A coruscating article has appeared in the Sunday Times by Shaun Bailey,* a black community worker on the impoverished estate in London’s North Kensington where he grew up. The article is noteworthy not so much for the vivid picture he paints of systematic lawlessness, thuggery, drugs and degradation but for the people he holds responsible for this affront to civilisation -- the so-called progressive liberals whose destruction of morality and all the disciplines that hold society together has pulled it apart.

Lots of kids here, getting towards 25%, smoke weed and skunk. It’s a serious problem. Use is starting younger than it did. It affects their mental health. It undermines their schooling and their life prospects. At our local park, young schoolgirls come around and smoke, young schoolboys, too. They smoke on the way to the bus to go to school. It affects their ability to concentrate. Weed affects their brain chemistry while their brains are still forming. These kids need all the motivation they can get. The drugs rob them of it. So they move into crime and become more addicted and need to smoke more. So they get excluded, sent to a referral unit or are truanting more or less permanently.

This is one thing that middle-class adult smokers who support liberalising drugs don’t understand. As adults it may not be affecting their brain chemistry doing it once a week. They also have jobs to go to. They may control it. But these young kids don’t. When the liberal classes have the view that 'oh, we can all smoke a bit', they do not realise how it generates crime for young people here who need to finance their habit. By not making drugs seem like a big deal, by decriminalising the drug, they are criminalising the kids. This sanctioning of drugs pushes poor kids into bullying at school, then into low-level crime to get the money for drugs. This introduces them to criminality. Most children don’t begin with the desire or the confidence to rob someone. But once they bully for items at school they gradually build up and their targets become more frequent and bigger until they rob adults.

Drinking, smoking and hanging around with undesirables also leads some girls to adopt a different sexual code. They let themselves be shared by the boys. I have been told that if a girl fancies your friend, you’ll make her sleep with you first to get to your friend. Young girls are starting to accept this. They mistake sex for affection. The next step up from this is when you get girls starting to have a baby just to get real love. Many of the teenagers are the children of the first generation of single mothers to be housed here. The assumption became that it was all right for mothers to have babies on their own. So it is doubly like that for their daughters...

If you talk to young people, they all support marriage. But people with our lives, in our circles, understand you are better off if you are a single parent. It has reached the point where a lot of people who are not single parents present themselves as such because it makes financial sense. If anybody thinks that people like us don’t sit around and have these discussions, they are deluding themselves. We soon figure out which way it will make us the most money. And that’s an example of how we are trapped by government policy, which discourages us from raising our children in nuclear families.

School was where young people could have gained some moral fibre, but governments have got rid of schools that gave strong moral messages. Young people want boundaries, but school has been emasculated so it can’t give them. Removing religion and what it is to be British from school has been a disaster. Where else are young people going to learn ethics? Citizenship is not enough. That’s how we’ve had bombers here. They’ve come here and not been exposed to the good things about being British...'

Read it all, and weep for Britain. Then demand -- DEMAND -- of your MP what he or she is going to do about. And if you are a Tory, ask David Cameron whether he still supports the legalisation of drugs.

* The article is a condensed version of a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies, which can be read here.

An excellent article by Charles Moore in the Telegraph a couple of days ago made a point about Israel that was as simple and eloquent as it was crucial. How did we forget, he asked, that Israel’s story is the story of the west?

If one stands back from the moral argument that rages round Israel, and just looks at this as a story, it reminds one intensely of that of ancient Israel's enemy, the Roman republic. An austere nation builds its power in the face of enemy neighbours. It does so by great feats of arms, and so its soldiers often become its political leaders. The commitment those leaders must give to the nation is absolute, lifelong, life-threatening. The deeds done in the nation's defence are frequently brave, sometimes appalling. Some would see Sharon as Milosevic, but might he not be Caesar?

But there's also an important difference from Rome: the purpose of victory has been more about security than conquest for its own sake. Israeli politics for the past dozen years has been the attempt to reconcile extrication from territory with security. That is what Sharon thinks about all the time, as did his Labour predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.

Noting the extraordinary turnaround in which a heroic and beseiged little country became transformed, in the narrative of the west, into a monstrous tyrant, Moore concludes, appositely and chillingly:

Western children of the Sixties like this sort of talk. They look for a narrative based on the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid. They care little for economic achievement or political pluralism. They are suspicious of any society with a Western appearance, and in any contest between people with differing skin colours, they prefer the darker. They buy into the idea, now promoted by all Arab regimes and by Muslim firebrands with a permanent interest in deflecting attention from their own societies' problems, that Israel is the greatest problem of all.

Well, some will say, that is the way it is: Israel has abused power, and is reaping the whirlwind. I don't want to argue today about the rights and wrongs of Israel's actions, though I think, given its difficulties, it stands up better than most before the bar of history. All I want to ask my fellow Europeans is this: are you happy to help direct the world's fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours? And are you sure that the fate of Israel has no bearing on your own? In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is 'the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance', the world of the West. He is busy building his country's nuclear bomb.

Here’s a remarkable development. A British member of Parliament – well, all right, it was George Galloway but he is still an MP – has been visiting Damascus. According to this account, after extolling President Assad and declaring that Syria would not betray the ‘Palestinian’ resistance or Hezbullah, the Lebanese ‘resistance’ (otherwise known to all civilised people as terrorists), Galloway said:

What your lives would be if from the Atlantic to the Gulf we had one Arab union -- all this land, 300 million people, all this oil and gas and water, occupied by a people who speak the same language, follow the same religions, listen to the same Umm Kulthum. The Arabs would be a superpower in the world if they had this unity, instead of the shameful situation in which the Arabs find themselves today. Hundreds of thousands are ready to fight them (the Americans) in the Middle East, and in Latin America there is revolution everywhere. Fidel Castro is feeling young again. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile are all electing left-wing governments which are challenging American domination. And in Venezuela, the hero Hugo Chavez has stood against them over and over and over again. So I say to you, citizens of the last Arab country, this is a time for courage, for unity, for wisdom, for determination, to face these enemies with the dignity your president has shown, and I believe, God willing, we will prevail and triumph, wa-salamu aleikum (peace be upon you all).

The ‘we’ here appears to be the Arab nation (of which Galloway now appears to be a member). The ‘enemies’ to be prevailed and triumphed over appear to be the Americans – and therefore, by extension, the British. Galloway therefore appears to be inciting war by the Arabs against us. Why is this man still a member of Parliament?

Now here’s an even more interesting thing. Look who has been saying virtually the same thing in Damascus – none other than David Duke, the American white supremacist:

Duke told a news conference at the 'Nation's Tent' at Rawda Square in Damascus that 'I have come to Syria to express my support to the Syrian people and their just stances...it's the duty of every free man to reject the conspiracies and threats Syria is exposed to.' He added that the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the US have influence on their country's foreign policy and have been working behind the scenes through their mass media in the US to hide ‘the reality of Israeli terrorism against the Arabs.’

On the war on Iraq, the former US Senator said the war has created a crisis in the world, adding that those who advised the American administration to go into this war have been working to widen the scope of the crisis to spread it to other countries in the region. Former Representative Duke said Iraq war cost the US 300 billion dollars, more than 2000 dead, and between 20,000 to 30,000 wounded, pushed America into a real crisis and raised hatred against its foreign policy in the world. He added that Israel has been practicing state terrorism against the Arabs, and the American people know this reality which ‘Zionist-controlled mass media seek to distort.’ Duke questioned why nobody has so far talked about the Israeli mass destruction weapons and its violation of more than 50 UN resolutions while it continues to occupy Arab territories and increase the number of its settlements in the West Bank. He added that Iraq was invaded under false allegations, that the country had WMD which never existed.Duke expressed appreciation of Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad, saying he would do his bets to convey 'the real peace-loving Syrian' stances to peoples across the world.

Neo-Nazis, the far left and the Islamists all in bed together. Go figure.

As we all know, if there is to be any hope of averting a showdown with a nuclear Iran, it rests with encouraging the Iranian opposition to oust the ayatollahs and institute the rule of law and freedom from tyranny. The Liberal Democrats in Britain are supposedly the party most closely associated with the cause of liberty. So it was particularly astounding to read here that Baroness Nicholson, a LibDem member of the European Parliament, had referred to the Islamic Republic as

an advanced form of democracy in the region.

