Hilarious spoof by Peter Briffa on how opinionistas such as yours truly line up in the face of the Tory wunderkind matinee idol David Cameron. A taster:

Alice Thompson:

There is a new excitement in the air. And David Cameron has seized it. Call it the zeitgeist. Call it the new era, but this is a man willing to take destiny by the scruff of the neck and drag it into the new millennium. With his tee-shirt and jeans, changing nappies as he leans effortlessly against his Aga in his Notting Hill kitchen, David Cameron is modernity personified. He exudes the air of a man at ease both with his own sexuality, and that of the nation as a whole. David Davis, by contrast, with his sleep-filled eyes and trembling gait, is a broken-nosed street fighter who wouldn’t know one side of a frying pan from the other and who probably doesn’t even know the name of his own children.

Robert Fisk:

The poor people of Basra aren’t too worked up about who will become the next leader of the Conservative party. They know all about rigged elections. They know all about George W. Bush. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, was elected with 98% of the vote. That didn’t stop the Americans from toppling him though. Could that plight be awaiting David Cameron?

Mark Steyn:

So it’s Tweedledumb versus Tweedledumber, TweedleDave versus TweedleDavid. One, a man so modern he’d like to teach the world to sing, furnish it with love, have a coke and a smile. The other, a paleo-conservative from the Jurassic era who is a walking cure for insomnia. In other words, the mogadon mastadon. Still, while the liberal media gets itself worked up into a frenzy about who will lead the Conservatives into its next glorious defeat, a little-reported story emanating from Nottingham Council is much more indicative of the way western culture is heading. There, the good burghers of Nottingham have decided to suspend Christmas for “one year only”, on the grounds of racial sensitivity, and replace it with a multicultural event in which the female councillors are all required to wear the burqa and get stoned. And no, that isn’t stoned in a David Cameron sense.

No-one is spared. Read it all.

The full text of Ahmadinejad’s speech, translated by the invaluable MEMRI, is worth reading. Here we can see starkly laid out the demented inferiority complex and paranoia of the jihadi, the mad inversion of cause and effect and the centrality of Israel to this apocalyptic vision -- and the centrality of the Palestinians in bringing about the goals of the jihad:

We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [i.e. the West] and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years. In this historical war, the situation at the fronts has changed many times. During some periods, the Muslims were the victors and were very active, and looked forward, and the World of Arrogance was in retreat. Unfortunately, in the past 300 years, the Islamic world has been in retreat vis-à-vis the World of Arrogance...

During the period of the last 100 years, the [walls of the] world of Islam were destroyed and the World of Arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world...

This occupying country [i.e. Israel ] is in fact a front of the World of Arrogance in the heart of the Islamic world. They have in fact built a bastion [ Israel ] from which they can expand their rule to the entire Islamic world... This means that the current war in Palestine is the front line of the Islamic world against the World of Arrogance, and will determine the fate of Palestine for centuries to come.

Today the Palestinian nation stands against the hegemonic system as the representative of the Islamic Ummah [nation]. Thanks to God, since the Palestinian people adopted the Islamic war and the Islamic goals, and since their struggle has become Islamic in its attitude and orientation, we have been witnessing the progress and success of the Palestinian people.

The Iranian president sees his country as part of an epic fight between the world of Islam and the rest of us. Because the world of Islam has lost out to the west since the Enlightenment, this is portrayed as an assault by the west upon the Islamic world. The failure of that world is thus presented as a defeat by a west that set out to destroy it. The idea that Islam was actually the last thing on the west’s mind while it just got on with inventing capitalism, while the Islamic world lost out simply because of its own inherent weaknesses, is not even considered. The west is a priori an aggressor. So it follows that Israel, which is composed of Jews who

came to this country from far away to plunder it

is the west’s beachhead in its diabolical intention to destroy the Islamic world. Of course, the fact that the Jews did not come from ‘far away’ but were a nation in Israel long before Islam was even invented, and retained an unbroken link with and residency in that country through waves of successive invasions and colonisations — notably by the aggressive Islamic world — is utterly denied. The fact that Israel palpably has only ever wanted its own self to exist and has never had aggressive designs on any other country is also denied. Instead, the mad logic of fanatical victim complex means that Israel must be destroyed, and the jihadi tells himself that the destruction of the west in turn is likewise an act of self-defence.

Iran is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons. No-one can now delude themselves any longer about its intentions. The fact that this morning it remains a member of the UN is itself a dismaying sign that the world is still passively waiting for immolation.

Needless to say, as the world foams with synthetic shock at Ahmadinejad’s declaration of intent to wipe Israel off the map, no Arab state has expressed its own outrage, revulsion etc. Most have remained silent. Well, there’s a surprise! According to the BBC News website, Egypt said:

We are way beyond this type of political rhetoric that shows the weakness of the Iranian government...

while Turkey called on the Iranian government

to display political moderation

which is not what one might call the most full-hearted repudiation of genocide. The silence or, at best, mealy-mouthedness of the Arab world furnishes an eloquent reminder that it overwhelmingly supports the Iranian aim of eradicating Israel, even though it may not support its current tactics. Indeed, with the exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab world has never renounced the war of extermination that it first waged against Israel when it came into existence.

The Palestinians, however, are far too street-wise to fall into the trap. Their support from European dupes depends, above all else, on the myth assiduously peddled that they do not want to destroy Israel. Thus Saeeb Erekat, their chief negotiator:

‘Palestinians recognise the right of the state of Israel to exist and I reject his comments’, he told the BBC News website. ‘What we need to be talking about is adding the state of Palestine to the map and not wiping Israel from the map,’ he said.

But the Palestinians have indeed wiped Israel off the map – in their own schoolbooks, where Israel does not appear at all on the maps of the Middle East, or on the map on their insignia which delineates the putative state of Palestine as the entire area presently composed of Israel and the disputed territories.

The Palestinians’ charter still calls for the destruction of Israel; its spokesmen have periodically repeated that the two-state solution is merely a Trojan horse for one Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel; they have rejected all offers and opportunities for a separate Palestinian state; they persist in their demand for the right of Palestinian settlement in Israel, which would destroy it as a Jewish state, even while they call for a state of their own.

In other words, Erekat’s words are opportunistic humbug. The Palestinians remain committed to the ethnic cleansing of the Jews and the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel – just as Ahmadinejad declared.

Nor is the shock, revulsion etc expressed by Tony Blair necessarily shared by his fellow Brits. Indeed, from the evidence of respondents to the BBC website, it seems that a number of them are positively sanguine about the prospect of a second Jewish holocaust:

• It is also somewhat in poor taste for us Brits to condemn Ahmadinejad's fiery wording when our government has stood by an American President who is even more guilty of such charges. Bush and Blair led an illegal war where thousands of innocent people have died and for us to now turn around and comment from afar on a situation in the Middle East that we have made far worse is beyond belief...

• Is this story true? The current American regime is expert at creating faked excuses for military and political action. The WMD scam in Iraq for example. The Americans who operate in concert with Israel have made almost daily unsubstantiated threats against Iran, Syria, and any country that opposes a domineering foreign policy. Maybe Iran is just sick of Americans...

• Israel continues its brutal human rights abuses against Palestinians ...and the rest of the middle east therefore continue to hate Israel. In a nutshell. When will we see justice for the innocent people killed? America provides billions of dollars annually to Israel, which is used on advanced military hardware mercilessly against palestinian people. Only when the killing stops will ties be mended.

• OK, his remarks were a bit strong, and personally I do find them offensive. But I'm not sure it's any worse than what Bush said about Iraq, and at least Ahmedinejad is using only words, not bombs.

Israel has called for Iran to be thrown out of the United Nations. Its Secretary-General Kofi Annan has expressed his ‘dismay’ at Ahmadinejad's remarks. Dismay, eh? Steady on, world.

With its customary hypocrisy, the alleged civilised world has recoiled in horror at the declaration by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’. So he’s a genocidal, Jew-hating maniac. So what’s new? Iran has never made any secret of its intention to annihilate Israel. It exports demented anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred to the Muslim world, it funds terrorists to murder as many Jews as possible (see the most recent victims this week in Hadera) and it is racing to build a nuclear weapon so that it can expeditiously carry out its professed aim to eradicate the Jewish nation state.

All this the world has known; and yet it has sat on its hands, occasionally extricating them to be wrung over Iran’s accelerating nuclear programme before resorting to the tried and tested strategy of maximum uselessness, diplomacy through the United Nations — fresh from that organisation’s triumph in disarming (not) that other threat to the world, Saddam Hussein; for which failure the head of its nuclear watchdog, Mohamed al Baradei, was doubtless awarded the Nobel Prize by a grateful Swedish establishment and wider world for whom America, not Iran, appears to be the greatest enemy of civilisation.

So Iran continues merrily on its diabolical way, murdering Israelis here, murdering Iraqis there, serenely building its apparatus of mass destruction while the alleged civilised world looks at Iraq and looks at President Bush and sucks its teeth and settles down to wait for the new Jewish holocaust wrapped in the mantle of sanctimonious opposition to pre-emptive action, and with Israel well on the way to being itself safely delegitimised and dehumanised. After all, are we not told by allegedly civilised people in Britain and Europe that it would have been better had Israel not been created?

How seriously can we take those expressions of horror at Israel’s putative annihilation, when those very same people lionise the Palestinians who are committed to precisely the same objective but whose every word and deed reinforcing that genocidal aim is sanitised or simply ignored? Since the Gaza pull-out, Israel has all but disappeared from the media radar. Why? Because the hacks only get excited when Israel behaves in a way they can condemn. Sure, Hadera was covered; but no-one would know, from the British media, that since the Gaza pull-out Palestinian attrition has relentlessly continued and has only resulted in so few incidents because so many attacks have been thwarted. Tom Gross’s invaluable resumés provide a flavour of what has been happening:

• During the course of an anti-terrorism raid in the West Bank, Israeli forces have found a hand grenade hidden by Palestinians under a baby. In a briefing following the discovery, Lieutenant General Arik Khen of the Israeli army said, "We felt something wasn't right. We demanded to search the baby and we found she (the wife of a wanted Palestinian) was carrying a grenade that she attempted to hide under the baby." The army said that the apprehension of five wanted terrorists in this raid almost certainly prevented a deadly attack against Israeli civilians. The IDF general added that searches were ongoing and daily attempts to carry out "terror attacks by Palestinian groups against Israeli civilians have not stopped even for a minute."

