It feels a bit like the cavalry has arrived. A sharp piece by John Lloyd in the Financial Times (subscription only, but see here) considers whether or not anti-Jewish feeling in Britain is a cause for concern and concludes that yes, it is. In particular, he ponders the Church of England’s vote to disinvest from companies supplying equipment to Israel that it uses against the Palestinians:

The Archbishop wrote to the Chief Rabbi, assuring him that the decision isn’t a boycott, and that he believed in Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.(A telling remark: of how many states in the world would a public figure feel it necessary to protest he believes that it should not be rubbed off the map?) Whatever: relations are soured...

No vote then, to disinvest from companies supplying equipment to China, which has a hideous human rights record, including the suppression of Christians. Nor of Russia, which has killed many more Chechens than Israel has Palestinians. Nor Sudan, whose government has been complicit in the massacres of up to 400,000 people in its Darfur region. Nor - to be ecumenical - the US, which continues to operate Guantanamo Bay detention centre amid allegations that its treatment of prisoners amounts to torture. Just Israel. It’s the ‘just Israel’ bit that is the worry. Why is it singled out?

...The 'don’t worry' bit is provided by a number of Jews who support these campaigns, who believe, as do some Israelis, that the state is acting in an oppressive, racist manner. That would dilute my worry, but not disperse it. The worry still is that Israel is singled out because it is the Jewish state. The worry grows as the environment darkens. A Populus poll earlier this month showed that 37 per cent of a sample of British Muslims regarded British Jewry as a 'legitimate target as part of the struggle for justice in the Middle East'. If I were a British Jew, that would worry me.

In the Middle East, Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections faces Israel with a governing party that wants to destroy it. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidates - running as 'independents' because of a ban on the Brotherhood itself - secured eight times more seats than the secular, relatively liberal United National Front for Change. The hope is that possession of, or greater proximity to, political power will force these radically Islamic, strongly anti-Israeli movements towards moderation; but if I were an Israeli, I would worry.

...But the nag at the mind [having criticised Israeli policy] is this: why do their sins cry out for particular punishment? And what do people, with the best of motives, see as the result of such efforts to brand Israelis - scholars, architects or bulldozer traders - as uniquely unfit to be part of their international communities? What’s so especially awful about them, that we have to cease talking to them?

A very good question. Indeed, it is the great question of our time. Only if Britain ever manages to arrive at the correct answer to this question will it finally understand the peril that it itself is in.

Lloyd is one of the few remaining truly independent thinkers in British journalism. A man who probably corresponds to the new definition of the ‘muscular left’ (as opposed to...oh, heck, who cares about these silly categories), he has made significant enemies by courageously supporting America over Iraq and by inveighing against the degradation of journalism into a conspiracy against the truth. Now he has ventured into this most toxic of territory, the scapegoating of the Jews – the prejudice of our time that dare not speak its name. It is very, very rare indeed for a non-Jewish person in British public life to put his head above this particular parapet at present. He is to be applauded for injecting a note of sanity into the politics of the madhouse.

A fascinating and important insight from the ever-astute French commentator Michel Gurfinkiel (subscription required) suggests that Jen-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s neo-fascist National Front, is poised to strike a strategic alliance with French Muslims. Those who have just done a double-take over that last sentence because they assume that French neo-fascists, like the British BNP, detest all immigrants equally and Muslims in particular, should think again.

First, one of the most striking aspects of today’s politics of racial hatred is the axis that links the far left, the far right and Islamists. If you read the websites and utterances of all three, there are certain areas where the point of view and indeed the language and the imagery are virtually identical. Three guesses what those areas are. Yup, got it in one: hatred of the Jews and of Israel.

This, however, is only a part of Gurfinkiel’s analysis of what’s going on in France:

The Islamicization of France is largely a fait accompli. It is assumed that 6 to 8 million citizens or residents of France, 10% to 13% out of a global population of 62 million, are Muslim by now. And that the Muslim community, being more prolific, is much younger than the rest of the population: As much as 25% of French citizens or residents under 20 is Muslim, with the number reaching 40% or 50% in the big cities.

The National Front is surprisingly popular among Muslim immigrants or second-generation Muslim citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Mr. Le Pen's party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes abroad, from Saddam's Iraq to Arafat's or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaeda to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself tends to be.

The attraction of the French far left, which accounts for another 20% of the national vote, toward Islam, rabid anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism, a phenomenon underscored by the emergence of Dieudonne, a former liberal music-hall humorist who has turned into an enormously popular French equivalent of Louis Farrakhan. Dieudonne, the son of a black Camerounese father and a white French mother, claims that Jews were the main European slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to civic and educational programs about the Holocaust as ‘memory pornography.’ He has welcomed the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine. According to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, he is in moral terms ‘Le Pen's son.’

Recently, Le Pen’s strategic adviser Jean-Claude Martinez has said that the National Front

must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, like ‘Joan of Arc fighting an alien invasion,’ and welcome immigrant blacks and Arabs into the national fold.

This is because, Gurfinkiel suggests, the far right in France is not monolithic but is in the process of fracturing into neo-fascists like le Pen and more traditional Christian right-wingers:

Neofascists think Jews and Americans are the chief enemy, rather than Arabs and Muslims. In a way, they even tend to celebrate Arabs and Muslims as fellow fascists. As for Christian right-wingers, they see Arabs and Muslims as the chief enemy. For years, Mr. Le Pen has been pretending he is a Christian right-winger rather than a neofascist and that resistance to Muslim immigration is his major concern. Now he has emerged on the side of the neofascist branch and is ready to drop the anti-Muslim issue.

It reminds me of the British Foreign Office during the 1930s and 1940s, which thought that the Arabs and the Jews were each as loathsome as each other but that the Jews had the edge in loathsomeness.

Did I say the 1930s and 1940s?

Andrew Sullivan, he of the well-known eponymous blog, has posted an absolutely astounding comment (24 February) on the Livingstone affair:

The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is suspended for a few weeks because he said something vile and inappropriate to a reporter? Who has that power? I had no idea that in England, democracy is really a veil for a bunch of unelected prissy tut-tutters to pick who can and cannot govern. Here's Sharia law from the Jewish lobby in England:

‘The London Jewish Forum welcomed the ruling, with chairman Adrian Cohen calling for the mayor to create a strategy which would ensure London's Jews would be treated with respect.’

Screw that and screw them. Just do your job. And if you don't show enough ‘respect’ for the voters, they can always throw you out of office.

Sharia law??? Let’s just get our heads round this one. Jews objected to an offensive remark which was hugely compounded by the fact that Livingstone failed to apologise. This was the most important point because it destroyed any hope that the remark had been a slip and institutionalised it as a deliberate intention to offend Jewish people – the reason the Standards Board found that he had brought the office of Mayor of London into disrepute. Sullivan, however, thinks this is the same thing as trying to impose Sharia law upon Britain, by which the values of British society would be subordinated to Islam. To put it baldly, he appears to think that Jews defending themselves against prejudice is an illegitimate act that threatens a society. So Jews who are the victims of prejudice are cast as cultural aggressors merely because they dared to protest at being treated like dirt.

There is an argument that the Standards Board overreacted. I happen to disagree –- as I said in my post below, the House of Commons acts in a similar fashion towards MPs who bring Parliament into disrepute -- but it is a respectable argument. Sullivan’s point, however, is something else altogether. It is an egregious example of moral equivalence whose outcome is to deny actual victimisation and blame the victim instead. It is disgraceful.

What follows is the text of a statement from Shelomo Alfassa, Executive Director of the International Sephardic Leadership Council:

Decent people of the world were horrified by the destruction of the gold domed mosque last week, but on the same day, the destruction of an active synagogue — by a progressive government, supposedly based on civil law — was hardly even noted.

On February 22, 2006, an active mosque, much beloved by its Muslim congregation, was destroyed after a powerful bomb exploded inside it, destroying the gold dome on its roof. This was one of Iraq's most famous religious shrines. Terrorists detonated powerful explosives, destroying most of the building, and prompting thousands of people to flood into streets across the country in protest. (This attack, 60 miles north of Baghdad, caused extensive international outrage.)
On February 22, 2006, an active synagogue, much beloved by its Jewish congregation, was destroyed after heavy construction equipment tore off the roof, crushed its concrete walls and drove through its sanctuary. This was the only active synagogue in the country of Tajikistan, a country north of Afghanistan and south of Russia. The synagogue was destroyed so the government can build a
grand palace for its president. 'If the Jews want to have [rebuild] a synagogue, let them pay for it out of their own funds,' said Shamsuddin Nuriddinov, head of the City of Dushanbe, Religious Affairs Department. (This attack, 280 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan, caused NO international outrage.)

According to Google News, 2,930 news articles appear for the mosque destruction, while only six exist on the synagogue destruction—and those six are really just one brief mention that has been repeated through syndication in American newspapers.

In regard to the mosque destruction, statements were issued from leaders around the world. President Bush stated, 'I extend my deepest condolences to the people of Iraq for the brutal bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra...The American people pledge to work with the people of Iraq to rebuild and restore the Golden Mosque of Samarra to its former glory.' He added: 'The United States stands ready to do all in its power to assist the Government of Iraq to identify and bring to justice those responsible for this terrible act.'

There are some 150-250 Jews in Tajikistan, mostly elderly Bukharian Jews. When news of the destruction of the Tajikistan synagogue reached the Bukharian community in the United States, the news was met with shock; people whose children were brought up in that synagogue reacted in tears. Members of the Bukharian community in Atlanta, Georgia stated they worry about the Jewish cemeteries that are near the synagogue; what will happen to them?

In regard to the synagogue destruction, not one statement was made by any government of any country around the world. The only Jewish organization to speak up on this was the International Sephardic Leadership Council, of which this writer is executive director of. While the media covered some 1,000 Israeli fans of a Tel Aviv basketball team demonstrating on Saturday night against the
destruction of the team's historic arena, not one person in the main stream media has come out to address the destruction of the center of Jewish life in Tajikistan. First the government destroyed the mikvah (ritual bath), then the kosher butcher shop, now the entire synagogue.

While Iraq is 97% Islamic, Tajikistan comes in at 85% Islamic and growing. And while the Iraqi Muslims claim say the community near the gold domed mosque was there for 1000 years, the Jewish community has been in the area surrounding Tajikistan for 2000 years. And while the gold domed mosque in Iraq was built in 1905 — a little over 100 years ago — the synagogue in Tajikistan was built 100 years ago as well. Yet, everyone is quiet about this. Including Jewish organizations — this must change.

The destruction of the Tajikistan synagogue is the most disgraceful act committed by a sovereign state toward its Jewish population since the end of WWII. The Soviet Union and its successor states may have oppressed and harassed their Jewish communities, but even at the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges they did not seek to wipe every element of Jewish existence like the Tajikistan government.
It is an ominous message for a Jewish community, that while living under a government that is attempting to rebuild its economic, political and social image — it starts by wiping out the only synagogue in its country.

Where is the outrage - where is the media coverage!?

You may well ask, Mr Alfassa; you may well ask.

Here is a very moving message I have received from a decent reader:

As someone who has no reason to be supportive of Israel - no reason beyond a sense of common fairness and a preference for the truth over propaganda, I want to say thank you for your continued and public defence of the state of Israel against its enemies. I am not Jewish. I have no Jewish blood, no Israeli friends, and indeed, my Irish Catholic background predisposed me at one time to mistakenly find common cause with the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, I am horrifed – utterly horrified - by the endless demonisation of Israel which has become so prevalent in the British and European media, simply for defending itself against the mass murderers of Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

I cannot recall a single other issue where black has endlessly been portrayed as white, and white as black; where a publicly-funded media with a duty to fairness and balance has so consistently told only half the story at best, while at worst telling outright lies, and openly admitting its bias by weeping for Arafat in his final illness. I cannot recall a more pernicious or more pervasive inversion of the truth than we are witnessing now in the British media's attitude to Israel and the defence of its citizens against religiously-driven murderers. We hear of Zionist 'ethnic cleansing' - yet where will we see openly compared the stated aims of Hamas and those of the state of Israel? Which side truly, openly espouses ethnic cleansing? Only one of them, and it is not Israel. We hear the lie again and again that the Palestinians are fighting for their own state. The truth is, of course, that they could by now have a peaceful and prosperous state alongside Israel - if that is what they really wanted.

It has been said that the Palestinians don’t know how to take yes for an answer, but the truth is that the west has consistently misunderstood the question they are asking. I recall reading of Hitler's depression following the Munich Agreement negotiations - how he had been given almost everything he had asked for, and became angry that he had been 'cheated out of his war'. Arafat, at least, did not bother to take the pretence so far, and yet everything isstill the fault of Israel.

I am grateful to you for using your voice to counter where you can some of the many lies and slanders about Israel. Personally I feel a kind of despair, Melanie. The lies are constant, they are everywhere, and the other side of the story seems never to be told, unless one takes the trouble to inform oneself rather than soaking up the television news. Is there anything that we normal people can do? Is there any way that the average citizen can contribute to the battle against these lies?

Just inform as many people as you can about the truth that you so clearly see, and never lose faith that right and justice will eventually prevail over evil and lies.

Interesting idea being floated that Israel might become a member of NATO. As the Jerusalem Post reported, the suggestion was made two weeks ago by the Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino, although it was shot down by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who said that

the issue of Israeli membership is not on the table.

Nevertheless, the same story reported that NATO has made an overture to Israel for closer ties:

Israel stepped up its relationship with NATO on Monday and received a delegation of multinational military officers who accompanied an AWAC early warning surveillance plane which they brought to show to the Israel Air Force. Head of the NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control Force, Gen. Axel Tuttelman, said the AWAC plane, which contained unique surveillance capabilities, was brought to Israel as part of a larger effort to enhance security cooperation between NATO and Israel in the war on global terrorism.

Others are thinking the same way. At the Heritage Foundation last month, John Hulsman and Nile Gardiner wrote this about the Iran crisis:

The West has one ace left to play before a final showdown looms. Extending NATO membership to Israel could convince Iran’s Mullahs that developing a nuclear capability is not in their interest… Behind the scenes of the negotiations, many in continental Europe secretly wish that the U.S. would simply accept the possibility of an Islamic Republic of Iran with a nuclear arsenal. They ignore, however, the harsh reality of such a foolhardy policy. The fallout from inaction would be disastrous. An arms race in the region would ensue, with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt all vying to develop their own nuclear weapons. Iran would become increasingly vociferous in its threats against Israel and could actively arm the myriad terrorist groups that depend upon Tehran’s protection. Israel would not play along with this game of Russian roulette. The world would shortly face a major regional conflict, possibly involving the use of nuclear weapons.

There is a way out of the present diplomatic morass that will signal to the Mullahs in Tehran that the West is serious about reining in their nuclear ambitions, but without allowing them to destabilize the Middle East. The United States should propose the quick admission of Israel into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a full and equal member.

Israel meets NATO qualifications: it is a democracy, has a free market economy, and is able to contribute to the common defense. In fact, unlike many new NATO members, it would be a net addition to the alliance, having lift and logistics ability, a second-to-none officer corps, and a first-rate military capable of all aspects of war-fighting. Israel spends nearly 10 percent of its GDP on defense and has active armed forces numbering 167,000 men and women, with 358,000 in reserve. It possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads, as well as a well-equipped Air Force and Navy.

Israel’s intelligence capabilities have been a vital asset in prosecuting the Global War on Terror, as few understand the conflict so well. Like the U.S. and Great Britain, history has forced Israel into being a genuine warrior nation. Its accession to NATO could only enhance the alliance’s capabilities.

More importantly, Israeli accession to NATO would explicitly extend the Western alliance’s nuclear deterrent to cover Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now it will be Tehran, and not the rest of the world, that has a proliferation problem. Any nuclear or conventional attack on Israel, be it direct or through proxies such as Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, would be met by a cataclysmic response from the West that would make the Battle of Omdurman look like a stroll in the park. Israel’s accession would leave the Mullahs with no illusions about the West’s determination to respond to Iran’s strategic threat to the region.

It would also be an unmistakeable riposte to the campaign of delegitimisation of Israel now under way in Europe which is so thoughtfully preparing the ground for Ahmadinejad’s declared goal of wiping Israel off the map. Ever since it was created, the so-called civilised world has paid pious lip-service to support for beleaguered little Israel, but has nevertheless been happy to watch it swing in the wind while the same so-called civilised world has breathed life into the Palestinian terrorist onslaught against it and prevented Israel from doing anything better than maintaining itself in a state of permanent and unending siege (rather than actually being exterminated. Which would rather give the game away). Making Israel a member of NATO would show once and for all that this so-called civilised world is really committed to Israel’s existence and that it recognises that Israel’s position is the same as that of the west – a democracy merely defending itself against the jihad and not, as some would assert, its cause.