As Potkin Azarmehr points out:

Islamic Republic is in fact a brutal, backward, religious dictatorship. Only Shiite Muslims can stand as candidates in the so-called 'elections', but not all the Shiites; only the ones who accept the state interpretation of Shiite Islam, even then they are still vetted by the unelected Guardian Council before the elections and after the elections, yet despite all this the state used all its apparatus to cheat in the last presidential 'elections' too.

We wrote to all Lib Dem MPs, MEPs and Lords to clarify their position on the Islamic Republic and on Baroness Nicholson’s continuous support for the mullahs. Only Lord Lester distanced himself from Baroness Nicholson. The leader of the Lib Dem MEPs, Chris Davies also replied to us but backed his colleague, Baroness Nicholson. Interestingly he also got Iran and Iraq mixed up in his reply!

By supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Lib Dems are supporting:

1) An evil theocratic dictatorship
2) A regime which stones women to death
3) A regime which holds public executions
4) A regime which executes underage minors
5) A regime which sponsors international terrorism
6) A regime which provides technology and training to kill British soldiers
7) A regime which publicly announces wiping another country off the map
8) A regime in which women are second class citizens
9) A regime which kills and imprisons journalists
10) A regime which does not recognise freedom of religion

We believe that none of the above are neither Liberal nor Democratic values and at a time when the Iranian president calls for another country to be wiped off the map, and the Islamic Republic technology explosives is killing British soldiers in Iraq, the Lib Dem leadership by not publicly distancing itself from Baroness Nicholson has shown gross incompetence and misjudgment. Would you trust such a party to be in charge of international affairs?

Quite.

And this, from the experience of Carol Gould, is what is happening in Britain:

The poppy is a symbol of the terrible loss of life in World War I in the fields of Flanders, where these blood-red flowers sprouted above the acres of corpses of fallen soldiers. As the decades have passed, the poppy has been worn to show one’s respect for the millions who have died in successive conflicts as recent as Iraq and Afghanistan. On British television, every presenter and anchor wears a poppy. In keeping with the motto of the British Legion -- 'Wear your poppy with pride' -- every shopkeeper, publican, hotel manager and cabbie wears a poppy. This year I proudly bought mine at my local doctor’s office.

It was therefore all the more astonishing last week when I took a long walk along Edgware Road, the most densely Muslim section of London, and discovered that not one person was wearing a poppy. This all started because I was accosted on my corner, a few yards from where I have lived for twenty-eight years, by a young Arab man who began to get very aggressive with me. Was I, he demanded to know, 'from the Jewish'?

He also wanted to know why I was wearing a poppy. I tried to explain the concept of the Cenotaph and Armistice Day. But he seemed determined to establish that I was a Jewess above all else. No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake him off. I began to get very alarmed. I hailed a taxi and, thankfully, my pursuer, who was by this time shouting, did not get into the taxi. The driver was enormously sympathetic but told me that I had been 'asking for it' by walking in what he called 'Little Beirut.' He then told me that we were in World War III. His white, working class anger at what he perceived as 'the Islamic takeover' of Britain was palpable. He was not the first London cabbie who has told me he would gladly join the far-right British National Party if pushed.

And yet still the British establishment just doesn’t get it. They should get out of their official cars and walk the Edgware Road, too.

Here is what is going on across the English Channel. The Washington Post reports from Belgium that the town of Maaseik has become a hub of terror:

The phones at City Hall began ringing nonstop one morning last year when several masked figures were spotted walking through the cobbled streets of this pastoral town. A small panic erupted when one of the figures, covered head to ankle in black fabric, appeared at a school and scared children to tears. It turned out the people were not hooded criminals, but six female residents of Maaseik who were displaying their Muslim piety by wearing burqas , garments that veiled their faces, including their eyes. After calm was restored, a displeased Mayor Jan Creemers summoned the women to his office. "I said, 'Ladies, you can be dressed all in Armani black for all I care, but please do not cover your faces,' " Creemers recalled. "I tried to talk to them about it, but it was impossible. They said, 'We are the only true believers of the Koran.'"

What the city elders did not know at the time was that the women came from households in which several men had embraced radical Islam and joined a terrorist network that was setting up sleeper cells across Europe, according to Belgian federal prosecutors and court documents from Italy, Spain and France. Over the next nine months, Belgian federal police arrested five men in Maaseik, a town of 24,000 people tucked in the northeast corner of Belgium. Each was charged with membership in a terrorist organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a fast-growing network known by its French initials, GICM.

With each arrest, investigators uncovered fresh evidence that placed small-town Maaseik at the center of a terrorist network stretching across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The town had served as a haven for suspects in the Madrid train explosions that killed 191 people in March 2004, for instance, as well as an important meeting place for the GICM's European leadership.

Meanwhile, Anthony Browne reported in the Times a few days ago how the Netherlands – that open, tolerant, multicultural country – has descended into an utterly horrifying state of mass intimidation and murderous terror directed against anyone who stands up against Islamic facism:

A film about gay rights should hardly raise an eyebrow in the Netherlands, which for centuries has prided itself as a beacon of freedom of expression and was the first country to legalise gay marriage. But when Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee turned Dutch MP, starts making a new film about the oppression of homosexuals under Islam, the threat to everyone taking part is deemed so great that there will be no faces shown on screen, no end credits, and the entire production team will remain anonymous.

Ms Ali, a 'lapsed Muslim' who revealed this week that she has finished the script, lives in a safe house under 24-hour protection. The precaution is as wise as the courage is extraordinary: Theo van Gogh, the director of Ms Ali’s previous film, about domestic violence under Islam, was killed — repeatedly shot and nearly decapitated in broad daylight in the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist. Impaled on a knife in Mr van Gogh’s chest was a five-page note declaring holy war on the Netherlands and threatening death to many other public figures deemed 'enemies of Islam'.

A year after his murder, the Netherlands is a country transformed. Previously, only the Queen and the Prime Minister had police protection, and ministers cycled to their ministries. Now, many politicians, writers and artists are considered to be in such danger that they have permanent armed guards and are driven around in bomb-proof armoured cars. The Interior Ministry has set up a special unit assessing death threats from Islamic extremists and providing protection squads.

Truly, these are dark days for Europe.

A production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great has been censored for fear of upsetting Muslim sensibilities. As the Times reports, the play tells the story of a shepherd-robber who defeats the king of Persia, the emperor of Turkey and, seeing himself as the ‘scourge of God’, burns the Koran. Audiences at the Barbican, however, did not see the Koran being burnt; nor did they hear disobliging lines Marlowe wrote about the prophet Mohamed. According to one of the producers, this would have been ‘unnecessarily inflammatory’. He said:

Marlowe was not challenging Muslims, he was attacking theism, saying, ‘I’m God, there isn’t a God’. If he had been in a Christian country, a Judaic country or a Hindu country, it would be their gods he’d be attacking.’ He said more people would be insulted by broadening the attack.

Eh? What a wally. Here’s that apostle of moderation, Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, playing clever politics by saying:

In the context of a fictional play, I don’t think it will have offended many people.

Another own goal for western civilisation. However, in another part of the beleaguered British forest, Imperial College London appears to have had a rare fit of courage and common-sense. It has banned students from wearing either Islamic headscarves or hooded tops on the grounds that obscuring the face poses a security threat in the wake of the London bombings. Naturally, students have attacked this threat to their personal freedom. And here is the busy Mr Bunglawala (one of the Prime Minister’s advisers on combating Muslim extremism) being slightly less moderate:

In today’s world, we understand there has to be security, but measures should not be so drastic as to prevent Muslim women taking up higher education, especially as they are being encouraged to do so.

Hello? Did anyone say anything about stopping them? Imperial has been very brave. It is so obviously right. It will now come under intense pressure to abandon this policy. One can hear the human rights lawyers rubbing their hands already.

In an interview in Ha’aretz, the noted French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut delivers a devastating put down to those who believe the French riots had nothing to do with religion:

‘In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult - Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese - and they're not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character… directed against France as a former colonial power, against France as a European country. Against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition...