• During Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's meeting with U.S President George W. Bush last Thursday, Bush agreed that Palestinian terrorists could be absorbed into the official Palestinian security organizations, and groups such as Hamas would not be disbanded as Israel and the Road Map demand. President Bush is supporting Abbas's decision to try and work with Hamas even though the Americans have consistently repeated that violent groups have no place in a democratic process.

• At the beginning of this week Luay Saadi the leader of Islamic Jihad's military wing in the West Bank was killed in clashes with Israeli troops. Saadi is believed to have been responsible for two recent suicide bombings. (Islamic Jihad said yesterday's suicide bombing in Hadera was revenge for the killing of Saadi. Israeli military sources pointed out that a bomb of this magnitude takes longer than two days to plan.) This year alone Saadi was responsible for organizing suicide attacks which led to the killing of 12 Israelis and the injuring of 150 others in suicide attacks. He was originally arrested in 1999 by Israel but freed from prison in January 2004. Israel is under constant pressure from other countries, including Western democracies, to release Palestinian prisoners. Saadi was not the first released Palestinian prisoner to quickly go on to kill Israelis again. For example, the Palestinian terrorist who blew himself up on August 28, 2005, at the Beersheba bus station was released in 2004 as part of a prisoner exchange with the Palestinian Authority.

• The Israeli military has discovered that Palestinian terrorists are preparing to launch mortar and rocket attacks on Jerusalem. Palestinians have smuggled launchers and mortars into Palestinian suburbs near to Jerusalem. On October 16, the Israeli army detained a 50-year-old Palestinian who was in the process of smuggling a mortar shell and firing mechanism from Bir Zeit to Jerusalem in the trunk of his vehicle. Meanwhile Palestinians continue to fire Qassam rockets into southern Israel. A Qassam rocket was fired into the Israeli town of Sderot from Gaza yesterday morning, prior to the suicide attack in Hadera. Five Qassams were fired into Israel on Tuesday.

• Israeli soldiers prevented a 15-year old Palestinian from crossing a checkpoint south of Nablus after he had attempted to avoid the security check. The Palestinian boy had in his possession a mortar shell and two knives. The mortar shell was detonated in a controlled manner by border police. This is the sixth weaponry smuggling attempt stopped by the Israeli army at the Hawara security crossing in the last two months.

• The Palestinian Authority continues to promote hate ideology on its television channels. PA TV has broadcast two shows that deny Israel's legitimacy as a state and another that depict Israelis as cruel and inhumane murderers. A play filmed in front of a live audience and broadcast on PA TV shows Palestinian "resistance fighters" in Israeli jails. A prisoner recounts how he was repeatedly beaten by an Israeli soldier for saying he comes from Jaffa. In "The Canaanite," a Palestinian-produced series for daily viewing during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, an actor depicting an Israeli soldier gleefully and cold-bloodedly murders a bride in her wedding gown. On Jordanian TV during the month of Ramadan, the series "al-Shatat" (the Diaspora) has been aired. The series features a "Jewish conspiracy theory" showing Jewish plans to dominate the world and repeats the blood libel lie that Jews ritually kill Palestinian children. (Jordan has now pulled the series after the translation service MEMRI exposed its vile nature.)

When is the world going to recoil in horror and issue fierce denunciations of all this too?

The appearance of a muted handful of opinion pieces today about the rioting in Birmingham last weekend merely serves to highlight the fact — as Alice Miles in the Times actually says —that so few people have said anything about it at all. Indeed, there has been a striking near-silence about these events. What happened was that a rumour spread by pirate radio stations went round the Afro-Caribbean community in the run-down Lozells road area of the city that a 14 year-old black girl had been gang-raped by between three and 25 Pakistani men. Reports of what happened next are confusing and inadequate, but in the disturbances that followed a black Christian was set upon by up to 11 armed youths and stabbed to death as he walked home from the cinema, a mixed-race man was shot dead and an Asian taxi-driver was attacked.

By any standards such occurrences are deeply disturbing. If this had been white on black violence, there would have been a media feeding frenzy and the newspapers would have been full of reconstructions, analysis and instant opinions and recriminations. Instead, there has been near silence. The reason is obvious. The cult of multiculturalism holds that all minorities are victims of the majority, and therefore minorities must always be blameless. When two minorities start beating each other up, therefore, politically correct Britain is paralysed. By definition, it cannot divide up the actors in the drama into good guys and bad guys. There can be no minority bad guys. It dare not investigate what actually happened, who started it and who was to blame because no minority can ever be blamed without incurring the dreaded labels of ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’. Furthermore, the fact that Pakistanis were involved adds a further radioactive dimension. For Pakistani, read ‘Muslim’ —and that’s a road down which the media’s finest refuse to travel, for fear of what they might be forced to discover and the consequences for them that might follow.

The result is that a serious and dangerous breakdown in community relations has not been investigated or analysed, the murder of two innocent people has been treated with near-indifference and the implications for multiculturalism all but ignored. Moreover, it may well be that the Pakistani Muslims have actually been traduced. For there is no evidence that this alleged gang-rape actually occurred. It may have done; but equally, it may simply have been an unwarranted rumour that spun out of control. But because of the absence of journalistic inquiry, we do not know. In the Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple — whose work as a prison doctor in Birmingham means he knows what he is talking about — points out what contemporary self-censorship prevents us from facing up to: the tensions between our multicultural communities.

Relations between the two "communities" (which themselves are hardly monolithic in their composition, attitudes or conduct) are far from warm. It is the complaint of some blacks that the Pakistanis do not treat them with the respect that it is every man's due, a respect that, in the minds of at least some young men, is indistinguishable from fear. And it is certainly true that people from the Indian subcontinent are hardly free from racial prejudice, and that for many of them a black man is several rungs below the top of the human ladder - at the very bottom, in fact.

On the other hand, you don't have to speak to many shopkeepers in Lozells, or areas like it, to hear of experiences that disincline them to a favourable impression of black youth; and, like most people, they generalise from one or several bad experiences, and make assumptions about everyone who physically and culturally resembles those of whom they have had those bad experiences. The Pakistanis may not believe that the 14- year-old girl was serially raped, but they will have no difficulty at all in believing that she shoplifted.

Such are the joys of multi-culturalism. The situation has, in my view, been inflamed by years of reflex political correctness on the part of the authorities and the authors of official reports that coin phrases such as "institutionalised racism" - a blood libel, in the sense of being impossible to disprove, if ever there was one. We now live in a political culture in which a sense of grievance stands as its own justification: you are wronged if you think you are.

And Dalrymple reflects on the irony of what he thinks may have been a multicultural ‘blood libel’ — the term used for the lies spread about the Jews by Christians in the Middle Ages or in Tsarist Russia — in the unsubstantiated rumour of the gang-rape:

Of all the paradoxes of the situation, none is greater than that the Muslim traders of Lozells, among whom an unthinking anti-Semitism is probably widespread, should now find themselves in the position of the petty-trading Jews of Tsarist Russia, Moldavia and Romania.

Such indeed are the joys of a multicultural society.

I am currently in Australia, where I dropped in for the weekend (as one does) to attend a conference discussing the phenomenon of judicial activism. The meeting, which brought together lawyers, judges and other interested parties from Australia, the US and Britain, brought out in a particularly fascinating way the deep divisions between lawyers – particularly in the US Supreme Court and the Australian High Court – over judicial activism. In one camp were the judicial activists themselves, who bridled at the very suggestion that they were anything of the kind and then proceeded by everything they said to demonstrate conclusively that they were; and in the other camp were their legal and judicial colleagues who were aghast at the damage the activists were doing to the integrity of the law and the place of the judiciary in western society as the arbiters of dispassionate and objective justice.

The first camp was made up of judges who believed in interpreting the US constitution or Australian statute law so creatively and flexibly that they would literally make things up to ensure that the law fitted their view of the way the world should work; the second camp insisted that the judiciary should stick to the words of the law and the constitution so that the intentions of their framers should be respected, judges should not replace them by their own views and the courts should restrict their activities to delivering the law rather than inventing it. The first camp called the second camp ‘wooden’ and ‘inflexible’; the second camp accused the first of having imposed a hegemony of anti-democratic judicial moralising around the western world from the US Supreme Court, through the English Law Lords and the European Courts of Human Rights and of Justice all the way to the High Court of Australia.

Needless to say, my sympathies were strongly with the second camp. And I was very struck by two things in particular: the posturing humbug of the judicial activists and the principled scorn of their judicial opponents who, despite winning the intellectual argument hands down, are clearly powerless to resist the tide of politicisation which has delivered justice into the hands of ideologues within the very courts on which they sit. One such self-denying activist, having denounced the ‘demonisation’ of the judiciary by their critics and piously called for an end to name-calling, proceeded to say – virtually in these words -- that anyone who criticised the judicial endorsement of ‘lifestyle choice’ was one step away from sending gays to Auschwitz. But of course, that couldn’t be name-calling because he embodied moral high-mindedness and was thus constitutionally incapable of grievous and unwarranted insult.

One after another, these judicial activists invoked the spectre of Nazi Germany to justify their activities, claiming absurdly that if Weimar Germany had had a human rights law the Nazis might never have come to power. They presented themselves sanctimoniously as the lonely defenders of freedom against tyranny and their critics, by implication, as fascist fellow-travellers. This provoked lawyers and judges from the opposite camp to point out that opposing gay marriage was a legitimate point of view and demonising such a view -- to coin a phrase – was an attempt to shut down a very proper and necessary debate. One very senior judge protested at the ‘insanity’ of a situation in which unaccountable judges ruled that gay orgies were a right under the US constitution or the European Convention on Human Rights. As he said, the vague and malleable provisions of human rights law had allowed the judges to pretend that they were laying down Platonic universal values rather than doing the job they were supposed to do, which was to deliver the values embedded in a society and embodied in its laws.

There are many issues which divide us; their resolution should depend on the outcome of public debate through elected parliaments. This does not mean, as the judicial activists so misleadingly claim, that there should be a tyranny of the legislature. The courts should always be the ultimate upholders of the law as a safeguard in a democracy. But to be that safeguard, they have to actually uphold the law rather than invent it. If they do the latter, they turn from democracy's defender into its nemesis.