It appears from this article that James Wolfensohn, the former chairman of the World Bank is cosying up to Hamas and soliciting funding for them from Arab states. This is the kind of thing Wolfensohn is helping finance:

Hamas, the Islamist terrorist group that won Palestinian legislative elections last month, recently posted on its official website a video which presents the parting video messages of two Hamas suicide bombers, with one of them stating that ‘we are a nation that drinks blood’ and that Hamas promises to drink the blood of Jews ‘until we have quenched our thirst with your blood … until you leave the Muslim countries.’ The second suicide bomber is seen assisted in dressing by his mother as he prepares himself for a suicide terrorist attack (Hamas website, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch).

Hamas’s Charter calls for the murder of Jews (Article 7), the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and affirms that it waging a global struggle against Jews who are trying to destroy Islam, citing in support the classic anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Article 32). Since September 2000, Hamas has been responsible for the murder of nearly 500 Israelis and the maiming of thousands more in five years of suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and missile assaults. Other videos recently mounted on the Hamas website includes one that appeared just before the elections and features Hamas leader Khaled Masha'al stating that Hamas will continue with terrorism and work for Israel's destruction, promising that ‘the homeland is returning through blood’ (Hamas website, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch).

Excerpt from the message of first suicide bomber from the Hamas video:

•'...to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere!'
•'We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.'
•'We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood.'
•'We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries.'
•'...we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you, purify the land of you, pigs that have defiled our country... This operation is revenge against the sons of monkeys and pigs.'
•'Jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine – all of Palestine – from the impurity of the Jews.'

But here’s the twist. The Israelis appear to be not overly hostile to Wolfensohn’s initiative; and here’s why:

While both Israel and the Quartet are wary of helping Hamas, they also fear ‘starving’ the Palestinian people by a total aid cut-off. ‘There is an acute awareness among Israeli decision-makers, from within the IDF all the way to the highest national level, that for legal, moral, and strategic reasons, this would be a harmful and potentially disastrous outcome,’ Lerman writes. Among the potential disasters: increasing radicalization (increasing?) of the Palestinian population, and deeper inroads by Iran.

The goal is ‘to peel the Hamas government off the people who may have voted for it -- but still need to be offered an alternative way to keep their families alive,’ by allowing NGOs and aid agencies to provide aid directly to recipients. ‘After all, Hamas previously did the same to Fatah, by maintaining a parallel structure,’ Lerman writes. ‘We are now called upon to help beat them at their own game.’

James Wolfensohn agreed to float the trial balloon. And through his own flamboyance and unpredictable character, he has given the State Department plausible deniability should the American public get wind of his efforts to allow the Gulf Arabs to fund a Hamas-run terror state in the Palestinian Authority. It’s a fool’s game, and it doesn’t pass the smell test.

It seems from this that, faced with a choice between people who want to exterminate it, and being held by the world to be responsible for causing those people themselves to starve – despite the fact that the only reason they are in such a position is their genocidal purpose – Israel would rather take its chances with the extermination than the condemnation by a morally bankrupt world.

Has any other people in the history of the planet ever been exposed to such a hideous dilemma – and left to swing in the wind upon its horns?

Mark Steyn, in a column which gets the point (as usual) about the refusal to acknowledge the Muslim terror against Jews in France, gets the deeper point too:

Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well: ‘We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.' ...What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it.

And multicultural Europe is rolling over and saying, ‘Take me – I’m yours’. A chilling story by Douglas Murray in the Sunday Times illustrates this by what is happening in the Netherlands:

'Would you write the name you’d like to use here, and your real name there?' asked the girl at reception. I had just been driven to a hotel in the Hague. An hour earlier I’d been greeted at Amsterdam airport by a man holding a sign with a pre-agreed cipher. I hadn’t known where I would be staying, or where I would be speaking. The secrecy was necessary: I had come to Holland to talk about Islam… I was given my key and made aware that the other person in the lobby, a tall figure in a dark suit, was my security detail. I was taken up to my room where I changed, unpacked and headed back out — the security guard now positioned outside my bedroom door...

Holland — with its disproportionately high Muslim population — is the canary in the mine. Its once open society is closing, and Europe is closing slowly behind it. It looks, from Holland, like the twilight of liberalism — not the 'liberalism' that is actually libertarianism, but the liberalism that is freedom. Not least freedom of expression.
All across Europe, debate on Islam is being stopped. Italy’s greatest living writer, Oriana Fallaci, soon comes up for trial in her home country, and in Britain the government seems intent on pushing through laws that would make truths about Islam and the conduct of its followers impossible to voice. Those of us who write and talk on Islam thus get caught between those on our own side who are increasingly keen to prosecute and increasing numbers of militants threatening murder. In this situation, not only is free speech being shut down, but our nation’s security is being compromised.
Since the assassinations of Fortuyn and, in 2004, the film maker Theo van Gogh, numerous public figures in Holland have received death threats and routine intimidation. The heroic Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her equally outspoken colleague Geert Wilders live under constant police protection, often forced to sleep on army bases. Even university professors are under protection.

Europe is shuffling into darkness. It is proving incapable of standing up to its enemies, and in an effort to accommodate the peripheral rights of a minority is failing to protect the most basic rights of its own people. The governments of Europe have been tricked into believing that criticism of a belief is the same thing as criticism of a race. And so it is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous to criticise a growing and powerful ideology within our midst. It may soon, in addition, be made illegal.

As if the kidnap, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi near Paris wasn’t bad enough, the way it has been dealt with and reported has graphically illustrated what can only be described as a pathological refusal within Europe to acknowledge the fact that French Jews are being attacked and murdered by Muslims in a kind of rolling pogrom. Ilan Halami was a Jew. He was almost certainly kidnapped and murdered because he was singled out as a Jew for this fate. A number of recent kidnappings have taken place of which the vast majority of victims have been Jews and their kidnappers Muslims. As Nidra Poller has reported in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

The murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel, slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a carving fork in his building’s underground parking garage. Adel came upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, ‘I killed my Jew, I will go to paradise.’ In the two years before his murder, the Selam family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish. The Selam case has not been opened by the magistrate. The murderer, who admits his guilt, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, and may be released soon.

Yet originally the French authorities insisted the crime was motivated by money and there was no racial motive.

Throughout Ilan’s disappearance, the police handled his case as a straightforward kidnap for ransom. The discovery of his body, bearing signs of barbaric torture over an extended period of time, raised serious doubts about this hypothesis. Later, a policeman admitted to the press that he and his colleagues were baffled by the gang’s erratic behavior...In initial statements to the press, Public Prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin and various police officials stuck to their hypothesis that money was the motive for the crime, not anti-Semitism. They noted that Ilan Halimi had been tortured as if the gang were following 'a known scenario.' Photos of Ilan, naked, with a sack on his head and a gun pointed at his temple were emailed to family members suggesting, according to the police, 'scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib.' As it turns out, the beheading of Daniel Pearl or Iraqi snuff films are the better comparison.

However, the French authorities have now been forced belatedly to acknowledge the blindingly obvious:

An anonymous police detective quoted in Monday’s edition of Libération said: ‘It’s simply that, for those criminals, Jew equals money.’ Later that same day, investigating magistrate Corinne Goetzmann detained seven of the suspects on charges of kidnapping, sequestration, torture, acts of barbarism and premeditated murder in an organized gang. They will also be charged with targeting the victim on the basis of his religion, French for hate crime, which carries a stiffer penalty. Justice Minister Pascal Clément explained that the charge of anti-Semitism was based on the fact that one of the suspects had declared to the judge that they picked a Jew because Jews are supposed to be rich. But, according to reports in the French press, some of the suspects in police custody said that they tortured Ilan with particular cruelty simply because he was Jewish...

Ilan’s uncle Rafi Halimi told reporters that the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Quran, while Ilan’s tortured screams could be heard in the background. The family has publicly criticized the police for deliberately ignoring the explicit anti-Semitic motives, which were repeatedly expressed and should have dictated an entirely different approach to the case from the start. Police searches have now revealed the presence of Islamist literature in the home of at least one of the gang members.

The highest echelons of the French government are now preoccupied with the murder of Ilan Halimi. Paris is well aware that the case threatens France’s international reputation, but far more than that is at stake. Once again, as in the suburban riots of 2005, the country is forced to come face to face with the criminalized, alienated and racist Muslim youth and their adult enablers in its midst. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, in a long speech delivered at the annual dinner of the CRIF, that this heinous crime was anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in France.

But before people in Britain get too self-righteous about the slowness of the French to admit the reality of the Muslim victimisation of Jews, the British ‘liberal’ media was also slow to acknowledge the Jewish dimension of this crime. As Tom Gross records, last Sunday’s Observer story failed to mention that Ilan was a Jew. Says Gross:

It is very unlikely that The Guardian or The Observer would report on an almost certain racial attack on a black or Asian Muslim without mentioning that it was a racial attack, or who the perpetrators and victim were. This was undoubtedly clear to The Observer at the time of publication as illustrated by the fact that Ha'aretz, for example, had already published an article highlighting this.

The Independent was worse. Its story on February 21 (subscription required), headlined

Jewish anger at 'racist' murder by kidnap gang,

implied that the Jewish reaction was paranoid because

Most of the other victims, or intended victims, were not Jewish

and furthermore that it was the Jews who were violent:

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for "smiling" at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Two days later, however, the paper abruptly changed its offensive tune. In a story headlined

This anti-Semitic attack is terrifying

it now said:

Anyone who has spent time in the banlieues will know that they are not race ghettoes but social ghettoes where different races are accepted reasonably well. All, that is, except for Jews. The ‘fuijs’ or ‘feujs’ (backward slang for juifs) have become an object of hate-filled fantasy among suburban youths (and not just youths). This is partly because the otherwise apolitical, suburban kids identify with the Palestinian cause. They also have the grotesque conviction that all Jews are super-rich and conspire to prevent other ethnic minorities from rising in French society. French authorities now admit that anti-Semitism was a ‘factor’ in the torture and murder of M. Halimi. They insist, however, that the main motive of the Barbarians was money, not race or politics. One police officer said: ‘If this gang had heard that all Martians were rich they would have tried to capture a Martian.’ This was meant to be reassuring. It is not. It is terrifying. The gang abducted M. Halimi for money. They casually tortured him for three weeks because he was Jewish.

This saga is an object lesson in the lethal state of European denial. Jewish victimisation, despite the Jews’ own factual evidence about their own victimisation, is not recognised as such until it becomes overwhelmingly and undeniably apparent. And that is because to acknowledge it is to acknowledge the murderous hatred of Jews by Muslims, which is unacknowledgeable for two reasons: 1) it destroys the governing fiction that Muslim rage in France is driven by poverty, discrimination and French racism and 2) it destroys the governing fiction that the Jews of Israel are the aggressors and the Palestinians are their victims. That is why Jewish victimhood is being expunged from the European mind.

Two excellent articles have neatly illustrated the profound confusion which has characterised the reaction to the jailing of the anti-Jewish rabble-rouser David Irving. His conviction and imprisonment in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial has provoked the general response that, odious as his views are, he should have been allowed to express them so that they could be exposed and defeated in open debate, this being the democratic way. The issue is therefore principally one of freedom of speech. A fine example of this viewpoint was furnished by Danny Finkelstein, who wrote in the Times:

It is difficult, even for me now, born in safety, free to bring up my sons as Jews, sitting at a desk typing my article in civilised Britain, it is difficult not to feel anger, rage at Irving. It is difficult not to wish him behind bars. And I do feel rage. But I do not wish him behind bars, not for giving his opinion, not for delivering a lecture, however warped and horrible his opinion is. I still believe in the power of truth. And my belief in truth is what separates me from Irving. The admirable author Deborah Lipstadt had it right when she destroyed Irving in the courts, challenging his methods as a historian, undermining his reputation, demonstrating his falsehoods and his distortions. It is always tempting to fear the liar and believe, as Mark Twain did that ‘A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on’. But I have more faith than that. I believe that by allowing free exchange, by allowing anyone to assert anything, the truth will triumph, provided that its friends are vigilant and relentless.

A point of view which is in itself admirable. But in this case, it is surely misplaced. For the issue raised by the Irving case is not one of freedom of speech. It is incitement of racial hatred. In the Guardian on the same day, David Cesarani got to the heart of the matter:

Irving has not gone to prison for defending truth. There is not the slightest resemblance between him and the courageous journalists in China, genuine martyrs for free speech, imprisoned for criticising a totalitarian regime. He is no impartial seeker after knowledge. He writes what amounts to propaganda for the neo-Nazi cause. This cannot even be defended as slanted history with a claim on our indulgence. It is an incitement to hatred. Holocaust denial is a particularly vicious form of anti-semitism. It is predicated on the absurd notion that after 1945 the Jews systematically fabricated evidence on the ground and in archives, and staged trials, to convince the world that millions of Jews had been murdered by the Nazis. Having forged this evidence, the Jews then ruthlessly squeezed the hapless Gentiles for every dollar and drop of sympathy they could. It reinforces the stereotype of Jews as powerful, merciless and conspiratorial.

At a time when anti-semitism is on the rise, tolerating Holocaust denial is like allowing a man to shout fire in a crowded theatre.

This is surely the point. Context is everything. Irving’s statements are not a simple matter of gross historical error. They are not even merely an expression of prejudice. They are an active incitement to hatred of the Jews. That’s why, as Cesarani also says:

He went to Austria at the invitation of a far-right student group to peddle his lies and spread his neo-Nazi message. Under these circumstances, the Austrian authorities were not only right to act, they were almost under a compulsion to do so.

And it is why Irving was also on his way to Iran to put his neo-Nazi lies at the service of Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intention to write the Holocaust out of history and thus pave the way for a second Shoah. On the Civitas website, David Conway puts it well:

There is a perfectly bona fide liberal case for favouring the legal interdiction in Austria and Germany, and wherever else there is a genuine threat of resurgent Nazism, of the public expression of such opinions as those which Irving expressed and for which he has been imprisoned. It issues from no less an impeccably liberal source than John Stuart Mill and is to be found in his famous essay On Liberty which this week has been so much wrongly cited as warrant for supposing liberals must condemn the fate Irving has suffered at the hands of the Austrian authorities.

In the first paragraph of the third chapter of that essay that immediately follows the famous one in which Mill defends freedom of thought and expression, Mill adds a caveat to his general commendation of such freedom. He observes: “even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed out among the same mob in the form of a placard. Acts, of whatever kind, which, without justifiable cause, do harm to others, may be, and in the more important cases absolutely require to be, controlled, ...when needful, by the active interference of mankind.”

...To illustrate what danger Irving posed, consider a speech he made in March 1990 in the East German town of Halle before an audience of neo-Nazis. The account comes from a book about Irving’s unsuccessful libel suit in 2000 against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt for having published a book she wrote accusing him of having wilfully and maliciously distorted facts of history of which he was fully aware so as cast doubt on the Holocaust having happened. A video of the speech was presented in evidence by the defendants:

‘A trench-coat clad Irving is shown addressing a crowd of young skinheads... As the ranks of skinheads march in front of him stamping their Doc Martens and waving the red and black Reichskriegsflagge – Reich battle flag emblem of German irredentism since the turn of the century, and a stand-in for the banned Nazi swastika,...in response to a burst of German rhetoric from Irving, they begin chanting: Sieg Heil! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!’ [D.D.Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial: History Justice and the David Irving Libel Case (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 244]

Again, consider a slogan that Irving coined and which he unveiled to the world in a press conference that he gave in West Berlin in October 1989 and which was subsequently used as the slogan of a conference in Munich in 1990 at which Irving spoke. The slogan runs: Wahrheit Macht Frei (The Truth Makes Free), and is a clear allusion to the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) that festooned the gates of Auschwitz. Clearly, within the context of Holocaust denial what it seems to be suggesting is that, by denying the occurrence of the Holocaust in the manner in which Irving and his like are, legitimacy, and thereby, more importantly, legality, will once again be able to be conferred on the Nazis and their latter-day sympathisers.

This is why the comparison that has been made with the Danish cartoon controversy is simply grotesque. It has been argued that, just as those cartoons should have been published, so too should Irving’s Holocaust denial; or conversely, from the Muslim perspective, that both should be banned. But the two things are totally different. The cartoons were a political protest against clerical fascism and intimidation. Irving’s utterances are the handmaiden of fascism and an attempt to incite racial hatred.

