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 spe