Judicial activism does not belong to the world of law. It belongs to the world of politics. The elision between the two is both damaging to the law and dangerous to democracy.

The Conservative party’s leadership contest has reached a point which may well come to be looked back upon as a watershed in the party’s development. With Ken Clarke being knocked out in the first of two votes by Tory MPs, it is clear that one of the two contenders who will go through to the hustings among the party in the country will be the boy from County Charisma, David Cameron. What is also clear is that, given the rapturous reception Cameron has received from party members and the lacklustre performance by David Davis, a run-off between Cameron and Davis would result almost certainly in a victory for Cameron. This provides a golden opportunity for the most under-rated and least talked-about candidate, Dr Liam Fox, to get Davis’s backers to switch to him in the MPs’ second vote tomorrow, on the basis that it is Fox who has the best chance of winning against Cameron.

This is almost certainly true. The reason is not that Davis is a poor orator or that he is personally unpopular, true as these may be. It is that he does not have a clear and consistent position but is more a blank sheet of paper on which anyone who can persuade him that they possess a winning formula can write a set of policy prescriptions. More pertinently still, he is not driven by a realisation of the destruction that has been wrought upon social and moral order in Britain by the culture wars and the attack upon the nation, and thus does not have a coherent vision of what needs to be done to rescue it before it slides off the cliff altogether.

This means that he is unable to land killer punches upon Cameron, who represents — by his own admission — a libertarian agenda which, even though he would doubtless deny it, lines him up squarely in the camp that is doing the damage to this country’s values and traditions in the name of ‘modernity’ and ‘change’. All Davis can do in these circumstances is to claim that Cameron’s actual agenda is — so far — vacuous and content-free. But then his own is not exactly rock-solid either. It would boil down to a contest between the aprincipled and the unprincipled. And Cameron has the killer factor on his side in such a contest. He’s got charm.

A contest between Cameron and Liam Fox, however, would be a very different matter. Fox undoubtedly has drawbacks. He has a reputation for light-weightedness, with a tendency to go in for shameless stunts and gimmicks which make him look ridiculous; he has never quite shaken off the impression that he remains a junior doctor in rag week. Nevertheless, the speeches he has been making recently have deservedly boosted his reputation and surprised people by their solidity and substance. This is because Fox actually has a set of unshakeable political beliefs founded upon a strong attachment to the nation and to moral codes such as personal responsibility, the rediscovery of which is the key to repairing social cohesion. He is thus categorised by our amoral, nation-despising, socially wrecking media as ‘right-wing’ and a ‘Thatcherite’.

If he were to upset the apple-cart tomorrow and face Cameron in the final showdown in the country, party members would finally be forced to confront the question which has been niggling away throughout their wilderness years of squabbling purposelessness. That question is simply whether they want to be conservatives any more, or whether they will sign up to anything — however vacuous or socially destructive it may be —which they think will win power. Mesmerised since 1997 by Tony Blair, they would now have the opportunity that so many in the party have wanted for so long — to elect in David Cameron their very own Tory Blair. They would thus be paying the greatest possible homage to the Labour leader and signalling unequivocally — in accepting Blair’s false assertion that he is the centre ground of British politics — that British conservatism has disappeared up its own fundament.

Dr Fox would offer them a clear alternative, the opportunity to restate the conservative defence of this country’s fundamental values. Would they decide, however, that the country has indeed changed irrevocably and that conservative values now merely put people off? If so, they must then be asked: what is the point any more of the Conservative party? Why should the country at large vote for Blair-lite when — in Cameron’s own phrase — they can have the real thing?

If there is to be such a run-off, Fox will have to raise his game once again. He will have to show that his conservatism can reach out to the famous middle ground of floating voters. It can be done, by presenting his ideas in the context of repairing the country, protecting the vulnerable and restoring fairness. In other words, a true one-nation agenda which reclaims the language of social reform from its debasement into its polar opposite, and which shows how the modernisers’ talk of social inclusion actually fragments society and drives people apart and abandons those at the bottom of the heap.

Or it might be Cameron v Davis. In which case, the Conservative party will almost certainly leap into uncharted waters — and leave many high and dry.

The Times reports:

Pagan priests will be allowed to use wine and wands during ceremonies in jails under instructions issued to every prison governor. Inmates practising paganism will be allowed a hoodless robe, incense and a piece of religious jewellery among their personal possessions. They will also be allowed to have Tarot cards but are forbidden from using them to tell the fortunes of other prisoners. The guidance, issued by Michael Spurr, the director of operations of the Prison Service, makes it clear that Skyclad (naked pagan worship) will not be permitted. Prison staff have been told that pagan artefacts should be treated with respect...

Prisoners will be allowed to practice paganism in their cells, including prayer, chanting and the reading of religious texts and rituals. The wearing of ritual jewellery must be risk-assessed by prison officers before the inmate is allowed to place it around the neck.

The guidance adds: “Washing prior to ritual is considered very important in some traditions. Where possible, prisoners should be permitted to shower prior to group worship.” In addition to a hoodless robe, prisoners can keep a flexible twig as a wand, a chalice and rune stones. The guidance makes clear that the hoodless robe can be used only during worship, and not by prisoners while on the wings.

This follows a decision last year to give a Royal Navy sailor the right to carry out Satanic rituals and worship the devil aboard the frigate HMS Cumberland. Two weeks ago the Chief Inspector of Prisons told prison officers to remove charity tiepins bearing the cross of St George (the flag of England) as these might be considered racist. And when the Samaritans applied for a £300,000 lottery grant to renovate its Sheffield premises last year, they were turned down because they were not targeting groups such as asylum-seekers and ethnic minorities.

Isn’t diversity wonderful?

As you can see, the site has a new design. We hope you like it. There are a few finishing touches to perform, but if you find any particular issues email me.

Sincere thanks to Daniel Sheldon and James Pittendreigh for their help in putting the new site together, and in particular for James's artistic flair.

Tom

The really important question about David Cameron and drugs has not been asked. The pressing issue is not whether the Conservative party wunderkind-on-a-roll and potential leader ever took drugs (unless he has done so in recent years, at which point it ceases to be a youthful indiscretion and becomes a disqualification from office) but what his views are about how to tackle drug abuse. And here he is on entirely the wrong side. It is not just that he is equivocal about cannabis, indicating that he disagrees with his party’s policy of re-classifying it back to the more serious class B category of prohibited dugs (although he has also implied that he is rethinking that, in part at least because of the strength of skunk). It is that – despite careful caveats, so that he does not openly come out and say he wants to legalise drugs — he lines up with the drug legalisation lobby, and has displayed that lobby’s utter inability to understand the importance of law in signalling social disapproval and regulating behaviour.

On May 23 2002, he wrote in the Guardian that the war on drugs could never be won. Pointing out that drug policy had been an abject failure, he observed that this was because the focus had been on law enforcement:

Customs and Excise is supposed to keep the drugs out. The police and the courts are supposed to catch and punish users and dealers. It hasn't worked. There have never been more drugs on our streets - and the prices have never been lower. It's time for a new approach.

Wrong. The problem is not law enforcement. It is that the law not been enforced. Customs and Excise took a disastrous decision to stop actively targeting cannabis; as a result, cannabis flooded the British market, the price fell to rock bottom, cannabis use shot up and dealers moved increasingly into hard drugs to keep up their profit margins. On top of that, the police have for years failed to enforce the law against users, preferring instead to concentrate on catching dealers. This is a disastrous strategic error. The drug trade is driven by demand, not supply. And on top of all that has come this government’s catastrophic mixed messages about drugs, reclassifying cannabis to give the impression that a) it is not that dangerous (wildly untrue) and b) that it is no longer illegal (also untrue). The only successful drugs policy is one of zero tolerance, which involves the triple approach of law enforcement, treatment and prevention, as practised for example in Sweden where despite recent ups and downs the success rate in getting on top of drug abuse dwarfs anything that we have done.

What the Swedes understand is that drug policy only works if all the signals that a society sends out consistently say that drug abuse is an evil which simply will not be tolerated. That does not mean banging up every user. It does mean that drug use — quite apart from its supply — will not be tolerated and so there will be strategies for preventing it from happening and for dealing with it in a variety of ways when it does happen. If blind eyes are turned to some drug use, such as cannabis, on the (utterly mistaken) assumption that it is relatively unharmful, this destroys the consistency that is the absolute requirement to hold a moral and behavioural line.

Instead, Cameron comes up with the classic ‘harm reduction’ approach which, whether its adherents admit it or not, is a figleaf for legalisation. No doubt he is genuine when he says he abhors drug use and wants more effective strategies to combat it. But like so many people, he seems to have fallen for the callow and cynical sophistries which have allowed the deeply disingenuous and dangerous doctrine of ‘harm reduction’ to take root. Instead of aiming to prevent drug use, this approach merely seeks to minimise the harm it does. And to achieve that, it is necessary for drug use to be legalised so that it can be ‘managed’. So Cameron comes up with all the usual ‘harm reduction’ arguments – targeting help at users rather than seeking to prevent them from becoming users in the first place, providing injection rooms to ‘clean up the streets’ and prescribing methadone and even heroin to users to get them ‘to get off the streets and start to rebuild their lives’. True, he also says: ‘Ultimately, all treatments should have abstinence as their goal’; but treating with methadone and heroin usually means merely maintaining addicts in a state of addiction. This is not so much harm reduction as a surrender to harm creation.

In a diary for the Guardian Unlimited website in 2001, he wrote:

I am an instinctive libertarian who abhors state prohibitions and tends to be sceptical of most government action, whether targeted against drug use or anything else...Hounding hundreds of thousands - indeed millions - of young people with harsh criminal penalties is no longer practicable or desirable.

This is a very instructive statement. What he is effectively saying here is that he is instinctively sceptical of the value of law as the principal signaller of social opprobrium and policer of social order. It is therefore no surprise that he has also said that he believes that the UN should consider legalising drugs. If this were to happen, millions of mainly young people would be sucked into drug use, with incalculable ill-effects on both themselves and the societies in which they live.

The UN conventions have at their core the aim of eradicating drug use. There is currently a covert and increasingly successful global campaign under way to undermine and eventually destroy those conventions so that drug use can be permitted instead. This truly evil campaign, which would if successful result in misery for millions and most particularly among those who are most vulnerable to both the blandishments and the catastrophic damage of drug use – ie, those at the bottom of the social heap – is now firmly entrenched within the highest counsels of the British establishment and making more headway all the time. It is a campaign representing the nadir of social nihilism and irresponsibility.