The key confusion is to view these issues, and others like them, through the prism of freedom of speech. The cartoons issue was not at root about freedom of speech. It was rather the latest salient of the global jihad against the west. That’s why the Danish cartoonists and editors should have been defended to the hilt, and why it was so disastrous that they were not. The academic boycott of Israeli universities by British academics was also wrongly fought on the basis that Israeli academic freedom of expression was being threatened. The real issue, however, was the abuse of free expression by the boycotters peddling lies and libels against Israel, whose effect was to whip up further hatred of Israel and aid those who wish to exterminate it.

The concept of ‘Holocaust denial’ is unfortunate, because in itself it muddles the issue and lends itself to the argument that freedom of speech is threatened. It would be far better to prosecute the Irvings of this world under the much clearer laws against incitement to racial hatred and incitement to violence. Unfortunately, such laws are rarely used in Britain because of the supine nature of the prosecuting authorities – but that is another story.

The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is constitutionally confrontation-averse. He has also formed a brotherly bond with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, which isn’t surprising since in many ways they are two of a kind, being scholars who are less than comfortable at finding themselves expected to navigate the political piranha pool. So Sir Jonathan’s stinging attack last week on the Church of England for its vote to support disinvestment in Caterpillar Inc. because the Israelis use its bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses – a vote which Dr Williams supported – is all the more notable. It shows just how grave Sir Jonathan thinks the situation is when the Church, as he said, has chosen this of all moments to extend to Israel vilification rather than support, just when Israel is under renewed existential threat from Iran and Hamas and has itself risked civil war to carry out the Gaza withdrawal.

Today, a churchman has replied to Sir Jonathan in terms which suggest that the Chief Rabbi’s remarks understated the unfathomable depths of the venom towards Israel within parts of the church. In the Guardian Paul Oestreicher, a former member of the General Synod, former director of the Centre for International Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral and now a chaplain at the University of Sussex, has written a riposte which turns the stomach through its combination of manipulation, misrepresentation and sheer unadulterated hatred – which is even more disgusting because it has the gall to present itself as love. Yes, says Oestreicher, Sir Jonathan is right that hatred of Judaism continues to stalk the world. But then, having carefully wrapped himself in the mantle of both Judaism and the Holocaust through his Jewish-born father, and having even more carefully identified himself with ‘Jewish fears’ over Iran’s threat to obliterate Israel, he says this hatred of the Jews is their own fault. They have brought it on themselves through Israel's behaviour. And he supports this odious claim with a series of gross misrepresentations. Thus:

I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee.

Now let’s get this right. He’s comparing Israeli Jews to German supporters of the Nazi party. German Nazis believed the Jews were a global virus which had to be exterminated. Israelis have been under existential attack by Palestinian Arabs for fifty years. Israelis don’t want to wipe out Palestinians; Palestinians want to wipe out Israelis. The comparison beggars belief – and Oestreicher wraps himself in the mantle of the Holocaust to make it.

I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history.

No it is not. It is propaganda. Modern Israel was not born in terror. It was born as a result of a decision by the United Nations finally to honour the pledge made decades earlier to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland but reneged upon and blocked by Britain until the Holocaust shamed the world into action.

It was not born through ‘killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing.’ On the contrary, it had to defend itself from ethnic cleansing and annihilation by the onslaught from five Arab armies which tried to strangle it at birth. And what on earth does ‘made possible in its present Zionist form’ mean? Zionism is the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. Israel is the physical embodiment of that movement. Oestreicher’s comment appears to be part of the current attempt to demonise Zionism by redefining it as the policies used to contain the war by terror being mounted from the disputed territories, policies which are themselves misrepresented and demonised. In the light of all this, Oestreicher’s ‘passionate’ belief that Israel should live in peace and security is the purest humbug.

The Israel characterised by the words of Golda Meir that ‘there was no such thing as Palestinians ... they did not exist’ is an Israel that is inevitably surrounded by enemies and that can only survive militarily and economically as a client state of the world's only superpower, for now.

What Golda Meir meant by that, as she went on straightaway to say, was that there was no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people – which was the truth. ‘Palestine’ was an artificial colonial construct and the Arabs who lived there considered themselves to be part of the wider Arab nation; Palestinian national identity was created solely by the attempt to destroy Israel. And to blame this perception of the Palestinians for the fact that Israel is ‘inevitably surrounded by enemies’ is grotesque. Israel has been surrounded by enemies since its creation, simply because it exists.

Peace cannot be made by building a wall on Palestinian land that makes the life of the miserably conquered more miserable still. A Palestinian bantustan will be a source of unrest and violence for ever.

But the security barrier is being built as a last-ditch measure to prevent Israelis from being systematically murdered. It is not this barrier that prevents peace; it is the refusal by the Palestinians to make peace that necessitates the barrier.

I say all this despairing of the Israel I love. Its people are my people...

Oh please. Spare us this cant.

The Palestinians are my neighbours. I wish they had stronger and better leaders. I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence. Just as I understand Jewish fears, I understand their despair.

They have not been ‘driven to violence’ by despair. They have chosen violence because they have been taught to hate – by being fed the kind of malevolence that Oestreicher is spouting, and worse.

And there are Jews in Israel and in the diaspora who know it. Most of them, out of a fear of being thought disloyal, are afraid to say what they know to be true. The state of Israel has become a cruel occupying power. Occupations, when they are resisted, are never benevolent. They morally corrupt the occupier. The brave body of Israeli conscientious objectors are the true inheritors of the prophets of Israel. They are the true patriots. What nation has ever loved its prophets?

This is really disgusting stuff. The claim that Israel is ‘a cruel occupying power’ is a lie. The only reason it imposes hardship on the Palestinian Arabs is because they remain in a state of war against it. Yet only those Jews who condemn Israel, he is saying, are the true Jews. So Jews who defend Israel against its aggressors are betraying their own moral heritage. To be true to that heritage, apparently, a Jew must turn upon and traduce his own people for having the audacity to try to prevent themselves from being murdered. And Oestreicher has the indecency to wrap himself in the shroud of the Holocaust to say so.

But the main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it practised today is in effect to be antisemitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought antisemitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage.

Well, if many feel condemned to silence because of this, I’d really hate to be around if they actually felt free to voice their opinions. The fact is that Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised every day, in language which openly uses the motifs of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred.

I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation.

So if there is a second Holocaust of the Jews, in Oestreicher’s view the cause will not be those who exterminate them but the Jews themselves who will be responsible for their own destruction. Just what kind of moral sickness is this?

Singling out the Jewish state for delegitimisation by misrepresenting as aggression, through the systematic use of distortions and lies, its attempts to defend itself from extinction -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; misrepresenting Israel’s history so that the Jews are presented in a false and hateful light -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; demonising Israeli Jews as Nazis -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; blaming the Jews for their own prospective annihilation -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; claiming that the only true Jews are those who would refuse to support Israeli attempts to defend themselves and the Jewish state from annihilation -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism.

So what is it?

The bad news is that the good guys lost last week’s debate at the Cambridge Union. This means that, at a time when Iran and Hamas are threatening to wipe Israel off the map, Cambridge students agreed instead that 'Zionism is a danger to the Jewish People'.

The slightly better news, however is that the vote was 125 to 121, with 71 abstentions. This means that, at a time of unprecedented vilification of Israel and Zionism, the majority for this motion was only four people. One of the team that opposed the motion, Jeremy Brier, who with Ned Temko stepped in at the last minute after both Jonathan Freedland and David Cesarani dropped out, says that given the balance of the audience this meant that his side won over a lot of moderate and undecided people. This is because in his estimation, Arab supporters had secured a large turnout and the Jewish contingent was small. He writes:

What a sorry state of affairs that a motion like this passes. However, I was reassured by the fact that the majority of intelligent, neutral Union members who go to debates to think and learn all seemed to vote for us.

Apart, that is, from the 71 people who were apparently left unsure whether Jewish self-determination was indeed a danger to the Jews or not. My earlier post on this debate elicited this response from the president of the Cambridge Union, Sarah Pobereskin:

Your suggestion that the debate was 'Jew-baiting' reveals your misunderstanding of the whole premise of this debate. The fact that it was argued by Jewish speakers is an indication of the diversity of feelings on this issue, not of the Cambridge Union's desire to 'set Jew against Jew'...As our audience included a very large number of our Jewish community here, it is clear that this issue is one of genuine interest and concern. It was discussed in a serious and sensitive manner. Whilst there was of course strong disagreement between the two sides, the turnout, the nature of the speakers attending and the vote demonstrate that this is an issue which deserves to be debated. As the President of the Cambridge Union, I am interested in addressing the real issues of importance to our members, and this was clearly one of them. Whilst you may disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the motion, to criticise it being discussed in this intellectual fashion denies both the genuine diversity of opinion, and the seriousness of this issue.

When I read a response like this – and other comments in similar vein about this whole issue – it’s as if I hear a steel door slamming shut. One is up here against a totally closed thought system. From the premise from which Ms Pobereskin starts, her argument is of course impeccable. Of course there must be debate on issues of ‘genuine interest and concern’. The problem is that the view that self-determination is a danger to a people whose homeland is threatened with extermination is not an issue meriting ‘genuine interest and concern’ but is tantamount to blaming them for their own annihilation and is therefore an expression of prejudice, ignorance and gross double standards. It would have been unthinkable, for example, while South Africa was ruled by apartheid, for the Union to have debated the proposition that ‘the activities of Nelson Mandela are a danger to the African people’ – and to have got six black Africans to fight it out. Or that ‘the campaign for Palestinian self-determination is a danger to the Palestinians’.

The fundamental problem is of course that to suggest that Israel is not the aggressor but the victim in the Middle East dispute is met by total, genuine incomprehension and bafflement. Such is the depth of ignorance and the corresponding total acceptance of propaganda based on lies as the unarguable truth. As a member of the audience at the debate writes:

Afterwards some of the students asked me questions and the sad thing is that the endless propaganda that they have been subjected to has become, in their mind, the established truth -- compounded by a staggering ignorance of the history of this dispute.

As a result, anyone who does attempt to present the truth is regarded automatically as being beyond the moral pale. Minds have simply snapped shut on this issue – and great evil is the result.

The Church of England Newspaper hits the nail squarely on the head in its eminently decent editorial comment on the Synod vote to support disinvestment in Caterpillar because its machines have been used by Israel to bulldoze Palestinian homes:

This Synodical act can hardly be read as even-handed in approach. The state of Israel emerges as a rogue state, oppressing Palestinians and not interested in brokering a fair two-state solution. Synod fails to put the situation into any historical context, even as far as the Arafat-Barak agreement facilitated by Bill Clinton setting up a Palestinian state, immediately broken by Arafat in favour of constant insurrection.

No wonder many in the UK and Europe were distinctly queasy at this foray into international politics by the members of General Synod. Is this assembly really equipped to make judgements on such very complex problems? The motion would be better placed in a university or school debating chamber rather than a Church. What has emerged looks one-sided and simplistic, possibly hindering Israeli efforts to make a stable peace. Again, Synod has lived up to a reputation for shadowing the Guardian newspaper in its political orientation and preferred topics of condemnation. Has Synod pronounced on Zimbabwe, genocide in the Sudan, persecution and oppression in China and the Middle East? Indeed Anglican dignitaries rushed to the letters columns after the murderous attack on the ‘twin-towers’ on ‘9/11’ to exculpate the bombers by seeking the reasons for their hatred of the West. No great rush by our new-found experts on global politics to express exculpatory reasons for Israeli bulldozing is evident. If Synod wants to become a sort of amateur United Nations body, it might investigate the misuse of cash poured into the Palestinian Authority, maintaining abject poverty for many.

It might indeed. It is heartening to see such a principled Christian response.

Bruce Bawer skewers Europe’s elites for their craven and lethal capitulation in the wake of the cartoon jihad:

...the day before a planned mass demonstration against the cartoons – Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, hastily called a press conference at a major government office building in Oslo. There, to the astonishment of his supporters, Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition on behalf of 46 Muslim organizations and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council. In attendance were members of the Norwegian cabinet and the largest assemblage of imams in Norway's history. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom: the dhimmi prostrating himself before the Muslim leader, and the leader pardoning him – and, for good measure, declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection, as if it were he, Hamdan, and not the Norwegian police, that held in his hands the security of citizens in Norway.

...On Tuesday, as if Norway hadn't already been disgraced enough, an official Norwegian delegation met in Qatar with Muslim leader Yusuf al Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish women and children) and implored him to accept Selbekk's apology for the cartoons. Lucky them: he did. ‘To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,’ the Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi told Aftenposten yesterday, ‘is tantamount to granting extreme Islamists and defenders of terror a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.’

...Among the European leaders who have insisted firmly in recent days that their nations enjoyed free speech – only to insist even more firmly that that right must be exercised "responsibly" – was Swedish foreign minister Laila Freivalds, who, responding on February 9 to a Muhammed cartoon in the newspaper of the right-wing Swedish Democratic Party, didn’t just call for "responsibility" but enforced it, sending the Security Police to close down the party website. "It is frightful," she sniffed, "that a small group of Swedish extremists can expose Swedes to a clear danger" – as if it were the Swedish Democrats, and not Islamic extremists, who were threatening violence.

...On February 9, Franco Frattini, EU Commissioner of Justice, Freedom, and Security, promised to take steps to "regulate" speech (though he later denied this); Kofi Annan, in a February 12 interview on Danish TV, said "You don’t joke about other people’s religion, and you must respect what is holy for other people." Since when do the EU and UN tell supposedly free people what to respect and what not to respect? Since now, apparently. Many Islamists do not hide the fact that their long-term goal is to turn Europe, step by step, into a Muslim caliphate ruled by sharia law. Alas, it looks at present as if the cartoon controversy may turn out to have been a significant step on the way to that goal.

Among ordinary people, though, scales are rapidly falling from eyes -- in Britain at least -- while their leaders plunge ever deeper into appeasement mode.

*Dhimmi Watch defines dhimmitude thus: 'Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race. The dhimmi attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today.'

This weekend, at a non-governmental meeting in Arlington, Virginia, tapes are due to be released which apparently contain voiced discussions between Saddam Hussein and his top brass over a period more than a decade in which he talks about how he is fooling the UN over WMD and names the countries in which he is hiding the stuff. The tapes have apparently been verified by US analysts as authentic, and cover hundreds of hours of recordings made in Saddam’s presidential offices from 1988 to 2000.

A report on ABC News says the tapes confirm the extent of Saddam’s deception of the UN during the 1990s, but do not prove that he was still hiding WMD by the time of the war that deposed him:

At one point Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the man who was in charge of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction efforts can be heard on the tapes, speaking openly about hiding information from the U.N. ‘We did not reveal all that we have,’ Kamel says in the meeting. ‘Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct.’ Shortly after this meeting, in August 1995, Hussein Kamel defected to Jordan, and Iraq was forced to admit that it had concealed its biological weapons program. (Kamel returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was killed in a firefight with Iraqi security forces.)

...Charles Duelfer, who led the official U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction after the war, says the tapes show extensive deception but don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at the time of the US-led war in 2003. ‘What they do is support the conclusion in the report, which we made in the last couple of years, that the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted.’

In a radio interview broadcast on February 1, however, John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who is running this weekend’s meeting, hinted that the tapes are rather more explosive. They go way beyond 2000, he said, they consist of conversations between Saddam and top officials including his deputy Tariq Aziz and the foreign minister, and reveal the countries which Saddam said was helping him hide WMD. The tapes, said Loftus, are ‘the most sensational historical find from the Iraqi era’.

Of course, it is possible that Loftus is exaggerating wildly. It is possible that the tapes tell us little that is new. It is possible that they are not authentic after all. But it is possible that they are as explosive as he suggests. It fits with another scarcely noticed interview that has surfaced on the web with a former senior Iraqi official. Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti was a southern regional commander for Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia in the late 1980s and a personal friend of the dictator. According to this site, units under his command dealt with chemical and biological weapons and he was known as the ‘Butcher of Basra’ due to his campaigns, defecting shortly before the Gulf War in 1991. He claims to maintain very close sources in Iraq and that some of Saddam’s key scientists are personal friends as well as other key leaders in the former Iraqi military. And he confirms what these tapes apparently reveal, that Saddam was planning to conceal his WMD from the US for a very long time – and that they have been hidden in Syria:

I know Saddam's weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals that were made going as far back as the late 1980's that dealt with the event that either capitols were threatened with being overrun by an enemy nation. Not to mention I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew.

At this point Saddam knew that the United States were eventually going to come for his weapons and the United States wasn't going to just let this go like they did in the original Gulf War. He knew that he had lied for this many years and wanted to maintain legitimacy with the pan Arab nationalists. He also has wanted since he took power to embarrass the West and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. After Saddam denied he had such weapons why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found? That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grudge against.