‘We are witness to an Islamic radicalization that must be explained in its entirety before we get to the French case, to a culture that, instead of dealing with its problems, searches for an external guilty party. It's easier to find an external guilty party. It's tempting to tell yourself that in France you're neglected, and to say, “Gimme, gimme.” It hasn't worked like that for anyone. It can't work.’

But what appears to disturb Finkielkraut even more than this ‘hatred for the West’ is what he sees as its internalization in the French education system, and the identification with it by French intellectuals. In his view, this identification and internalization - which are expressed in shows of understanding for the sources of the violence and in the post-colonial mindset that is permeating the education system - are threatening not only France as a whole, but the country's Jews, too, because they are creating an infrastructure for the new anti-Semitism.

‘In the United States, too, we're witnessing an Islamization of the blacks. It was Louis Farrakhan, in America, who asserted for the first time that the Jews played a central role in creating slavery. And the main spokesman for this theology in France today is Dieudonné [a black stand-up artist, who caused an uproar with his antisemitic statements]. Today he is the true patron of antisemitism in France, and not Le Pen's National Front.

’But in France, instead of fighting his kind of talk, they're actually doing what he asks: changing the teaching of colonial history and the history of slavery in the schools. Now they teach colonial history as an exclusively negative history. We don't teach anymore that the colonial project also sought to educate, to bring civilization to the savages. They only talk about it as an attempt at exploitation, domination and plunder.

’But what does Dieudonné really want? He wants a `Holocaust' for Arabs and blacks, too. But if you want to put the Holocaust and slavery on the same plane, then you have to lie. Because [slavery] wasn't a Holocaust. And [the Holocaust] wasn't ‘a crime against humanity,’ because it wasn't just a crime. It was something ambivalent. The same is true of slavery. It began long before the West. In fact, what sets the West apart when it comes to slavery is that it was the one to eliminate it. The elimination of slavery is a European and American thing. But this truth about slavery cannot be taught in schools.

’That's why these events sadden me so greatly; not so much because they happened. After all, you'd have to be deaf and blind not to see that they would happen. But because of the interpretations that have accompanied them. These dealt a decisive blow to the France I loved. And I've always said that life will become impossible for Jews in France when Francophobia triumphs. And that's what will happen. The Jews understand what I've said just now. Suddenly, they look around, and they see all the `bobo' (French slang for bourgeois-bohemians) singing songs of praise to the new `wretched of the earth' [Finkielkraut is alluding here to the book by the Martinique-born, anti-colonialist philosopher Franz Fanon - D.M.] and asking themselves: What is this country? What's happened to it?’

The most chilling observation of all comes at the end:

‘But there's something in France - a kind of denial whose origin lies in the bobo, in the sociologists and social workers - and no one dares say anything else. This struggle is lost. I've been left behind.’

France once held the line for Europe when, at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, it stopped the Muslim advance from Spain and preserved Europe for Christianity. If Finkielkraut is right and the French struggle is indeed lost, the effect will be felt on all of us. And this time, the defeat of a civilisation will have been inflicted by its own side.

Meanwhile, let us not overlook the significance of this:

At least 200,000 persons demonstrated yesterday against the recent bombings of three luxury hotels, while a new online statement attributed to terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi defended the attacks and threatened to cut off the head of Jordan's King Abdullah II. An anti-terrorist demonstration of such size is unprecedented in the Arab world, where Zarqawi, his mentor, Osama bin Laden, and their al Qaeda organization have attained folk-hero status among Muslim masses. ‘Zarqawi, from Amman, we say to you: “You are a coward,"’protesters chanted while brandishing banners with the names of their tribes from every part of Jordan. A similar protest in Jordan two days after the attacks on three hotels in the capital, which killed 59 persons, mustered several thousand people. One attacker blew himself up at a wedding party in the ballroom of the Radisson SAS hotel. Seventeen relatives of the bride and groom died. ‘More than 100,000 people took part in the demonstration which left the al-Husseini mosque and then moved towards Amman town hall,’ security forces spokesman Bashir al-Daajeh told Agence France-Presse. ‘Their number increased as the demonstrators were approaching the town hall and then reached 250,000,’ he estimated. The demonstrators marched along a mile and a half route before arriving at the town hall, where several asked the public to denounce ‘this savage terrorist crime’ or to recite poems in praise of Jordan and the royal dynasty.

The tectonic plates are shifting.

This is what happens in Saudi Arabia, our trading partner, when a Muslim praises the Jews:

A teacher in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes for discussing the Bible and praising Jews.Secondary school teacher Mohammed al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students, according to the Saudi newspaper Al-Madina. He was charged with promoting a 'dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer,' the newspaper disclosed. Mr al-Harbi is apparently to receive 50 lashes each week for 15 weeks, in in the public market in the town of Al- Bikeriya in Al-Qassim. He was the school activities organizer at the Al-Fowailiq High School in the town of Ein Al-Juwa in Al-Qassim. Following a terrorist attack at the Al-Hamra Compound in Riyadh in 2003, Al-Harbi used his position as an educator to enlighten his students and warn them of terrorism and its consequences. He went to great lengths by talking to students, hanging anti-terrorism signs around the school and speaking out against terrorism.

Mr al Harbi has displayed astounding courage in standing up for life, moderation and decency in the very heart of darkness itself. Shamefully, the UK and US governments are hugger-mugger with the Saudi tyranny whose vicious punishment of Mr al Harbi is but a tiny example of the evil it does in the world. The US State Department recently criticised Saudi Arabia for denying religious freedom. If that pious declaration is to mean anything at all, if the west’s desire to promote Muslim moderation has any substance to it at all, the loudest possible voices should be raised at the level of the US and UK governments to demand that this inhuman treatment of Mr al Harbi be stopped. Like other courageous Muslims, he should be regarded in the same way that the west once regarded dissidents in the Soviet Union -- people whose cause must be championed, and whose fate must be publicly protested at every turn to rouse the conscience of the world.

In response to my article today in the Mail about the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, an officer has sent me the following deeply alarming cri de coeur:

I am a uniformed Inspector with the Metropolitan Police Service, having 17 years service all spent in the ‘backwater’ of uniformed street patrolling. I and five of my former colleagues only this year became the latest ‘victims’ of the politically correct culture that stifles proper policing within London. After been falsely accused of assaulting a black youth, we received an apology from an assistant commissioner lamenting the near ‘miscarriage of justice that we had faced’. We still await the results of an Association of Chief Police Officers ordered enquiry into the Directorate of Professional Standards investigation that saw us removed from operational duties for a period in April this year.

Our saving grace came in that a brave commander at New Scotland Yard realised that the allegation and initial belief of the MPS management board was false. The DPS investigation was based on the willingness of the MPS to sacrifice officers as a ‘prize’ for rooting out ‘racist attitudes’. However, independent pathologist evidence showed the complainant to have falsified the entire accusation. I’m sure the 14 page report I submitted to my MP would make interesting reading in the public domain.

Until the public are aware of how little trust the constables, sergeants and inspectors have in the majority of the MPS leadership, they will not realise the scale of crisis that affects London’s police. Few if any officers are now willing to risk their homes and careers in tackling street criminals as they genuinely feel they will receive no support. Until April this year I refused to adopt such an attitude, still believing justice existed. My own horrendous experience almost resulted in my and my colleagues standing trial for a matter which never occurred. The willingness and eagerness of politically correct colleagues who relished our plight goes a long way to explaining the shambolic performance of London’s police.

I still have a great love for my job and try to serve the public as I have always done. I no longer have any trust in the MPS, and that sadly reflects on the commitment I show to still being an operational officer of 17 years.

Ye gods.

Amnon Rubinstein identifies the intellectual genocide against the Jewish state being attempted by ‘intellectuals’ which parallels the nuclear-tipped one being threatened by Iran:

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, by former BBC foreign correspondent Alan Hart, is a lengthy - 600 pages in the first volume - diatribe against Zionism, the Balfour declaration and the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. The title is taken from a motion discussed in a symposium organized by London's Evening Standard, in which the mainly Jewish audience voted for the motion. Hunt, quite rightly, sees this debate and vote as an event of historical significance and develops this thesis into a two-volume treatise.