If conservatism means anything at all, it is surely to defend society against such catastrophic predation. If the Conservative party votes to have as its leader someone who shares such attitudes, it will be signalling in the most unequivocal terms that it has no understanding of what is needed to defend or restore social order, and therefore has become utterly unsuitable to govern this country.

One of the factors that has created the current climate of lies about Israel and the Jews is the respect afforded to academics who, despite the fact that they tell blatant lies and thus rewrite history, are regarded as authoritative simply by virtue of the fact that they are university professors. Since the academy is the custodian of knowledge, it is assumed that its representatives are disinterested seekers after truth. Thus what they say mutates into the normative truths of a culture. The problem is that this fundamental premise is no longer true. Great swathes of the academy are no longer disinterested at all. For a variety of separate but sometimes related reasons, including the development of the grievance or victim culture, the rise of interest groups with money to spend promoting that culture, the dependence of academics on such groups for funding and the post-modern deconstruction of the very concept of truth, academia has become a prime site for propaganda. If one reads social science research, for example, one has to pick one’s way through a minefield of error and distortion in piece after piece of special interest pleading masquerading as objective research. Some of this finds its way into government policy – much ‘research’ upon which the British government bases its policy on domestic violence, for example, offers a disgracefully distorted picture based on the vilification of men, startlingly at odds with the overwhelming amount of truly authoritative research which shares responsibility for such violence equally between the sexes.

When it comes to the Middle East, however, this ability to mislead an entire society has literally lethal consequences. Historians who have produced a false or distorted view of its history have been indulged by the academy and taken seriously enough to provide an apparent academic grounding for what is nothing other than propaganda built upon lies. A glaring example of this has occurred at the prestigious Stanford University, as reported in the Stanford Review. Joel Beinin, a tenured history professor at Stanford, has at times accused others of trying to silence him. There is no evidence of this at all. On the contrary, as the Review notes, he has hardly been silent:

'Beinin has taken on, in the last few years, President Lawrence Summers of Harvard, Dr. Daniel Pipes, and Paul Wolfowitz. He has defended Sami Al-Arian, the alleged al Jihad terrorist operating out of the University of South Florida. He has been photographed by the Stanford Daily carrying placards on “Nakba Day” (the “catastrophe”) a day that is known elsewhere as Israel’s Independence Day.'

Of course, he is free to attack or defend whoever he chooses. However, if he is poisoning the well of knowledge by teaching demonstrable lies, that is surely a different matter. Beinin teaches an online course sponsored by Stanford, Oxford and Yale entitled ‘Palestine, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.’ But what he teaches is highly questionable, as the Review reveals:

‘In the video narrative by Beinin for the first week, Beinin stated that, following the destruction of the Jewish Second Temple by the Romans in the year 70, C.E., Jews had next come to Palestine in the sixteenth century, at the invitation of the Moslem Turks, “to study religious books and to be buried there.”

'A poster noted that, in fact, the past two millennia in Palestine that Beinin had implied had little Jewish history were actually chock-full of events. These included Jewish revolts, for over five centuries; the writing and the publication of the Jerusalem Talmud and later, the Shulhan Aruch; and the establishment of a synagogue in Jerusalem by Nachmanides after 1270, a city in which Jews have lived since. Only during the First Crusades, when the Jewish community was burned alive, was there a brief period in which Jerusalem did not have a Jewish community.

‘Beinin lectured that the “only” remnant of the Herodian Jewish Temple was the “Wailing” Wall (an archaic term) and that the Haram, or the Moslem holy site, was located above. A post reminded the class that, actually, the whole Western and Southern Walls were remnants of the Herodian temple, and that the area above had been the Jewish Temple seven centuries before Mohammed was born. A link was presented to pictures of excavations with Hebrew inscriptions such as the Trumpeter’s stone covering an area about ten times larger than the one Beinin incorrectly described.

‘In week two, Beinin stated that “Jewish identity before the twentieth century was not rooted in a nation-state,” but did not add that the premodern version of Jewish identity included daily prayers for Jerusalem to be restored-- and had included these prayers for centuries. For example, the prayer after meals, said three times daily, has one paragraph about Jerusalem and another about the land.

‘In week three, Beinin alleged that Jewish and Palestinian nationalism developed at “about the same time.” In fact, Zionism restricted to its most modern form began at least a generation before Palestinian nationalism. Most Arabs regarded Palestine as part of the sanjak of southern Syria at least into the 1920’s, when King Faisal of Syria was deposed, twenty years after the First Zionist Congress of Theodor Herzl. No historical account of Palestinian nationalism predates the Zionist Congresses.

‘The same week, Jewish historical claims were compared to the Palestinians, who, Beinin claimed, might have descended from the Canaanites. In fact, whereas Israel is regarded as the third Jewish commonwealth, there is no basis for ancient claims of a Palestinian state emanating from Canaan. Even the Palestinians who engage in denial of Jewish claims are rarely willing to take that one any distance. Beinin even said “it does not really matter,” who was first.’

Such distortions continue, not surprisingly, into modern history:

‘In the later weeks devoted to the United States and Israel, Beinin erroneously stated that the US had spent a trillion dollars on aid to the Jewish state since 1948. Since the true number was about eighty billion, or eight percent of the amount claimed, I questioned Beinin’s integrity. He had been challenged on this amount previously, on the Internet, highly publicly, in a previous incarnation of the class and yet still had not changed the videotape for subsequent classes. While our class did not get an apology from Beinin, the administrator of the class summarily announced that the wrong tapes had been sent, and mailed the class new videotapes, identical to the old, except with the editing out of the “mistake.”’

Such behaviour surely betrays the ideals and values of a university and should be called to account by that university. Far from silencing him, however, Stanford appears not to have done so. The Review is right to protest at this trahison des clercs. I am forever meeting Arabs and Muslims who are otherwise perfectly fine people but whose view of Israel is founded on precisely such terrible distortions. Through such behaviour and its indulgence, hatred is fuelled and lives are being lost.

The press today have written Tony Blair’s political obituary. After last night’s defeat over the Terrorism Bill’s proposal to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charge, the universal view is that Blair now has no chance of getting through his proposals to open up health provision to the private sector and usher in education reforms involving (modest) independence for state schools, both of which are anathema to his party’s left wing. Maybe so. Blair’s famed political brilliance is equally widely said to have deserted him, and his bullish insistence on sticking to 90 days and avoiding the compromise being urged on him by other in his party is being held up as evidence that he has lost the political plot, destroyed his authority over his party and is now so weakened he will have to stand down.

The fact remains, however, that Blair was correct. Blair was right to say that the police had made a compelling case of 90 days. And he was right to say, after the defeat, that the vote had been grossly irresponsible. As I said on last night’s BBC Radio Four Moral Maze it was an act of moral imbecility which revealed that the British political class is still in a state of deep denial over the changed nature and full extent of the threat we now face.

Those who say the problem is that the police show a high level of incompetence in using – or not using – laws that currently exist undoubtedly make an important point. But true as that may be, it does not address the argument the police have made that current provisions under terror law do not enable them to protect the public against a changed and unprecedented terrorist risk. They may be – indeed have been – faced with situations where they have good reason to suspect someone of being part of a human bomb plot but cannot assemble in time the evidence to sustain any charge because of the time it takes to collect and decipher encrypted information or computer programmes in many languages for which they have to find translators. To take a hypothetical example, if they arrested someone on suspicion of plotting such an atrocity and discovered he had shaved all his body hair – a common rite of preparation for a human bomb – but could find no information within two weeks (or even 28 days) to pin on him because that would require communicating with foreign governments, tracking down computers, cracking their encryption codes and all the rest of it, they would have to let him go.

The counter-argument put up last night by Michael Mansfield QC that in such circumstances a suspect could be held under a control order at home is inadequate. Home detention a) is not totally secure; b) requires resources which the police and security service do not necessarily possess; c) is itself a denial of liberty which the likes of Mansfield would undoubtedly be the first to challenge as yet another breach of human rights.

Personally, I think Lord Carlile got it right. He’s the independent watchdog who produced a report recently which said that he had been persuaded that the police did need a 90-day maximum for interrogating suspects but that the safeguard of a judge to whom the police would have to report every week was inadequate. Instead he thought that a judge should supervise the interrogation. This continental-style idea, although foreign to English legal tradition, seems to me to be a good way of reconciling the demands of security with the need to preserve judicial safeguards appropriate to a democracy.

The government missed a trick by refusing to adopt the Carlile proposal and has paid a stiff penalty. To be more precise, the country has paid a penalty because it has now been left patently undefended in the face of a lethal threat as a result of an utterly irresponsible spasm by MPs. The politics of this were sickening, and none more so than on the Conservative benches. The Tory leader Michael Howard showed he was prepared to sacrifice the security of the country for crass political opportunism in leading his party to oppose the 90-day proposal and then call for the Prime Minister’s resignation.

We now have the astonishing political situation in Britain where a Labour Prime Minister represents the country’s overwhelming desire for appropriate laws to protect itself -- and as a result loses his authority in Parliament as a result of an alliance between the left of the Labour party and the Conservatives on the basis that such necessary security measures to prevent massive loss of life represent a 'police state'!

What on earth are the Conservatives for any more if they can’t even defend the country’s security because they now line up with the left in assuming that the police are a conspiracy against personal freedom, and refuse to acknowledge the implications of the changed nature of the terrorist threat? The Tories have now lined up with those claiming fatuously that the 90-day provision would have introduced ‘internment ’or a ‘police state’ -- once the deluded shriek of those confined to the far-left. Thus does Britain now depict sensible provisions to defend itself.

The importance of this defeat cannot be over-estimated. Its significance can be gauged by the reaction of Britain’s enemies. Carol Gould, who subjected herself to the grim experience of watching the BBC’s coverage, captures the shocking depths of this country’s lethal drive to self-destruction:

Even more significantly, those outside Britain will not know how the BBC handled today's tragic vote. The barely-disguised glee amongst television anchors and commentators was breathtaking even by West-bashing BBC standards. After the vote, the BBC wheeled in an endless stream of Muslim leaders, mosque activists, human rights activists and ultra-Left-wing MPs (in the UK, ultra-Left means to the Left of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky), but not one ordinary Briton was interviewed. Not one MP who voted for the Bill was interviewed.