What we are witnessing now is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.

He goes further. Saddam was so much into deceiving the world over his WMD, he says, that he also used Libya to fool everyone:

Iraqi scientists were turned over to Libya along with many documents and research from Iraq on nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that Saddam was attempting to use Libya as a laboratory to further his nuclear development just like he was attempting to do by sending his weapons to Syria. Saddam knew after the Gulf War he needed to start shipping his weapons and programs outside of his borders to avoid detection which is exactly why Saddam became so emboldened and laughed at the West every time he stood in front of the camera. If you were to compare him in the 80's and 90's you would see a much more confident and defiant Saddam in the latter due to the fact he knew there was nothing to materially pin him on within the borders of Iraq.

He also confirms that Saddam was indeed in league with al Qaeda, with both camps putting aside their differences to fight the common enemy of the US:

As far as Al-Qaeda is concerned this support was limited for a long time, mainly due to the fact that Al-Qaeda had the hopes of creating an Islamic empire while Saddam wanted a secular Arab nationalist empire. They only really came to terms in the mid-90's due to the fact that both knew they shared the same short term enemy. Once they came to terms on this Saddam provided Al-Qaeda with intelligence support and whatever money or munitions they could provide. Saddam has had very long standing contacts in the black market as well as with Moscow and would provide whatever munitions he could through these contacts.

And he issues this stark warning to America about the way its accelerating internal collapse of nerve may turn its enemies’ false statements of its failure in Iraq into reality:

There is no doubt that the United States military has learned the mistakes of the past and are really getting on track in terms of the learning curve of the reconstruction of Iraq. My criticism was aimed at the politicians on the Hill who are beginning to run the war from Congress and taking this role from the military. I see this in the very near future. I have a lot of fears that with upcoming elections and poll numbers down for the Iraq war the politicians are sticking their fingers in the air and they are wanting to cut and run essentially and isolate themselves from the war.

I am optimistic that the Iraqis and the U.S. military can salvage whatever damage may be done due to this. There is much more progress in Iraq today than there was in Vietnam when we pulled out than. The biggest hurdle is going to be putting enough pressure on the Hill to just let the Pentagon run the war and allow our military establishment to do what we entrusted them to do. Win the war and reconstruct the country. The day the politicians take that away from the Pentagon is the day I really see a serious escalation in terrorism to continue a propaganda war from Iraq to persuade the politicians to cut and run. Zarqawi and the rest have been attempting to do this from day one and they are getting closer to their goal if you look at the sentiment within the Senate alone.

I am still quite optimistic that the Iraqis will prevail due to the amount of progress and reconstruction the United States military has made in Iraq but there is always that small amount of doubt and fear which I have. I have seen politicians try to rake the reigns of a war from the military and the war is lost almost immediately. The ball though is in the Iraqis court in terms of defending their newfound democracy and being able to energize the public enough to make this work irregardless of what happens in Washington or the number of troops left in Iraq in the near future.

Maybe this guy is actually out of touch and just shooting his mouth off. Maybe none of this is true. But maybe it is all true. What is undeniable is that there is a huge amount of information captured in Iraq which the US has not even looked at but which may shed light on these matters. It is almost beyond belief that the US has not yet analysed it. As Stephen Hayes comments:

Estimates from people involved in the document exploitation project tell us the U.S. government has in its possession some 2 million 'exploitable items.' Of that number, less than 3 percent -- somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 items -- have been fully exploited. The information that will be made public by the end of this week--28 captured al Qaeda documents and 12 hours of audiotape from Iraq -- will provide a glimpse of a fraction of a fraction of the total collection...What these documents demonstrate more than anything else is that the U.S. intelligence community and the Bush administration should make document exploitation a high priority.

It is a great pity that the Centre for Policy Studies, whose normally shrewd and thoughtful contributions have added much of value to political debate over the years, should have published something as ignorant and absurd as this pamphlet by Peter Oborne which claims that the government has grossly politicised and misused the threat of terrorism in the UK by telling the British public ‘half-truths, falsehoods and lies’.

He looks in particular at two cases – the ‘ricin plot’ and the alleged terrorist conspiracy to blow up Old Trafford stadium. In early 2003, the police announced that they had foiled a terrorist ring in its attempt to launch a chemical attack in Britain using the deadly poison ricin, which was being manufactured in a London flat. This ‘ricin plot’ ended last year in the conviction of Kamel Bourgass for conspiracy to use poisons, the acquittal of his co-defendants and the aborting of a second planned related trial. Oborne says that the Prime Minister and other ministers claimed that ricin had been found in the flat even though in fact no ricin was ever found there. His implication is that this claim was cynically used to whip up British public support for war against Saddam Hussein.

But the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive. Subsequently, as Oborne says, Porton Down changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin. This correction was not communicated to the police for several months, an oversight for which Porton Down has apologised. So when ministers said ricin had been found, they were speaking in good faith and in accordance with what was believed to be true. As Oborne himself acknowledges, by the time the error was revealed the matter was sub judice and couldn’t be mentioned. So why blame the government?

It must also be borne in mind that ricin, like other chemicals, degrades over time and so it is possible that traces which originally were present had disappeared by the time the second tests were carried out. But in any event, whether or not ricin was present was irrelevant. What mattered was whether there was a plot to make the stuff. And what the police found in that flat showed there was indeed just such a conspiracy to make ricin and other poisons. The police found:

•Four sets of poison recipes
•Two further lists of chemicals
•More than 20 castor beans, the key ricin ingredient, plus ground cherry stones, the ingredient for cyanide
•Acetone, the key chemical for extracting poisons from seeds
•Apparatus for making chemical compounds
•One sealed jar of nicotine poison
•An Arabic CD-rom with jihadi content and information about making electronic circuits, bombs and timing devices

The fact that the jury convicted Bourgass of conspiracy to use poisons showed that it agreed that this was indeed evidence of a poisons plot. The implication of their verdict is that, by acquitting his co-defendants, they believed the conspiracy had been committed with others not brought to justice. Yet Oborne complains that

The press has continued to report the ricin plot as if it was real, while the Government has never formally announced that there was never any ricin at the Wood Green flat.

But it was real. And why should the government have announced there was never any ricin, when a) this had been revealed in court and b) it was irrelevant to the threat?

Next, Oborne claims that the ‘Old Trafford’ plot was also a fiction. In 2004, Manchester police arrested and held a number of people who were eventually released with no charges laid. This was nevertheless written up in the press as a foiled plot to bomb Old Trafford stadium. From the absence of charges and apparently from his own interviews with some of the suspects, Oborne concludes that such a plot never existed.

But why does that follow? It might simply have been that the police could not find the evidence they needed to make a case stand up in court – a common occurrence. There is no evidence whatever that the claim was a lie. And while there are legitimate questions about leaks from the police and the treatment of these claims by the media, as Oborne himself acknowledges the government cannot be blamed for the behaviour of the police and the media. So why include this case in an argument that the Prime Minister has needlessly terrified the British people out of their wits over the terrorist threat?

Some of Oborne’s other criticisms have more substance. The government’s anti-terrorism package has been variously ill thought-through and badly presented and has owed less to substance than to rhetoric. Much of the rest of his argument revolves around his criticism that the government smashed the chance of consensus between the parties over anti-terror measures because it was determined to look tougher than its opponents, and failed to make an adequate case to Parliament for them. There may be some truth in some of this, although one might equally say that it was the opposition that decided to ride the civil liberties bandwagon and thus smashed the possibility of consensus. And Oborne also fails to acknowledge the very strong case made in a police paper for detaining terror suspects for up to 90 days. He says:

The Prime Minister’s suggestion that the Security Services were demanding new powers in order to deal with a new category of terrorist suspect turns out to have been nonsense.

But it wasn’t nonsense, at least as far as the police were concerned. That was precisely what they were arguing in their paper.

Next he claims that the Prime Minister’s observation that there were ‘several hundred [terrorists] in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts’ seemed to have been ‘plucked out of thin air’. But this was not so. The security service was reported as saying precisely this. And Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said publicly that up to 200 terrorists trained by Osama bin Laden would commit atrocities in Britain if they could. Reports that had crossed his desk, he said, ‘made my hair stand on end’.

The reason why this report is so inadequate is that the real agenda here – laid out unmistakeably in its foreword by Anthony Barnett and in its conclusion – is opposition to the war in Iraq. It is the same belief that ‘since no WMD were found they never existed and so Blair lied to us’ which inspires the claim here that since no actual ricin was found, no ricin plot ever existed; and since no-one was charged over the Old Trafford plot, no Old Trafford plot ever existed.

These are, of course, irrational non sequiturs; but such is the toxicity of the feeling against the Iraq war, and so deep have the lies about ‘Blair lied’ penetrated the national psyche that irrationality is now the dominant motif of British public debate. And it unites left and right. Thus, absurdly, the terrorist threat to Britain is presented, as in this pamphlet, as the result of the Iraq war – and therefore it is Blair’s fault, to be covered up by spinning it to terrify and bamboozle the public. But the real spin is surely in this pamphlet.

Oborne is right to say that there is now a massive problem of a loss of public trust. But that problem – potentially lethal at a time of war -- is hugely exacerbated by reports such as these.

UPDATE:

In response to this item Dai Richards, producer/director of Dispatches – Spinning Terror transmitted on Channel 4 on 20 February, wrote:

I write in response to your weblog article – The deadly poison of irrationality – attacking Peter Oborne’s pamphlet ‘The Use and Abuse of Terror’. I do so because much of the information in Peter’s pamphlet comes from the Channel 4 programme Spinning Terror which I produced (and Peter reported).

You claim that Peter’s pamphlet is ignorant and absurd. Yet it is your own critique of it which displays ignorance and is full of partial truths.

You start by critiquing Peter’s comments on the ‘ricin case’, in which eight Algerians were arrested following the discovery of recipes and ingredients for making poisons, including ricin. In his pamphlet, Peter drew attention to a number of claims made about this case which were self-serving, prejudicial to a fair trial and misrepresented the evidence – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes wittingly.

Following the raid on the north London flat, the police issued a press release, which was co-signed by the deputy chief medical officer. It stated that 'a small amount of the material... has tested positive for the presence of Ricin poison.' and further that 'tests have confirmed the presence of toxic material'. The first of these statements was misleading, the second plain wrong.

You wrote: 'the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive.'

What you fail to mention is that this initial test was simply a screening test, namely one which is known to be approximate and to err heavily on the side of safety. So it should, for it is a procedure designed to ensure the safety of those entering premises where toxins might be present. As such, it offers no proof of the presence of poison but only suggests it might be present. The police, and particularly the deputy chief medical officer, ought to have known this, yet they still claimed emphatically that the presence of toxins had been confirmed.

You go on to say that 'Porton Down then changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin'. Thus you imply that the scientists at Porton Down simply altered their opinion, as if on the balance of probabilities. In fact the second test, carried out the very next day, is specific to ricin and is a conclusive test, unlike the initial screening test. It showed there was no ricin.

You assert that:
'when ministers said ricin had been found, they were speaking in good faith and in accordance with what was believed to be true'.

By writing this, you imply that Peter claimed otherwise. In fact, his assertion was that it was premature to make such a claim, and prejudicial to any subsequent trial. But it is strange that nobody in the police, the Home Office or the Health Department – for which the deputy chief medical officer works – contacted Porton Down to find out whether the initial screening test had been confirmed. Even though it was clear that a second, ‘Elisa’ test would have to follow the first – approximate – test, nobody enquired about its result. Strange too that Porton Down sat on the true result of the Elisa test - showing there was no ricin - for two months, while world leaders cited the ricin ‘find’ in support of the Iraq war. Testimony at the trial on this point from people at Porton Down was almost farcically confused and full of contradictions.

You claim that: 'by the time the error (ie the false claim that ricin had been found) was revealed, the matter 'was sub judice and couldn’t be mentioned. So why blame the government?'

Are you seriously suggesting that a publicised claim which is utterly prejudicial to the defendants in a trial and is completely wrong cannot be corrected because it is sub judice? The law is not such an ass. It’s noteworthy that the truth about the absence of ricin came out in a pre-trial hearing and was reported by the Sunday Times. At that time it was still sub judice, but nobody suggested the Sunday Times be prosecuted for contempt of court.

You write that, in making public utterances about ricin having been found and the plotters being connected to Al Qaeda, the Prime Minister and others – including Colin Powell in his speech to the UN in support of waging war against Saddam Hussein – acted 'in good faith.'

In fact they acted recklessly. As well as the error in claiming ricin had been found in the first place, they claimed a link between the ricin “found” in London and an Al Qaeda poison factory in northern Iraq. There was no such link. They implied ricin could kill thousands. In fact ricin really has to be injected to be fatal, so is quite impractical as a WMD. Further, for months the prosecution claimed the ricin recipe found in north London was copied from an Al Qaeda poisons manual. This link too was false; when investigators working for the defence showed that the recipe was copied from a Californian Survivalist website, the prosecution dropped this claim.

Yet you attack Peter for: His implication... (that the ricin case) was cynically used to whip up British public support for war against Saddam Hussein.

It is you who choose the word 'cynically'. Peter put no adjective to it. I believe it was shocking that this case was cited in support of something so crucial as taking us into war against Saddam, given that the claims made were generally presented as fact, whereas in truth no facts had yet been established. Most of it was therefore surmise, and much of the surmise turned out to be wrong.

You then criticise Peter’s references to another case, in which nine Kurds and North Africans and a young English woman were arrested on apparent suspicion of plotting to blow up Old Trafford on match day. You claim that:'There is no evidence whatever that the claim (that suspects planned to attack Old Trafford) was a lie.'

Peter did not say it was a lie, but that it was untrue – ie wrong. My information, direct and indirect, from the intelligence services is that they believed at the time that it was untrue, and have not altered their opinion since. All nine suspects were of course freed without charge.

In other respects your critique of Peter Oborne’s pamphlet is simply confused. For instance you say that, in his pamphlet, Peter criticised Tony Blair for claiming in support of the current terrorism bill that: 'there are several hundred (people) in this country who we believe are engaged in plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts...'

In fact the Prime Minister made this statement in arguing for an earlier anti-terrorism bill, which created Control Orders. You dispute Peter’s assertion that the Prime Minister’s reference to 'several hundred' plotting against us was unsubstantiated.

Yet the day after Tony Blair made this claim, intelligence officers informed several newspapers that they disagreed with the Prime Minister’s assertion. The Daily Mail, the newspaper for which you write, reported: 'Even Blair's own security chiefs - normally the next in the queue after the nation's chief constables to warn that the Armageddon question is not if but when - pour cold water on Blair's call to panic stations.'

One reason why Peter was asked to report this film was that he had already written extensively about Downing Street spin (eg 'The Rise of Political Lying', Free Press, 2005) When I joined the production team, Peter was keen that I undertake most of the research, because he wanted it to be done by someone with investigative experience who had a fresh perspective and an open mind on the subject. The elements which made up the film – and Peter’s pamphlet – were included because I found them disturbing and compelling. I did not set out with an agenda. To do so leads to poor journalism, for it prejudices objective scrutiny of the evidence - as your critique demonstrates.

In response to this, I wrote to Dai Richards:

I have now read your letter and re-read Peter’s pamphlet and my own original remarks. The first thing to say is that I did not see your Dispatches programme. My observations are therefore confined solely to the pamphlet.

You say of the police press release: 'It stated that "a small amount of the material...has tested positive for the presence of Ricin poison" and further that "tests have confirmed the presence of toxic material". The first of these statements was misleading, the second plain wrong.'

They were neither misleading nor wrong. Tests DID confirm the presence of toxic material: nicotine poison in a Nivea jar, as well as ricin in 22 castor beans, which was listed in these terms by Porton Down. So your statement that this was ‘plain wrong’ is plain wrong. Or don’t you think that nicotine poison is toxic?

On the first statement, as you yourself acknowledge, the initial test did find that ricin was present. My statement that 'the facts are that the initial tests for the presence of ricin in the flat, carried out by the biological research establishment Porton Down, were positive.' was therefore true.

You then claim that although this initial test was positive for ricin it was ‘simply a screening test’ and that ‘The police, and particularly the deputy chief medical officer, ought to have known this, yet they still claimed emphatically that the presence of toxins had been confirmed’.

The police believed that the first test had found ricin. They say they had no reason to believe that this test was dubious in any way.

You say: ‘You go on to say that “Porton Down then changed its mind and said further tests had showed no traces of ricin” .Thus you imply that the scientists at Porton Down simply altered their opinion, as if on the balance of probabilities.’

