Amazing piece by Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal sets out with stunning power and clarity why Iraq is so vital and why it is imperative that we stay the course. He points out that the liberation of Iraq and the empowerment of the previously repressed Shi’ites and Kurds has exposed the silence of the Arab world in the face of the tyranny and barbarism in its midst and its refusal to speak up for, let alone come to the aid of, those whom its own world enslaves:

'It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.'

As Ajami says, terrible mistakes have been made by Iraq’s western liberators, which have left them vulnerable to the gloating of those who want to see America’s come-uppance. And America’s duty to rid the region of its malignancies has been further weakened by its duty to repair the devastation within its own country caused by hurricane Katrina:

'Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner that this country has always assumed redemptive projects. But that other project, in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the '90s. That era had been a fools' paradise; Nasdaq had not brought about history's end. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.

'We have not always been brilliant in the war we have waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more difficult settings, but there, too, the established orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day." The rage against our work in Iraq, all the way from the "chat rooms" of Arabia to the bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within this broader struggle… It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.'

Read it all.

On September 7 (see post below) I wrote about a heartening initiative by a decent member of the Church of England, Simon McIlwaine, to organise a group which would challenge Anglican animosity towards Israel. Today this group, 'Anglicans for Israel', has opened its own website, found here, which contains articles that approach the subject of Israel and the Middle East in a spirit of fairness, truth and historical memory.

This is an immensely welcome development for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates that there are Christians in Britain who are motivated by principled impulses, a spirit of generosity and absence of prejudice towards the Jews and a sound understanding of the wellsprings of evil in the world. As a result, they will give heart to others who think like them but who until now have lacked a voice to represent their viewpoint against the decadent prejudices within Anglicanism. Second, they will provide a vital public challenge to those prejudices for Anglicans who genuinely do not realise that the world-view they take for granted as the moral high ground is actually a repository of moral inversion, historical ignorance and the discourse of racial hatred.

I recently found myself confronting this world-view in a conversation with a senior cleric in the Church of England. We had both just heard an account of Israel's history and society which to me was a travesty of the truth, omitting altogether the half-century of exterminatory Arab attacks on Israel, the vilification of Jews in Arab and Muslim discourse and the five year campaign of mass murder against Israeli citizens in the Oslo intifada. Instead, Israel's Jews were presented as motivated by an otherwise inexplicable racial prejudice against the Arabs and a desire to discriminate against them and generally do them down.

When I protested, the cleric declared that he wanted to understand my pain. I replied that my pain was caused by having heard an account of Israel that was not based on the truth and which would further deepen the already toxic prejudice against the Jews. To which this cleric replied that there was no one truth, and that we all had to respect each other's truths. To which I inquired whether this meant that we had to respect each other's lies -- which elicited the reply that these were merely 'competing narratives'.

So to this cleric, it seems, the Arab lie that, for example, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians -- a lie which has the direct result of inciting the mass murder of Israelis -- has to be respected. Not surprisingly, therefore, he told me that the person to whose narrative I had objected was, to him, 'a hero'. For good measure, dismissing the fusillade of rockets that Hamas had just launched from Gaza against the Israeli town of Sderot, he declared that it was wrong for Israel to attack Hamas in response and that it should be talking to it instead.

When I inquired what they might find to talk about, since Hamas has a non-negotiable postion which happens to be the extermination of Israel, and wondered whether he would have similarly urged negotiations with Hitler instead of declaring war in 1939, he acknowledged that he too had been pondering that very scenario! But attacking Hamas, he persisted, would not achieve anything - a prediction dashed within hours, when after Israel had pounded Hamas positions and thus showed it would not tolerate such aggression but would defend its citizens with tenacity, Hamas was moved suddenly to re-impose its ceasefire.

Maybe 'Anglicans for Israel' will now challenge the moral and intellectual muddle displayed by this cleric and many more like him, and help restore decency and sanity to the church.

An article in the Guardian by its veteran Arabist David Hirst is as illuminating for what it does not say as what it says. Reflecting on the fact that the UN team investigating the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafiq Hariri is apparently about to accuse members of the old Syrian-backed regime and thus implicate Syria itself, he reports Arab commentators claiming that this event will have seismic repercussions throughout the Arab world:

'"a truly historic turning point that could shatter the dominance of political power by Arab security and military establishments"... with "the same impact in this region as the birth of the Solidarity trade union movement had in eastern Europe 25 years ago ... ultimately resulting in the collapse of the communist police state system".'

Hirst himself makes the following observation:

'The region-wide implications of the Hariri affair stem from the abiding fact that what happens in one part of the Arab "nation" is inherently liable to have an exemplary effect on others, especially if it is something constructive.'

Now that, of course, is precisely the thinking behind the Bush doctrine and the whole notion of democracy-building in the Middle East; for the Americans, it was a significant factor behind the toppling of Saddam. Hirst, a visceral opponent of Bush, his doctrine and the Iraq war, draws a clear distinction, however, between the possible exemplary effects of seismic change in Lebanon (good) and the possible exemplary effects of seismic change in Iraq (bad).

As a result, he bestows all the credit for seismic change in Lebanon/Syria upon the (sainted) UN. What he completely omits from this analysis is the event which started the sequence of events which, through the catalyst of the Hariri assassination, led to what has been called the ‘Cedar revolution’ last spring in which the UN ordered Syria out of Lebanon so that, after decades of occupation, it meekly packed up its tanks and left. That event was, of course, the toppling of Saddam and the arrival of free elections and a democratic constitution in a country which, while still engulfed by a bloody civil war caused by the desperate attempt to prevent a liberated Iraq from achieving precisely such an ‘exemplary effect’ on other parts of the Arab nation, has nevertheless ignited similar aspirations among other Arabs groaning under the yoke of tyranny.

Soon after Hariri’s assassination, President Bush declared:

'We want that democracy in Lebanon succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power, and that power is Syria.'

The Lebanese, paying close attention, took to the streets and demanded Syrian withdrawal. Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader said:

'I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.'

To omit the fall of the Arab Berlin Wall altogether from an analysis of this struggle towards a revolutionary new political order in the Arab world is quite an achievement. But then Hirst elegantly adds a harmonious coda to this singular thought process. For he seems to conclude that, despite the excitement of the Syrian people at the prospect of deposing their hated regime, since there is a danger that Syrian despotism might crumble under the impact of the Hariri repercussions into Iraq-style chaos, the world should think again – and keep Bashar Assad in power!

'If the Syrians [ie the Ba'athists] themselves are so worried, shouldn't the world be too? Would it really like its "good" intervention, undeservingly, to go the grim way of its "bad" one - and risk a second Iraq? If, in the era of Bush's "freedom and democracy", it was cynical enough to strike such a bargain with a minor player such as Colonel Gaddafi, mightn't it do the same with an embattled Bashar, for much greater reward, at the strategic and emotional heart of the Arab world?'

Ah yes — the stability of despotism is so much safer than unleashing the manifold unpredictabilities of freedom.

Don’t you just love the left-wing press?

A headline in the current Spectator made me blench:

‘Israel’s actions affect our security’

Here we go again – the Jews being blamed for Islamic terrorism in London. Which particular right-on leftist or paleo-rightist was making this poisonously warped and cerebrally-challenged claim this time? It turned out to be the Labour MP John Denham, described by his admiring interviewer Peter Oborne as ‘mainstream’, ‘courageous’, ‘quietly spoken and pragmatic’, ‘impressive’ and the possessor of ‘common sense ‘. He is also chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, which makes him

'perhaps the most influential and privileged Westminster observer of the domestic war against terror'

.

So what does this ‘mainstream’, ‘courageous’, ‘quietly spoken and pragmatic’, ‘impressive’, ‘influential and privileged’ British politician say about Britain’s Islamic terrorism problem?

He is sceptical about the banning of Islamic organisations, such as al-Muhajiroun, which allegedly promote terrorism. This is because, he says, a year ago the Home Office was advising against such a move and yet

'"there has been no change in the situation as far as the intelligence is concerned. It’s more that there’s been a change of mood that makes the government eager to be perceived to act against these organisations."'

Well, yes, and that mood might just have changed because Londoners just happened to get blown up, and just possibly the Home Office got it wrong a year ago, which contributed to Londoners being blown up, but is getting it right now. Not that the Denham common sense seems to encompass such a possibility.

He doesn’t seem to like any of the government’s proposals to counter terrorism, except detention without trial where he allows there may be some need to lock up some people for whom prosecution may be difficult; but he doesn’t see the point of acting against incitement to terrorism, or the groups doing the inciting, or throwing foreign inciters out of the country. This is because

'The government’s unremitting focus on legal measures aimed primarily at foreign radicals is in danger of distorting the counter-terrorism effort.'

And what should that counter-terrorism effort principally consist of? Engaging with young British Muslims, whose alienation has been ignored. Does he mean the alienation arising from the interpretation of their religion that they are taught and the hatred of western society in which they are steeped? He does not. He does not even mention any possible cause within their own culture. Instead, this alienation is the fault of the government for

'failing to give the ‘issues and concerns raised within the Muslim community any priority till after the London bombings'.

And so what are these 'issues and concerns'?

