-Muslims. Their dispute with the world isn't imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that Action Directe had twenty years ago. . . . They exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live only to destroy the system. . . . [This radicalization] isn't at all the consequence of a "clash of civilizations," that is to say, the importation of intellectual frameworks coming from the Middle East. This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West."

'Roy may overstate the autonomy of Islamic radicalism in Europe from the militancy in the Middle East; he surely diminishes too much the religious ingredient in the emerging radical Muslim European identity. But my own visits to numerous radical mosques in Western Europe since 9/11 suggest that he is more right than wrong about the Europeanization of Islamic militancy. The Saudis may pay for the mosques and the visiting Saudi and Jordanian imams, but the believers are often having very European conversations in European languages. In France, Belgium, or Holland, sitting with young male believers can feel like a time-warp, a return to the European left of the 1970s and early 1980s.'

This is of course part and parcel of the axis that has developed between the left and Islamofascism, which has filled the totalitarian gap left by the defeat first of Nazism and then of Communism. It is surely no accident that the word 'struggle', which is used in Marxist thinking to sanctify the attempts by the workers or the self-designated 'oppressed' to destroy western civilisation, was also found in the defining creed of Nazism --'Mein Kampf'-- and is the meaning of the word 'jihad'. Nazism and Communism required the submission of free peoples to their ideology -- and 'submission' is of course the meaning of the word 'Islam'.

I wouldn't go as far as Gerecht or Roy in downplaying the influence of the Arab and Muslim world on the Muslims of Europe; nor would I downplay the role of the grievance culture -- based on the lies and libels about the west and the Jews that are disseminated by that world -- in acting as a recruiting sergeant for terror among European Muslims. But I do think that there is a symbiotic relationship between Islamic fascism and the European left, which has, alas, created a particular and distinctive European nightmare.

I wondered who would be the first person in Britain to openly blame the Jews for the London bombings. Step forward for the garland of hatred Professor Sir Bernard Crick, the government’s former adviser on citizenship. On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0852) this morning, he said:

‘It’s not easily refuted that these kinds of protests…have been going on since the failure of Israel to follow the UN resolutions after the 1967 war.’

Sir Bernard, whose speciality is politics and who is a biographer of George Orwell, has a selective grasp of historical facts. Contrary to popular myth, the UN’s most important resolutions concerning Israel (which ones he was referring to he did not specify) do not place unconditional obligations on Israel to give up the territories it occupied after the Six-Day War. They require it instead to give up ‘territories’ — the absence of the definite article was deliberate — but not necessarily all of them, and then only if the Arab states that declared war on Israel and thus caused it to take the territories as an act of self-defence abandon that war. That has never happened. To repeat for the umpteenth time — Israel’s occupation of those territories was not an act of aggression but an act of self-defence, and its continued presence there while war continues to be waged against it by Arabs pledged to its destruction is sanctioned under international law as a legitimate defensive measure.

There is no doubt that ‘Palestine’ is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic death cult by propagating the big lie of Israeli aggression and oppression and thus inciting hatred and murderous hysteria towards the Jews among Muslims across the globe. To blame the Jews, who are the victims of this terrifying evil and are in the front line of fighting it, rather than those who are perpetrating the lies and racial libels which are fuelling it, is disgraceful.

Sir Bernard Crick is not some marginal figure. He is at the heart of the Labour and British establishment. Moreover, the view he ariculates is shared by a very significant proportion of that establishment. He is therefore a symptom of the moral sickness that has gripped Britain and which poses such terrible dangers to the defence of the west. The hatred of Israel lies at the very epicentre of the war that now rages. Until and unless this fact is grasped, along with the profound moral inversion that it has caused throughout the west, we will not win this fight for civilisation.

A reader has sent me this impression of ‘multiculturalism’ in the British classroom:

‘As a Christian primary school teacher, I believe the moral values, religious beliefs and ethical codes (or lack thereof) are the foundation of society, our dialogue and interactions with people of various faiths. Many Brits are unsure of their own beliefs (due to watered-down Christianity which lacks any vitality or relevance) and definitely ignorant of the beliefs and religious teachings of the main faiths represented in Britain (Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism). Hence the confusion, as you mentioned, over the term 'jihad' and cultish Muslim doctrine.

’I believe that this 'moral inversion' starts in schools. A lot has been said of the responsibility of mosques and Muslim Society leaders, but the schools these children attend play a large part in their 'moral upbringing' albeit passively. The majority of Muslim children attend state schools, Catholic and Church of England Primary Schools. Twelve years ago when I was at C of E Sixth Form, I remember the religious tension and the political correctness creeping in.