Jacqueline Rose's The Question of Zion and John Rose's Myths of Zionism are two similar attacks against Zionism. Professor Tony Judt of New York University also wiped Israel off the map in the New York Review of Books in October 2003 by writing that 'Israel is an anachronism' and by proposing that it be replaced by a binational state.

Perhaps following Judt's lead, Prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University eradicates Israel in his article in the French L'Essentiel (summer 2005) in which he hopes that the return of the Palestinian refugees will give rise to 'one unitary secular and democratic state' which would replace Israel. Naturally, Pappe surmises, the Jews will live happily ever after as a minority in a secular democracy, of which there are so many in the Middle East...

There are also those who do not advocate eradicating Israel, but work to remove any shred of justification for supporting the Jewish state. To the long list of Israeli academics who vilify their country, is now added a new opus: Suppressing the Guilt by Daniel Dor of Tel Aviv University. The source of guilt, of course, is Israel's actions in the West Bank and the suppressors are the Israeli media, who conceal the truth from their readers.

I took part in that Evening Standard debate, and a sickening event it was. To be accurate, however, the reason the motion against Zionism was carried was that it talked of ‘Zionism today’, thus allowing the other side successfully (if dishonestly) to redefine Zionism as ‘the occupation’ post 1967. This sleight of hand was eagerly accepted by the audience which was baying for Israel’s blood from the start. The reason that debate was sickening was that it set Jew against Jew, the wonderful new spectator sport for ‘hands-clean’ Jew-haters. The striking thing is how many on this list of infamy are Jews. Rubinstein comments:

Their attacks against Zionism are compulsive, non-academic, full of half-baked truths and barely disguised hysteria. Indeed, Israel-bashers use a style which is very similar to the language used by anti-Semites: Israel is inferior and should not enjoy the rights accorded to other peoples. Formerly it was the Jewish person, now it is the Jewish state. The Nazi refrain was ‘the Jews are our disaster’; now, the Jewish state is being portrayed as the world's disaster. Consequently, all these eradicators, whether they are Israeli, Jewish or distinguished professors, are objectively - if one may revert to Marxist terminology - biological anti-Semites.

There have always been Jews who hate the Jews, for a variety of shocking and even more shocking reasons. Now they hate the collective Jew as represented by the Jewish state. They have a great deal of traction. They are delivering an evil agenda. The Jewish community has been too silent about and towards these people. They need to be exposed, systematically and forensically, for the intellectual charlatans they are.

A warm welcome to the new website launched by Tom Gross, the indefatigable middle East commentator, which reveals the creation of yet another Islamist group in London:

Anjam Choudry a lawyer and the former leader of al Muhahjiroun, an extremist organization which disbanded itself in October 2004, told the Saudi-owned paper Asharq al Awsat yesterday that he had invited the group’s 700 ex-members to unite under the banner of 'Ahl al Sunnah and al Jamaa' (the community following the teachings of the Prophet.) Choudry also expected several students of Omar Bakri Mohammad, the spiritual guide of the banned al Ghurabaa group who currently lives in Beirut, to attend the launch. The new group aims to unite British Muslims under one roof, away from more secular organizations.

An important interview with Bill Tierney, a former military intelligence officer and UNSCOM inspector, records the way in which the Iraqis ran rings round the weapons inspectors during the late 1990s. Tierney does not just believe the Iraqis were then concealing the weapons programme the world now concludes they disposed of (for reasons that remain utterly confused and absurd). He also points out the way in which history was rewritten to make the physical existence of the WMD the apparent cause for war, which it was not:

It was during this period that Tariq Aziz pulled out his 'no smoking gun' line. Tariq very cleverly changed the meaning of this phrase. The smoking gun refers to an indicator of what you are really looking for - the bullet. Tariq changed the meaning so smoking gun referred to the bullet, in this case the WMD, knowing that as long as there were armed guards between us and the weapons, we would never be able to 'find,' as in 'put our hands on,' the weapons of mass destruction. The western press mindlessly took this up and became the Iraqis’ tool. I will let the reader decide whether this inspection constitutes a smoking gun.

Tierney believes furthermore that the physical WMD did exist and were concealed or exported:

In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land, you reply 'I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof, sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.' You won’t last very long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for an educated guess). The Democrats understand the difference between the two concepts, but have no qualms about blurring the distinction for political gain. This is despicable. This has brought great harm to our nation’s credibility with our allies. A perfect example is Senator Levin waving deception by one single source, al-Libi, to try and convince us that this is evidence there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as though the entire argument rested on this one source. Senator Levin, and his media servants, think the public can’t read through his duplicity. He is plunging a dagger into the heart of his own country.

Could the assessments of Iraq’s weapons program been off? I am sure there were some marginal details that were incorrect, but on the matter of whether Iraq had a program, the error was not with the pre-war assessment, the error was with the weapons hunt... I was on the inspections that follow-up on Hussein Kamal’s defection, and Hossam said at the time that Hussein Kamal had a secret cabal that kept the weapons without the knowledge of the Iraqi government. It was pure pleasure disemboweling this cover story. Yet the consensus at DIA is that Iraq got rid of its weapons in 1991. This is truly scary. If true, when and where did Saddam have a change of heart? This is the same man who crowed after 9/11, then went silent after news broke that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague. Did Saddam spend a month with Mother Theresa, or go to a mountain top in the Himalayas? Those that say there were no weapons have to prove that Saddam had a change of heart. I await their evidence with interest...’

Golly. Logic, rationality and informed common sense over Iraq. I must have died and gone to Heaven.

The attitude of much of the liberal media in Britain, France and the US to the French riots is now clear. The riots have nothing to do with Islam. The fact that most of the rioters are Muslim is irrelevant. The riots are about poverty, unemployment and discrimination. Anyone who says there’s an Islamist agenda here is a far-right bigot peddling patent and dangerous untruths.

Thus the Big Lie is being promulgated, and all who speak the truth are to be neutralised through vilification. This is vicious stuff, and truly lethal. If it becomes the received wisdom – and there’s every chance that it will, since the weapon of vilification is a ruthlessly effective censor – we’re finished. So before reality is totally submerged by fantasy, let’s remind ourselves of a few facts which have emerged from journalists who still have their heads screwed on the right way.

The French authorities, in desperation, have asked imams to restore order in the ghettoes. Funny kind of non-Islamic problem when imams are having to sort it out. They have also issued a fatwa telling the rioters to cool it -- all in the name of the same Islam which we are told has nothing to do with the problem.

As Charles Bremner wrote in the Times:

Bearded Muslim activists have been wading into the night-time mayhem of the housing estates, megaphone in hand, and addressing the rioters ‘in the name of Allah’. Far from inciting the violence, they have been urging the rioting teenagers to stop destroying property and go home. For the Government, the Muslim mediators have been playing a useful role calming youngsters from the mainly Arab estates who respect their authority far more than that of the police and local officials. However, the Muslim mentors, who style themselves ‘big brothers’, are also causing unease in France because they symbolise what many see as a root of the unrest: the isolation of the ethnic Arab and black minorities into ghettos where Muslim law and outlook prevails. There is also a widespread belief — denied by the authorities — that the unrest is being fostered by the Islamists. The mediators were bolstered yesterday by a fatwa issued by one of the main Muslim organisations, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France, quoting the Koran as saying that ‘God abhors destruction and disorder and rejects those who inflict it’. The fatwa sparked a dispute with the mainstream Muslim Council, which said that the edict equated Islam with the current vandalism.

In the Spectator, Rod Liddle reports:

The black youths I spoke to in Grigny, hooded and furtive, lurking in the stairwell of a particularly noisome concrete development, mentioned jihad three times in the course of a very brief and slightly scary exchange.

Jihad, eh? Another characteristic of western European unemployment patterns?

As Liddle observes:

It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam that gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d'etre. The political aspirations of many French Muslim organisations and explicitly of the most important political Islamic organisation on the Continent, the Arab European League, are for much greater segregation, for Hendrik Verwoerd's ideal of separate development: the very essence, to my mind, of racism.

The appalling Arab European League likens assimilation or integration to rape and calls on Muslims to resist such cultural imperialism. And the director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who delivered that nice fatwa, has seemed to request that the French Government give Muslims autonomy within the state; to allow them, in effect, to follow their own rules. So for those pundits on French TV, apologies, but au contraire: the French Muslims do not, as a whole, want greater integration. They want less integration.