'"One of the reasons why people got so worked up about Zimbabwe is that they identified with the white farmers. In the same way young Muslims very much identify with Palestinians. We should recognise that areas like the Israel–Palestine conflict, Kashmir or Chechnya are of as much concern to these fellow British citizens as, say, the concern over the plight of white farmers in Zimbabwe to many in the majority population or as Israel’s security is to British Jews. The complaint that the suffering of Muslims in countries like Uzbekistan or Chechnya is given lower priority and lower concern does have a real foundation. The decision not to count civilian deaths in the Iraq war or Afghanistan causes deep offence. And the fact that these are not reported in the mainstream media does not mean that they are not well known and reported in the Muslim community. We need to recognise that some foreign policy has now a very direct impact on domestic policy. And we may well need to give [these things] higher priority and more energy, and indeed be prepared to change the emphasis of our foreign policy in order to safeguard our own security.'"

And so

'"It is no exaggeration to say that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of foreign policy — it is a matter for British domestic security policy too."'

So what Israel does, or is perceived to do, to the Palestinian Arabs is the cause of Islamic terrorism against the British. Logic? All you need to grasp, to follow this reasoning, is that the perception of British Muslims is all that matters. If they say Israel is committing ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians or murdering their children, then that is the grievance which has to be addressed in order to quell Muslim rage and avert terrorism against, er, Britain.

It does not seem to occur to this ‘courageous’, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘impressive’ chairman of the home affairs committee that such opinions espoused by Britain’s young Muslims are based on demented hatred and lies, prejudice and blood libels against the Jews of Israel, that Muslim alienation is based on bigotry and that to give these ‘issues and concerns’ any credence whatsoever is to hand terrorism its greatest victory. Instead, Denham opines that

'terrorism is rarely defeated until serious efforts are made to engage with the political and social problems that give rise to it in the first place'

and that

'If a substantial section of the population believes that it is in any case subject to arbitrary injustice — at home or abroad — then it is much more difficult to win consent.'

But what if this ‘substantial section of the population’ believes — as it does — that the very existence of Israel is an injustice? Or — as it does — that Israel's attempts to protect its citizens from mass murder are an injustice? Or — as it does — that the Jews control America and thus the west? Or — as it does — that the West wants to take over and destroy the Islamic world? Does the ‘mainstream’, ‘courageous’ and above all influential chairman of the parliamentary committee charged with considering how to combat Islamic terrorism believe that it is these views that should drive our foreign policy?

This, of course, represents not an antidote to terror but its apotheosis. And it reveals Denham’s startling inability to understand one crucial fact. Yes, Israel and the Jews are indeed central to Islamic terrorism — but not in the way he implies. Israel is not the cause of Islamic terrorism, but its victim. Blind, bigoted, fanatical hatred of Israel and the Jews, along with the lies and libels that flow from this prejudice, are central to the Islamic hatred of the west which such extremists believe they control. This is nothing to with Israel’s actions, but its very existence. Those who fail to understand this will never grasp the nature and extent of the threat that everyone in the free world now faces. The fact that even the chairman of the home affairs committee fails to do so and seeks instead to appease such prejudice is a measure of Britain’s inability — even now — to connect to reality.

On my travels for the past few days, I have been reading a book which tells the story of a quite astonishing part of British history of which I was previously unaware. In 'White Gold', Giles Milton records the appalling details -- gleaned,it appears, from a wealth of historical documents including diaries and letters -- of a seaborne Islamic jihad against Britain which lasted for no less than two centuries.

From the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, thousands of British men women and children were kidnapped by Arab corsairs and sold into slavery in Morocco where they were kept in conditions of unspeakable barbarism. The astounding thing is that these British victims were not merely seized at sea where they ran the gauntlet of such pirates in places such as the Straits of Gibraltar. They were actually abducted from Britain itself.

Corsairs from a place in Morocco called Sale -- who became known in Britain as the ‘Sally Rovers’ -- sailed up the Cornish coast in July 1625, for example, came ashore dressed in djellabas and wielding damascene scimitars, burst into the parish church at Mount’s Bay and dragged out 60 men women and children whom they shipped off to Morocco. Thousands more Britons were seized from their villages or their ships and dispatched to the hell-holes of the Moroccan slave pens, from where they were forced to work all hours in appalling conditions building the vast palace of the monstrous and psychopathic Sultan, Moulay Ismail, who tortured and butchered them at whim. Most of them perished, but the book records the survival of a tenacious Cornish boy Thomas Pellow, who survived 23 years of this ordeal and whose descendant, Lord Exmouth, finally ended the white slave trade when he destroyed Algiers in 1816.

The book makes clear that this assault upon the British people (and upon Europeans and Americans who were similarly seized) was a jihad. The Sally Rovers, writes Milton, were called ‘al-ghuzat’-- the term once used for the soldiers who fought with the Prophet -- and were hailed as religious warriors engaged in a holy war against the infidel Christians who were pressurised to convert to Islam under threat of hideous punishment. What is even more striking was the response of the British crown. For almost two centuries, it made only the most ineffectual attempts to rescue its enslaved subjects. Those who had succumbed to the torture and inhumanity of the Sultan and converted to Islam were deemed to be no longer British and therefore outside the scope of any rescue. The pleas of Pellow’s parents were simply brushed aside. Popular outrage forced successive Kings to dispatch a series of feeble emissaries to try to get the Sultan to end this vile traffic and release the slaves, all to no avail.

But this went on for virtually two centuries. For almost 200 years the British state either sat on its hands or wrung them impotently while the Islamic jihad seized, enslaved and butchered its people. And then it appears, this staggering onslaught was all but airbrushed out of our history.

Food for disquieting thought.

Those who have long been fans of The New Criterion, the American monthly which charts the depredations of the culture wars, will be heartened to find that as of last week it is now being published in Britain. Its first UK issue is packed with intelligent, well-written and pointed commentaries on the rout of British culture by such seasoned commentators on this melancholy phenomenon as Theodore Dalrymple, John Gross, Daniel Johnson, Peter Mullen, David Pryce-Jones and Andrew Roberts.

These and other writers chart the revolution which has progressively wiped out British virtues including -- as Dalrymple records -- politeness, lack of self-importance, stoicism, fortitude, emotional self-control ‘and an ironic detachment from their own experience, especially when it was unpleasant’ and redefined them as unpleasant and anachronistic. Pryce-Jones records the evisceration of British institutions; Johnson flays the narcissistic and culturally masochistic intellectual priestly caste; Mullen savages a Church of England which has replaced the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible by ‘dumbed down, politically correct prayers which sound as if they were written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx and Noddy’ and broadcasts on BBC Radio Four’s Thought for the Day such expressions of religious principle as a defence of voodooism.

For me, though, the most poignant essay is the one by Dalrymple, in which he recalls the selflessness, dignity and integrity displayed by his patients in a different age. After observing that it is still possible to find British cultural virtues in India (as a result of the Empire, which we must all despise) he notes that as a result he feels an instinctive sympathy with such Indians and concludes:

‘And this reassures me that my perception of what has happened so disastrously, so hideously in my own country is not merely the psychological product of embittered old age, in which the ancientry as a matter of course decry and deride youth as being nothing but the getting of wenches with child and stealing and fighting, but something more accurate and objective. And this in turn is depressing, for it means permanent exile and estrangement from the land of my birth, wherever I may live’.

The appearance on British shelves of The New Criterion means, however, that those who are trying to prevent Britain from making strangers of us all now have an outlet and an ally.

Is there no limit to the abjectness of the Church of England’s response to Islamic terror? A working group of bishops led by the Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries has suggested that western Christians should apologise for the Iraq war. The moral stupidity of this is hard to believe, even by the standards of the CofE. Yes, terrible mistakes have been made by the coalition which have contributed to the appalling violence in Iraq which continues. But apologise -- for what, precisely? For getting rid of Saddam Hussein who subjugated his people and subjected them to unspeakable barbarity? For enabling the Iraqis to taste democracy and freedom for the first time? And apologise to whom exactly? To the Ba’athists, perhaps, who subjected the rest of the population to a regime of unmitigated horror and towards whom the church – by this logic – feels badly that they have been deprived of power?

The Times packs one idiotic argument by these bishops after another into one short news story. First, they want to apologise not for something they have done but for something the government has done:

‘The bishops say that the Government is not likely to show remorse so the churches should. They want to organise a major gathering with senior figures from the Muslim community to make a “public act of repentance”.’

No doubt they think they should muscle in like this on the political process because of their superior moral reasoning. Their arrogance is therefore as vast as their moral obtuseness. They plead for more ‘understanding' of what motivates terrorists but display zero understanding themselves of the principal motivation: Islamic fanaticism. And just look what they are comparing the war in Iraq with:

‘The bishops cite as precedents the official statements by the Vatican expressing sorrow for the Christian persecution of the Jewish people throughout the ages, the repentance by the Anglican Church in Japan for its complicity in Japanese aggression during the Second World War and the regret expressed by leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa for their theological and political backing of apartheid.’

In other words they are comparing the removal of Saddam Hussein with the persecution of the Jews, the axis against democracy in World War Two and South African apartheid. But it was Saddam Hussein, the butcher of his own people and sponsor of terrorist murder against Israel and America who was the brother in blood to the tyrants of history. To compare these evils with the attempt to remove a similar modern evil is a straightforward inversion of good and evil. One associates such anti-reasoning with moral imbeciles – but the church?

According to Bishop Harries:

‘…it is not terrorism but American foreign policy and expansionism that constitute “the major threat to peace”’.