‘On many occasions I have attended conferences with other colleagues in education from the north of England. According to my colleagues in these multicultural areas, their schools consist of at least 75%-100% Muslim children. White British children are in the minority and often feel intimidated. The daily grief their staff endure is unbelievable.

‘White, British female teachers are often insulted by their own pupils, suffer sexual harassment from young Muslim males and are intimidated by Muslim fathers (in their own classrooms) who have no respect for women. Parents aggressively handle their own children, undermining school codes and ethos in front of the children. One colleague said she was told by a father, if his daughter did not achieve academically, she (the teacher) should tell her that she is stupid, lazy and useless and let him know so that she can be beaten at home! This is a regular occurrence in schools - especially C of E schools, and teachers have their hands tied as opposition would be branded as religious hatred and racism.

‘Heads and governors are frightened to step a foot wrong in their own schools, lest they offend the community by upholding Christian values and denying the right for Muslim children to pray during the day. There is so much fear that paralyses and I believe actually prevents clear religious dialogue because Christianity is seen as inferior and submissive to the wishes of Islam. When you think that thousands of these Muslim children also attend Koran school (sometimes everyday) you can see they way they are indoctrinated by Muslim logic from the very start.

‘I work in a predominantly white school. I am the only ethnic minority teacher on staff, and there are only a handful of children from ethnic minority groups. Even in this predominantly Christian school, there is fear of being associated with Islamophobia and racism. Many people are afraid to talk about religion these days. Religious discussions as seen as taboo, as they may cause offence.

‘We actually held a themed 'Multicultural Week' this year and the person who co-ordinated it decided not to cover any RE during the week as it could upset some people. So we looked at the nations of China, India, Pakistan without even a mention of their religious beliefs and festivals! As our area is not very multicultural at all, there weren't even any minority groups who could visit and share their culture. Needless to say, the children were left with a very narrow and unrealistic view of the places and the cultures they were studying.

’I know that this is only a brief mention or a snapshot, but when I think of all the multicultural schools across Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and London, there must be thousands of children (British Christians and British Muslims) who are seeing Christianity undermined while Islam forces its way in. These children, shaped by our example and actions now, will be Britain tomorrow.’

Michael J Totten’s website links to an ABC News item in 1999 which reported evidence of substantial links between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Much of this has been reported by Stephen Hayes in his various books and articles (see previous posts), but it is helpful to hear audio proof that this connection was acknowledged back in the days of the Clinton administration.

If you ignore the over-excitable commentary which irritatingly punctuates this clip, you will hear the ABC reporter in 1999 reveal that Osama bin Laden was trying to obtain nukes for al Qaeda and went to Saddam Hussein, one of the few sources who was in a position to help, on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’; that the relationship had started in the Sudan; that Sudanese officials acting on behalf of bin Laden asked representatives of Saddam Hussein for asylum and were told that bin Laden would be welcome in Baghdad; and that bin Laden observed that there were people who were prepared to commit terror in his name whom he did not control.

When is the British mainstream media going to start reporting any of this voluminous evidence of the connection (see earlier posts)? How long are they going to collude in the myth that there were no links between Saddam and al Qaeda?

An editorial in The Business makes some excellent points about the state of denial in Britain and the true nature of what we face:

‘In today's Britain you will find proof positive that those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. The fact is that Britain is pockmarked by all manner of communities which feel alienated, marginalised and discriminated against, from East Glasgow to South London, but none become suicide bombers, bar those contaminated by a perversion of Islam. Nor were the London bombers particularly poor: some were university educated, most lived normal lower-middle class lives; the Egyptian biochemist suspected of being the bombmaster (and this weekend being interrogated in Cairo) had been granted £30,000 by the British taxpayer to continue his studies at Leeds University. So much for marginalisation or discrimination.

‘Then there is Iraq. In the most stupid intervention so far by a major British politician, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy tried to link the country's vulnerability to terrorism to Britain's intervention in Iraq. Our memory might sometimes fail us but we seem to remember that the jihadists who inspired the London atrocity were bombing New York's Twin Towers and Paris subway stations a full decade before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the brutal reality of today's Iraq is not that it is a crucible for terrorists out to bomb London but that it is under attack from the very same sort of terrorists who have bombed London. Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadist, is currently slaughtering thousands of innocent Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad on a much grander scale than Londoners were slaughtered on 7/7 -- all because he would rather have civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims rather than peace and democracy.