So it is that the French authorities have woken up of late and banned the headscarf in French schools and begun deporting the more radical imams: a tacit admission that this extreme form of multiculturalism, of separate development, doesn't work and could lead, one of these days, to civil war.

Then there is support for Osama bin Laden, as reported in the Boston Globe:

Mahmoud Khabou, 20, the jobless son of Algerian immigrants, knows little of the world beyond the concrete housing projects that rise in bleak rows barely an hour's subway ride from the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and other grand monuments of Paris. But he knows who his heroes are. '’Osama bin Laden and Rodney King,’ he said, referring to the Al Qaeda leader and the African-American whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 spawned massive racial riots. ‘One because he gives pride back to the Muslims,’ the young man asserted as he and a trio of friends stood near the charred ruins of a carpet shop. ‘The other because he was just a poor man, a 'nobody man' of color, but he caused a great city to burn.’

Jihad and nihilism spatchcocked together – the reality of what is currently consuming France.

In the Observer today, Jason Burke attacks the article I wrote in the Mail last Monday in which I said that the French riots were a Muslim intifada against the French state. Burke’s article betrays a certain lack of confidence in his own argument by resorting to a particularly ripe smear. The essence of his argument -- such as it is -- is that the French riots are not Muslim riots because some of the rioters are not Muslims but Arabs and some aren’t even black but white (don’t ask). He says the most radical Islamist areas in France have been the calmest. To characterise the rioters as 'Muslim' at all is ludicrous because they are so westernised. Then we get the full glorious smear: that my analysis is rooted in a barking mad species of conservative thought expressed variously around the world through Russian racism, demagogic Hindu nationalism, Gallic exceptionalism, US Christian fundamentalism (natch) and, er, Muslim fundamentalism (hello?) which are all marching shoulder to shoulder in an attempt to stop the clock of history. However:

Pulling up the drawbridge will not work. History is flowing in the wrong direction. This means their actions are likely to get more desperate, their logic more twisted, their conspiracy theories more barmy and their rhetoric more rabid.

But don’t worry --

The rearguard is doomed to perish eventually, wrapped in the flag and out of ammunition, but it will go down fighting.

Ye gods. Yes, this really did appear in a serious British newspaper.Everyone in the world who is fighting Islamic fascism is, er, a fascist. It’s not the Islamists who are guilty of twisted logic, barmy conspiracy theories and rabid rhetoric, but their victims!

Let’s just confine ourselves here to a few more observations about France. I am told by French analysts that there are no white rioters. Of the rioters, about 80 percent are Muslim. They are regularly chanting ‘Allahu akhbar’ and support for Osama bin Laden. Bit of a clue there, perhaps?

Yes, Muslim extremists can be very westernised. Read the insights of Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal (see earlier post) about the lethal internal conflicts this can provoke. Yes, the most radical Islamic areas are indeed the quietest. That is because these people are not fools. They are positioning themselves to play the role of honest brokers with the French government. To be more precise, the Muslim Brotherhood – the extremist sect that wants to Islamicise the world and has a strategy of infiltrating the west to do so -- is positioning itself to play honest broker with the French government. This happened to be endorsed on the Today programme yesterday (0810) by a French/Lebanese writer, Caroline Fourest, who spoke of the tactic being employed by the Muslim Brotherhood in France of acting as intermediaries with the government and thus positioning themselves to play a seminal role in the Muslim community when everything has died down. The same thing, she said, happened in Algeria in the 1990s after two weeks of rioting, when the Brotherhood posed as interlocutors with the Algerian government and then leap-frogged their way into power.

The French government is showing every sign of falling neatly into the trap. To defuse an emergency which is (pace Jason Burke) nothing to do with Islam, the French government is desperate to deal with — guess who? — the Islamists! Stranger and stranger! The French government too must be composed of deluded rabid barmy twisted exceptionalists!

Never fear -- help is at hand for them in Mr Burke's truly exceptional analysis. Maybe, having read today’s Observer, French ministers will strike their brows and cry: ‘Zut alors, Nicolas, vous êtes complètement fou! Ce sont nous-mêmes — pas les Islamistes — qui sont les démagogues les plus enragés et les plus dangereux du monde! Nous sommes les victimes de nous-mêmes!’

On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0810), I listened to the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Levy declare that it was a great mistake to assume that the French riots are about Islam. They are merely an outbreak of nihilism, apparently. This article from 2003 by Olivier Guitta about the inroads made by radical Islamism in France puts B-HL in un peu de perspective:

This extremist indoctrination also extends to French schools, where non-Muslim teachers are subject to daily insults and racist remarks. For instance, the principal of the Trappes’ primary school described how an 11-year-old kid insulted his female teacher because she was not wearing the hijab. Intolerant behaviors especially against teachers and other religions have skyrocketed in the past three years. These young children are taught from the time they can walk that Islam is the answer to everything the Ultimate Truth and that is why even six-year-olds are now fasting during Ramadan.

Therefore, is not surprising that ten-year olds call for the institution of Shariah, or Koranic law, during class. Or that during a high school History lesson regarding the Crusades, a Muslim student yelled: 'Anyway, the Arabs are going to kill the Christians and the Jews.' The teacher then asked him, 'When?' and the child replied, 'I do not know. It was not mentioned on the imam’s tape.' Or that on a course on the Holocaust, Muslim children demanded to be let go to ask their imams if what they were being taught was true.

But school is not the only place in France where militant Islam is omnipresent. For example, in Avignon, Muslim extremists distribute loads of Koranic tapes in French and drive around town with their windows open and propaganda blasting through the speakers. In French hospitals, most Muslim women, sometimes under the family’s pressure, refuse to be examined by male doctors and many Muslim men by female doctors. Many Muslim defendants refuse to be tried by Jewish judges, and some municipal pools have different hours for women and men to accommodate the Muslim population. A number of supermarkets carrying non-Halaal products (food not permitted by the Koran), have been vandalized by Muslims and then surrendered to this violent blackmail by taking the products off their shelves. This is what France has become.

Islamists have the clear goal of transforming France into the first Islamist regime of the West. Their master plan is clearly formulated and being implemented every day.

That was two years ago.

The former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has revealed links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda which have come to light from the archives of Saddam’s regime. He says that Ayman Al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two, was summoned by Izza Ibrahim Al-Douri – then deputy head of the council of the leadership of the revolution in Iraq - to take part in the ninth Popular Islamic Congress in 1999. He also says that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi entered Iraq secretly in the same period and began to form a terrorist cell.

In Allawi's view, Saddam's government 'sponsored' the birth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, coordinating with other terrorist groups, both Arab and Muslim. 'The Iraqi secret services had links to these groups through a person called Faruq Hajizi, later named Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and arrested after the fall of Saddam's regime as he tried to re-enter Iraq. Iraqi secret agents helped terrorists enter the country and directed them to the Ansar al-Islam camps in the Halbija area,' he said.

The former prime minister claims that Saddam's regime sought to involve even Palestinian Abu Nidal - head of a group once considered the world's most dangerous terrorist organisation - in its terrorist circuit. Abu Nidal's organisation was responsible for terrorist attacks in some 20 countries, killing more than 300 people and wounding hundreds more. He added that Abu Nidal's refusal to cooperate with Islamist groups was the reason for his death in Iraq, in the summer of 2002.

Allawi is but the latest to attest to the links between Saddam and al Qaeda, a relationship the existence of which has always been denied with religious fervour by the anti-war crowd who claim furthermore that Saddam posed ‘no terrorist threat’ at all to anyone outside his own country.

So now let’s all look at how this is reported in the mainstream media...