This is demonstrably untrue. I did not imply this. I stated explicitly that they said ‘further tests had showed no traces of ricin'.

The fact that the second test(s) were carried out the following day is irrelevant. This negative result was not communicated to the police for months. According to Porton Down, this was because of ‘a breakdown in procedures’.

You say ‘nobody in the police, the Home Office or the Health Department – for which the deputy chief medical officer works – contacted Porton Down to find out whether the initial screening test had been confirmed.’ My understanding is that Porton Down did confirm the initial (false) positive test, a confirmation which was in itself clearly wrong, before finally communicating the correct negative findings.

As you yourself say, Porton Down’s evidence in the case was ‘almost farcically confused and full of contradictions’. This implies bungling incompetence, which I believe to have been the case. Yet in your letter to me, you imply a conspiracy. There is no evidence for this whatever – quite the reverse.

There is therefore no reason to suppose that the police and everyone else were acting in anything other than good faith when they spoke of the discovery of ricin in the flat. You suggest that the pamphlet did not claim otherwise, merely that ‘it was premature to make such a claim, and prejudicial to any subsequent trial.’

To claim that the pamphlet was not claiming bad faith is disingenuous, to put it mildly. The whole purpose of including the ricin chapter in this pamphlet was to claim that the ricin plot was used to ‘persuade the British people to wage war against Saddam Hussein in order to prevent him distributing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists...’ -- but that there was no such plot. The implication that the police and politicians acted in the worst possible faith throughout this whole episode, and that Porton Down was part of a conspiracy to mislead the public in order to bounce them into war, is built into the entire chapter. Yet the facts suggest that this fevered suggestion is wholly without foundation.

You say: ‘Are you seriously suggesting that a publicised claim which is utterly prejudicial to the defendants in a trial and is completely wrong cannot be corrected because it is sub judice?’

Yes. You are clearly ignorant of the law. Ministers and police officers are not. I suggest you purchase a copy of 'Essential Law for Journalists'.

Any claim that ricin could kill thousands was indeed an exaggeration.

You say: ‘Further, for months the prosecution claimed the ricin recipe found in north London was copied from an Al Qaeda poisons manual. This link too was false; when investigators working for the defence showed that the recipe was copied from a Californian Survivalist website, the prosecution dropped this claim...’

The police had good reason for thinking that the recipe was taken from an Al Qaeda manual because of distinctive similarities it bore with material seized in al Qaeda training camps inAfghanistan. In court, however, this was impossible to prove because that material was not available to the prosecution, and it was clearly the case that other recipes were available on the net. That does not prove, as you claim, that this link was false.

Most important of all, however, the ricin chapter misses the main point altogether. The presence of ricin in the flat was irrelevant. There was a plot to produce it. The fact that ricin was not found didn’t make that plot any less dangerous. The pamphlet says: The press has continued to report the Ricin Plot as if it was real...’ But it WAS real. A poisons factory was discovered with apparatus and ingredients to make poisons, an actual jar of nicotine poison and blueprints for a bomb. A man was convicted of conspiracy to use poisons. To state therefore that the plot was not real demonstrates a quite remarkable inability to acknowledge reality.

The pamphlet not only fails to acknowledge any of this but uses this episode to back up the claim of a ‘false narrative’ – ie, a lie. It states ‘the British public has been fed half-truths, falsehoods and lies’ and that ‘New Labour has set out to politicise terror, to use it for narrow party advantage.’ It uses the ricin case at great length to support this claim. It is therefore undeniable that the pamphlet imputes to the government the most cynical of motives.

As for the Old Trafford case, you claim that ‘Peter did not say it was a lie, but that it was untrue – ie wrong.’ Yet the second paragraph of this chapter states ‘It was a complete fabrication’ and ‘The police and, to an extent the media, are responsible for the invention.’ Do you not understand what a lie is?

In short, by a combination of omission, misrepresentation and the most perverse interpretation possible, this pamphlet was deeply misleading. Your letter signally fails to show otherwise, and even manages to misrepresent what the pamphlet said.

In response to this, Dai Richards wrote further:

It still seems to me – in fact more so now than when I read your initial piece – that you come to the subject with a determination to find the evidence to back your existing standpoint, rather than studying at the evidence in the various examples we gave in the pamphlet and the film and then drawing a conclusion. You know as well as I do that no argument is entirely black and white, no story really has all good on one side and all bad on the other. It is always possible to find something in an event to back one’s argument, even if that something goes against the generality of how the event unfolded. Personally, I think that’s what you have tended to do in scrutinising Peter’s pamphlet: you have tended to use the exception to prove the rule, so to speak. So, for instance, you claim the quote we gave from the police press release about ‘confirming the presence of toxic material’ could have been referring to nicotine or castor oil beans. I cannot see how you can genuinely reach that conclusion. For a start, I believe the beans themselves would not be classified as “toxic material”, but that’s by the by. A fuller quote from the press release runs: 'A small amount of the material recovered from the Wood Green premises has tested positive for the presence of Ricin poison. Ricin is a toxic material which if ingested or inhaled can be fatal. Our primary concern is the safety of the public and the police have worked closely with the Department of Health throughout. Tests were carried out on the material and it was confirmed on the morning of 7.01.03 that toxic material was present.

This clearly implies that there was an initial test which found ricin and also a confirmatory test. Ricin is mentioned throughout the press release. There is no mention at all of finding castor oil beans or nicotine poison. But it does not suit your argument that the press release should be misleading, so you look for a way to demonstrate that technically it could be correct.

Your statement that the first test for the presence of ricin was positive is of course right, but you fail to tell the whole truth. The point we made was that this test simply showed ricin might be present. As explained to me by toxicologists, this test gives a positive result when other elements with the same structure as ricin are present. So it was wrong for the police and deputy chief medical officer not to point out that this was only an approximate test.

What’s more, I have seen no evidence that the Home Office or Dept Health, for instance, enquired about the result of the Elisa test, which is the confirmatory test. It was normal procedure in these circumstances to undertake such a test. The authorities knew or ought to have known that an Elisa test would be done. I have not seen or been told of any enquiry about the undertaking of or result of such a test.

Your assertion that the police had 'good reason for thinking that' Bourgass’s recipe was an Al Qaeda recipe is telling. Good reasoning is not evidence. Bourgass’s ricin recipe looked like an Al Qaeda ricin recipe. They were similar. But they contained differences. Someone jumped to the conclusion that Bourgass’s was copied from Al Qaeda’s, without wondering why they contained several notable differences. They then put forward their guess as fact, whereas in fact it was based on assumptions. Not surprisingly, the recipes may have had the same root – but one was not copied from the other. Yet you still entertain the possibility that they were copies one of the other. If you had wanted, you could have searched out the truth on this point. You have not done so.

Your summation of the ricin publicity in your critique of the pamphlet makes it all sound most straightforward. It was not, and surely you know that. The claims made by Tony Blair and Colin Powell were reckless. They put forward as facts untested prima facie evidence. That is the point we made. We never claimed Blair knew there was no ricin or knew there was no connection to Al Qaeda poison camps in Iraq or knew ricin was not a WMD, but that, without being certain one way or the other, he was content to allow these uncertain claims to be presented as facts, and gave them his backing. To do so to help justify something as critical as going to war was wrong.

My first career – many years ago – was as a barrister. Not that that made me an expert on sub judice. But I do know something about it and the case law, rather than a book for journalists, does not preclude the police correcting a public statement which they made and which was germane to the case, prejudicial to the defendants and now known to have been erroneous at the time it was made. As I pointed out to you, this is what happened anyway, when The Sunday Times reported the absence of ricin, and no law officer took action. They would have known about the article. They were the prosecution.

On the Old Trafford case, you are disingenuous. It is completely clear that Peter was not accusing the police of lying . He specifically wrote that the police had presumably based their leaks about their suspects’ targeting Old Trafford on information and evidence they had found. He detailed the Manchester United paraphenalia and tickets found at the flat of two of the accused. So you know quite well that he was accusing them of reckless talk and - once again – of jumping to premature and prejudicial conclusions. Not of lying.

Mr Richards has asked me to make his responses public, which I am happy to do here. Readers can judge the exchanges for themselves.

With reference to the post below, I am grateful to Andrew Bostom for sending me the following:

The Shi'ite Iranians of the Qajar dynasty (1724-1925) had a sport called 'Jew Bashi'. C.J.Wills (in Persia As It Is 1887, p. 23.) provides an acerbic description of this egregious form of public degradation suffered by the Jews throughout the 19th century:

'At every public festival-- even at the royal salaam [salute] before the King’s face -- the Jews are collected, and a number of them are flung into the hauz or tank, that King and mob may be amused by seeing them crawl out half-drowned and covered with mud. The same kindly ceremony is witnessed whenever a provincial governor holds high festival: there are fireworks and Jews.'

Clearly, the sport at Oxford and Cambridge this week is an anglicised version of this old Islamic entertainment.

Following on from my post below about this week's anti-Jewish hate-fest at Oxford, it turns out that Cambridge is not to be outdone. On Thursday, the Cambridge Union will debate the motion 'This House believes that Zionism is a danger to the Jewish people'. And not for the first time (as in last year's disgusting 'Intelligence Squared' debate in which against my better judgment I took part) the proposal that the Jews should be blamed for their own annihilation will set Jew against Jew, the amusing device employed by the Israel-hating world to get the Jews to do their dirty work for them. Thus the Cambridge line up is: Daphna Baram,journalist and author of ‘Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel’; Dr. Brian Klug, Oxford academic, founder member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights; Prof Gabriel Piterberg (three days after denouncing Israel at Oxford: my, what a popular guy this is), professor of Middle Eastern history, UCLA; Daniel Shek, British Israel Communications and Research Centre; Jonathan Freedland, journalist, the Guardian and Jewish Chronicle; Prof. David Cesarani, professor of history, Royal Holloway college, London.

Thus the delightful sport of Jew-baiting, now the activity of choice of the finest minds in Britain, with the essence of the sport being the thrill of seeing just which of these Jews is going to knock out the other -- as they all implicitly accept the premise that blaming the Jews for their own persecution is a legitimate proposal to discuss. No doubt the takings at the door will break all records.

Update, 17 February: Both Jonathan Freedland and David Cesarani pulled out of last night's Cambridge Union debate having decided not to take part.

Emanuele Ottolenghi says that Europe is waking from its trance. According to polling data, most Europeans believe Iran's intentions are not peaceful, and most are ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ worried’ about its nuclear programme. Although they still back the diplomatic game over Iran, more Europeans are ready to support limited NATO military strikes if it emerges that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon than those who would oppose strikes no matter what:

This is not a mandate for military strikes — not yet at least. The experience of the Iraq war teaches a lesson in caution for Europe. If military strikes become a distinct possibility, there will be a concerted effort by the usual suspects to question intelligence and call into doubt whether Iran is so close to the bomb after all. Europeans have little appetite for military action, and under violent pressure, their governments have not shown signs of resolve and commitment.

But the data are nevertheless encouraging: It is becoming clear is that there is a European constituency for a blunter, more self-assured foreign policy that believes in Western values and refuses to cave in to pressure and blackmail; and there is an awareness — even in the country of Jack Straw — that some of the threats that come from the East are real, not the sinister concoctions of the ‘neo-cons.’

Right now, apathy is the trademark of Europe's silent majority. Intimidated by Islamic fanatics who call for the beheading of anyone who insults Islam, and scorned by their elected representatives who prefer to pander to radical Islam rather than take a principled stance, it is no wonder their views remain largely unexpressed. The only ones who clamour in the streets are Islamist fanatics. The PC brigade, largely stationed in the media world and in the public sector, is dominating the public sphere with its apologetic message. Those who care to express European outrage openly in the name of Western values and freedom are usually Fascists or from some other extremist group — hardly the standard bearers of freedom and democracy, and often indistinguishable in their message of hatred and intolerance from their Islamist foes. Still, it would be foolish to assume that there is no room for grassroots movements and political parties which can both uphold freedom and take the Islamists head on.

The EFD data show that the public is not easily fooled about the true motives and intentions of our Islamist adversaries. And their willingness to support military action if all else fails proves that even Europeans, if pushed against the wall, will wake up to the ugly reality that confronts us all. All that is needed now is to put a good argument forward and show that there is a truly democratic alternative to the current dominant views. People who endorse this message are out there, waiting for a wake up call. If shown the way, they will reclaim the public spaces of Europe. And for this to happen, all it would take is for a few good men (and women) to stand up and say loudly and with pride: We will not let freedom die.

Has there ever been an obsession like this? At the University of Oxford an entire week is being devoted to Jew-hatred, dedicated to declaring Israel as an apartheid state, with speakers, films and more designed to vilify Israel. Here is the agenda for this carnival of hatred and lies, staged by the Palestinian society:

•Monday, February 13: Zionism and Apartheid: Prof. Gabi Piterberg (University of California at Los Angeles); Introduction by Dr. Kaveh Moussavi (University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies)

You can read about the charming and enlightened Prof Piterberg here.

•Tuesday, February 14: Documentary Night; Screening of Award winning documentary Arna’s Children

You can read about this balanced and fair-minded film here.

•Wednesday, February 15: Palestinian Resistance; Dr. Karma Nabulsi (University of Oxford) and an Oxford student panel

You can read Dr Nabulsi's scapegoating of Ariel Sharon for the massacres in Sabra and Shatila which were actually carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalangists here.

•Friday. February 17: Resisting Apartheid: Divestment and Solidarity, Prof Ilan Pape (University of Haifa); Introduction by Prof. Steven Rose (Open University)

You can read about Prof Pappe's rational and informed views of his own country here. As has been noted on this site many times already, the proportion of Jews who are prepared to diabolise their own people -- the historical accompaniment to every major Jewish persecution -- is simply tragic.

The Chancellor of Oxford University is Chris Patten. Maybe someone should ask him whether he is happy for his university to be used to disseminate lies, libels and hatred and demonise a country for having the temerity to defend its people against annihilation.

Update: it appears that the Palestinian Society has no conection with the university; which raises the question of why it is being allowed to stage these events in the university's buildings and operate under its name.

Another terrific piece by Amir Taheri in the Sunday Times. The sanity, balance and knowledge Taheri is bringing to bear on the crisis in the Islamic world is proving invaluable. Here’s a sample of his thinking yesterday:

Not long ago when I asked an imam in a London mosque why it was that God hardly featured in his sermons, he thought I had lost the plot. 'What matters today is the suffering of our brethren under occupation,' he snapped. In other words: in our Islam we don’t do God, we do Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq...

Islam cannot have it both ways: pretend to be a religion and demand special respect while operating as a political ideology which, by definition, must be open to criticism and even denigration. Politicised Islam’s attempt at destroying individual freedoms is as much a threat to Islam as the inquisition was to Christianity. By preaching martyrdom as the highest goal for Muslims and beating the drums of 'the clash of civilisations', it is also a threat to world peace. To protect itself, Islam needs to revive its theology with emphasis on divinity. In other words, Islam must re-become a religion.

Plain speaking which is straight to the point -- today, almost unheard of on this subject.

The capitulation by America and Europe over the Danish cartoons has provoked a remarkable protest by one of the journalists on Jyllands-Posten, Per Nyholm, a translation of which appears on the Brussels Journal website:

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the opinion makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

The cartoons are no longer something Jyllands-Posten can control. They have already been manipulated and misrepresented to the point that few know what is going on and fewer know how to stop it. This affair is artificially being kept buoyant in a sea of lies, suppressions of the truth, misconceptions, lunacy and hypocrisy, for which this newspaper bears no blame. The only thing Jyllands-Posten did was provide a pin-prick which has made a boil of nastiness erupt. This would have happened sooner or later. That it happened more than four months after the publication of the cartoons, raises a question of its own. Are we dealing with random events or with a staged clash of civilizations? One might hope for the former yet be prepared to expect the latter.

That is why I say: freedom of speech is freedom of speech is freedom of speech. There is no but.

Initially I was doubtful of the timeliness of publishing the cartoons. Later events have convinced me that it was both just and useful to do so. That they are consistent with Danish law and Danish custom seem to me less important than this: that we now know that remote, primitive countries deem themselves justified in telling us what to do. Unfortunately we must also note that governments close to us are agreeing with them in the name of expedience.

It was right and just for this newspaper to launch an offensive for freedom of speech, and useful, as we have now acquired new knowledge. Welcome to a brave new world where even our Prime Minister – in spite of his laudable firmness – must gaze out upon a scorched political landscape. True, his friend in Washington, George Bush, has uttered the customary condemnation of the torching of our embassies, but his State Department alludes to us as being the guilty ones in this case. The suggestion that Danish troops might contribute to democratization is buried under the charred remains of our diplomatic representations in Beirut and Damascus.