So the global jihad, the intention to restore the medieval caliphate, 9/11 and the many attacks on America and other western interests that preceded it, all apparently do not constitute ‘the major threat to peace’. Only America, the principal victim of this threat, fills that role in this hall of moral mirrors. And of course, American ‘moral righteousness’ and – wait for it – ‘the use of biblical texts’ fill these churchmen with the deepest possible horror. Furthermore, it is not, it would appear, the practical obstacles in the way of turning Iraq from a despotism into a democracy that worry these men of God – it is democracy itself that they despise:

‘“Democracy as we have it in the West at the moment is deeply flawed and its serious shortcomings need to be addressed,” state the bishops, members of the only unelected house in the Church’s own governing democratic body, the General Synod.’

The Telegraph made an additional point in its leader:

‘The impression given to the Islamic world by such an act, or even its proposal, is that the bishops of England had confirmed that the war against Iraq was a Christian crusade against Muslims. That is not what the bishops mean to say. They opposed the war. They think it was mostly about oil and American power. The inflammatory consequences of reinforcing the erroneous notion of a war against Islam could be far more horrific than anything yet seen, even in Iraq.’

Christianity is currently at the hideous receiving end of the global jihad, with countless millions of Christians being persecuted and massacred around the world and their churches burned to the ground. Yet the response of these bishops is to genuflect before terror, to apologise for the attempt to defeat it, to abase themselves and offer up their faith – and their country – to barbarism.

Who can ever take such a church seriously when its bishops behave like this?

On the global political stage the UN is Israel’s implacable foe, helping create the impression that the country is grinding the Palestinians into abject poverty and destitution – that is, when it not committing genocide against them. Leaving aside the inconvenient detail that genocide wipes out whole populations while the numbers of Palestinians have actually been increasing, official data published this month by the UN gives the lie to its own propaganda about the lack of Palestinian well-being. The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2005 is a massive tome. But chapter five which deals with violent conflict makes it clear that it was the second intifada beginning in Sept. 2000 which reversed a small trend towards improvement on the Human Development Index and resulted

‘in a sharp deterioration in living standards and life chances,’

more than doubling the poverty rate. Israel is commonly blamed for this deterioration. But as the report observes:

‘...violent conflict is one of the surest and fastest routes to the bottom of the HDI table’.

And that conflict was started and promulgated by the Palestinians.

What is even more revealing is that in tables on p 220, the Occupied Palestinian Territories are in the medium cluster with an HDI of 0.729 – a better standard of living than the Arab states overall which have an HDI of 0.679. On the Human Poverty Index, the territories are ranked seventh on a list of 103 developing countries, with other Arab countries ranked below them. Saudi Arabia is ranked 32; Syria is 29; Iran is 36; Egypt is 55; liberated South Africa (all those who accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’, please note) is 56.

Now what is the one factor which the Palestinians have that other Arab states do not have, the factor which lifts their living standards above even those Arab states which have massive oil wealth? It is their close economic relationship with Israel, both in terms of the jobs that Israel provides for them and the massive amounts of aid that Israel pours in to the territories. And what has been the Palestinians’ response to this country which is so crucial to their living standards? Why, to murder its citizens in great numbers and try to destroy it altogether. And what has been the outcome of that genocidal campaign against Israel, apart from murdering large numbers of Israelis? Why, to put Palestinian development into reverse.

Is this the biggest self-inflicted wound in history?

A new website called The Second Draft says it provides the raw material of TV footage which shows how mainstream broadcasters distort news about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. The founders write:

‘Because those of us working on the opening dossier at this site are primarily American, French and Israeli Jews, that constitutes the initial core inspired to put up this website and to manage the material that comes in about Pallywood. But because we feel that the Israelis are not alone in suffering from this particular debacle, we hope that Palestinians and other Arabs, as well as fair-minded and sincerely concerned outsiders will join us in trying to sort out the widespread damage these continuing media errors cause to all involved. And because we feel the loneliness of trying to draw the larger public’s attention to media malfeasance, we hope to draw other groups with similar problems to consider our website a place to air their concerns as well.

We believe in the dignity of difference, and that we therefore need to listen carefully to others. We do not think people should ignore what we have to say because we are Jewish or Israeli or defending Israel or Zionism. Everyone should listen, critically, to each others’ narratives, and judge the evidence not on the basis of some prejudice (whichever side one may sympathize with), but on the basis of fair and impartial assessment of the evidence.’

If people can see for themselves how ‘events’ in this conflict have been staged – an industry dubbed ‘Pallywood’ by the site’s founders – this could provide an important antidote to the poison that is being disseminated.

Those who believe that supra-national jurisdiction and the internationalisation of ‘human rights’ law betoken an elevated sphere of being and the imminent establishment of utopia will no doubt be cheering on the fact that soldiers trying to defend their citizens from genocidal attack can no longer set foot in Britain for fear of being arrested on charges of war crimes.

Israel’s Maj.-Gen. Doron Almog who flew to Britain to raise money for a charitable cause, was warned by Israel’s ambassador to London not to disembark from his El Al flight at Heathrow because British detectives were waiting to arrest him. The arrest warrant had been issued on Saturday by the Bow Street Magistrate's Court at the request of a pro-Palestinian group. The warrant alleged that in 2002 Almog had ordered the demolition of 59 Palestinian homes in Rafah. Gen. Almog decided not to alight from the plane, and remained aboard until it turned around and returned to Israel.

The Guardian reported Almog’s reaction:

‘He said that neither he nor his country had any case to answer for the deaths of innocent Palestinians in their battle against militants. "As a soldier and a general I have never committed a crime. Many times I have saved Palestinian lives by risking my life and the lives of my soldiers," he said. The actions of the army in Gaza were to prevent terrorist attacks against Israel, he said.'

The indictment had been filed by an Israeli lawyer living in Britain, Daniel Machover, who is working with a Palestinian pressure group. According to this article Machover is a fully paid-up member of the Israeli Israel-haters' club:

‘In May 2005, Machover signed a letter in support of an academic boycott against Israeli universities, as adopted by Britain’s Association of University Teachers. The letter called on European governments to pass sanctions on Israeli universities. In October 2000, Machover signed a letter which compared the Oslo peace process to “apartheid:”

‘“To the dismay of the Israeli government, the Palestinian people would not put up or shut up with apartheid masquerading as peace process. The barbaric Israeli response is the mowing down of unarmed civilians utilizing Apache (helicopter) gunships and tanks. Israel inflicts collective punishment, such as destruction of homes and the cutting of utilities. All because the Palestinians will not accept apartheid…. The truth is now out and the Oslo sham cannot be resurrected,” said the letter.

‘Machover’s client, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is a politicized nongovernmental organization. The organization’s ‘philosophy’ page on its website condemns “Israel's violent campaign to crush the Al-Aqsa Intifada and maintain the Occupation since September 2000,” and omits any condemnation of Palestinian suicide terrorism against Israeli civilians. The page also contains a pro-Palestinian political platform which calls for a “right of return for Palestinian refugees.” The organization’s website provides a direct link to the anti-Israel ‘Electronic Intifada’ Palestinian website, which advocates a boycott against the State of Israel.’

Alog is not the only one facing such an action. Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s Chief of Staff Dan Halutz is in the same position:

‘Halutz - like Major General (res.) Doron Almog, who refrained two days ago from disembarking from an El Al plane in London and was forced to return to Israel, and like former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon - is facing in Britain a complaint pertaining to his involvement in approving the targeted killing of Salah Shehadeh in July 2002. A one-ton bomb was dropped on a residential neighborhood in the Gaza Strip in that operation, killing 14 innocent Palestinians, most of them children. As is the case with Almog, if Halutz or Ya'alon decide to travel to London, courts there are likely to issue an arrest warrant against them. But, unlike Almog's predicament, the initiative to open a criminal investigation against Halutz and Ya'alon does not come only from Palestinian organizations, but also from the Israeli Yesh Gvul movement.’

Yesh Gvul supports Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the disputed territories. Its targeting of these IDF officers for defending their country has finally woken even some of the Israeli left from their torpor. Knesset member Yigal Yasinov of the Shinui Party has said:

‘"There is a limit to the chutzpah of traitors as well. I expect the members of Yesh Gvul to give up their Israeli citizenship, assume PA citizenship, and to live on the order side of the border." He said he plans to ask the Attorney General and Justice Minister to declare Yesh Gvul a terror-sponsoring organization, outlaw it, and open investigations against its members.'

While the Israeli 'human rights' worm might just finally be beginning to turn, Britain's legal establishment with its power-crazed, anti-democratic mania for supra-national jurisdiction and its elevation of international and human rights law to the status of unchallengeable holy writ has created a hospitable judicial environment for any group with a grievance to criminalise acts of military self-defence if civilians get caught in the cross-fire. A judicial structure, in other words, that can now be used to emasculate the defence of the free world by empowering its enemies to hound and persecute those who are trying to mount that defence.

To cap this madness, Machover has now also called for the arrest of the Israel ambassador – for warning Alog that he was about to be arrested by the forces of a state that appears to have taken leave of its senses.

No doubt if Almog had torched a synagogue or two, he’d have been hailed as a heroic fighter for freedom.

In the September 11 post below, I wondered how the media would respond to the revelations in Sunday’s newspapers of extreme anti-Jewish bigotry and Holocaust denial among Muslim advisers to the government on combating Islamist extremism. As I feared the reaction has ranged from silence to indifference, with more than one report even appearing to endorse some of the most poisonous prejudice at the core of the Muslim demand.