Readers may recall that the government’s committees that it set up to advise it on how to deal with Islamist extremism after the London bombings last July were stuffed with, er, Islamist extremists (see earlier post). Now they have reported. Guess what! They have concluded that the main problem is not what is wrong with Islam or the Muslim community -- but with Britain! Thus they say, as the Guardian tells us, that

foreign policy had been ‘a key contributory factor’ in driving extremist groups, and perceptions of injustices inherent in western foreign policy were triggering ‘radical impulses’ among British Muslims

and that

proposed Foreign Office database of ‘foreign extremists’ and a Home Office list of extremist websites, bookshops and organisations of concern will lead to a clampdown that will be seen as "censorship of all those who might criticise British foreign policy or call for political unity among Muslims: 'This is disingenuous to say the least, carrying the dual risk of radicalisation and driving the extremists further underground'

and of course that

the present anti-terror regime is already excessive [my emphasis], and that the measures risk provoking further radicalisation of young British Muslims. It says the proposal to make "inciting, justifying or glorifying terrorism" a criminal offence ‘could lead to a significant chill factor in the Muslim community in expressing legitimate support for self-determination struggles around the world’.

Instead, the Guardian goes on, they want

A rapid rebuttal unit to combat Islamophobia, a better reflection of Islam in the national curriculum, and the training of imams in ‘modern’ skills.

But hey — let’s not be unfair. They do also say that they want to convey to young British Muslims a ‘counter-narrative to terrorist readings of the Qur'an’. Promising. So who might they get to promulgate such a counter-narrative? Why, none other than our old friend Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who supports human bomb terrorism in Iraq and Israel. But not in the UK, apparently — so that makes him a role model for Muslim moderation!

As they say in my trade, you couldn’t make it up. Read it and weep for Britain. And let’s remind ourselves – this has been published by the British government Home Office. It might as well have published a national suicide note.

The tragic epitaph of this society might well be that, at its moment of greatest danger it was led by a politician who appeared to bend over backwards to ensure that the public refused to believe a single word he said — even when he was telling the truth. What has emerged today is the extent to which the police crossed the important line into the political sphere and allowed themselves to be used by the government to push the case of the 90-day period for interrogating terrorist suspects. The Daily Telegraph led the paper on it.

Readers will know that I supported the 90 day provision, albeit with reservations (see post below). I believed, and still do, that the police had made a compelling case for this extension of their holding powers. However, allowing themselves to be used like this was wholly improper — and as we can now see, politically utterly disastrous. For it means they are now seen as politicised (a process which has been going on, as it happens, for a considerable period of time); and once that happens, their claim to be trusted as the dispassionate and apolitical voice of professional expertise is destroyed. People now think that everything the police said in support of 90 days was a lie, simply because they were deployed by the government to say it. In its panic over its inability to persuade MPs of the necessity of the 90-day provision, the government has therefore shot both itself and the police in both sets of feet.

What is even more astonishing is that this is an almost exact re-run of what Tony Blair did to himself over the Iraq war. Failing to persuade his MPs that toppling Iraq was a necessity, he whistled up the intelligence world to help him out by producing material supporting the claim that Iraq had a live WMD programme. This not surprisingly created a ferocious backlash over the politicisation of intelligence, which meant that not only was Blair still not believed — especially when no WMD were found — but nothing the intelligence hierarchy said was believed either, because they had become government patsies. Of course, that world should not be believed as a matter of course since their hard currency happens to be lies and dissimulation. However, that does not mean that everything they ever say is a lie, and the fact was that every intelligence agency at the time believed that Saddam had such WMD programmes running. But the result was that Blair came to be so comprehensively disbelieved that many concluded Saddam was no threat to anyone at all beyond his own benighted people.

You would think, therefore, that Blair might have learned a very hard lesson from that ruinous episode. Not so: the silly chump has gone and done an almost identical thing again with the police and 90 days. In the fable, the little boy who cried wolf was eaten by the beast even though he was telling the truth about the danger. Tony Blair has now achieved the signal feat of being eaten alive twice.

The press have written Tony Blair’s political obituary. After Wednesday 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. He 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 Wednesday 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 on the Maze 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 poorly defended 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 grounds that measures to prevent atrocities amount to a 'police state'. What on earth are the Conservatives for 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’. Thus does Britain now describe 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 seems to have literally driven this country mad.

Readers may have noted a novel development on my Articles page — a piece by me which was published today in the Guardian. This was a riposte to an article last week attacking me by Dr Ben Goldacre, which you can read here,
following the column I wrote on the MMR controversy in last week’s Daily Mail.

I have received a huge amount of support for both my articles — along with three like-minded letters printed in the Guardian yesterday. Following today’s piece, however, I have received a number of notable emails — notable, that is, for their extreme condescension and vitriol on the basis that I, as a mere non-scientist, not only never knew what I was talking about in the first place but have had the damned cheek to show up a professed scientist for his ignorance and bias. Not that they say that, of course — I’ve apparently merely exposed my own ignorance even more thoroughly.

So what do these scientists say that shows their superior grasp of evidence and commitment to scientific inquiry? Here’s a distinguished opinion from a biochemist:

You ARE a moron & an irresponsible hack. That is why you write for the Daily Jackboot. Do fuck off why doncha.

Slightly more temperately — if no less unscientifically — some correspondents claim that I have relied for most of my information on the Journal of Physicians and Surgeons, described by one as ‘a bunch of screaming fascists’ and which is not even listed by PubMed, the international directory of peer-reviewed medical publications. This, they say, underlines the fact that I cannot tell bad science from the real thing.

Not so fast. First, this totally ignores the various research papers* -- which have been published in a range of distinguished journals -- to which I referred in my article, along with the American Institute of Medicine, also all but totally ignored. In fact, I was entirely unaware of the existence of the Journal of Physicians and Surgeons until I wrote the Guardian article. Moreover, I have written extensively about MMR in the past, have read most of the literature and interviewed a large number of parents of affected children as well as government officials — which, I wager, is more than my Ph.D-laden correspondents, whose idea of ‘research’ appears to be a quick trawl through Google.

Because of such lazy web-surfing, they appear to be unaware that this Journal is a new publication dating from 2003, when it replaced the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons’ 'Medical Sentinel'. At this point, it changed its whole approach to something that appears to be much more rigorous. As a result, it is indeed being listed in PubMed later this year. PubMed requires a year's articles before it will consider listing a publication, and only meets once in a blue moon to consider them. So it's a slow process. The Journal says its papers are peer reviewed in the normal way by acknowledged experts. PubMed's imprimatur would appear to confirm this.

Above all, surely what matters is the quality of the science in these papers. No-one has shown there is anything wrong with the paper by Bradstreet et al showing the presence of measles virus in cerebro-spinal fluid. Ignoring the science while mounting what appears to be a smear campaign against the journal in which it is published seems to me to be a less than scientific approach -- compounded in several of these messages by virulent prejudice.

Next, I am accused of believing that epidemiology establishes proof when all it can do is estimate probability. Oh dear: another major point missed. It is not I who claim epidemiological proof but the government and others who claim that the epidemiology ‘proves’ MMR is safe. I’m the person saying there is no proof, remember?

Next, I’m told epidemiology can and does prove causal associations. Maybe so. I didn’t say it couldn’t or didn’t. What I said was that it could not disprove the clinical findings from a group of patients. Can’t these guys even read?

Next, I’m told (again) that I don’t understand that epidemiology is perfectly capable of disproving the Wakefield thesis. One correspondent wrote:

‘I can think of no scientist or doctor in my wide circle of colleagues in Oxford, Cambridge, London and Boston who would disagree with the main points of his [Goldacre’s] article.’

Oh dear oh dear. My observations are based on what I have been told by a wide variety of doctors and scientists, who tell me the limitations of epidemiology that I have highlighted are as accurate as they are elementary. Let me spell it out again for those who have difficulty understanding. In order even to begin to test Wakefield’s thesis with a degree of credibility, any such study would have to specifically test whether MMR had affected a small sub-set of vaccinated children. No epidemiological study has done this. They have therefore tested something which Wakefield never alleged. One does not have to be a rocket scientist — or indeed any kind of scientist — to spot this most elementary of flaws.

All those who so kindly suggested that I did not know my epidemiology from my elbow might also care to reflect on this, from the American Institute of Medicine's report on the MMR controversy:

The evidence favours rejection of a causal relationship at the population level between MMR vaccine and ASDs [Autism Spectrum Disorder]…However, the committee notes that its conclusion does not exclude the possibility that MMR vaccine could contribute to ASD in a small number of children because the epidemiological evidence lacks the precision to assess rare occurrences of a response to MMR vaccine leading to ASD and the proposed biological models linking MMR vaccine to ASD, although far from established, are nevertheless not disproved.