Perhaps it is time we started mopping up this mess. Perhaps Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste ought to remove his apology which has gone stale sitting so long on the front page of our internet edition and which does not seem to interest the madmen. Perhaps our government ought to announce to Mona Omar Attia, the strange Ambassador of Egypt, that she is persona non grata.

Perhaps the ambassadors that have been called home to fictitious consultations in the Middle East should be told that they may spare themselves the cost of the return ticket. Insofar as possible, the Lying Imams probably ought to be expelled. And then we ought to make an effort to support those Muslims who in a difficult situation have proven themselves to be true citizens.

We, for our part, have no wish to be a burden to the Arab governments. We will happily withdraw our soldiers, policemen and diplomats. If they think our money smells, we will retract our aid. Our trade must make do as well as it can. We promise to not bear a grudge and, in time, we will be glad to return, but we are through with the hypocrisy. We have better things to do than being pissed upon at our own expense. Cut down our activities in the Middle East. The world holds plenty of other opportunities.

Immensely brave and important piece by Nonie Darwish in today’s Sunday Telegraph:

My father was killed as a result of the Fedayeen operations when I was eight years old. He was hailed by Nasser as a national hero and was considered a shaheed, or martyr. In his speech announcing the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, Nasser vowed that all of Egypt would take revenge for my father's death. My siblings and I were asked by Nasser: ‘Which one of you will avenge your father's death by killing Jews?’ We looked at each other speechless, unable to answer.

In school in Gaza, I learned hate, vengeance and retaliation. Peace was never an option, as it was considered a sign of defeat and weakness. At school we sang songs with verses calling Jews ‘dogs’ (in Arab culture, dogs are considered unclean). Criticism and questioning were forbidden. When I did either of these, I was told: ‘Muslims cannot love the enemies of God, and those who do will get no mercy in hell.’ As a young woman, I visited a Christian friend in Cairo during Friday prayers, and we both heard the verbal attacks on Christians and Jews from the loudspeakers outside the mosque. They said: ‘May God destroy the infidels and the Jews, the enemies of God. We are not to befriend them or make treaties with them.’ We heard worshippers respond ‘Amen’.

My friend looked scared; I was ashamed. That was when I first realised that something was very wrong in the way my religion was taught and practised. Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.

Palestinian television extols terrorists, and textbooks still deny the existence of Israel. More than 300 Palestinians schools are named after shaheeds, including my father. Roads in both Egypt and Gaza still bear his name - as they do of other "martyrs". What sort of message does that send about the role of terrorists? That they are heroes. Leaders who signed peace treaties, such as President Anwar Sadat, have been assassinated. Today, the Islamo-fascist president of Iran uses nuclear dreams, Holocaust denials and threats to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ as a way to maintain control of his divided country.

Read it all.

While the cartoon jihad raged on, this demonstration in London at the weekend was almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. A disgrace. The only person to record the brave and important stand being taken in Iran against the mullahs by the ordinary people was Nick Cohen in today’s Observer:

Ahmadinejad won the rigged Iranian elections last year with a promise to stand up for the little man against the Islamic Republic's corrupt elite. Faced with a choice between sticking to his word and carrying on with despotism, he showed his true colours by allowing the most ferocious crackdown Tehran has seen since the religious authorities crushed dissident journalists and students in 1999.

The company's managers and Islamic council called in the paramilitary police who arrested the union's six officers and beat workers until they agreed to renounce the strike. Bravely, the majority refused. The state's thugs then targeted their wives and children. Mahdiye Salimi, the 12-year-old daughter of one of the strike leaders, told a reporter that they had poured into her home in the early hours of the morning trying to find her father. When his wife said she didn't know where he was, the assault began. 'They kicked my mum's heart with their boots and my mum had an enormous ache in her heart. They even wanted to spray something in my [two-year old] sister's mouth.'

No one knows how many people the authorities arrested. The highest figure the British TUC has heard is 1,300. International trade union federations and the British embassy in Tehran estimate that somewhere between 400 and 600 people are still in prison...Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the US State Department and British Foreign Office have all protested. Trade unions, Iranian exiles and gay groups have demonstrated. Yet the media have barely noticed. The failure is due in part to my trade's perennial inability to walk and chew gum at the same time: we consider stories one by one and today's story is Muslim anger with cartoonists.

This silence is worse than disgraceful. It is also a symptom of the free world’s tragic and terrifying failure to deal properly with the nuclear crisis in Iran. There are three possible responses to this crisis: appeasement, military strikes and a people’s revolution. We are heavily into the first, are flinching from the second -- but have never properly considered the third. The Iranian people are largely pro America, pro freedom and friendly towards the west. They are heavily against the tyrannical theocracy that enslaves them. America, Britain and the rest of the free world should be putting muscle behind their movement to free themselves by refusing to deal with Iran, treating the regime as a pariah and lending public support and encouragement to the people to overthrow these tyrants. Yet we don’t even report the action they are taking and the reprisals they are enduring.

What’s wrong with us?

Now that Israel is under threat of extermination by Iran and Hamas, with Nazi-style libels against the Jews pouring out of the Arab and Muslim world and with Jews everywhere under siege from physical and intellectual attack, what is the response of the most progressive religious and intellectual minds in Britain and America to this phenomenon of global fascism and threat of a second Holocaust directed against the Jewish state? Why, to cut Israel’s economic throat. Last year’s aborted Israel boycott by Britain’s Association of University Teachers was, as predicted here at the time, merely a practice run for what has become the progressive recreational sport du jour – singling out the one country on the planet that is targeted for extermination, first by demonising it with a campaign of lies and then severing its intellectual and economic lifelines to the so-called civilised world.

Israel boycotts now seem to be as popular as a CND badge on a 1950s beatnik. The Church of England, which has done so much to foster hatred of Israel, has now successfully resurrected its narrowly averted boycott support attempt of last year (you can’t keep a good prejudice down) and at the General Synod overwhelmingly backed the call by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem to divest from ‘companies profiting from the illegal occupation ... until they change their policies.’

As Ruth Gledhill pointedly reported in the Times:

The Jewish community’s distress will be augmented by the fact that the vote to disinvest was backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. By contrast, Dr Williams has so far not commented on the recent Palestinian election victory of Hamas, an organisation committed to destroying the state of Israel.

Dr Williams – who only recently delivered a strongly worded condemnation of the resurgence of antisemitism – has now issued the most weaselly of ‘regrets’ about the timing of the motion for which he himself voted. As Ruth Gledhill subsequently reported:

In his carefully crafted letter Dr Rowan Williams, who voted in favour of the motion, denies that it represented a decision to disinvest. At the same time, he admits that it was a response to a call from the Anglican church in Jerusalem to disinvest... Dr Williams defends the synod as merely urging the Church of England ‘to engage with companies about whom we had concerns and to encourage a fact-finding visit to the Holy Land.’ In his letter to Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Archbishop of Canterbury says: ‘The Synod has not resolved to disinvest. Dr Williams says: ‘It is unfortunate that this has arisen at a time when anti-Semitism is a growing menace and when the State of Israel faces challenges not only in respect of the new administration in the territories administered by the Palestinian Authority but also elsewhere in the region.’

‘Unfortunate’, eh?

Although this vote does not bind the Church Commissioners, the managers of denominational investments, it is rightly considered to be ‘hugely symbolic’. And what it symbolises is the complete and abject capitulation by the Church of England to the forces of unspeakable evil, mendacity and mass murder – backed by the equally vicious and scarcely less significant NGOs. Thus Nick Dearden of War on Want urged the Church Commissioners

to enforce the Synod’s decision, and to send a clear message that companies like Caterpillar [which makes bulldozers used in Israeli anti-terrorist operations] have a responsibility to ensure their products are not used to violate human rights.

The good news is that decent Christians are appalled, and their numbers appear to be growing. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, bravely claimed that as a result of the Synod vote he was ‘ashamed to be an Anglican.’ The vote, he rightly said, ‘ignores the trauma of ordinary Jewish people’ in Israel subjected to terrorist attacks. Last year he said of the church’s boycott attempt that the Israelis already felt traumatised by attacks on them and this would be ‘another knife in the back’.

Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St. Albans, told the Synod the call was ‘unbalanced’ and failed to reflect the complexity of the situation. Anglicans for Israel courageously expressed its dismay by uttering some immensely important home truths:

We believe that the motion -- founded on ignorance and deceit -- represents a severe blow to Jewish-Anglican relations, and on behalf of concerned clergy and laity, we dissociate ourselves from it and will continue to take our stand with Israel. We offer our humble apologies to our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in faith. We pray for peace in the Middle East, but in doing so, affirm that reconciliation cannot be built on falsehood and willful ignorance of Israel's predicament.

The continuing demonisation of Israel will increase antisemitism. It is almost beyond belief that the Anglican Church, at the behest of some clergymen who seem to be motivated by a combination of liberation theology and a strange, Islamicised version of New Testament theology, should seek to collaborate with the forces of Radical Islam-which destroyed the Middle East's only once-Christian state, Lebanon, whilst the Church largely looked the other way- to deliver the last corner of western values, religious liberty and democracy in the region to Wahabbist Islam.

The most passionate and bitter denunciation of all was made by Canon Andrew White, the Cof E cleric who knows more about the Middle East, and does more to promote reconciliation between Jews, Arabs and Christians, than any other clergyman. He was so appalled that he issued the following statement from Iraq:

Last year I wrote about the ‘sanctimonious claptrap’ of the Anglican Consultative Council after they called for the disinvestment from the state of Israel. This week the General Synod of the Church of England has called for the same thing. This time though they have targeted a particular company ‘Caterpillar’ for allowing its products to perform the so called evil deeds of the Israeli Government. This is the same company involved in the reconstruction of the Gaza and West Bank, that I have seen doing amazing work even in the past few weeks. Fortunately Caterpillar does not rely on their funding from the C of E to perform. At the moment I am in Iraq. Here we move around in heavily armored buses called rhino buses. They happen also to be produced in Israel by the same company that produces Israeli Defense Force equipment. I have not seen here the refusal of any British or American staff to use these vehicles. After all they are a matter of life and death and they have protected many lives.

This action has put back many years the attempts to deal with anti-
Zionism and antisemitism in our own nation. For whether we like it or
not anti Zionism is seen here by the majority of British Jews as antisemitism. If we are to take seriously this issue we have to also hear the voice of Jewish people both in Israel and the Diaspora. What are we, the Church doing? Do we not realize that far more Jews have been killed at the hands of Christians than of Muslims? This is the 350 year anniversary of Jews being allowed back into the UK, it should be a time forrejoicing at the great Jewish contribution to our nation. Most Jews though are scared; scared at what is happening to world Jewry led not just by the Church of England but also established Churches in the US.

It is now nearly four years since the Israeli Government came to me
saying they needed the help of the C of E to create a religious track of the peace process. Lord Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, led the process which has continued to this day. Just before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was taken ill I was summoned to his office, to give account for the attitudes of the C of E. Then I was able to explain that this was the action of the ACC [Anglican Consultative Council] and not the C of E. There was considerable assurance that as Lord Carey was no longer the Archbishop the process could continue. It was all very difficult. Where do you take things from here? There is some hope in the fact that I no longer work for the Church of England, but the reality is that I feel very angry. Angry at the lack of compassion shown to Jews both in Israel and our own land and angry that such a decision should put the real work of peace-making in jeopardy in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Things are already really difficult with a terrorist group having been elected to run the PNA.[Palestinian National Authority] We do not know what the future of peace and reconciliation will be in land that is called Holy. We do know now that the job will be even more difficult. Once again I am sure I will be summoned by the Israeli Government to give account for the actions of what for the first time I am ashamed to call my Church.

The Church has fallen into the trap of thinking that you must be either pro Israeli or pro Palestinian. The reality is that we should be pro both people. Both have suffered and both need our support, love and understanding. When I return to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in just over a week my main duty will be to help with the opening of a major Cardiac Surgery Hospital in Bethlehem. This will be paid for by Christians in the USA. Christians who love Israel and the Palestinian People, this should be a lesson to the C of E. What the Palestinian people need is action not just talk. The Synod voting for disinvestment in Israel will not help the Palestinians, but it will make the search for peace even harder and it will diminish any positive role that the C of E could have played in the region.

Things are now more than desperate in the region. In the last five
years alone Hamas has killed Hundreds of Israelis; they are now the PNA. Is the Church of England going to say anything about that! The fact is the Lord Carey and I am the only Church of England Clergy working intimately with both the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We were never consulted. If the concern was for the Christians of the land I doubt if there are any people working so closely with the Palestinian Christians as us, raising funds for needy Christians in Gaza and the West Bank, helping schools, hospitals and churches.

I despair at my own Church, but the reality is that it causes me to ask questions about the Church rather than Israel. We will press on with our work; fortunately it is no longer the work of the C of E and we will continue loving both peoples and seeking truth and justice for all and never falling into the evil trap of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

But it appears that Uncle Tom Professional and all are falling over themselves to enter ‘the evil trap of anti Zionism and antisemitism’. Now, British architects have decided to institute their own boycott of Israel's construction industry in protest at the building of Israeli settlements and the separation barrier in the disputed territories:

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, whose members include Richard Rogers and the architectural critic Charles Jenckes, met for the first time last week in secret at the London headquarters of Lord Rogers’ practice. He introduced the meeting, and the 60 attendees went on to condemn the illegal annexation of Palestinian land and the construction of the vast fence and concrete separation barrier running through the West Bank and Jerusalem. The group said that architects, planners and engineers working on Israeli projects in the occupied territories were ‘complicit in social, political and economic oppression’, and ‘in violation of their professional code of ethics’. It said that: ‘Planning, architecture and other construction disciplines are being used to promote an apartheid system of environmental control.’

One really does have to marvel at the way the Arab Big Lie appears to have destroyed the capacity for reason among some of our most illustrious citizens. The occupation is not illegal; there is no social, political and economic oppression of Palestinians, merely Israel’s attempt to defend its citizens from being murdered in large number by those same Palestinians; the charge of apartheid is a disgusting libel without a shred of truth (and one which incidentally does for South African apartheid what Holocaust denial does for the Nazi genocide). Architects are supposed to build things; but the aim of this action appears to be to allow Israel to be destroyed. No wonder this meting was held ‘in secret’.

Charles Jenckes told the Independent:

There reaches a certain point where an architect can't sit on the fence. [sic] Not to stand up to it would be to be complicit.’ He said the separation barrier built by Israel was ‘a contorted, crazy, mad, divisive, drunken thing’. ‘In 10 years’ time, its builders will see it as a great folly,’ he said. ‘Architecturally it is madness. I understand fully that security is the problem for Israel and they have the right to protect themselves. But this is not the solution. It is an extremist measure which foments extremism, by incarcerating and intimidating Palestinians.

So let’s get this right. Israel has been under existential attack for more than half a century. When it was founded, the Arabs tried to destroy it. They were beaten. Has there ever been another situation like this, where half a century on the country that was the target of a war of extermination is told that it must met the demands of those defeated aggressors who have never stopped trying to destroy it? And that if it doesn’t meet them, then it and not those trying to destroy it are behaving in a tyrannical fashion? And that a barrier which prevents those potential murderers from reaching their intended victims is ‘an extremist measure which foments extremism’?

According to these architects of lies, Israel is not permitted to defend its citizens against the war waged against it. It is not permitted to kill the terrorists, nor to demolish the houses that are the terror factories, nor to take any military action at all. Yet the non-military means of self-defence, the separation barrier, is also illegitimate – because it causes hardship to the aggressor community which is trying to commit mass murder! These accomplices to the Big Lie claim that the architects, planners and others working on Israeli projects in the occupied territories are ‘in violation of their professional code of ethics’. But is this grotesque moral inversion of the function of a construction which is designed to save lives not the obscene repudiation of their professional ethic?

And now look at the extra twist to this story:

Eyal Weizman, the Israeli director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith’s College in London, urged action. ‘A boycott would be totally legitimate,’ he said. ‘The wall and the settlements have been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and we should boycott any company which does business, any architects that participate - anyone facilitating these human rights violations and war crimes’...The biologist Steven Rose, who led the British academic boycott of Israel from 2002, said: ‘Architecture and planning are an integral part of the fascist* apartheid state.’

One of the most tragic and disturbing features of the history of Jewish persecution is the part that has been played by certain Jews who, for a variety of reasons, have done the dirty work of those who wish to destroy the Jewish people. It is a pathology which is rampant at present, with numerous Jewish academics in particular helping foment the lies and hatred which are steadily demonising and delegitimising Israel and putting Jews in peril.