There is now a real feeling of siege among the Jews of Britain. The most extraordinary anti-Jewish libels and prejudice are pouring forth from Muslims and their unholy comrades on the left — including some deracinated or pathologically embittered Jews —and yet there are no outraged or impassioned editorials condemning such bigotry, putting the record straight or warning about where all this may be leading, not just for the Jews but for the wider population. The pathological hatred of Israel and the Jews, at the very heart of which lies Holocaust denial, is central to the Muslim animus against the west. Unless this is understood, the British will never understand the danger they themselves are in. But while there is concern about Islamic extremism in Britain the assault on the Jews of Israel, and on the Jewish people as a whole, is generally put in a completely different compartment and treated to a range of attitudes stretching from indifference to endorsement.

There is therefore a real sense that the Jews are simply being abandoned — and amazingly, this seems to have increased in intensity since the July bombings in London. At present, to be a Jew in Britain feels like being under relentless ideological bombardment in a script written by Kafka. Whether it’s Holocaust denial, the lies about Israel’s ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian Arabs or the blood-lust and anarchy currently on display in Gaza, the British media are managing to blame the Jews and excuse their attackers.

Take for example the Arab torching of the abandoned synagogues in Gaza. ‘The Israelis left empty buildings,’ said Mahmoud Abbas Ph.D (Holocaust Denial). They were left intact by the Israelis because, although empty, they were still holy places. It is a hallmark of civilised peoples everywhere that they respect the holy places of others. The Israelis have never attacked mosques but have protected the places holy to all religions when they have come under their jurisdiction and refrained from attacking mosques even when the Arabs have used them as sniper points. But the rampaging Palestinian mob torched these synagogues while PA policemen passively looked on.

None of this of course is a surprise to the Jews. The destruction of Jewish holy places by Arab mobs has recurred time and again. In September 1996, Palestinian rioters destroyed a synagogue at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. In October 2000, Joseph's Tomb burnt down after the Israeli garrison guarding it was temporarily withdrawn during Palestinian attacks. It has since been rebuilt by the Palestinian Authority as a mosque. In October 2000, the ancient synagogue in Jericho was deliberately torched and completely destroyed, while another historic synagogue in the city, with an ancient mosaic floor, was damaged and now lies derelict. Since 1996, Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem has been attacked numerous times by Arab snipers, bombs and Molotov cocktails. When Jerusalem and Hebron were under illegal Jordanian occupation between 1948 and 1967, Jews were barred from praying at Judaism's holiest site, Jerusalem's Western Wall. Jordan also demolished all 58 synagogues in Jerusalem's Old City and Jewish grave stones were broken and used to pave roads and Jordanian army latrines.

What is so dismaying is the almost total indifference displayed by the British media, who if they reported the torching of the synagogues at all did so in a muted way -- and even, on the BBC, sought to justify it by blaming Israel. As HonestReporting.com noted:

‘The BBC TV report justified the arson mobs in this manner: “Palestinians came streaming to the settlements that caused them so much pain, to sightsee and to loot. Israel stole thirty-eight years from them; today, many were ready to take back anything they could.” ‘This is a clear example of BBC bias ― the reporter states as 'fact' that Palestinians in Gaza had their lives somehow 'stolen' by Israeli since 1967, a claim the BBC uses to rationalize the Palestinian mob violence...’

when of course, far from having their lives stolen from them, the Arabs of Gaza have spent not just thirty eight years but more than half a century attempting to exterminate the Jews from their historic homeland in Israel.

Another item on BBC News 24 on Sunday night showed the burning synagogues -- but said something to the effect that the Palestinians were in a very difficult position because Israel had refused to dismantle them. Excuse me? Why was this difficult? What, pray, was it that forced these Arabs to behave like savages towards the holy places of another faith? If it had been the Israelis burning down mosques, the British media would have been apoplectic. But Arab savagery, whether towards Jews or Christians or towards each other, is either justified or ignored.

In addition, the rapid descent of the Gaza Arabs into anarchy so great it has turned not just Hamas but Fatah against the PA and instantly threatened Egypt’s security to boot has barely been mentioned. Thus the abduction by masked gunmen of Italian journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi in the Gaza town of Deir El-Balah before releasing him unharmed; the storming the same day by 60 armed Palestinians of the local governor's headquarters and Interior Ministry offices demanding jobs with the Palestinian Authority; the gunning down of Moussa Arafat, a cousin of Yasser Arafat, who was dragged from his house by more than a dozen gunmen and shot in the street while his son Manhal, a major in the Palestinian military intelligence service, was kidnapped; and the illegal crossing of thousands of Palestinians into Egypt over the past two days prompting Egyptian security officials to file a complaint with the PA; all this has scarcely been reported, let alone commented upon.

Arab misdeeds, like Jewish victimisation, appear to be airbrushed out of history by the British media. Instead, Israel is bullied, reviled, demonised, traduced and delegitimised: the only country in the world to be so treated. No tyranny, no human rights offender, not South Africa under apartheid has ever been treated in this way by the British media -- subjected to such a sustained, obsessive, disproportionate, unfair, mendacious, prejudiced and venomous attack and such brazen double standards and moral inversion. And now the maggot of Holocaust denial has emerged from within this filth finally to reveal, to those who would not believe it, just what it is that we are up against.

Apologies for the intermittent nature of these posts at present; this is due to extreme pressure of work. Unfortunately, this situation is likely to continue until the end of the year, but I will try to keep posting as much as I can during this time.

No fewer than three separate and deeply disturbing stories in today’s newspapers serve to confirm that Britain’s core values are not only now under sustained and entrenched assault from a section of its Muslim minority but that its governing and intellectual class remains unable or unwilling even to grasp the nature and extent of the threat.

The first story in the Independent on Sunday reveals that the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir, which Tony Blair has said should be banned, has members in some of Britain's most important institutions including the NHS and blue-chip companies such as IBM and Reuters:

‘The IoS has now learned that at least two members of Hizb, which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law, work for the computer giant IBM, and that Reuters, the international news and financial information agency, has at least one member among its employees… Several members of Hizb are medical practitioners, including its spokesman, Dr Imran Waheed, a psychiatrist practising in London. Its women's representative, Nazreen Nawaz, is a qualified doctor who worked in cancer research. Another member is a manager at University College Hospital, London. The group is also strong in the education sector, where a former member of the executive board lectures in IT in an east London college. The former headmistress of a prominent Islamic primary school in the same area is also a member of Hizb, as is the landlord of the building.’

The second story in the Mail on Sunday reveals that a Muslim barrister has claimed that the war in Iraq was planned by a secret group of Jews and Freemasons. Ahmad Thomson, a convert to Islam and a member of the Association of Muslim Lawyers,

'...claims this hidden alliance has shaped world events for hundreds of years and now controls governments in both Europe and America… He told the Mail on Sunday that the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein was part of a masterplan by Jews and Freemasons to control the Middle East. “Pressure was put on Tony Blair before the invasion”, he said. ‘The way it works is that pressure is put on people to arrive at certain decisions. It is part of the Zionist plan and it is shaping events”.

This is of course the standard demented conspiracy delusion of the Muslim world and neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe. But Mr Thomson is no marginalised nutcase. For he has been appointed by the British government to advise it on how to tackle, ahem, Muslim extremism. And his views have hardly been concealed. For the story also reveals that in 1994 he published a book in which he claimed that Jews and Freemasons had conspired to control the Middle East and now controlled the governments of Europe and America; that the Nazis were a Christian backlash against the Jews; that the Jews had no right to live in the ‘Holy Land’ because they were not a pure race and therefore not true biblical Israelites; that Saddam Hussein was used as an excuse for American troops including thousands of Jews to occupy Saudi Arabia; and that Hollywood and the international media are controlled by Jews whose aim is to ‘re-educate’ Muslims.

This is the man the British government thinks will give them handy tips to counter Islamic extremism.

When confronted with this information, the government still saw nothing wrong in its appointment. A Home Office spokesman said:

‘It is part of the job of government to talk and consult with people from different communities and that means that it routinely deals with people whose views it does not necessarily agree with’.

Just process that thought for a moment in the context of the British landscape post the July bombings. To equip itself against Islamist extremism which is fuelled in its murderous rage against the west in large part by its view of the Jews as a conspiracy against Islam and the world, HMG will seek the advice of one who shares precisely such a view. That’s the spirit, chaps! Would these officials, one wonders, have sought the advice of Goering or Himmler on how to deal with the Nazi threat on the basis that the British government ‘routinely deals with people whose views it does not necessarily agree with’?

This is all of a part with the astonishing attitude of the Foreign Office revealed in last week’s Observer story (see my post below) which revealed the horrifying depths to which Whitehall is currently going in its wholly misguided and culturally suicidal strategy of appeasement of radical Islam. Which brings us on to the third story in today’s terrifying triptych. In the Sunday Times, Abul Taher reports that yet another committee of Muslim government advisers on extremism (or possibly the same one) is proposing to proposing to scrap Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims:

‘A member of one of the committees, made up of Muslims, said it gave the impression that “western lives have more value than non-western lives”. That perception needed to be changed. “One way of doing that is if the government were to sponsor a national Genocide Memorial Day. The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.”

'The recommendation, drawn up by four committees including those dealing with imams and mosques, and Islamophobia and policing, has the backing of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain. He said: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.” Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.”'

Now this is quite obviously appalling on a number of levels. First, it reveals the open anti-Jewish hatred of supposedly mainstream Muslims. Holocaust denial is quite simply a declaration of war upon the Jews. Second, it shows that these attitudes can now be brazenly expressed because such bigots are confident that they are supported at the very heart of the British establishment. Third, it reveals once again the appalling naivety or worse of that establishment in thinking it can draw the poison of such people by embracing them. Fourth, it reinforces the suspicion that Whitehall embraces people with such poisonous prejudices because it actually shares them.