The IoM recommended the issue should receive 'continued attention' -- which it never has, except from those who wish to bury it.

What price the future of science, when so many of today’s alleged practitioners appear not to understand the difference between fact and fulmination?

*Some papers endorsing or replicating the Wakefield research:

1) Evaluation of an association between gastrointestinal symptoms and cytokine production against common dietary proteins in children with autism spectrum disorders;
Harumi Jyonouchi MD, Lee Geng PhD, Agnes Ruby BS, Chitra Reddy MD and Barbie Zimmerman-Bier, MD

Journal of Pediatrics, May 2005, p 610

2) Dysregulated Innate Immune Responses in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Their Relationship to Gastrointestinal Symptoms
and Dietary Intervention;
Harumi Jyonouchi Lee Geng Agnes Ruby Barbie Zimmerman-Bier Department of Pediatrics, New Jersey Medical School, UMDNJ, Newark, N.J. , USA

Neuropsychobiology 2005;51:77–85

3) Some aspects about the clinical and pathogenetic characteristics of the presumed persistent measles infections: SSPE and MINE;
Paul Richard Dyken, Institute for Research in Childhood Neurodegenerative Diseases, Mobile, Alabama, U.S.A.

Journal of Pediatric Neurology 2004; 2(3): 121-124

4) Spontaneous Mucosal Lymphocyte Cytokine Profiles in Children
with Autism and Gastrointestinal Symptoms: Mucosal Immune
Activation and Reduced Counter Regulatory Interleukin-10
Paul Ashwood, Andrew Anthony, Franco Torrente and Andrew Wakefield

Journal of Clinical Immunology, Vol. 24, No. 6, November 2004 ( C_ 2004)

5) Panenteric IBD-Like Disease in a Patient with Regressive Autism Shown for the First Time by the Wireless Capsule Enteroscopy: Another Piece in the Jigsaw of this Gut-Brain Syndrome?
Federico Balzola , Valeria Barbon , Alessandro Repici , Mario Rizzetto , Daniela Clauser , Marina Gandione , Anna Sapino.

American Journal of Gastroenterology, April 2005

6) Gastrointestinal abnormalities in children with
autistic disorder
Karoly Horvath, MD, PhD, John C. Papadimitriou, MD, PhD, Anna Rabsztyn, Cinthia Drachenberg, MD.

Journal of Pediatrics, Vol 125, no 5

7) Autistic disorder and gastrointestinal disease
Karoly Horvath, MD, PhD, and Jay A. Perman, MD

Pediatrics 2002, 14:583–587

The Muslim riots in Paris have now been going on for eight nights. How is Britain reacting to these disturbing events just across the English Channel, four months after its own ‘wake-up call’ from last July’s bombings? With almost total indifference, since far from having woken up Britain is still sleep-walking in its own little trance. Media coverage has been sporadic and downplayed, and the disturbances have been portrayed as caused by deprivation and race. The fact that the rioters are Muslim has been mentioned, if at all, only in passing. But in Denmark, as Viking-Observer has reported, Muslims have also been rioting for days in Arhus, apparently over the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet. The cartoons were in turn a response to the difficulties encountered by a children's writer, Kare Bluitgen, who couldn’t find an illustrator for his book on the Koran and the Prophet's life since all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of the Prophet. The daily Jyllands-Posten which published the cartoons reported:

Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. ‘This area belongs to us’, the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack. Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. ‘Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants...We have planned this for three weeks.’

In line with routine contemporary moral inversion, in which the perpetrators of violence are excused and their victims blamed instead by an alliance of Muslims and western decadents (Britain was blamed for the July bombings of its citizens because of Iraq) the French authorities are being blamed for fanning the flames of discontent by discriminating against the country’s Muslims. Should we also blame the Danes for refusing to accept self-censorship and asserting their own values of freedom of expression? Is every country to be held responsible for the jihad being waged against it - despite the fact that in every case the alleged provocation is different — rather then responsibility being properly assigned to those who have declared war upon the free world?

Much of the coverage of the Paris riots has blamed the policies of France’s Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy for abandoning French Muslims inside squalid ghettoes and failing to integrate them. But as Robert Spencer points out, it is the Muslims themselves who insist on not being integrated. In her book Eurabia, Bat Ye’Or details

a series of agreements between the European Union and the Arab League that guaranteed that Muslim immigrants in Europe would not be compelled in any way to adapt ‘to the customs of the host countries.’

The European Union has implemented such recommendations for decades — so far from playing down the differences between ethnic groups, they have instead stood by approvingly while immigrants formed non-assimilated Islamic enclaves within Europe. Indeed, as Bat Ye’or demonstrates, they have assured the Arab League in multiple agreements that they would aid in the creation and maintenance of such enclaves. Ignorance of the jihad ideology among European officials has allowed that ideology to spread in those enclaves, unchecked until relatively recently.

Consequently, among a generation of Muslims born in Europe, significant numbers have nothing but contempt and disdain for their native lands, and allegiance only to the Muslim umma and the lands of their parents’ birth. Those who continue to arrive in Europe from Muslim countries are encouraged by the isolation, self-imposed and other-abetted, of the Islamic communities in Europe to hold to the same attitudes.

The Arab European League, a Muslim advocacy group operating in Belgium and the Netherlands, states as part of its ‘vision and philosophy’ that ‘we believe in a multicultural society as a social and political model where different cultures coexist with equal rights under the law.’ It strongly rejects for Muslims any idea of assimilation or integration into European societies: ‘We do not want to assimilate and we do not want to be stuck somewhere in the middle. We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live. In order to achieve that it is imperative for us to teach our children the Arabic language and history and the Islamic faith. We will resist any attempt to strip us of our right to our own cultural and religious identity, as we believe it is one of the most fundamental human rights.’ AEL founder Dyab Abou Jahjah, who was himself arrested in November 2002 and charged with inciting Muslims in Antwerp to riot (Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said that the AEL was 'trying to terrorize the city', has declared: ‘Assimilation is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others.’

What is now taking place in Paris is merely an intensification of what has been going on since long before the electrocution of the two youths which prompted the current disorder. And the scale of it is astonishing; Sarkozy told Le Monde that

...twenty to forty cars are set afire nightly in Paris’ restive Muslim suburbs, and no fewer than nine thousand police cars have been stoned since the beginning of 2005.

Multiculturalism, the doctrine that governs Britain and Europe and which grew out of a war upon their values from within by allowing the values of minorities to trump the majority, has been applied by the west to appease an ideology that has declared war upon its values from without. The poulets have now come home to roost in France, but the message for the rest of us is just as ominous.

In City Journal, the Birmingham prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple has provided a profound and brilliant insight into the minds of those who turn themselves into British human bombs. Far from the problem lying in ‘fundamentalist’ religious faith, he identifies it instead as secularism — or to be more precise, the psychic war that rages within such an individual between a secularism that he cannot withstand and an ideology that provides his identity. The putative human bomb, writes Dalrymple, is deeply secularised, has little religious faith and adopts all the habits of his fellow inhabitants of the slums including soccer and pop music, drugs and casual sex. But rather than integrating, he lives in parallel with young white men who are indulging in similar activities; and he also has a particular desire to exercise dominance over women. In this fragile state of mind, any perceived insult can have an incendiary effect — particularly since he is told incessantly by every arbiter of British culture that he is the victim of discrimination. But he is so deeply westernised that he can only resolve the terrible conflict inside him between the two irreconcilable cultures by becoming a human bomb, since to die for the faith is the one thing that can expunge the west from his psyche:

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain. Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men—modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else.

They therefore have at least a nagging intimation that their chosen utopia is not really a utopia at all: that deep within themselves there exists something that makes it unachievable and even undesirable. How to persuade themselves and others that their lack of faith, their vacillation, is really the strongest possible faith?

What more convincing evidence of faith could there be than to die for its sake? How can a person be really attached or attracted to rap music and cricket and Mercedes cars if he is prepared to blow himself up as a means of destroying the society that produces them? Death will be the end of the illicit attachment that he cannot entirely eliminate from his heart.