In America too, the boycott movement is accelerating. The Palestine Chronicle tells us that student activists are meeting later this month at Georgetown University for the fifth annual Palestine Solidarity Movement conference.

They will discuss rebuilding the campus divestment movement and hold training sessions for new and experienced solidarity activists. Speakers include Palestinian activist Omar Barghouthi; British academic boycott advocate Sue Blackwell; Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada; and dozens of veteran divestment activists.

Training sessions in hatred and lies; and in a university, no less, a supposed custodian of truth and enlightenment. Meanwhile, three major New York-based foundations are sponsoring an American Association of University Professors’ conference in Italy on Monday, which has invited virulent enemies of Israel to discuss a boycott. This is despite the fact that one of the articles circulated in advance of the meeting was found to have been what executives of two of these foundations called ‘an anti-Semitic paper by a Holocaust denier.’

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only) reports:

The article,‘The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany: The Economic Boycott of 1933,’ appeared in the January/February 2001 issue of The Barnes Review, a magazine of revisionist history published by Willis A. Carto, founder of the conservative group Liberty Lobby, which ceased operations in 2001. The article states that Hitler’s actions against Jewish people were ‘a defensive -- not an offensive -- measure,’ and were a response to Jewish leaders’ call for an economic boycott of Germany. The AAUP included the article in a packet of reading materials it sent to 23 scholars and university leaders scheduled to participate in the meeting, which was to have started next Monday in Bellagio, Italy.

Roger W. Bowen, the association’s general secretary, sent an e-mail message last week apologizing to the participants. And in a statement posted on its website, the association said the inclusion of the article was ‘an egregious error.’ ‘Nothing of this sort will happen again,’ the statement said. Ruth Flower, a spokeswoman for the organization, said the Barnes Review piece was retrieved by staff members searching online for reading material for the conference, as they looked for articles that had ‘boycott’ in the title. But she said the AAUP had not been able to reconstruct how it came to include the piece in the packet sent to participants.

The bodies funding the conference, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Nathan Cummings Foundations, issued statements saying they doubted the conference’s viability. As Alec Magnet reported in the New York Sun (subscription only):

The president of the Ford Foundation, Susan Berresford, and the president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Lance Lindlom, issued a joint statement yesterday that said, ‘While we accept that this offensive paper does not reflect the views of the AAUP we believe its errant inclusion in the conference materials has undermined the credibility of this conference as a forum for intellectually honest and rigorous exchange.’... Ms. Berresford and Mr. Lindlom called the distribution of ‘an anti-Semitic paper by a Holocaust denier’ an ‘unacceptable error.’

An ‘unacceptable error,’ eh? But the Ford Foundation has previous form on this issue.

At a 2001 United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, radical antisemitic groups the Ford Foundation funded dominated the agenda. In November of 2003, under pressure from Congress, the press, and American Jewish organizations, Ms. Berresford announced that the Ford Foundation ‘deeply’ regretted some of its funding of anti-Israel groups. She announced new policies requiring guarantees not to engage in bigotry or promote violence or terrorism.

So much for that particular promise. Durban was of course the notorious carnival of anti-Jewish hatred sponsored by the UN. As Alan Dershowitz has commented, this AAUP meeting promises to be an academic Durban. And it appears that the conference is still going ahead. The AAUP General Secretary has said that

...academic boycotts are irreconcilable with the purposes of higher education

but also that

We believe, rather, that the conference should be held now, with the same group of invitees, and with every intention of mounting an academically rigorous conference.

Those who note the absence of intellectual rigour in the confluence of those two statements might not share his optimism. And as James Lewis correctly notes in The American Thinker:

When you agree to debate a question, you legitimize the issue. This is a standard tactic of campus radicals around the US, who hold positions of power in AAUP. Decent people do not sponsor headline conferences on certain questions. Should we consider the death penalty for Danish cartoonists? Decent people just take a stand on those questions. You can tell a lot about someone’s decency by the questions they ask.

The list of people in both Britain and America who are boycotting decency altogether is getting longer by the day.

*Update: Steven Rose says he was misquoted by the Independent, and what he actually said was that Israel was a 'racist apartheid state'.

Whoops, what a giveaway.

It turns out that the Danish cartoons were republished on the front page of the Egyptian newspaper al Fagr back in October. Did the editor of al Fagr get death threats? Did mobs ransack the world for Egyptians to kidnap in revenge? Were there enraged demonstrations in Egypt at this insult to Islam? Of course not. There wasn’t so much as a peep of protest. But when various European newspapers republished them, there was global insurrection. That’s because, contrary to the cultural cringe from much of the British media and the man of straw in the British Foreign Office, this uproar isn’t about insulting the religion at all. It’s a put up job by the jihadis.

Amir Taheri has sussed the whole thing in the New York Post – a view that seems to be shared, incidentally, by Condoleezza Rice. According to Taheri, the attempt by the Danish imams to use the cartoons to whip up anti-Danish feeling – amplified by their inclusion of three obscene cartoons of the Prophet which they appear to have passed off falsely as having been published by Jyllands Posten in order to further inflame passions – found a particularly receptive audience in Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, that well known moderate Muslim Brother beloved of Ken Livingstone, the Metropolitan Police and the British establishment, and who delivered a (false) theological imprimatur for world-wide protest. And then Iran and Syria spotted an opening:

For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran's purposes, than to portray Denmark as ‘an enemy of Islam’ and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council? To regain the initiative from the Sunni-Salafi groups, Ahmadinejad quickly ordered a severing of commercial ties with Denmark, thus portraying the Islamic Republic as the Muslim world’s leader in the anti-Danish campaign.

Syria was next to jump on the bandwagon, again for mercenary reasons. The United Nations wants Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and five of his relatives and aides, including his younger brother, for questioning in the murder of Lebanon's former premier, Rafiq al-Hariri. (Assad has tried to negotiate immunity for himself and his brother in exchange for handing over the others — but the U.N. wouldn't play.) As with Iran’s nuclear program, the Syrian dossier will reach the Security Council under Danish presidency. To portray Denmark as ‘an enemy of the Prophet’ would not be such a bad thing when the council, as expected, points the finger at Assad and his regime as responsible for a series of political murders, including that of Hariri.

The Danish-cartoons cow will also be milked in another way: Tehran and Damascus have launched a diplomatic campaign to put the issue of ‘protecting religions against blasphemy’ on the Security Council agenda. If that were to happen, issues such as Iran's quest for the atomic bomb and Syria's murder machine in Lebanon might be pushed aside, at least as far as world public opinion is concerned. People watching TV news may think that the whole Muslim world is ablaze with righteous rage translated into ‘spontaneous demonstrations.’ The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, even if offended by cartoons which they have not seen, have stayed away from the street shows put on by the radicals and the Iranian and Syrian security services.

In Britain, the street shows are set to continue. Two more massive Muslim demonstrations are planned. Today’s newspapers dumbly fell for the spin and dutifully reported that these would be organised by ‘moderate’ Muslims. as opposed to the mob that demanded murder and bombings last weekend. These ‘moderates’ are the ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, who moderately boycott Holocaust Day, moderately back the Jew-hating, gay-hating, human-bombs-in-Israel-and-Iraq-supporting Qaradawi and moderately want to criminalise anyone who even talks about Islamic terrorism; and the Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood whose offshoots are busy terrorising Iraq and Israel and are a principal ideological core of the jihad against the west.

This show of force on Britain’s streets will put muscle behind the ‘moderate’ demand by 300 ‘moderate’ Islamic religious leaders who want the law to be changed and the Press Complaints Commission code of conduct to be tightened to stop the publication of any images of the prophet Mohammed. Not only is this a demand for special treatment, not only is it an attempt to bludgeon Britain into censoring speech about Islam, it is also – according to Amir Taheri again, this time in the Wall Street Journal -- based not on religion but on political extremism:

The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan -- who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British Home Secretary -- can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false. There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else...Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers...

Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam just as the Nazi party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims ‘suicide-martyrdom’ as the highest goal for all true believers. The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of ‘laughing at religion,’ at times to the point of irreverence.

John O’Sullivan sums it all up well on National Review Online:

Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation. For, contrary to much ‘responsible’ commentary, Jyllands-Posten, the small regional Danish newspaper that first published the caricatures of Mohammed, did not do so from trivial motives. This was not the kind of avant garde ‘shock’ tactics on show in Piss Christ or in the Sensations exhibition in Brooklyn that included a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung. It was a serious and justified protest against the fact that Danish artists had been frightened out of illustrating a children's book on Islam and Mohammed.

They feared for their lives — and their fear was reasonable. In Holland only last year the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a radical Islamist for his semi-pornographic film criticizing Islam as hostile to women. His collaborator, the Somali-Dutch feminist MP, Ayaab Hirsi Ali, is now under permanent police protection since radical Islamist terrorists have threatened to kill her too. And murderous intimidation of this kind is now not uncommon in Western Europe. Nor were the Danish cartoons all as crude and pointless as some critics have alleged in their earnest search for reasons to hold "both sides" guilty. One cartoon shows the Prophet with his turban evolving into a bomb. Insulting? Maybe. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Or maybe a perfectly fair comment on the arguments of radical Islamists that their religion justifies the murder of innocent bystanders, on the subsidies that Muslim governments give to suicide bombers, and on the thousands of Muslims baying for blood (and occasionally obtaining it) in response to a caricature. Three cartoons were, indeed, more harsh and insulting than the rest. But these had not been published originally in Jyllands-Posten. They were added by the radical Islamists who distributed the cartoons around the Muslim world. These men committed the very blasphemies that they now use as an excuse for attacks on Danes and Christians.

Vile though it is, this trickery by radical Islamists at least demonstrates the uselessness of appeasing their demands for censorship. If they are granted, our concessions will merely be the springboard for a further attack on Western liberty. And if we disobligingly refuse to furnish them with a pretext, the Islamists will manufacture one as Hitler used to manufacture border incidents in order to justify his planned aggressions. So we might as well fight in the first ditch rather than the last.

Alas – in Britain the ditch is pretty sparsely peopled right now.

Scott Burgess on the Daily Ablution is doing a simply magnificent job decoding the current lunacy. Read, and marvel at what has happened to Britain.

So now we can see the true extent of Muslim moderation in Britain. The Times today published the results of a Populus poll of British Muslims, commissioned by a coalition of Jewish community groups, which produced some truly terrifying findings for Britain’s Jews:

Nearly two fifths (37 per cent) believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target 'as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East'. Moreover, only 52 per cent think that the state of Israel has the right to exist, with 30 per cent disagreeing, a big minority. One in six of all Muslims questioned thinks suicide bombings can sometimes be justified in Israel, though many fewer (7 per cent) say the same about Britain. This is broadly comparable to the number justifying suicide attacks in ICM and YouGov polls of British Muslims after the July 7 attacks…

12 per cent of 18 to 24-year-old Muslims believe that suicide bombings can be justified here, and 21 per cent in Israel. A fifth of all Muslims, and a quarter of men, say suicide attacks against the military can be justified, though only 7 per cent say this about civilians.

Furthermore, other findings showed that 53% believed British Jews had 'too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy', and no fewer than 46% thought the Jewish community was 'in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics'.

These are -- as has been the case in previous similar polls -- horrifying figures which reveal that a huge proportion of British Muslims are not ‘moderate’ by any reasonable interpretation of the word. There are officially 1.6 million Muslims and only about 300,000 identifying British Jews. If these findings are accurate – and this was a small poll of 500 Muslims – it would mean that around 600,000 British Muslims believed Britain’s 300,000 Jews were a ‘legitimate target’.

Note also the reason: the Middle East conflict. So much for those who claim that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are totally distinct. Well, forgive us but among the beleaguered 300,000 it doesn’t quite feel like that. If there’s still any doubt about the inseparability of these two hatreds, other findings of this poll reveal both the horrifying extent and depth of the anti-Jewish prejudice among British Muslims and the extent to which they have swallowed the demented, Nazi-style libels and conspiracy theories which pour unstoppably out of the Muslim world. Nearly half of British Muslims actually believe this stuff. That is a staggering proportion, and a vast problem. But who can be surprised, when it is a stock-in-trade of the Muslim world that the Jews are behind every single bad thing that happens? Thus Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed that the Danish cartoons were an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over Hamas’s win in the Palestinian elections. Eh? The cartoons were published early last autumn. Hamas won the elections last month. No matter – doubtless those diabolical Jews can make the calendar run backwards, too.

When will the penny finally drop that this hatred of the Jews is not primarily caused by the Middle East conflict but by the fact that vast numbers of Muslims – including, it seems, getting on for a million in Britain -- really do believe, with all the credulousness of their Jew-hating forbears across the globe, that the Jews are a conspiracy for evil in the world? The Middle East conflict is the result, not the cause, of this appalling hatred. ‘Too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy’, eh? With Britain’s ‘camel-corps’ Foreign Office, and an establishment which is bending over backwards to appease the Muslim and Arab world?! If it wasn’t so terrifying, it would be absolutely hilarious.

But it is indeed terrifying, not least because of the attitude of the wider British society which, far from springing to the defence of the Jews against this terrible prejudice and mortal threat, is either indifferent to it, actually shares the prejudice or blames the Jews of Israel for causing the threat. Far from correcting the lies that underpin the Muslim hatred of the Jews and of Israel – and beyond them, in a direct line, the west -- the British intelligentsia helps foment them.

Thus a quite appalling article in the Guardian – even by its own standards – which sought with unprecedented ferocity and malice to paint Israel as an apartheid state, even though anyone with even a passing knowledge of that country can see at a glance that this is an utterly baseless lie and despicable libel. Did I say article? It ran to 14 pages over two days. What kind of sick obsession is this?

The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) has published a riposte. As it says:

• Did black South Africans have the right to full citizenship in apartheid South Africa? No
• Are Israeli Arabs citizens with full rights? Yes

• Did black South Africans have full political rights in apartheid South Africa? No
• Do Arab citizens of Israel have full political rights, including voting rights and representation in the government? Arab citizens of Israel are full citizens with voting rights and representation in the government. There are currently 11 Israeli Arab and Druze MKs.

• Did black South Africans have the right to pursue any type of education or employment they desired in apartheid South Africa? No
•Do Arab citizens of Israel have the right to pursue any type of education of employment they choose in Israel? Yes

•Did apartheid South Africa have segregated public transport? Yes
•Does Israel have segregated public transport? No

•Was there severe censorship of the press in apartheid South Africa? Yes
•Is there complete freedom of speech and freedom of press in Israel? Yes

•Who were the majority in apartheid South Africa? The black community
•Who are the majority in Israel? The Jews

This extensive piece of work published in the Guardian offends not only British Jews but all friends of democracy as well as friends of Israel. Direct comparisons to apartheid South Africa and insinuations about collusion between Jews and Nazis are simply abhorrent. The content and associated imagery are inflammatory and one-sided. They are conveyed with a degree of emotion and hatred that should have immediately alerted the Guardian’s editors to question the writer’s professional integrity. There is a difference between criticising what Israel does and what Israel is. This article puts Israel’s right to exist in question and therefore crosses a very dangerous red line.

At any time, crossing this most dangerous red line would have been utterly disgusting, a travesty of journalism. But at this particular juncture, with Muslims in Britain and around the world being incited to violence against Jews in particular and the west in general on the basis of just such lies and libels, with demonstrators on the streets of London calling for more human bomb attacks on Britain and for the beheading of people they don’t like, with Islamists rampaging around the Middle East seeking Europeans to kidnap at random and with Iran racing to equip itself with nuclear weapons to annihilate Israel, such an ‘article’ takes on a different hue altogether. Along with the unrivalled platform the paper affords the Muslim Brotherhood on its op-ed pages, the article looks like a placard for the Farringdon Road wing of the jihad.

The British press is supposed to regulate itself. I hope there are complaints about this monstrosity to the Press Complaints Commission; if the British press had any moral fibre left, it would call the Guardian to account not just for this egregious display of its pathological hatred of Israel but for the likely consequences in these most incendiary of times. The press is supposed to spread enlightenment; instead, articles like this merely spread the darkest kind of prejudice which is casting ever lengthening shadows over Britain.

I was watching Boris Johnson's BBC2 TV programme The Dream of Rome this evening, marvelling at his re-invention in yet another new guise as telly presenter, when I nearly fell out of my armchair having heard him say that the Christians who martyred themselves for their faith under the Romans were the equivalent of modern Islamic suicide bombers. What astounding moral illiteracy. The Christians were real martyrs; that is, they were killed, or sometimes actively sought their own killing, for their faith. The Islamic suicide bombers are mass murderers; they kill others for their faith. The Islamic suicide bombers use their bodies as lethal weapons to do mass murder. That is not martyrdom but homicide.