But there is a further concern about this story. For the language in which it is written suggests that the writer too may perhaps share this prejudice. Taher writes that these Muslims want to replace Holocaust Day

‘with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.’

‘The mass murder of Muslims in Palestine’? Hello? There has been no such mass murder. The only people with genocide on their minds are the Arabs who want to bomb the Jews of Israel out of existence. The only people who talk about ‘the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine’ are those who perpetrate this libel. But this revealing phrase was not in quote marks. It was Taher’s own phrase. He also said that Holocaust Day ‘was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler.’
As Adloyada writes on her website, Holocaust Day actually came about as the result of thinking by various governments in Europe as well as in the US. Adloyada has also been doing some digging of her own:

‘So who is Mr Taher, and how can the Sunday Times account for his lamentably inaccurate account of the origins of the day, which just happens to make it look as if it was a purely Blair thing in response to sustained pressure from Jewish leaders? Well, a little investigation turns up that in 2001, Mr Taher was editor of The Eastern Eye, an Asian newspaper. Then there's this quite extraordinary exchange Mr Taher had online with a Muslim dissident, which includes these contributions from our intrepid and entirely balanced reporter:

'"Are a lot of the people that write for you actually Muslims, or militant Christians or Jews masquerading behind Muslim names?

'"In yr writing, I sense a hatred of Islam that some would say is deeply racist, and has its basis in some paranoia that Islam is going to take over. It's like the classic fear of foreigners taking over - why?”

'Not surprisingly, the correspondent declined Mr Taher's request for his address and a photo. And Mr Taher back in 2000 was a 25 year old student journalist who entered a competition to win a trainee position as a journalist with his story about his investigations about a simulated nuclear accident on a Royal Navy ship. He was at the time completing an MA in journalism at Sheffield University. Hang on. Doesn't that sound just a bit familiar? We couldn't possibly have another Dilpazier Aslam type case on our hands, could we? No, there's nothing so alarming as evidence that he was writing for Hizb u'Tahrir. But in 2001, he did write this story for the Independent on the motives of potential British jihadi suicide bombers, in which he repeatedly suggests that the problem is the West, and especially the United States. He doesn't fully agree with George Galloway, but that's the politician he quotes in support of his view that US and UK intervention in Afghanistan, at that time still controlled by the Taliban, will produce and recruit more suicide bombers for Bin Laden.’

All this is deeply, deeply alarming not just for British Jews but for the defence of Britain and the west. It will be interesting to see therefore how tomorrow’s papers react. This horror is only growing because the general complicit silence in the face of anti-Jewish prejudice (and much mainstream opinion, alas, contains more than an echo of some of these views) has emboldened Islamist bigotry. Many members of the public are horrified by the government’s supine response to Islamist extremism; yet even here there is a reluctance to see the connection with anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudice because so much of this particular prejudice is unfortunately shared as a result of the campaign of vilification of Israel mounted by the media. Only when the country as a whole puts all this together will it begin to have a chance of fighting the monster that has arisen in its midst.

Heartening and uplifting news about a group of brave and decent Christians who have decided to challenge the Anglican animosity towards Israel. The group, being organised by Simon McIlwaine who is a practising member of the Church of England, will be called ‘Anglicans for Israel’* and will have the following aims:

'1. To resist the call for a boycott of Israel.
2. To support the people of Israel and to secure defensible borders
for the State of Israel.
3. To promote bonds of fellowship and interfaith understanding
between Anglicans and the Jewish people.
4. To recall the Church to G-d's Covenant with the Jewish people and
to call the Church to affirm the centrality of Israel to the Jewish faith.
5. To call Anglicans to repentance for the wrongs-of both word and deed- inflicted by Christians on the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.
6. To fight all libels against Israel and the Jewish people and their State.
7. To promote reconciliation and ties of friendship between the
people of Israel and the righteous Arabs who oppose terrorism and wish to have peaceful relations with Israel.
8. To protect the Christian communities threatened by Islamic
extremism in the Middle East.
9. To bring the Church back to an understanding of the Jewish roots
of our faith.'

Following the vote last June by the Anglican Consultative Council to ‘commend’ divestment from companies supporting Israel’s polices, based on a travesty of a report on Israel by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (see my June 27 post) to which Dr John Moses, the Dean of St Paul's, objected, Mr McIlwaine wrote to Dr Moses thus:

'I am a regular worshipper at St Paul's and am writing to you, as I am deeply concerned by the signs that our Church is close to adopting a boycott of Israel. As an Anglican who cares for Israel and its people, I felt it important that I write to you to congratulate you for your courage in opposing the motion to adopt the APJN' s recommendations. A very large number of laity and clergy — as I know from my discussions with Dr Irene Lancaster of Manchester University — are frankly horrified at the prospect of an Anglican boycott of Israel. If the Church were to disinvest from Israel, the consequences would not only be catastrophic for future Anglican-Jewish relations, but would also give a green light to those who are not prepared to accept Israel's legitimacy and existence and who seek the destruction of what is not only the only Jewish homeland, but is also the only real democracy in the Middle East.

'Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which the Christian population has grown, and indeed Israeli Christians probably have the highest educational and economic status of all Israel's citizens. Religious activity — including evangelism — is legally protected and upheld, and there is no other state in the region which affords its citizens complete freedom of religious observance. Yes, indeed, the number of Christians in the West Bank has dropped — but that is mainly because of their appalling treatment by the Palestinian Authority, which has fomented a rising tide of Islamic radicalism since its formation in 1994. Christians are being expelled by Moslems from their homes and businesses, are having their farms stolen and are being assaulted — all with the connivance of the Palestinian Authority and its security agencies. A friend of mine in the Israeli Army watched in horror as Fatah terrorists seized a Church in Beit Jala and used it as a vantage point to shoot at him and his comrades. Of course, if he fired back and the Church was damaged, he was well aware the Army would get all the blame. Fatah terrorists took over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and not only desecrated it, but looted and threatened the monks there — who, I assure you, were and are deeply, deeply grateful for their rescue by the Israeli soldiers.

'There is much confusion over the status of the West Bank. It is incorrect to call it the "occupied territories". They are land that was seized by Jordan-illegally — in 1949 in the course of a war launched against the infant State of Israel with the goal of its destruction. It is land that was gained by Israel in a war of self-defence in 1967. As such, these can be considered "unallocated" territories pursuant to the expiry of the Mandate, and there is a good case for saying that Israel legally and morally has the better title, especially as Jordan forbade Jews to become citizens or own property in territory under its control, and the Mandate required that Jews be given the same right to reside there as Arabs.

'In any event, I feel it important to stress that the land was not stolen from the Arabs, and Jewish settlements are built on what was Jordanian state-held land during 1949 to 1967 or on land which was lawfully owned by Jews before their forcible expulsion in 1949. It is unfair that Israel should be singled out for vilification, with the long history of attempts by Arab regimes to destroy her simply ignored by APJN. The security measures that Israel has taken have only been taken to prevent her citizens from being murdered by terrorists. Suicide bombs have not discriminated between Jew, Christian and Moslem.

'Having visited Israel recently, I have seen the security fence on many occasions and along much of its length. Except in a very few places — and then only to protect motorists from snipers — it is not a wall. It is probably the most humane measure that Israel can take to protect all her citizens from murder and it has saved countless lives. Finally, I feel it important to stress that none of the legal challenges by Palestinians to the construction of the fence concern the amount of (generous) compensation offered. Israel has an activist Supreme Court which cares for the rights of all its citizens, as well as the Palestinians who live under Israeli administration.

'Once again, I thank you for your courage in opposing the boycott and I hope and pray that other senior members of the clergy will act to oppose any motion at the forthcoming Synod to adopt the APJN recommendations.’

To which one can only hope that Mr McIlwaine now finds many other similarly well-informed, courageous and principled Christians who will join his group and turn it into a force that can defeat the moral and spiritual evil that has so consumed the Anglican church.

*The email address for this group is: anglicansforisrael@hotmail.co.uk

Two days ago, I posted up the views of a reader from New Orleans who laid the blame for the disastrous aftermath of the hurricane squarely at the door of the Democrats and in particular the governor of Louisiana. In the interests of balance, I reproduce here a contrary view from an American reader.

‘I was extremely interested to read the letter from one of your readers about the devastation in New Orleans. While your reader was correct that President Bush does not deserve all of the blame for the incompetence and mismanagement that magnified the scope of this disaster, your reader nonetheless makes a variety of unsupported and dishonest arguments.

‘Your reader clearly attempt to blame Democratic policies, personalities and economics for all of New Orleans' current security problems. If only President Bush had been in charge of the National Guard, the argument goes, they would have been more disciplined and would have acted far sooner to dispel the riots. However, federal mismanagement has been already apparent through the lack of military coordination in the disaster response. It was clear two days before the hurricane hit that this would be a disaster on a national scale, and that national strategic interests were at stake. Why weren't Army and Air Force helicopters sent immediately? National Guard police could only do so much from the flooded streets of the city, but the President is authorized to use federal military capabilities in such a state of emergency.

‘In a similar fashion, your reader faults the governor for relying on the Clinton-era director of FEMA for assistance, even while the current director, Michael Brown, has already demonstrated his incompetence. I will not go into the examples of his many egregious blunders in this letter, for reasons of length. However, if one wishes to discuss how cronyism and "third-world political systems" can wreak havoc on government, one needs look no further than at his being appointed as director of FEMA. Meanwhile, our Director of Homeland Security has been quoted as having stated that this disaster was unexpected, even while various governmental reports have long labeled New Orleans as a disaster waiting to happen. Of course the Homeland Secretary is not responsible for the disaster of the hurricane; shouldn't he be held responsible, however, for the stupidity of his own excuses?