The dreaded "Sir" Iqbal Sacranie – who was an activist years ago in the Fatwa against Rushdie and publicly refuses to criticize suicide bombers and who wants Holocaust Memorial Day removed – was on air for what seemed an eternity and his joy could barely be contained. The BBC set up a mobile studio outside the main mosque in Bradford and kept repeatedly interviewing two young men who were clearly ecstatic that the anti-Terror Bill had been defeated. On various street corners, microphones were thrust in front of Muslims who were numb with happiness that the Bill – and "Bush's puppy dog Blair" – had been quashed.

Despite my ability to change minds and inform the public as a journalist, I feel powerless and helpless as a British voter. Seventy percent of us – registered British voters – wanted the House of Commons to approve the Bill and lock up suspected terrorists in our midst for a minimum of ninety days, but our elected representatives chose to cave in to the relentless browbeating we receive every day from Islamic radicals who are given endless media exposure, not to mention my fellow journalists who write daily diatribes against the United States, Israel and Blair’s attachment to the American war on terror.

One BBC reporter breathlessly expressed her view that this vote "will be a supreme embarrassment" for Prime Minister Blair. How is it embarrassing, if the majority of British voters, watching a bloody Intifada exploding in the rest of Europe and having seen fifty-two of our own blown up on July 7th, want the 90 day rule adopted? The BBC and the Left-wing media, who now dominate Great Britain, inform us that Blair is ‘embarrassed’ when in fact the general public is dismayed and alarmed that he could be defeated on such a pragmatic position. The fact that every Muslim activist interviewed on television tonight is filled with happiness indicates that the United Kingdom is headed for a sorry future.

The pathological and irrational hatred of Blair’s support for America and the war in Iraq appears to have driven this country literally mad.

Yesterday, BBC Radio Four broadcast a programme called ‘A war Against Prejudice’, which looked at the work of the British Jewish defence organisation the Community Security Trust, and the broader issue of the rise in anti-Jewish feeling against which the CST was helping defend the Jewish community in Britain. I was interviewed for this programme, but I listened to it with mounting horror and a sick feeling in my stomach. It started neutrally enough, by describing the work of the CST in providing protection for the community and collating statistics about anti-Jewish incidents, and interviewed some Jews about attacks. But then it set out to demonstrate that the CST had exaggerated this problem by inflating its statistics. It produced no evidence to support this smear, merely assertions, and it was careful — with one notable exception — to use Jews to do so. One was Tony Lerman, whose undoubted knowledge of Jewish sociology has been vitiated in recent years by his conviction that there has been no increase in anti-Jewish feeling in this country and that anyone who says there has is merely trying to sanitise the crimes of Ariel Sharon. The other was a rabbi called Gluck who was involved in Jewish-Muslim dialogue and -- surprise surprise -- saw no evidence of anti-Jewish feeling whatsoever. These two individuals are utterly unrepresentative of the mainstream Jewish community.

The third accuser of the CST was Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain. Now this was really something else. Here is what Bunglawala himself had to say on the subject of Jews some years ago:

'1) 'The Jews consider themselves to be God’s chosen people - although the blessed prophet Jesus called them the children of the Devil (John 8:44) - and so can do just whatever the hell they like'.

2) He cited claims that the Zionist movement is 'at the core of international banking and commerce' and observed 'Nonsense? You be the judge'.

3) 'The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade [then the chief executive of Channel 4 and now BBC chairman] and Alan Yentob [BBC2 controller and friend of Salman Rushdie]. The three are reported to be "close friends… so that's what they mean by a 'free media.'

One might have thought that, in a programme ostensibly looking at anti-Jewish prejudice, Bunglawala might have been asked about the views he had once expressed. One might have thought he would have been asked about the MCB’s stated aim to abolish Holocaust day, and its many inflammatory statements about Israel and the Holocaust. One might have thought he would have been asked about the sale by Muslims on campus of that iconic text of Jew-hatred, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the regular attacks and abuse of Jewish students by Muslims. One might have thought he would have been asked about the contribution to anti-Jewish prejudice in Britain being made by the poisonous hated of Israel and the Jews pouring out of the Arab and Muslim world.

But no, he was asked none of these things. Indeed, the programme did not mention Islamic attacks upon Jews at all. Instead, it used Lerman, Gluck and Bunglawala to rubbish the claim that there was a rise in anti-Jewish feeling in Britain. It clearly set out to do this; the difference between the hostile questioning of myself, for example, and the easy ride given to these three was unmistakeable. There was absolutely no attempt by the programme to explain where the current anti-Jewish feeling was coming from, or to analyse it at all; it was apparently just a paranoid claim to be knocked down.

Anyone who talks to the police will know that the Jewish community in Britain has to be guarded against the very real threat of attack from both Muslims and neo-Nazis. Every single synagogue or communal event has to be guarded. It is a threat we Jews all live with, daily. We also have to live daily with the pathological hatred of Jewish nationhood that now courses through this country’s media, along with routine claims of a global Jewish conspiracy. The BBC was at it again this morning on Radio Four’s Start the Week with an unchallenged implication of sinister Jewish power; look at this post by Adloyada for yet further evidence of the way this ancient racial libel has now been assimilated without challenge into mainstream media discourse.

This is what the journalist Simon Winchester said on Start the Week: that in New York there was a growing move towards orthodoxy, that young Jews were now 'cajoling or impressing' on others the need to go to temple and at the same time the 'steady drumbeat of Zionist enthusiasm' was increasing so that far from attitudes becoming 'more benign' they were hardening, which was 'bad for everyone'. So now, we have arrived at the happy state where a British journalist says on air that orthodox Judaism is 'bad for everyone' without anyone turning a hair. And of course, orthodoxy and Zionism don't in fact go together, but hey; and now we find that it's not just the settlers in Israel who are extreme but Zionism itself. In other words, the self-determination of the Jewish people is said to be 'bad for everyone'. And no-one turns a hair.

Instead, a BBC radio programme makes out that the claim of a rise in anti-Jewish feeling in Britain is all total exaggeration, that the CST produces dodgy statistics and that there really is no threat to the Jews at all.

So all the attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, on this account, are not anti-Jewish attacks at all; all the attacks on people in the street, with Stars of David torn off their necks or anti-Jewish taunts thrown at them, aren’t anti-Jewish attacks at all; all the intimidation meted out to Jewish students on campus aren’t anti-Jewish attacks at all; all the racial stereotypes, lies and libels about Israel and the world Jewish conspiracy that assault British Jews daily when they open their newspapers, go to dinner parties or tune into the wretched BBC aren’t anti-Jewish attacks at all. And the CST, whose unpaid volunteers are an essential defence against the physical threat that daily faces the Jews of Britain is made out instead to be a dubious outfit.

No mention of the fact that the Metropolitan and Manchester police promote the CST, rely upon it and regard it as a model for community action; no mention that the Home Affairs Select Committee lauded it and advised the Muslim Council of Britain to ask it for help; no mention that the European Union Monitoring Centre has recommended its systems to European governments and law enforcement agencies and that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe is using it for training NGOs and law enforcement agencies. No discussion of the phenomenon it is fighting. Instead, a hatchet job.

A advance synopsis of the programme on the website of CTVC, the production company that made it, revealed the animus that lay behind it:

'File On Four’s prestigious reporter, Gerry Northam, uncovers the myths and realities of anti-semitism in Britain today, through the controversial activities of its defence organisation, the Jewish Community Trust. This is the first time the story has been told of British Judaism’s “private volunteer army” – its security operations, training, intelligence-gathering and influential (hyped and hysterical, critics say) reports on anti-semitism.'

The CST’s activities are not in the least controversial. To describe it as a ‘private volunteer army’ makes it sound like a sinister, covert militaristic organisation that people should be worried about, when in fact it is merely a bunch of public-spirited civilians defending their own community against attack.

In social gatherings, one nowadays runs the gauntlet of sneering and incredulous bien-pensants for whom the assertion that Israel is the victim of aggression is regarded on a par with supporting apartheid South Africa, and for whom the suggestion that life has become uncomfortable for British Jews is regarded as evidence of Jewish special pleading. Consciously or unconsciously, this country is setting out to expunge the reality of Jewish victimhood and replace it by the narrative of toxic Jewish power.

A war against prejudice? No, this is war by prejudice. I have said it before, and here it is again: Britain’s Jews – including those who, in tragic repetition of history, refuse to see it – are under siege.

The BBC is holding an ‘impartiality review’ of its coverage of the Middle East. This is the second such review; the first, of BBC coverage of the European Union, found that in a number of respects it was not impartial.

The Palestinian lobby clearly has a particular understanding of what impartiality means. It would appear that a) even to question the delivery of impartiality in the context of the Middle East is by definition loaded b) the BBC’s review is a Jewish plot c) the Jews are as rich as Croesus and are thus able to buy influence and power d) the impartiality review should be targeted by an organised Palestinian lobbying campaign. An email that has been sent out by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign illustrates the charming mindset:

'Subject: BBC Review of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

'Dear PSC Members,

'The BBC Governors have commissioned an "impartiality review" of the
"Israeli-Palestinian conflict". These terms in themselves are loaded. How is it desirable to be impartial towards a brutal illegal occupation? Where does the morality lie in treating oppressor and oppressed alike? Referring to the situation as a conflict between two parties as if they were equal, is likewise misleading. The BBC has been dragooned into this exercise by massive pressure from the zionist lobby. This does not bode well for the outcome.

'The PSC will be making a formal submission to the Review. However, it is vital that PSC members as individuals write or email the
enquiry to make sure the Palestinian case is made. If you have had contact by telephone, email or mail with the BBC please refer to it in your submission. Always be polite, clear and concise. Please send us copies of any submission you make.

'Try to get hold a copy of the book "Bad News from Israel" by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, or ask the office for a copy of the media pack for guidelines. It is worthwhile reading the document on the link below.

'The list of organisations which the panel intends to contact include the Israeli PR company, BICOM, a multi-million pound propaganda machine, along with Conservative Friends of Israel, and the Chief Rabbi: against which are set organisations such as Arab Media Watch and CAABU with nothing like the resources available to the pro-Israel lobby. This imbalance reflects the David and Goliath relationship between Israel and the occupied Palestinians and the self-defeating nature of an inquiry set up under such a false premise, where bias and self-censorship masquerade as impartiality.