Shouldn't the Tories' higher education spokesman know the difference?

For those who are interested, BBC Radio Four's The Moral Maze, on which I am a panellist, put on a special edition last night devoted to the Danish cartoon conflagration. You can find it here.

The still escalating confrontation over the Danish cartoons dramatically illustrates the now pathological reluctance of the leaders of Britain and America to face up to the blindingly obvious and the extent to which they have already run up the white flag in the face of clerical fascism. With holy war declared openly upon the west, with death threats being issued against cartoonists and editors, with Danes, Scandinavians and other Europeans being hunted for kidnap and in fear of their lives, with blood-curdling intimidation, with mob demonstrations, calls to behead westerners and rallying cries for ‘holy war’ by Islam against Europe, the governments of Britain and America are busy prostrating themselves before this terror, apologising for ‘causing offence’ and blaming the victims of this assault; while their intelligentsia earnestly debates whether it is wrong to insult someone else’s religion, for all the world as if this were a university ethics seminar rather than a world war being waged by clerical fascism against free societies and with people in hiding and in fear of their lives for having exercised the right to protest at religious violence and intimidation.

Thus the spineless British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said:

There is freedom of speech, we all respect that, but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.

While in the US, according to the Times, State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said:

We all respect freedom of the press but...inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.

Subsequently another State Department apparatchik tied himself up in knots in this press briefing trying simultaneously to condemn religious insults and defend freedom of speech against intimidation:

Our response is to say that while we certainly don’t agree with, support, or in some cases, we condemn the views that are aired in public that are published in media organizations around the world, we, at the same time, defend the right of those individuals to express their views. For us, freedom of expression is at the core of our democracy and it is something that we have shed blood and treasure around the world to defend and we will continue to do so. That said, there are other aspects to democracy, our democracy — democracies around the world — and that is to promote understanding, to promote respect for minority rights, to try to appreciate the differences that may exist among us.

Er... right. Would anyone really ‘shed blood and treasure’ to defend such equivocation?

Yet while declaring that free speech should be limited to avoid being insulting or gratuitously inflammatory, Britain also believes that it should be totally unlimited when Muslims incite mass murder.

For two days now, hundreds of Muslims have been demonstrating outside the Danish Embassy in London. ‘Bomb bomb Denmark’ and ‘Nuke nuke Denmark' they roared yesterday. Their placards screamed: ‘Exterminate those who slander Islam’, ‘Behead those who insult Islam’, ‘Europe you’ll come crawling when muhajideen come roaring’, ‘As Muslims unite we are prepared to fight’, ‘Europe you will pay, fantastic four are on their way’ ( a presumed reference to last July’s suicide bombers in London).

This was outright and sustained incitement to violence and to murder. What action was taken against the perpetrators? Nothing. Let’s hear what Jack Straw said again, that freedom of speech carried no obligation ‘to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory’. Now look at what happened when passers-by angered by yesterday’s demonstration in London thought that what they were seeing went far beyond Straw’s definition of what was intolerable. As the Times reports:

There were sporadic clashes with passers-by over chants praising the four British-born suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on three Underground trains and a London bus last July 7. People who tried to snatch away what they regarded as offending placards were held back by police. Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protesters, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the ‘Magnificent 19’ — the terrorists who hijacked the aircrafts used on September 11, 2001 — and others threatening further attacks on London. The officers said that their role was to ensure public order and safety. Police had closed off main roads to allow the procession a clear route. Protesters screamed: ‘UK, you must pray — 7/7 is on its way.’ Organisers of the protest insisted that there would be more rallies over the weekend and predicted that British Muslims would lead the backlash against those mocking Islam.

Of course they will – because Britain is leading the retreat. The man of straw congratulated the British media for their restraint in not republishing the Danish cartoons, praising them for what he called their ‘considerable responsibility and sensitivity’. A Foreign Secretary might manage to keep a straight face when talking cobblers, but really! The British media have hardly been overcome after all these years by a sudden and wholly uncharacteristic outbreak of cultural sensibility. The reason they didn’t republish the cartoons was because they were terrified of provoking a violent reaction against themselves.

In other words, the intimidation has worked. The media are now craven. Self-censorship over Islam has been the order of the day ever since the Rushdie affair – and it was instructive to see that yet more ‘moderate’ British Muslims have been saying that the cartoons would never have been published had Rushdie been killed. That’s the kind of comment that these days doesn’t even merit any comment in dhimmi Britain. Now the BBC faces the threat of violence, even though it did not even show the cartoons properly but just wafted them across the screen. Not craven enough, chaps! Memo to programme editors: must take care to abase selves unequivocally in future.

Britain’s culture of denial means that even now, the issue is being presented as one of freedom of speech. But it is ever more obvious that this is a war on the west, prosecuted in the name of Islam against the west’s core values – and against those moderate Muslims who are also alarmed by what is now so clearly erupting.

The cartoon jihad has caused protests in Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan where 800 people converged on the Danish mission in Islamabad. The Pakistan Government has called for economic and political sanctions against ‘offending’ countries that supported publication. The Telegraph reported:

Mullah Krekar, a radical imam living in Norway, was quoted by the Dagbladet daily as saying: ‘These drawings are a declaration of war.’ But other Muslim community groups called for moderation and calm. Norway’s Islamic Council said in a statement: ‘Muslims in Norway feel violated twice in this case - first through the caricatures then by the Norwegian flag being burned’...

In Sudan, protests at the cartoons attracted as many as 15,000 people. Politicians then led the crowds in a march on the United Nations offices in Khartoum and called for holy war against any move to send a UN force to Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region. In Iraq, thousands of people took to the streets after Friday prayers. Christians said they feared retaliatory attacks. In the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, more than 150 Muslim extremists stormed an office building housing the Danish embassy. They pelted a Danish coat of arms with eggs then tore down a Danish flag and burnt it.

Even more striking has been the reaction of Palestinians in Gaza:

An imam in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that those behind the drawings should have their heads cut off. Protesters in Ramallah chanted: ‘Bin Laden, our beloved, Denmark must be blown up.’ About 10,000 demonstrators, including Hamas gunmen firing in the air, marched through Gaza City to the Palestinian legislature, where they climbed on to the roof and waved Hamas banners.

‘We are ready to redeem you with our souls and our blood, our beloved Prophet,’ they chanted. ‘Down, down Denmark.’ Before dawn, Palestinian militants threw a pipe bomb at a French cultural centre in Gaza City and many Palestinians started boycotting European goods, especially those from Denmark.

Foreign diplomats, aid workers and journalists began pulling out of Palestinian areas because of kidnapping threats against some Europeans. Gunmen in Nablus briefly kidnapped Christopher Kasten, 21, a German teaching English at a local school. Palestinian police rescued him unharmed.

Suddenly, the veil has lifted. Denmark of course has no form whatsoever in the Middle East dispute. Now the Palestinians are suddenly revealed as part of the Islamic jihad against the infidels. Well, there’s a surprise. The canny guys in Hamas have spotted this particular elephant trap and are taking steps to avoid it. The Times reports:

In demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza yesterday a preacher told 9,000 worshippers at one mosque: ‘We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible [for the cartoons]’ But as thousands converged on the Palestinian parliament building, Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas spokesman, told the crowd that, whatever their anger, they should not disgrace their religion.

Let us remind ourselves again – the cartoons were not an attack on Islam. They were instead a protest against the violent intimidation being practised in its name after the author of a (totally inoffensive) children’s book about Islam had difficulty in finding an illustrator because artists feared they might be attacked. Since then, the violence that has erupted across the world has more than proved the cartoonists’ point. This was noted by Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, who in striking contrast to his British straw counterpart said in the Telegraph:

‘It is not normal to caricature a whole religion as an extremist or terrorist movement.’ But the extreme reaction to the cartoons ‘would suggest the caricaturists were right,’ he added.

The problem is that the perpetrators of aggression, suffering from a pathological inferiority complex about the weakness of Islamic culture and firmly believing the lies and libels with which they have been indoctrinated about Jews and the west, invert their own aggression as an attack upon Islam by their victims.

Thus the Times reported remarks by Liaqat Hussain, the secretary of the Bradford Central Mosque, who although adding as a postscript that any protest should be peaceful nevertheless turned the cartoons from a defence against Islamist intimidation into evidence of a world-wide attack upon Islam.

‘This is clearly a demonstration by the Christian world of hostility towards the Muslim community,’ he said. ‘This has come from all the nations of Europe and it reflects an ongoing campaign against Muslims by the Western powers. You can’t differentiate between the Western world and Christianity; you can’t separate what’s happened from the people of those countries and their governments. I blame all of the Western population because these cartoons reflect the opinion of the people.’ He said that the publication of the cartoons across Europe was a deliberate act of provocation. ‘We have already seen the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia and we’ve witnessed the support by Christians and the West for Israel and its atrocities against the Palestinians,’ he said. ‘Now we’re seeing the early stages of creating a suitable environment for a Muslim holocaust in Europe.’

The madness of this protest deepens when one considers that the claim at its heart, that pictorial representations of the Prophet are forbidden in Islam, is not true. Like so much else, it is all a matter of interpretation; but the fact remains that there have been many representations of the Prophet in Islamic art over the centuries. This website shows many images of the Prophet in medieval Islamic paintings and illuminated manuscripts, some showing his face in full, others with it blanked out.

In the Telegraph, Charles Moore makes an excellent point:

There is no reason to doubt that Muslims worry very much about depictions of Mohammed. Like many, chiefly Protestant, Christians, they fear idolatry. But, as I write, I have beside me a learned book about Islamic art and architecture which shows numerous Muslim paintings from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and so on. These depict the Prophet preaching, having visions, being fed by his wet nurse, going on his Night-Journey to heaven, etc. The truth is that in Islam, as in Christianity, not everyone agrees about what is permissible. Some of these depictions are in Western museums. What will the authorities do if the puritan factions within Islam start calling for them to be removed from display (this call has been made, by the way, about a medieval Christian depiction of the Prophet in Bologna)? Will their feeling of 'offence' outweigh the rights of everyone else?

Obviously, in the case of the Danish pictures, there was no danger of idolatry, since the pictures were unflattering. The problem, rather, was insult. But I am a bit confused about why someone like Qaradawi thinks it is insulting to show the Prophet's turban turned into a bomb, as one of the cartoons does. He never stops telling us that Islam commands its followers to blow other people up.

Moore also asks a very pertinent question. Since the cartoons were actually published last autumn and protests at the time were confined to demonstrations in Denmark, why have they only now erupted across the world?

One possible if dismaying answer, which should receive more attention, is suggested by David Conway on the Civitas website yesterday:

But who wanted or caused the heat to become so turned up and why at that this particular moment? The clue to the answers to this second question lies in a second event almost certain to occur to today, if it has not already happened by the time this blog gets posted. This is the likely decision today in Vienna by the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its programme of nuclear research. If that decision should occur, when the UN Security Council gets round to considering what form of sanctions to impose on Iran, guess to whom chairmanship of the Council will have passed. You’ve got it... plucky little Denmark.

Suddenly, the pieces fall into shape. The rumpus suddenly escalated, complete with fabricated offensive cartoons, to so enflame Muslim opinion that Denmark could be intimidated directly through a threatened Muslim boycott of its goods, or indirectly by the EU fearful of a wider boycott, into voting in favour of Iran.
Whatever the Security Council eventually may decide over sanctions against Iran, it is unlikely to deter that country from continuing to develop the technology needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, Prospect of its acquisition of them is likely to trigger a nuclear arms race in the region, as well as, sooner or later, oblige Israel or the US to make some pre-emptive strike against it to prevent its programme from reaching completion.

At best, such a strike will succeed, but not without precipitating a conventional war in the Middle East the repercussions of which will not escape Europe in the form of suicide bombings. At worst, pre-emption will fail, Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, and, with a President of that country as gung-ho as its current one, we all receive tickets for a one-way trip to oblivion.

It is not a thrilling prospect for sure. But that is all the more reason why the West needs to remain strong, united, and resolved to resist the challenge of militant Islam. If Europe has recently been made more so than it has been of late, it has to thank for that, paradoxically, the malicious militancy of the mullahs and imams whose fabrication of the grounds of the current crisis has given the West a second wake-up call to the true scale and nature of the current danger that it faces to which all too many Europeans failed to have become alerted by the first wake-up call given on September 11th.

Whether or not Conway is right about this, the cartoon jihad has made one thing crystal clear. No more alibis. The roots of global terror do not lie in Iraq, nor in Israel/Palestine, nor in Chechnya, Kashmir or any of the other iconic conflicts which are said to be its cause. They lie instead in the Islamists’ rage that their religious culture is not in power across the world, their determination to subordinate that world to its tenets and their truly pathological belief that it is they who are under attack if their victims dare defend themselves. Twelve scribbled drawings have lifted the veil -- on both the nature of the threat and the disarray that greets it.

It was back in November when I first wrote about the Danish cartoon furore. At that time, Muslims were rioting in Denmark over the images published in Jyllands-Posten and no-one was taking any notice. Now the issue has snowballed into a conflict which is spreading across Europe.

It is worth reminding ourselves at this juncture what the issue was about from the start of the affair. Gratuitous offensiveness towards Islam or any other religion is not to be approved of. But not only is censorship of such offensiveness another matter, and violence and intimidation arising from it another matter still, this was not in any event gratuitous offence.

The offending cartoons, playing on the violence committed in the name of Islam, illustrated an article about the perils of self-censorship on the subject of this religion following the difficulties encountered by a children’s author in obtaining any illustrations for his book on the subject because the artists he approached were frightened for their lives. It was to draw attention to this disturbing state of affairs, in which people were being intimidated in the name of Islam into censoring perfectly innocent free speech, that the cartoons were published. They were therefore levelling a satirical criticism not at the Prophet but at the intimidation being practised in the name of the religion, a very different matter.

The truth behind that criticism has now been reinforced and amplified many times over to create an international crisis. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, took a commendably firm line when he said: ‘I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press.’ Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten bravely held the line, saying ‘We will not apologise, because we live in Denmark under Danish law, and we have freedom of speech in this country. If we apologised, we would betray the generations who have fought for this right, and the moderate Muslims who are democratically minded.’

But the Muslim world then targeted Denmark for intimidation. Danish Muslim leaders and imams fomented hatred against Denmark within the Islamic world by distributing vile pictures of the Prophet which Jyllands-Posten had never published. This outright fabrication and incitement by Danish citizens appalled Prime Minister Rasmussen, who said: ‘I am speechless that those people, whom we have given the right to live in Denmark and where they freely have chosen to stay, are now touring Arab countries and inciting antipathy towards Denmark and the Danish people’.

The cartoonists then received death threats, along with Danish citizens in Saudi Arabia. Denmark was threatened with human bomb attacks. Danish goods were boycotted around the Arab world. The Saudi and Libyan ambassadors to Denmark were recalled. The hysteria engulfed Norwegians and Swedes too, who found themselves threatened too simply for being part of Scandinavia along with Norway. Yet for becoming the latest unlikely front in the war declared upon civilisation by religious fascism, Denmark has not been supported but criticised from the United Nations and the EU. This was a staggering reaction when one considers the fact that relatively mild images making a valid political point were condemned by the EU and UN; while the truly hate-filled, disgusting images about Jews that pour out of the Arab and Muslim world portraying them as diabolical, Satanic, bestial, repellent and inhuman – in the service of lies and libels designed to incite mass murder – attract no opprobrium from the EU or UN at all.

Jyllands-Posten has now apologised for causing offence. But the furore has moved up yet another notch. Publications in various countries – France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain – have re-published the Danish cartoons in a gesture of solidarity and to show that the core western value of freedom of expression would not be cowed by clerical fascism. This was marred by the abrupt sacking of the editor of one of these publications, France- Soir, by its French-Egyptian owner. More heartening was the reaction by the Jordanian independent tabloid al-Shihan which reprinted three of the cartoons on Thursday. As the BBC reported:

‘Muslims of the world be reasonable,’ wrote editor Jihad Momani. ‘What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?’

The New York Times reports that Carsten Juste, the editor in chief of Jyllands-Posten, has concluded from all this that freedom of speech has lost.

‘My guess is that no one will draw the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark in the next generation, and therefore I must say with deep shame that they have won,’ he said in an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tiden.

And people still say there is no clash of civilisations. There is – and on this evidence, the west is losing it.

Anyone who would like further enlightenment about the intellectual feebleness, confusion and downright moral bankruptcy that now characterise British public debate should grit their teeth and listen to last night's BBC Radio Four Moral Maze, in which I took part, and which discussed the implications of the creation of the democratic republic of Hamastan.