‘On a deeper level, your reader ignores the central questions that Hurricane Katrina poses for modern conservatism in America. Congress voted to divert funding for New Orleans' levees towards "homeland security," and National Guard forces have been diverted to fight the war in Iraq, an important and vital component of America's security in its own right. On a purely pragmatic level, is it really possible to succeed in Iraq, strengthen America's borders against terrorism at home, fund disaster relief for Katrina and other possible future terrorist attacks, all while rejecting any sort of progressive income tax or increases in federal taxation? Is deficit spending meant to continue indefinitely as the alternative, and is this really a viable "fiscal conservative agenda"?

‘Your reader claims that local private organizations such as churches will provide the best disaster relief to the hundreds of thousands of lives devastated by Katrina. On one level, these organizations can be much more efficient than government agencies because they are less bureaucratic. However, rebuilding the infrastructure of the city, reinstalling sanitation and electricity and repaving roads, not to mention providing basic care for the city's poorest inhabitants, will require the commitment of an involved government at the highest federal level, and assuming that the private sector will coordinate and fund such efforts is naïve at best.

‘In addition, in ascribing such influence to church outreach your reader implicitly assumes that the poor in New Orleans are organized around effective, cohesive religious and ethnic communities. In fact, the opposite is the case. New Orleans was perhaps distinctive in the extreme savagery of its ghettos, and the inability of civic organizations to penetrate poor areas. This was not solely due to Democratic corruption and incompetence. In certain cities, at certain other times, corruption has managed to go hand in hand with systems of patronage that may have been mob-like and far from perfect, but that also created certain levels of protection and neighborhood authority that were at some level responsible. This was not the case in the worst neighborhoods of New Orleans, where the closest thing to "neighborhood authority" in the slums might have been the drug lord that terrorized the neighborhood.

‘On another basic level, Hurricane Katrina questions the basic American ethos of self-sufficiency. Americans may be more accepting of economic inequalities than Europeans because of our ingrained belief in "pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps," but even Americans find it extremely difficult to watch the images of third-world level poverty and desperation being broadcast over the dinner-time news. People may shrug their shoulders and say that "life is tough" for the poor in times of stability, but when someone who already has nothing is simply the victim of bad luck by living in the path of a hurricane, even the most libertarian Americans might acknowledge a responsibility on the part of our country to provide a "safety net" in times such as these. Inevitably of course, some people will blame the poor and desperate for their own situation, for the fact that they could not spontaneously stop their community from breaking into riots or for the fact that they chose to remain in New Orleans rather than lose the remnants of what they had.

‘What remains to be seen, however, is whether these images will unsettle Americans enough that they question why such extreme poverty exists in our country year-round. I suspect that such questions, if they are asked, will be short-lived and soon forgotten in the public discourse amidst the many other news stories which are grabbing our public's attention, some of which, like Iraq, are very important, and some of which, like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt's divorce, are less so. This is not because Americans are in any way heartless or lack conviction; indeed, I believe Americans to be among the most generous and loyal of people. But we may lack the attention span and long-term focus to seeing our efforts through to the very end. The futures of both Baghdad and New Orleans rest on whether America can commit the attention and resources of its government to fixing the root problems of these cities, which extend beyond merely rebuilding buildings and roads to addressing problems of ideology, leadership and civic morality.’

A stunning article in Commentary by Nidra Poller exposes what might eventually come to be regarded as a racial libel on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in both its malevolence and its contribution to the history of racial hatred. The defining image of the second Palestinian intifada was the television footage of 12 year-old Mohammed al Dura being sheltered by his father as they cowered under a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers in a gun battle at the Netzarim junction on September 30 2000, at the very beginning of the violence. These pictures, shot by a France 2 cameraman, instantly achieved a lethal iconic status. The image of Mohammed al Dura slumped in death in his father’s lap like an Arab pieta was used on countless occasions to recruit human bomb volunteers for the jihad against Israel. As Poller says, his death scene has been replicated on murals, posters, and postage stamps, even making an appearance in the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading.

Testifying under oath before the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the cameraman Talal Abu Rahmeh alleged that Israeli soldiers had intentionally murdered the boy and wounded the father. There had been, he said, a five-minute exchange of fire between Palestinian policemen and Israeli soldiers. This was followed by fully 45 minutes of gunfire coming exclusively from the Israeli position and aimed directly at the man and the boy crouching desperately behind a concrete barrel. He had captured on film a total of 27 minutes of this fusillade, risking his own life in the process.

From the start, however, many smelled a rat and several journalists have suggested that this event was not what it seemed. Now, Poller reveals information that strongly suggests the whole thing was a cynical and evil fraud. She has obtained hours of out-takes from film shot by dozens of cameramen at the Netzarim junction that day. What was recorded on these films were two types of activity — real attacks and crudely staged, entirely confected battle scenes:

'In the "reality" zone, excited children and angry young men hurl rocks and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli outpost while shababs ("youths") standing on the roof of the Twins throw burning tires down onto the caged lookout; this goes on seemingly for hours, without provoking the slightest military reaction from Israeli soldiers. At the same time, in the "theatrical" zone, Palestinian stringers sporting prestigious logos on their vests and cameras are seen filming battle scenes staged behind the abandoned factory, well out of range of Israeli gunfire. The "wounded" sail through the air like modern dancers and then suddenly collapse. Cameramen jockey with hysterical youths who pounce on the "casualties," pushing and shoving, howling Allahu akhbar!, clumsily grabbing the "injured," pushing away the rare ambulance attendant in a pale green polyester jacket in order to shove, twist, haul, and dump the "victims" into UN and Red Crescent ambulances that pull up on a second’s notice and career back down the road again, sirens screaming. In one shot we recognize Talal Abu Rahmeh in his France-2 vest, filming a staged casualty scene.* Split seconds of these ludicrous vignettes would later appear in newscasts and special reports; the husk, the raw footage that would reveal the fakery, had been removed, leaving the kernel rich in anti-Israel nutrients.

‘The al-Dura death scene was filmed right in the middle of these falsified incidents. It can be localized and situated. In one section of Reuters footage we see the man and the boy crouched behind the upended culvert as a jeep drives slowly up the road, stops in firing range of the Israeli position that is clearly visible in the near distance, makes a U-turn, drives in the opposite direction, stops short of the barrel/culvert, and helps perform the clearly faked evacuation of a man wounded in the right leg, as also shown in the France-2 news report. In fact, two ambulances stand for a long moment no more than fifteen feet from the al-Duras. There is no evidence of armed combat in their vicinity. No sound of gunfire. Men run down the road, passing in front of the al-Duras. No one is hit...

‘I also viewed a copy of the satellite feed transmitted by Abu Rahmeh late in the afternoon of September 30. In addition to the 55 seconds aired that evening, it includes a final image of the boy who would be described afterward as "killed instantly by a shot to the stomach": in it he is seen shifting position, propping himself up on his elbow, shading his eyes with his hand, rolling over on his stomach, covering his eyes...

'The 45 minutes? Gone. Abu Rahmeh’s 27 minutes? Gone, too. We are left with approximately a single minute of Jamal and Muhammad al-Dura filmed in continuous time. In that minute, the two crouch behind an upended culvert and contort their faces in fear. Guttural screams are heard, but they do not come from the man or the boy; they come from men standing within range of the France-2 cameraman’s microphone. Jamal bobs his head. Muhammad stretches out at his father’s feet. Then, in the brief portion that was carefully edited out but that can be seen in the outtakes, the boy changes position several times, using voluntary muscles that only living people can activate. During the 55-second sequence we see two bullets hitting the wall, which is already pockmarked with a number of other bullet holes nowhere near father and child. A cloud of dust obscures the last few frames. There is no sign or sound of a crossfire. There are no death throes. The rest, as we say in French, is literature.

‘But now look again at the Reuters outtakes. A jeep drives up a road, turns, goes down the other side, takes part in a battle scene. An ambulance pulls up, a "wounded" man is dragged across the road, placed on a stretcher, loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance drives away. Men run from position A to position B. Children toss Molotov cocktails at the IDF fortress. There is much laughter and cheering from the "audience," clusters of cheerful young men watching the show. All this time, traffic trundles through the intersection, schoolchildren go by with their bookbags, a fashionably dressed woman talks on her cellphone and chats and jokes with cameramen who stand nonchalantly with their backs to the Israeli position. Things are moving, the energy level is high, the shababs are fearless. Palestinian policemen mingle in the crowd, occasionally shoot a few rounds into the air, join in the battle scenes, get "wounded" and come back for more. Children set fire to tires; you can almost smell the rubber burning. The France-2 cameraman, Abu Rahmeh, is there, too, clearly visible, in the heat of the action, filming ambulance evacuations of fake casualties in large patches of real time. Familiar, retrievable, believable.’