'The closing date for receiving responses is 5pm, Friday, November25th, 2005. Please write to: Israeli-Palestinian Impartiality Review, BBC Governance Unit, Room 211, 35 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4AA. Or send an email to: israelipalestinianreview@bbc.co.uk.

'For full details of the terms of reference, panel biographies,
commissioned research and other background information, please go to:
http://www.bbcgovernors.co.uk/docs/reviews/israelipalestinian_terms.txt
You can buy a copy of Greg Philo and Mike Berry's "Bad News from Israel" here: http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/books/badnews.htm
Alternatively, extensive extracts can be viewed here:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/sociology/units/media/israel.htm

Thank you for your support.

***********************
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
***********************
PALESTINE, ISRAEL AND THE LAW

'Palestine Solidarity Campaign International Conference
Saturday 22nd October 2005...

'This major international conference, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, will focus on the many dimensions of law and legality crucial to the achievement of justice for the Palestinian people. It will bring together experts in law, politics and resistance to present the issues for discussion. Since 1948, the UN has passed numerous resolutions on the plight of the Palestinians, including calling on Israel to withdraw from territories illegally occupied in 1967, opposing the building of illegal settlements and affirming the right of return and compensation for refugees displaced by Israel. With impunity, Israel continues to flout these resolutions and other international laws, such as the Geneva convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice calling for an end to/dismantling of the Apartheid wall on stolen land in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

'The conference will address Israel's illegal policies, including those regarding land confiscation, home demolition, refusal of refugee rights, settlements. It will look at how Palestinians have challenged the occupation and discuss strategies that can be used by the international community to exert pressure on Israel to abide by international law and ensure that the Palestinians finally achieve the right to self- determination.

'Speakers include:
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi- Secretary , Palestinian National Initiative
Ronnie Kasrils, Minister for Intelligence, Government of South Africa (in a personal capacity)
Diana Buttu - Lawyer, and Communications Director to the Palestinian
Technical team
Dr Karma Nabulsi - research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford University
Marwan Dalal, attorney with Adalah
Michel Abdul Massi QC
Professor Iain Scobbie, Professor of International Law, SOAS
Dr Nabeel Kassis, Birzeit University
Dr Oren Ben-Dor, University of Southampton
Lea Tsemel, Israeli Human Rights lawyer
Dr Nabeel Kassis, Birzeit University
Barry Camfield, TGWU
Danny Machover, UK Human Rights lawyer
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Geoffrey Bindman, UK Human Rights lawyer

***

'The different sessions of the conference will be looking at the following: * The Reality of Occupation * Violations of international law * Consolidating Occupation - * Palestinian Legal Challenges - * Resisting Illegality * Political prisoners * The right of return of refugees * The policy of home demolitions * Implementation of the ICJ ruling on the Wall’

Now there’s impartiality for you.

Perhaps those tempted to attend the PSC's conference might care to consider the implications for human rights of an organisation that peddles the ancient prejudice of rich Jews working behind the scenes to manipulate the levers of power against the interests of truth.

An excellent article in the Times by Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, should put the appeaseniks to shame (if they had any):

'The lesson of the ghastly drumbeat of terrorism, the rioting in Basra and the vile murder of the leadership of the Iraqi Anglican Church is that the battle of Iraq cannot be won by retreat or compromise, but by the vision and determination for which Britain is renowned. Above all, Britain owes no apology for delivering the enslaved people of Iraq from the hands of a callous tyranny.

‘The challenge is to show fortitude in the face of horror so that we can finish the job that began in 2003 of uprooting dictatorship and implanting a democratic government. Reforming Iraq, restoring a society distorted by fascism, was never going to be easy. The alternative — to pretend that sanctions were working and that Saddam Hussein was contained — was an illusion. As has now been established, the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme was corrupt in root and branch. Saddam manipulated Oil-for-Food to become his personal chequebook for a campaign of international bribery and a trough from which his psychopathic progeny supped. Saddam’s regime openly declared in August 2001 that the sanctions had collapsed. Indeed, in 2003, as Saddam proclaimed his innocence to the world, his envoys were in Syria to negotiate the purchase of North Korean long-range missiles.

'The Baathist regime, guilty of aggression and genocide, was overturned because Britain and the United States had courageously enforced the UN Security Council resolutions that others would barely support with words. Today the painstaking effort to enable Iraqis to express their views freely is also grounded in international legality. Foreign troops are in Iraq on the basis of a Security Council resolution, just as Iraq was liberated through the enforcement of 17 such resolutions that Saddam chose to flout.
‘Those who preferred the stability of the mass grave to liberation, and who raised their voices to save Saddam, but not his victims, have spuriously claimed that the war was fought to discover stocks of weapons of mass destruction. But Rolf Ekeus, the first head of the UN weapons inspectors, has argued that stocks were not the issue. Saddam could always re-create his stocks and until the end he could restart mustard gas production within months and nerve gas production within a couple of years. Moreover, Saddam used chemical weapons casually, gassing 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988 and then using chemical bombs against Shia Arab civilians in 1991 — after the Gulf War ceasefire.'

It comes as a shock to read in a British newspaper such a factual account of recent history and a simple assertion of the need to protect the world from such an obvious threat that Saddam Hussein actually posed to us all. The fact that this has been written by the President of the very country which has thus been liberated will, nevertheless, still cut no ice at all with what has become mainstream opinion. Such are the depths of the madness to which we have descended here.

A jailed Muslim terrorist, Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), spells out the aims of the jihad:

'What can the West, especially the US, do to make the world more peaceful?
ABB: They have to stop fighting Islam. That's impossible because it is sunnatullah [destiny, a law of nature], as Allah has said in the Koran. If they want to have peace, they have to accept to be governed by Islam.
SA: What if they persist?
ABB: We'll keep fighting them and they'll lose. The batil [falsehood] will lose sooner or later. I sent a letter to Bush. I said that you'll lose and there is no point for you [to fight us]. This [concept] is found in the Koran… Osama believes in total war. This concept I don't agree with. If this occurs in an Islamic country, the fitnah [discord] will be felt by Muslims. But to attack them in their country [America] is fine.
SA: So this fight will never end?
ABB: Never. This fight is compulsory. Muslims who don't hate America sin. What I mean by America is George Bush's regime. There is no iman [belief] if one doesn't hate America.
SA: How can the American regime and its policies change?
ABB: We'll see. As long as there is no intention to fight us and Islam continues to grow there can be peace. This is the doctrine of Islam. Islam can't be ruled by others. Allah's law must stand above human law. There is no [example] of Islam and infidels, the right and the wrong, living together in peace.'

As Mark Steyn writes in a typically terrific piece in the Australian (4 October) after the latest massacre in Bali:

'The jihad has held out against some tough enemies: the Israelis in the West Bank, the Russians in Chechnya; these are primal conflicts. But what's the beef in Bali? Oh, to be sure, to the more fastidious Islamist some of those decadent hedonist fornicating Westerners whooping it up are a little offensive. But they'd be offensive whoever they were and whatever they did. It's the reality of a pluralist enclave within the world's largest Muslim nation that offends. It's the coexistence, stupid...

'As Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Gottingen University in Germany, said in an interesting speech a few months after September 11, "Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms, these mean different things to each of them. The word peace, for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or House of Islam -- to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought. Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or House of Peace."'

An EU apparatchik has admitted that it pumps money into the Palestinians not because it supports their cause but to prevent Arab and Muslim violence in Europe. The Jerusalem Post reports remarks by the EU Parliamentary President Josep Borrell Fontelles:

‘The EU, which provides the Palestinian Authority with half of the $1 billion in European aid, is not an altruistic player in the Middle East, said Borrell. With its growing Muslim population, Europe is finding that violence in the Middle East leads to unrest within its own borders, he said. "The conflict in the Middle East is dangerous for us. We are not just here, as the good guy who says, please do not fight between you. We need this conflict to be finished because of its impact on life in Europe. "As European society faces the problem of xenophobia, it can destabilize our society," said Borrell explaining that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fuels anti-Semitism, "Islamophobia," and anti-globalization feelings.’

In other words EU support for the Palestinians, which has played quantifiable part in legitimising terror and demonising its Israeli victim, was a kind of blood money, paid to appease a threat which, as is now all too apparent, has merely grown instead.

A blistering piece by Nick Cohen in the New Statesman accurately describes the firestorm of anti-Jewish hatred that now flares across the British cultural landscape. Cohen is one of those brave few on the left who have defied their comrades and supported the war in Iraq. For this they have been vilified and bullied by those same comrades. But Cohen here describes the further twist provided by the racial identity marker of his surname:

'I learned it was one thing being called "Cohen" if you went along with liberal orthodoxy, quite another when you pointed out liberal betrayals. Your argument could not be debated on its merits. There had to be a malign motive. You had to support Ariel Sharon. You had to be in the pay of "international" media moguls or neoconservatives. You had to have bad blood. You had to be a Jew...

'As the months passed, and Iraqis were caught between a criminally incompetent occupation and an "insurgency" so far to the right it was off the graph, I had it all. A leading figure on the left asked me to put him in touch with members of the new government. "I knew it! I knew it!" he cried when we next met. "They want to recognise Israel."

'I experienced what many blacks and Asians had told me: you can never tell. Where people stand on the political spectrum says nothing about their visceral beliefs. I found the far left wasn't confined to the chilling Socialist Workers Party but contained many scrupulous people it was a pleasure to meet and an education to debate. Meanwhile, the centre was nowhere near as moderate as it liked to think. One minute I would be talking to a BBC reporter or liberal academic and think him a civilised man; the next, he would be screaming about the Jews...

'I could go on. The moment when bewilderment settled into a steady scorn, however, was when the Guardian ran a web debate entitled: "David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic". Gorgeously, one vigilant reader complained that the title was prejudiced - the debate should be headlined: "David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man, or woman, anti-Semitic"...

'To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.'

It appears that it has taken some time for Cohen to realise the precise nature and extent of this madness that has consumed British public life. However, while he is correct to identify the extraordinary axis between the left and Islamic fascism, he has not spotted the fact that this group-think also embraces much of the right. Conservatively-minded middle-Britons, who start from the premise that there would be no threat to themselves from frightening Islamists if only Britain had pulled up the drawbridge across the Atlantic, fervently believe that the global jihad is indeed a rational reaction to Israeli oppression.