The two forms of jihad, the inner and the outer, the greater and the lesser, thus coalesce in one apocalyptic action. By means of suicide bombing, the bombers overcome moral impurities and religious doubts within themselves and, supposedly, strike an external blow for the propagation of the faith.

Read it all.

From within the pages of the Guardian, no less, sounds a voice of choking disgust from Maureen Lipman at the everyday voice of British bigotry and moral bankruptcy in the form of, on the one hand, the 'cantata' for Rachel Corrie and, on the other, the latest effluent from Clare Short MP:

So, I wasn't standing outside the Royal Court theatre last month for the third showing of the Rachel Corrie requiem, with those prominent Jews and Gentiles who are mourning her tragic death. Not, at least, until there is equal public mourning for the hundreds of exploded Israeli victims, including 16-year-old Rachel Thaler, born in England and killed three years ago by a bomb in an Israeli pizza parlour. Meanwhile, Clare - deep throat/deep-thinking - Short has decided to tell us that American support for Israel is the biggest single factor in global violence in the world today. Well, that really is timely. It also clears up any worries we might have had about the causes of violence in Darfur in western Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, Chechnya, Rwanda, Northern Ireland ... shall I go on? Is there a conspiracy theory to follow, Clare? I'm shaking in my shoes. No, I really mean it, I am. Chilled and shaking. The causes of global violence are global extremism, of any creed, in any guise.

Much comment today about the fact that the government’s anti-terrorist bill only scraped through the House of Commons yesterday by one vote, which means that it’s in trouble. The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, is apparently now preparing to water down the provision to hold terror suspects for up to 90 days; a 28-day compromise is now being talked about. The comment has almost all been along the lines of the wheels coming off the Blair government bus. That may or may not be so. Much more important is the fact that powers that are needed to fight the menace of Islamist terrorism will not now be provided.

At present, the police can hold terrorism suspects for up to 14 days before charging them. As a wholly convincing paper written by the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism Branch argued, the police need much longer because Islamist terrorism is a completely different beast from any previous terrorism. In the past, the police waited before making arrests until at or near the point of a terrorist attack, so that they could assemble enough evidence to make the case stand up in court. But unlike previous terrorists, the Islamists give no warnings and seek to inflict as many casualties as possible. So the police can no longer afford to take the risk of waiting. To protect the public, they are therefore forced to arrest suspects well before they have finished their investigations. Given the global nature of the terrorist networks, those investigations can involve inquiries on several continents, involving hundreds of computers and with many different languages to be translated. So clearly, unless they can hold suspects for much longer than 14 days, they cannot protect the country.

Yet this is precisely the risk that our parliamentarians have now endorsed, thanks to a bone-headed alliance between the supremely irresponsible left of the Labour party and — get this — a Conservative opposition that is making common cause with it. Dean Godson says what needed to be said in today’s Times:

The most unedifying aspect of the passage of the Terrorism Bill through the Commons has been the pleasure with which the Tory home affairs team, led by David Davis, has entered into a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the do-gooding classes and Campaign Group crusties to dilute key elements of the Government’s response to the 7/7 suicide attacks...Yet despite a briefing from the Met on Privy Council terms, Mr Davis breezily waved aside such points at the second reading — asserting that government should not simply go along with what the police want. Instead, like some anguished Islingtonian from Matrix Chambers, he frets about draconian measures creating more 'martyrs'. Why?

Partly, it is because Mr Davis himself is a fairly crude beast who likes opposition for opposition’s sake. In his opportunistic way, he no doubt thinks he is pulling a brilliant stunt by citing such ultra-liberal judges as Lord Steyn — the retired law lord who has taken over as chairman of the civil liberties group, Justice. But there is a broader intellectual failure, too. Much of the Conservative Party has not fully grasped — as did the Prime Minister — the changed nature of the world after 9/11. Not even the murder of more than 50 Londoners has shaken it out of its torpor.

Just to complete this bizarre picture of a Conservative party in denial, David Davis is supposed to be the hard man of the Tory right-wing in the current leadership contest. But it’s not just the Tories who are in denial here. It’s most of the rotten establishment. The former head of MI6 gave the starkest imaginable warning this week in the Telegraph:

Sir Richard Dearlove, who retired last year as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, said chemical, biological and genetic terrorism was in prospect and a nuclear attack could not be ruled out. Acknowledging that the July bombings had been 'very lethal', he said they did not amount to a 'strategic terrorist event'.

Sir Richard, who was taking part in a debate on terrorism arranged by the City law firm Ashurst, said the July attacks 'bore the characteristic of a locally planned and carried-out event'.However we probably had to conclude that 'the clock is running on some much more dreadful events that could occur'.

In the medium to long term, terrorists would have access through the internet to 'some quite frightening dual-use technologies,' he said. These had not yet been used in the context of terrorism, but Sir Richard thought that they would probably eventually be used.'There is no question that bits of al-Qa'eda would have been extremely interested in biological weapons technology, chemical weapons technology, radiological devices and, ultimately, nuclear devices.'

Sir Richard expressed 'some sympathy' for the Government's approach to fighting terrorism through legislation, adding that there was 'extensive complacency' in Britain about the nature of the terrorist threat.'

Indeed. They just don't get it.

A demonstration has been taking place in Rome today against the declaration of intent by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. Ha’aretz reports that it is being backed by politicians from left and right (although the left is split – of course). The demo is reaffirming Israel’s right to exist -- prompting Iran, incredibly, to complain through diplomatic channels! Similar demonstrations have been held in France (even), Vienna, Austria, and Budapest, Hungary, where protestors ‘drew up signs that read “Israel today, Europe tomorrow?”’ Indeed.

The one country conspicuous by the absence of any similar demonstration on its streets reaffirming the right of Israel to exist (and how appalling that this should be necessary at all) is of course Britain. Instead, two days after Ahmadinejad’s genocidal outburst thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of London -- to demand that Israel be wiped off the map.

As RealityGaps has observed, this was a pro-terrorism march:

Looking through the video footage the rally comes off as an incredibly pro-terrorism march, with the slogans moving between the classic ‘Palestine will be free... from the river to the sea’ to the more recent ‘Zionism...Terrorism’ (repeat ad infinitum at top of voice). What was more surprising was the amount of Islamic chanting going on at the rally, about one in five chants was an ‘Allah Akbar’ or a ‘La’ila’lail’Allah’. These were often followed by ‘We are all Hezbollah’ chants and a couple of token anti-war slogans.

And yet all the people who had expressed revulsion shock and outrage two days before at the outburst from Iran suddenly lost their voice when confronted not merely by calls from British jihadists and fellow-travelling leftists for Israel’s annihilation, but the spectacle of supporters of Iran’s terrorist army on the streets of London calling for the destruction of a lawfully constituted, democratic country.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said in his sermon at the remembrance service at St Paul’s Cathedral today for the victims of the London bombings, the following:

‘There is one thing that is always common to any sort of terrorist action, wherever it happens and whoever performs it. It aims at death – not the death of anyone in particular, just death. It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist; what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.’

Anyone spot the omission in the list of victims? Yup – he left out the Jews. OK, let’s not jump to conclusions here. Let’s be charitable. Let’s think of some reasonable reasons why he omitted the people who are specifically targeted for genocide and ethnic cleansing by Islamic fascism and who in Israel are in the front line of attack in the jihadi war on the free world (not to mention the fact that three victims of the London bombings were Jews). Maybe he just selected a few random faiths with a pin. Maybe inserting a monosyllable here would have ruined the poetic symmetry of his sentence. Maybe his washing machine blew up just as he was typing J… and he forgot the rest of what he was going to say.

Or maybe he just doesn’t think of Jews as being victims of Islamic terrorism at all because he thinks of Jewish victims as Israelis. And Israelis, in the eyes of so many in the CofE, are a different category of people altogether. They are not victims but oppressors. In the new moral order that the church represents, Jews may once have been victims – safely in the past -- but Israelis are the new Nazis. So when Israelis are incinerated by the unspeakable atrocity of human bomb terrorism – merely the latest weapon in the fifty-year genocidal war against them -- they become for the Church of England as invisible as those who fell out of favour with Communism and were airbrushed out of the pictures.

Shame on him.