The story then gets even worse. A retired Le Monde journalist, Luc Rosenzweig, wrote an article which was due to be published in the weekly l’Express in which he accused France-2 of an ‘almost perfect media crime.’ The magazine’s editorial director, Denis Jeambar, decided to double-check Rosenzweig’s facts. He, Rosenzweig and a TV director met a France 2 executive:

‘They requested the 27 minutes of raw footage showing the al-Duras pinned down by Israeli gunfire; they were shown a half-hour of fake battle scenes similar to those described above. They asked why there were no pictures of Israeli soldiers aiming at the al-Duras; they were told that on this point the cameraman had retracted his testimony, given "under pressure" to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. They asked to speak to the cameraman, then said to be undergoing medical treatment in Paris; they were told he did not speak French and that his English was too rudimentary (patently untrue). They asked to see the scene of the child’s death throes, professedly edited out by Charles Enderlin because it was "too unbearable"; they were told that no such images existed. They in turn produced pictures of a dead child, identified as Muhammad al-Dura, who had been admitted to Gaza’s Schifa hospital at noon or 1 PM on September 30, several hours before the alleged incident occurred; his face did not match that of the boy in the shooting scene, his wounds did not match the eyewitness descriptions (my emphasis). They were told that the channel’s forensic specialists would look into the matter.’

Jeambar, it seems, then lost his nerve but the story was leaked and a vicious row ensued which has left the whole thing up in the air. As Poller says, there is no conclusive evidence to prove beyond doubt that the killing of Mohammed al Dura was an atrocious lie staged to whip up hatred of Israel, most lethally in the Arab world. But the evidence assembled in this article strongly suggests that France 2 is guilty of one of the most monstrous pieces of deception of modern times whose effects in terms of fomenting hatred, violence and mass murder have been incalculable.

Israeli officials who have privately said from very early on that the al Dura footage was faked also say that there is no point opening up this affair to public scrutiny because the magnitude of this lie is so great, and so deeply has Europe absorbed the wider big lie of Israel’s ‘oppression’ of the Palestinian Arabs, that even to raise a question about the death of Mohammed al Dura is to invite further opprobrium. Faced with a world that has taken leave of its senses and suspended normal conventions of journalism, evidence and reason over the war against Israel, the despairing fatalism of the Israelis is understandable. But it is wrong. Whatever reaction it provokes, there is an obligation to history to unmask an apparent lie of this magnitude and establish the truth. Commentary has performed an important service.

As the arguments rage over who should take responsibility for the Katrina disaster, the role of the Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco appears to be coming under particularly harsh scrutiny. A reader has sent me the following message from Baton Rouge:

'In our Federal system, the President is and in this case was painfully at the mercy of state officials. Just as President Bush cannot be blamed for the fact that New Orleans was hit by a category four hurricane - global warming or no global warming -- he is not responsible for the fact that the Louisiana National Guard was not in place immediately before or immediately after the storm.

'I should point out that there were National Guard troops in New Orleans before Katrina hit. Many of them were at the Superdome. However, they were unarmed and unprepared to deal with the looting and violence. If anything, this fact only serves to illustrate the incompetence. If the situation was serious enough to warrant placing uniformed soldiers in front of the largest shelter, surely it was serious enough to provide them with the tools they might need if the situtation actually got out of hand. It was a typical liberal response to a crisis. Do something - anything - to show that you are on top of the situation and that you "care" without any consideration as to the effectiveness of your actions.

'Once flood waters entered the city through the Seventeenth Street canal, the New Orleans Police Department was incapable of handling the situation. President Bush does not have the authority to order troops into an American city. Democrat Governor Kathleen Blanco and the (largely African American) New Orleans civil authorities are the real incompetents behind the disastrous aftermath. The poverty of New Orleans itself is largely a byproduct of third-world political systems dominated by Democrats.

'As soon as Ms. Blanco finally conceded that she was way out of her league and asked for full Federal assistance, the immediate problems were sorted out in short order. Of course, you won't find any tapes of her concession speech. Ms. Blanco's capitulation was behind closed doors.

'It now appears that the Governor has refused to sign over full authority to the Federal government. Now that things have stabilized, she reportedly is insisting that the State government retain control over the troops and that James Witt, President Clinton's FEMA Director, be put in charge under her so-called leadership. Just what we need, the Clinton administration and the Blanco administration working hand in hand to feel our pain.

'Further, people need to understand the scope of the problem. New
Orleans is a large city with limited access under the best of circumstances. Everything to the east of New Orleans was completely destroyed and impassable. The remaining thoroughfares to the north, north-west and west were inaccessible to the worst areas of flooding. There is no egress to the south. On top of that, there was a well armed gang and drug addict population determined to take full advantage of the situation by preventing the police from restoring order. The National Guard should have been on the ground in force last Monday evening. The fact that they were not is fully Governor Blanco's fault. I love New Orleans, but any professional person from the city will tell you that the civil catastrophe was foreseeable. New Orleans has been crippled by corrupt and incompetent local leaders for many years. (In fact, New Orleans government has always been corrupt, but fifty years ago it was much more competent.)

'The one criticism of President Bush that I share with you is his poor omprehension of the situation. He stated on television that no one realized the levees were going to break - as if this exact scenario had not been forecast for decades. Unfortunately, we all knew it would happen eventually. Governor Blanco just didn't do anything to prepare for the possibility that last Monday and Tuesday were the days of reckoning.

'Finally, a word about disaster relief. If you were present, you would see the overwhelming generosity and coordination of private citizens in response to Katrina. This is the heart of the American conservative message - government is often incompetent and usually a hindrance. Only private efforts can be relied upon to quickly effect results. The churches of Baton Rouge are the backbone of all local efforts. I'm sure the same is true wherever evacuation shelters have been established. I spent my weekend helping to set up a temporary hospital in Baton Rouge and delivering supplies to a shelter on the Southern University campus. Others were active at shelters in the Baton Rouge convention center and on the campus of Louisiana State University. At least a hundred people from University Baptist Church were involved. Our facility has been designated as a drop off point for relief supplies. We are just one congregation among hundreds in Louisiana working to bring peace and stability to the thousands of American citizens left stranded by Katrina. Our people will be provided with the world's greatest disaster assistance. We did it after the tsunami, we are doing it after Katrina. The initial deadly incompetent response is a national disgrace. But recovery from the sudden destruction of a major city was never expected to be easy.

'I could share much more, but I am busy helping my law partners rebuild our New Orleans firm out of the Baton Rouge office. We grieve for our beautiful city. No-one has yet stopped to comprehend what the loss of New Orleans will mean to our lives in the years ahead. But we will survive, God willing.'

The Jerusalem Post reports a pogrom by Palestinian Muslims against the Christian Arab village of Taibah near Ramallah. Although no-one was injured, many were forced to flee the village. The attack was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir who was apparently killed by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

'"When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison," said one source. "Then they buried her without reporting her death to the relevant authorities..."

‘More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night," said a Taiba resident. "They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances." With the exception of large numbers of PA policemen, the streets of Taiba were completely deserted on Sunday as the residents remained indoors. Many torched cars littered the streets. At least 16 houses had been gutted by fire and the assailants also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

"It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs," said another resident. "Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there. Then they tried to enter the local beer factory, but were repelled by PA security agents.'

Will those churches in Britain and the US which are pushing for divestment from Israel on account of its alleged ill-treatment of the Palestinians now speak out against the persecution of Arab members of their own faith at the hands of some of the very people whose cause they so relentlessly champion?

The Observer yesterday published an immensely important and disturbing story. It has obtained two leaked documents which explicitly reveal what has long been apparent to those with eyes to see — the government’s craven and lethal policy of appeasement towards radical Islamism in Britain. The first document was a letter from William Ehrman, the top intelligence official at the Foreign Office. He proposed that spies should infiltrate extremist Islamist websites posing as radicals with the aim of dissuading extremists from taking up arms. This would be done, apparently, by feeding them anti-western propaganda which would nevertheless stop short of violence:

'But behind the scenes he proposed developing 'messages aimed at more radicalised constituencies who are potential recruits to terrorism'. These radicals would not listen to the traditional calls 'for the Middle East to become a zone of peace and prosperity', said the intelligence officer. 'They might, however, listen to religious arguments about the nature of jihad, that, while anti-Western, eschew terrorism.'

This is stark staring mad. Delivering anti-western messages will not damp down violence. It will promote, incite, justify and increase it. Not surprisingly, there are those in the FO and elsewhere who are deeply alarmed by this official lunacy:

‘Officials within the Foreign Office are known to be unhappy about the growing 'Islamisation' of the department and many feel uncomfortable with moves across Whitehall to open up a dialogue with radical Islamists. However, ministers believe it makes sense to engage with the more moderate fringes of political Islam… ‘The 7 July bombings were a direct challenge to the policy of engagement and have led some critics to suggest it should be abandoned. One former minister said last night: 'The strategic error is to think you can fight hot fire with cooler fire. These people still want to see sharia law extended and find it difficult to handle secularism or gay rights. You need more, genuine political engagement rather than searching for the acceptable face of Islam.'

The second document is a memorandum from Mockbul Ali, the FO's Islamic issues adviser, which recommends allowing the radical cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi into Britain. This deploys the classic argument of appeasement – that unless Britain lets Qaradawi in, notwithstanding his support for human bomb terrorism in Israel and Iraq, Muslims will claim that Britain has an anti-Islam agenda and more will be recruited to violence:

'We certainly do not agree with Qaradawi's views on Israel and Iraq, but we have to recognise that they are not unusual or even exceptional among Muslims. In fact it is correct to say that these are views shared by a majority of Muslims in the Middle East and the UK. Refusing entry on these grounds would also open a Pandora's box in relation to entry clearance for others in the Muslim world.