Now Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks has at last spoken out about what is happening. He has warned in the Jewish Chronicle of

'a new wave of anti-Semitism, saying that "there have been times, the first in my memory, when it has been uncomfortable to be a Jew in Britain"...

'In the message, Sir Jonathan cites calls, backed by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, to abolish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is offensive to Muslims. He also refers to remarks with "anti-Semitic undertones" by public figures, the threatened academic boycott of Israel earlier this year and Church debates over divestment from Israel.

'He says that Israel and Jews are being cast into the role of scapegoat for the troubles thrown up by rapid global change, even though they are not responsible for them. The new anti-Semitism differed from the old in being "political rather than racial, focused on Jews as a nation rather than Jews as individuals. But it has adopted and adapted all the old myths, from the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although Israel has nothing to do with such events as "the millions of Muslims murdered by their fellow Muslims" in Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere, it is being turned into "the scapegoat of the 21st century," the Chief Rabbi says.'

The Chief Rabbi’s intervention is significant. Hitherto, he has been circumspect, possibly reflecting the fact that, like so many British Jews for whom the illusion of an idyll has now been cruelly shattered, he was reluctant to admit to the destruction of the myth that the Jews of Britain were safe. Moreover, the Jewish community in Britain is polarised; there are many British Jews – mainly on the left – who would line up alongside the very people who have subjected Cohen and the rest of us to this odious vilification, and who resolutely deny the resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling, blaming it all instead on Ariel Sharon, the neocons and George W Bush. But the fact that someone of the stature of the Chief Rabbi has now come out and said it, loud and clear, means that it will no longer be so easy to dismiss as the ravings of a few cranks, paranoiacs and Sharon-groupies. It forces itself onto the mainstream agenda. It requires an answer by the political class.

A propos my post below, a reader writes:

'One of the things that astounds me in the UK is that the Today programme is seen as a sober objective news programme when in fact it is both arrogant and highly politicised. For some time, I have suffered this in silence, but I am nearly at the point where I become a regular complainant to the BBC complaints board.

'The Today program uses a more or less sober and measured presentation and this masks the fact that they have abandoned the basics of fair journalism. They seem only ever to get an opposing view when a speaker says something with which they disagree. So, if George Bush (whom they loathe) is defended in some policy debate, such as recently, on the environment, they will get someone to counter this view. However, when the Bush government is attacked for human rights violations, no one is invited to defend him.

'They also frequently refer to so and so "being right of centre" or a
"right-wing think-tank"". They never do this on the left. An example of this egregious behaviour is how they continually invite George Monbiot to comment on the environment. He is always introduced in a context which leads the listener to believe that he might be a scientist when in fact he is not. It is never mentioned that he is (pretty much by his own admission) a dedicated anti capitalist campaigner and well to the left.

'Today, they slyly tried to report indirect speech as direct speech. They quoted the Guardian and the Independent saying that George Bush said he was told by God to invade Iraq. I am pretty sure that these newspapers would have reported that this was according to someone on a Palestinian delegation (who would be biased in the matter). I have no doubt that the Today program knew that this was an indirect quote, but they presented it in a direct way. Further, the White House has denied this. Do you think this denial will be reported on the Today programme?

'The irony for me is that I grew up in South Africa and as a child
listened to a transplant of the Today program - that was indentical in form to the UK version. This was essentially used to support the
policies of the then South African government. The Today program in the UK reminds me of the South African version in the way in which the same sleazy tricks are used. Amazingly, both versions used the "Thought for the Day Slot" as a propaganda slot. I am struck by how most participants on "Thought for the Day" mention scriptures as little as humanly possible. "Thought for the day" was meant to be religious but it is now an opportunity for left wing or at least "right on" commentary. Time after time commentators will say just one sentence mentioning a religious text or theme. I wait for the day when someone just editorialises with no religious content at all. We should campaign to remove this toxic editorial slot (another complaint perhaps to the BBC board).

'I am a consumer of a radio news programme in the morning and it is a great shame that there is not another competing news programme. (Of course, the BBC is so smug about American news, but at least in the US you have some choice of political discourse on the radio). Often, in frustration, I just have to change to Virgin Radio and just listen to music.'

BBC Radio Four’s Today programme ran an item in its prime 0810 slot this morning on accusations by the former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Boyce that the BBC and other media were demoralising British troops in Iraq by their relentlessly one-sided presentation of the situation in Iraq as an unmitigated disaster. Credit must go to the BBC, of course, for airing this accusation against itself, and in such a prominent position. But the discussion itself illustrated the problem. Presenter John Humphrys was incredulous that such an accusation should be made, asking whether it could possibly be right not to report the bad news from Iraq. To which Admiral Boyce reasonably replied that he was not for a moment suggesting that the bad news should not be reported, merely that the situation was not one of unrelieved disaster, that there were many positive things happening in Iraq and that all he was saying was that in the interests of fairness these should be reported too.

This concept of an even-handed approach to Iraq was too much for Humphrys, whose response was that reporting ‘good news’ would be propaganda. To which Boyce made the reasonable riposte that reporting only disaster was equally propaganda. Indeed, from the moment the Iraq war began, if not before, the BBC — and most particularly, the Today programme — has been arguably the jihad’s most powerful propaganda weapon in the world. Interesting, though, that in the Today universe, only the coalition side can be guilty of propaganda. Arguing from the enemy’s perspective doesn’t seem to count. And this is almost certainly because Today genuinely cannot see that it is the enemy’s perspective — because it so completely shares it. And that is the most frightening thing of all about the BBC in its approach to Iraq, the US and countless other topics: it is an almost totally closed thought system.

A new pamphlet by David Meir-Levi provides an essential corrective to the myths that have accumulated around the establishment of the State of Israel, the most poisonous of which is the claim that the Jews deliberately drove out the Arabs and thus the very foundation of the state was illegitimate. What Meir-Levi brings forward is the evidence – none of it new, but all of it overlooked or denied in today’s climate of profound ignorance and malice – that the Arab refugee problem was caused by the Arabs and that the flight of Arabs from Palestine was largely the result of being told to flee by the Arabs, who at around the same time forced out, often at gunpoint, some 800,000 Jews from Arab lands who had been living there peacefully for hundreds of years but were ethnically cleansed from countries which even today practice racist restrictions against any Jewish entry, a fact which goes unremarked by a majority opinion which portrays instead the Jews of Israel, the victims not the perpetrators of aggression – and who include those refugees from Arab lands and their descendants – as racist aggressors.

One of the most striking features of his narrative is the way he sets the record straight over Deir Yassin, the iconic 'massacre' of Arab villagers in 1948 which is invariably used as a stick with which to beat up the Jews of Israel but over which the facts are hotly disputed. Meir-Levi presents evidence that, while many died at Deir Yassin, it was not a massacre but a military battle:

'...the Red Cross, which was called in to assist the wounded and civilians, found no evidence of a massacre. In fact, even the most recent review of the evidence (July 1999), by Arab scholars at Beir- Zayyit university in Ramallah, indicates that there was no massacre, but rather a military conflict in which civilians were killed in the crossfire. The total Arab dead, including the Iraqi soldiers, according to the Beir Zayyit calculation, was 107.

‘So where did the idea of a massacre come from? The same Arab
sources that confess to having urged the Arabs to flee have also
acknowledged that Arab spokespersons at the time cynically exaggerated the casualties of the Deir Yassin battle, making up stories of gang rape, brutalizing of pregnant women, killing unborn children cut from their mothers’ wombs by blood-thirsty Jews, and massive murders with bodies thrown into a nearby quarry. The same Arab sources admit that their purpose in these lies was to shame the Arab nations into entering the conflict with greater alacrity, so that the Jews would be destroyed by the overwhelming numbers of Arab invaders.

'The plan backfired. As a result of this propaganda, Arab civilians
panicked and fled by the tens of thousands. This was confirmed in
the 1993 PBS documentary called The Fifty Years of War in which
Deir Yassin survivors were interviewed. They testified that they
had begged Dr. Hussein Khalidi, director of Voice of Palestine (the
Palestinian radio station in East Jerusalem) to edit out the lies and fabrications of atrocities that never happened. He told them: "We must capitalize on this great opportunity!"

'The flight of Arabs had begun many months before Deir Yassin. So Deir Yassin cannot account for those hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sought refuge prior to April 9, 1948. Moreover, while current Arab propaganda asserts that Deir Yassin was one of many examples of Jewish massacre and slaughter, there is not one other documented example of any such behavior by the Jews. By any standard, Deir Yassin was not an example, but an exception. In sum, it was not what happened at Deir Yassin that caused the flight of tens of thousands of Arabs; it was the lies invented by the Arab High Command and Dr. Hussein Khalidi of the "Voice of Palestine" radio news channel that caused the panic. One can hardly blame Israel for that.

'Moreover, we have information from a famous source, Yassir Arafat himself (his authorized biography, by Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker) that the Deir Yassin lies were spread "like a red flag in front of a bull" by the Egyptians. Then, having terrorized them with these stories, the Egyptians proceeded to disarm the Arabs of the area and herd them into detention camps in Gaza (today’s Gaza refugee camps). Why did the Egyptians do this? According to Arafat, it was to get the Arabs out of the area because the Egyptians wanted
a free hand to wage their war. Egypt had every intention of conquering the Negev and southern part of the coastal plain. They wanted no interference from the local Arabs. Deir Yassin was not a massacre; nothing even vaguely akin to what the Jews are accused of ever happened. We don’t know how many Arabs fled as a result of the Arab propaganda over Deir Yassin. Several hundred thousand is a good estimate. Most of them ended up in the Egyptian detention camps in Gaza.'

Of such myths are the world’s tragedies made.

A fine piece in the Jerusalem Post by Yossi Klein Halevi gets to the heart of why dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians is so difficult:

'My journey into the faiths of my neighbors was part of a much broader attempt among Israelis, begun during the first intifada, to understand your narrative, how the conflict looks through your eyes. Your society, on the other hand, has made virtually no effort to understand our narrative. Instead, you have developed what can be called a "culture of denial," that denies the most basic truths of the Jewish story.