‘Last week he had the head of the Egyptian ambassador to Iraq hacked off because he believes that all earthly governments are an affront to Allah. At the same time his bombers were killing and maiming scores of Iraqi children. Anybody who thinks that the beheading and the bombing (in London or Baghdad) will stop - and that video copies of the beheading will no longer be passed around outside London mosques, as they were this week - only when the last British soldier leaves Basra is an idiot. We will know Britain's Muslim leaders have come of age when they stop bellyaching about the invasion of Iraq, start realising that the people of London and Baghdad face a common jihadist enemy, condemn unreservedly killers like Mr Zarqawi and urge their young people to turn against him and his kind.’

Tony Blair’s speech last Saturday on the threat that we face was excellent and seminal, a step-change in his rhetoric on Islamic terror, and should be read in full. He spelled out more clearly than he had ever done before why the argument that the London bombings were carried out in response to Iraq or indeed to any other conflict is exceptionally stupid and ignorant:

‘This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past 12 years, Al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked 26 countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims… They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taleban states and Sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations...

‘From the mid 1990s onwards, statements from Al-Qaeda, gave very clear expression to this ideology: "Every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hatred towards the Americans, Jews and Christians. This is part of our ideology. The creation of Israel is a crime and it has to be erased. You should know that targeting Americans and Jews and killing them anywhere you find them on the earth is one of the greatest duties and one of the best acts of piety you can offer to God Almighty." Just as great is their hatred for so-called apostate governments in Muslim countries. This is why mainstream Muslims are also regarded as legitimate targets.

‘Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can't be moderated. It can't be remedied. It has to be stood up to.’

Quite. But will he do so?

Last week there was an Islamic Jihad suicide bombing outside a Netanya mall that killed five and wounded 90 Israelis, and hundreds of Hamas rocket attacks over the Gaza border into Israel that killed a woman who was sitting on her porch. This followed five months of the so-called ‘truce’ declared by Hamas and Islamic jihad which in fact has seen dozens of mostly thwarted terror attacks on Israelis. Finally, Israel responded by resuming attacks on the Hamas leadership. Yet parts of the media described this as Israel breaking the truce. As HonestReporting.com reports, the Washington Post said:

‘The Israeli military killed seven members of Hamas on Friday in rocket strikes that renewed Israel's policy of assassinating militant Palestinian leaders and effectively marked the end of a five-month truce’

while Associated Press claimed:

‘The Israeli military launched an airstrike Friday on a van carrying Hamas militants and a cache of homemade rockets in a Gaza City street, killing four people in what may be the most serious blow to a 5-month-old truce.’

Question: why do these media outlets regard the sustained terrorism by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as not breaking the truce but when Israel finally tried to defend its citizens this is breaking the truce? Answer: because Jewish casualties of Arab terror are invisible since the media ‘know’ that the Jews don’t do self-defence, only aggression — even when they are under rocket attack.

The authority on anti-Jewish hatred Professor Robert Wistrich, writing in the Jerusalem Post about Britain’s fanatics, makes the crucial point that anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred lie at the very core of the jihad against the west:

‘Perhaps most worrisome, stridently anti-Israel sentiments have long ceased to be limited to Muslims. Earlier this year, the city's mayor, Ken Livingstone published a piece in The Guardian claiming that Ariel Sharon "is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office," adding that "Israel's own expansion has included ethnic cleansing." ‘Since the election late this spring, things have only gotten worse. On May 21, a massive rally held in Trafalgar Square featured a crowd waving anti-Israel banners. In addition to Palestinian representatives and local Muslim leaders, several prominent non-Muslim public figures also spoke. Tony Benn, for instance, a former Labor MP and veteran Leftist, called George Bush and Sharon the "two most dangerous men in the world," while Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War coalition demanded the dismantling of the Jewish state. "The South African apartheid state never inflicted the sort of repression that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians," he said to cries of allahu akbar! from the audience. "When there is real democracy, there will be no more Israel."

‘The demonization of Israel has had a profoundly debilitating effect on British public opinion. It has helped to blind Britain to the true nature of the Holy War currently being waged against Western civilization. In reality, the motivations of the bombers have little to do with Palestine, with poverty or despair - the usual suspects evoked after every murderous terrorist assault in Europe or elsewhere. It has everything to do with religious fanaticism. Slowly yet surely, the jihadist challenge is effecting a profound erosion of Britain's proud history of tolerance, moderation and multiculturalism. Unfortunately, until Britain acknowledges this growing cancer of terrorism, jihad and anti-Semitism in its midst - and acts to stamp it out - we can expect that Thursday's tragedy will not be the last London sees.’