'Excluding Qaradawi would give grist to AQ propaganda of a western vendetta against Muslims and would undermine Qaradawi's counter-terrorism messages. Qaradawi would be the first port of call when encouraging statements against terrorism and the killing of Muslim civilians in Iraq, as requested recently by Iraq Policy Unit. He has repeatedly and authoritatively condemned terrorist attacks -- after 9/11, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, the Bigley kidnapping and recently after the bombings in Qatar, as well as on other occasions. When Qaradawi was accused last year of justifying kidnappings and kidnappings of civilians in Iraq, particularly US civilians, he has firmly stated "I did not issue such a fatwa". In fact Qaradawi was widely reported as "vehemently opposed to kidnapping and killing innocent civilians" and "urged the release of four Italian and French individuals recently abducted in Iraq" (see Annex 1). We could not engage with Qaradawi on counter-terrorism or Iraq should there be a decision to exclude him from the UK'.

So let’s get this right. This FO adviser is saying we cannot offend Qaradawi because we need him to condemn terrorist attacks — which he does nevertheless only selectively, disapproving of al Qaeda operations while telling Muslims it is their duty, no less, to kill Israelis and coalition troops in Iraq. Despite this we are already, it seems, 'engaging' with this inciter of jihadi terror on counter terrorism. And we cannot do anything that might further inflame the false view by Muslims that the UK has a vendetta against them because most of them subscribe to extremist jihadi views of the kind that Qaradawi espouses. The logic of that thinking is that since Muslims take the view that a) any assertion of western values that conflict with Islam or b) any attempt by western society to defend itself against Islamic attack is instead an attack on Islam, it follows that the British government will never do either a) or b) for fear of recruiting yet more to the jihad. And if that really is the case, then it’s all over for British culture.

The leaks provoked a fine polemic in the Observer by Nick Cohen who, after drawing attention to London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s continued support for the ‘murderous queer basher’ Qaradawi and pouring scorn on the FO for sucking up to the Muslim Brotherhood, then alighted on a particularly unsavoury passage in Mockbul Ali’s memorandum:

'The Foreign Secretary may remember the negative media storm when Livingstone last brought the priest to Britain, the civil servants tell Jack Straw. He should ignore it. The accusations came from tainted Jewish sources, "the Board of [Jewish] Deputies" and the Israeli monitoring site Memri, which is "regularly criticised for selective translation of Arabic reports". This simply isn't true. Qaradawi's extremist views haven't been spread by scheming Jews but are well documented on his very own website.'

In fact, Ali went further and said:

'The founding President of MEMRI is retired Colonel Yigal Carmon, who served for 22 years in Israel's military intelligence service. MEMRI is regularly criticised for selective translation of Arabic reports.'

The latter claim is not true. There has never been a single authoritative challenge to the veracity or integrity of MEMRI’s authoritative translations, which have opened the eyes of the west to what the Arab and Muslim world is really saying. And the former remark echoes Livingstone’s own smear that MEMRI was a Mossad plot, a claim for which Carmon is now suing him for libel.

With these references to MEMRI and the Board of Deputies, Ali has made a tactical error. The rest of his memorandum may be guilty of appeasement but it studiedly distances itself from the extremist views under consideration. But when Ali gets to the Jews, his guard slips and he endorses the conspiracy theory which is the signature of the Islamic extremist.

Britain, it need hardly be said, is allegedly in the forefront of the fight against Islamic extremism. Now we can see that its own Foreign Office is acting as a kind of appeasement fifth column in the very heart of government.

All too predictably, the horrific disaster caused by hurricane Katrina is being blamed on our old friend global warming. The British government’s chief scientist Sir David King -- the one who said global warming was a bigger threat than terrorism -- leapt instantaneously on the bandwagon. The Independent reported :

'"The increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming," Professor King told Channel 4 News yesterday. "We have known since 1987 the intensity of hurricanes is related to surface sea temperature and we know that, over the last 15 to 20 years, surface sea temperatures in these regions have increased by half a degree centigrade. So it is easy to conclude that the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

Well no, it’s not easy if your mind is not turned by propaganda and you have any knowledge of the facts. As the Independent also reported, various climate experts think Sir David is talking balderdash:

‘Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also claimed, less than a month ago, that ocean surfaces had become warmer, which doubled the destructive potential of tropical storms in the past 30 years. But he said that Monday's storm "is part of a natural" cycle of powerful Atlantic storms that have struck since 1995. He told The Independent: "I don't think you can put this down to global warming."Other scientists point out that the 150-year record of Atlantic storms show there is ample precedent for hurricanes of Katrina's power. They say it is part of a natural upswing that has taken place since the mid-90s...

‘William Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist who is considered one of the fathers of modern tropical cyclone science, said worldwide weather records were too inadequate for a thorough examination of trends. He told The Los Angeles Times: "The people who have a bias in favour of the argument that humans are making the globe warmer will push any data that suggests humans are making hurricanes worse, but it just isn't so ... These are natural cycles."

It’s worth also recapping on a scandal that I wrote about on January 17 this year, when an expert on hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, Chris Landsea, resigned from the International Panel on Climate Change after what he said was a gross misrepresentation of scientific evidence to claim falsely that global warming was producing more hurricane activity.

In an open letter to his colleagues, Landsea said that shortly after he had drafted the hurricanes chapter for the IPCC's fourth assessment report's Observations chapter, the Observations lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, told a press conference organised by scientists at Harvard that global warming would spur the occurrence of more hurricane activity. But Landsea knew that this was the precise opposite of what the scientific evidence had suggested. He wrote:

'I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.

'Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).

'It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.'

When Landsea expressed his concerns, he said, the IPCC simply brushed them aside. So Landsea left the IPCC, saying:

'I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound'.

Now the appalling tragedy in the southern states is being repellently exploited to serve that very same scientifically unsound preconceived agenda -- not to mention bashing Bush into the bargain. The toxic sewage released by Katrina is not confined to the floodwaters.

A welcome new blogger, Adloyada, rightly excoriates an article about Israel on the BBC website which displays once again the BBC's astounding ignorance and lethal prejudice towards that country. Martin Asser presents Israel’s relations with the Arabs both inside and outside its borders as animated by an aggressive racism. Taking as his paradigm the wholly atypical village of Beit Safafa, which is half inside Israel and half over the Green Line, he quotes Arab voices — and only Arab voices — to present an entirely one-sided and embittered view. The picture he paints is of Israelis who were once friendly and sympathetic to the Arabs of this village but whose atitudes have recently changed to hostility. Pondering why this change might have occurred, he comes up with this:

‘It is hard to say whether Israel's current efforts to make itself more Jewish has any bearing on this deterioration in relations.’

‘Israel's current efforts to make itself more Jewish’? What on earth does that mean? Such an imputation of racial exclusivism is no less unpleasant for being entirely fact-free. The facts, of course, suggest a different explanation. Five years ago, the Palestinian Arabs launched their most devastating existential war against the Jewish state by targeting innocent Israelis for death and using their own bodies to do so, thus turning any Israeli relationship with them into a potentially suicidal exercise. Might that not perhaps have something to do with this ‘deterioration in relations? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that it is entirely reasonable for people under such genocidal assault to be less than friendly to the enemy side, rather than demonise the Israelis as racists for doing so — unless of course you uncritically take the part of the people who support the murder of Jews and then blame Israel for defending itself?

Asser ploughs on ever deeper into his demonology of the victims and sanitising of their aggressors:

‘But there are some tell-tale signs that Arab citizens are not valued by the state in the same way as their Jewish counterparts.’

And what might they be? Well, problems with getting residency in Jerusalem, visas. That sort of thing.

"It is true there are no Arab democracies," the man says. "But when Israel claims to be the only democracy in the region it should add, 'it is the only democracy for Jews'!"

(sic)

Asssuming he means ‘it is only a democracy for Jews’, he’s wrong, of course — Israeli Arabs have full democratic rights. But if Asser knows this, he isn’t saying. He allows this libel to remain unchallenged. Yes, any discrimination against Israeli Arabs is deplorable. But is it really any worse than discrimination in any other country, such as the UK — or in Israel itself, for that matter, against the Jewish Sephardim? On and on Asser goes nevertheless, rehearsing one Arab whinge after another. Ludicrously, he even complains that Israeli Arabs are not forced to serve in the Israeli defence force to avoid them having to bear arms against other Arabs, an exemption to be criticised because — wait for it —

‘there are financial benefits from being in the military, such as improved credit ratings and national insurance rebates.’

And then finally there is this heart-rending account:

‘A young visitor from the north of the country describes how her behaviour has changed since two shooting incidents in which eight Israeli Arabs and Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers trying to disrupt the Gaza pullout. "I have never been afraid of being an Arab before, but I am now. I was on a train the other day talking to this Jewish girl. She asked where I did my army service, and I had to lie, saying I hadn't done it yet because I've been away, but I'll do it soon.I don't want to be recognised as an Arab, because at any time someone could put a gun to my head, and it would be all over for me."’

Yes, the killing spree by a Jewish terrorist was appalling. But to date, there have been three isolated incidents of Jewish terrorism against Arabs in Israel, all carried out by nutcases and all overwhelmingly denounced by the country – but literally thousands of unprovoked attacks by Arabs on Israelis with thousands killed or maimed, a fact which Asser does not even mention. So for the BBC, the existential attack upon Jewish Israel which has been taking place for the past half century and which is the actual cause of the Middle East conflict might as well never have happened. Instead, the victims in the Middle East are the Arabs and their oppressors are the Jews.

And for this inversion of history and morality, which will have incited murderous hatred of the Jews among a few more million Arabs and others, we actually pay a licence-fee.