'According to this culture of denial, which is widespread not only among your people but throughout the Arab world, there was no Temple in Jerusalem, no ancient Jewish presence in the land, no Holocaust. Nowhere is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as popular as in the Arab world, which has also become the international center for Holocaust denial. The real problem, then, is not terrorism, which is only a symptom for a deeper affront: your assault on my history and identity, your refusal to allow me to define myself, which is a form of intellectual terror.

'In your society's official embrace, through media and schools and mosques, of the culture of denial, you have tried to reinvent us, to redefine us out of our national existence. We too once tried to define you out of national existence, insisting that you weren't a real people but an appendage to the Arab world. Today, though, only the Israeli hard Right repeats Golda Meir's insistence that there are no Palestinians. Yet your political and spiritual leadership routinely insists that there is no Jewish people – only a Jewish faith, or an invented identity like General Yusuf's "Arab Jews," or an ersatz people descended from the Khazars. In so doing, you ignore how Jews have always defined themselves: as a people with a faith.
‘True, it's easier for the powerful than it is for the powerless to develop more nuanced attitudes toward the conflict. When you have an army and a thriving economy, you can afford to rethink your own history and even accommodate a competing narrative. Yet in truth you have never understood us, never understood that we aren't a modern version of the Crusaders but an indigenous people returning home.'

All very true, except for one point with which I would cavil. Golda Meir did not, as far as I recall, insist that there were no Palestinians. What she said was that there was not a Palestinian people. The indefinite article was crucial. There were people who were Palestinian, of course, but not ‘a’ people – because the Arabs who were already in or had immigrated into Palestine considered themselves to be Syrian or Egyptian or part of the Arab people. Palestinian national identity was constructed as an artifice to bamboozle the world and finally drive out the Jews. It succeeded in the first aim beyond their wildest dreams, and has now become a created fact. Halevi’s article, which poignantly demonstrates that while the Israelis want co-existence in two separate states the Palestinians do not, suggests why the second aim remains still tragically alive.

A reader writes:

'I am a PPE undergraduate at Oxford University. I had been hoping to obtain an internship placement at various government institutions, such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). However, to my utter bemusement, it appears that the FCO wishes to restrict the employment or recruitment of white students. How? Allow me to explain.

'This link is the FCO work experience page. As the FCO website illustrates, candidates of all racial backgrounds can apply for a one year economic placement, on the condition that they follow a sandwich course. Moreover, 16 to 17 year-olds of any racial background can apply.

'However, the websites indicates 2 areas where only non-white candidates should apply. The Windsor Fellowship Scheme offers placements to Black and Asian people only. And the ethnic minority scheme finds placements at various embassies for ethnic minorities only.

'But I am a 2nd year PPE undergraduate and white (non-ethnic minoity too). I cannot apply for the sandwich course placement because (to state the obvious) I am not on a sandwich course. Also, I am not 16 or 17. Therefore, the Foreign Office has nothing to offer a person such as myself (and my status is common of many, for a tiny percentage of students study Economics with a sandwich year, or are 17). However, if I was of a Black or Asian origin, or of an ethnic minority, schemes would be open to me.

'In fact, I am aware of students at my college who have gained placements at the Egyptian Embassy, which were processed by the FCO, through the ethnic minorities scheme. I am also aware of Windsor Fellowship Candidates. But in my case, nothing was offered because my application was simply not allowed. I failed the entrance requirements because of race.

'To state my point more clearly, it is apparent that the FCO is wilfully rejecting a meritocratic approach to the recruitment of students. Instead it seeks to rig the process by excluding white candidates such as myself. Why? Why purposely exclude candidates from the application process? Is this not unjust discrimination, serving to yield disutility? I claim disutility on the (reasonable) assumption that a meritocratic recruitment procedure would yield placements that are more capable and thus more able to serve their country in future years (irrespective of race). Thus the negation of a meritocratic process will lead to less able candidates and a less able FCO serving the nation. I am appalled at such clear race based recruitment.'

An application form issued by Birmingham and Solihull Connexions Service declares:

'Birmingham & Solihull Connexions Services welcomes your application and will give it equal consideration, irrespective of race, sex, disability, colour, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sexuality, marital status, responsibility for dependents, age (up to 65), religion, trade union activity or offending background. Our aim is to ensure that all aspects of our work reflect out commitment to equality of opportunity irrespective of any legislative obligation.'

Then it invites applicants not only to tick the box for gender, ethnic origin or disability, but to define their sexuality and religion. But if it really does intend to give every application ‘equal consideration, irrespective of race, sex, disability, colour, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sexuality, marital status, responsibility for dependents, age (up to 65), religion, trade union activity or offending background’, why is it asking these questions? Could it possibly be that if one is a white, Christian, heterosexual, married, able-bodied person without a criminal record, a connexion will not be made?

No more posts now until Thursday, due to the Jewish New Year. Shana tova to all.

Those who watched John Ware’s excellent and important Panorama on the extremism of British Muslim representative institutions might be interested to discover what happened next. The Muslim Council of Britain, the government’s Muslim interlocutor of choice whose moderate reputation was simply evsicerated by this programme, lodged no fewer than four letters of complaint plus a revision with the BBC. We can now see both the guts of this complaint and the BBC’s response from two items on the BBC website: a BBC news story here
and the substantive response by Panorama editor Mike Robinson here. The latter in particular is a must-read. It reveals two things: the devious and slippery nature of the MCB complaint, which time after time simply misrepresented the programme -- as all who saw it can attest - as part of an attempt to bully and intimidate the BBC; Robinson says, for example:

‘You have continued to send letters making further allegations about the integrity of Panorama journalists and to publish them on your website without waiting for a full response’

and the unusually long, detailed and utterly robust response by Mike Robinson. It repays study, if only for two reasons: a) to see yet again what we are up against and b) to be heartened by the attitude displayed by the BBC, which not only did a fine journalistic job but had the strength and courage not to buckle under pressure.

A riveting entry on the Emperor’s Clothes website reprints a memorandum which was submitted by associates of The Nation magazine to the General Assembly of the United Nations on April 30, 1948 covering the British record in Palestine since November 29, 1947. As the entry says the memorandum, based on British intelligence documents, is significant today because it contradicts widely held views about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including those put forward in today's Nation magazine:

‘The 1948 Arab-Israeli war plays a key part in the Arab National Liberation tale. The Israeli victory in that war is presented as the defining event, the nakba or catastrophe. In order to claim that the PLO and Fatah are fighting for National Liberation in 2005, their promoters argue that British imperialism, using Jewish proxies, crushed Palestinian Liberation in 1948. The corollary: if the Jews will just grant Arabs the National Liberation they were denied in '48, Arab leaders will deliver on peace with Israel. Of course, if this story is false, if in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and if it was not the Jews but Arab leaders who were agents of imperial Britain, then it certainly suggests that their protégés are not fighting for National Liberation today…
‘Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the common perception that the creation of Israel was a project of Western colonialism. The Nation shows that during the half year prior to the all-out Arab invasion on 15 May, Britain incited, micro-managed and did public relations work for a campaign of Arab troop infiltration and terror. And this at a time when Britain was responsible for security in its Palestine Mandate territory.

‘The intelligence documents cited below show that before the 15 May invasion, British intelligence knew that the Arabs terrorizing the future Israel were being led in part by Nazi advisers. These included Bosnian Muslims from the infamous Handzar Division of the Waffen SS. According to a French intelligence document published by The Nation seven months later, the British sent thousands of Nazi prisoners of war, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack. This was after the Arab invasion. [1]

‘Consistent with British tolerance for and apparent employment of Nazi war criminals against new-born Israel, the Nation memorandum shows that the British adopted a propaganda line reminiscent of the Nazis' "Jewish-Bolshevik plot" motif. The British accused Jewish Holocaust survivors trying to get to Palestine of being Soviet Communist infiltrators. A 1948 article in the London Times shows that Arab leaders were saying the same thing’.

The story revealed by the memorandum is a shocking one, exposing the bad faith and duplicity of the British and their deep partiality on the side of the Nazi-affiliated Arabs and against the Jews. The memorandum said, for example:

‘Through their action they have admitted into Palestine Arabs of known Nazi allegiance in command of the invading forces, and have even admitted escaped Nazi prisoners of war, now to be found in command of Arab detachments. From secret British intelligence reports, which are quoted extensively in this record, it is clear that the British know and have always known of every single Arab troop movement in Palestine, and that their relations with the Arabs are such that they could ask Arab leaders to request the invading forces to remain unobtrusive.

‘British sabotage has resulted in turning Jerusalem into an armed camp, has permitted the Arabs to seize the Old City and to hold as hostages some 2000 Jews. The British have failed to take any action to insure that Haifa should remain an open city, even though they were fully aware of the desire of local Arabs to achieve this and that the Jews wanted only to be safe from attack.

‘Their prejudice against the Jews has been clearly indicated in their refusal to allow the Jews to arm for defense against Arab attack, and their blowing up of Jewish defense posts; in their turning over to the Arabs - and to certain death - members of the Haganah; in their confiscation of Haganah arms; in their treatment of Jewish defense personnel as criminals. The British have connived at the starving of the Jewish population of Jerusalem by their failure to keep the highways open. They have refused armed escorts to the Jews.

‘Their attitude to the Arab community is quite different. By British admission, the Arab community has been armed by the British. Arab train robberies, which have been frequent, have been met with shooting over the heads of the robbers. Arab desertions from the police, for the purpose of joining the attackers, accompanied by the stealing of arms, have never been prevented, and Arab violators of the peace go unpunished.

‘To this record can be added the detailed facts concerning the fashion in which the British have destroyed central authority, and, under the guise of establishing greater local authority, turned over in largest part to the Arabs the various services of the Palestine government created and maintained chiefly by taxation of the Jewish community. Simultaneously, assets have been dissipated and vital communications disposed of to foreign agencies. The effect of this has been to seal the Jewish community in a limited area, cut off its access to the outside world by land and sea, and surround it by Arabs in order to create such a state of siege as would cause the Jews to send up a white flag.’

Even to someone who is well aware of the betrayal of the Jews by the British during the Mandate period and the way it tried to wriggle out of its commitment under that Mandate to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, such bald evidence of British collusion with the persecutors of the Jews is deeply shocking. The Nation’s memorandum reminds us, moreover, that there was a time when the left shared this sense of outrage. Who would have foretold, when the Nation wrote this memorandum in 1948, that within sixty years the left would be playing the part that the British had played then.