Emanuele Ottolenghi has written a really superb analysis of the Israeli election. Rightly lamenting the fact that voter apathy/disaffection failed to give Israel the strong government that it so desperately needs, he observes:

The real losers are the Israelis and judging by their apathy, they probably deserve it: By not voting, they brought it upon themselves. Like their fallen hero, Ariel Sharon, who is in a deep coma in a hospital, they sleepwalked through an election where they had a chance to shape their destiny but instead gave their new and untested leaders an inconclusive verdict.

Still, a clear message emerged from this vote. Israelis are ready to partition the land, though they cannot trust the Palestinian give-and-take. History offers its ironies, and it is remarkable that on the day Israelis voted to seal their willingness to endorse the partition of the land, a Hamas government won an easy majority in the Palestinian parliament and renewed its militant vision. While Israelis are prepared to endorse a two-state solution, Palestinians, through their Hamas-led Palestinian entity, are ready for a final solution only...

Olmert wants to redraw Israel's boundaries today. He will have to avoid the nightmarish scenario of a civil war that a narrow center-left coalition would no doubt usher in and will have to negotiate the consensus with the right. That, even in ideal conditions, would take longer than the time it took Rabin's far more stable coalition to sign Oslo and it would cost infinitely more than the Disengagement did: this time, it would evict tens of thousands of settlers from their homes, and it is the heartland of Biblical Israel that they would be asked to abandon for an uncertain future.

But conditions are not ideal. While Israelis were busy voting (or not voting), a Katyusha rocket landed in southern Israel, killing two Beduin shepherds. No doubt, now commentators will bend over backward to say that it was not Hamas, but some "militant" group that "rejects" the "peace process." Whoever pulled the trigger, Gaza today is closer to Tel Aviv than ever before. And the presence of much more efficient, elusive, and sophisticated weaponry in Gaza seven months only after the disengagement shows how frail and fragile the Kadima vision was, how unreliable the international community who should be monitoring the borders is, and how ineffectual (not to say worse) are the Egyptians in Sinai when it comes to weapons' smuggling into Gaza. And that withdrawal does not a peace make.

With Israel now encircled by Iran's proxies and Islamist fanatics, the last thing the country needed was an inconclusive result. It got just that. It will reap the whirlwinds of its apathy.

It cannot be said too often that Israel’s agony is that it is damned if it does and damned if it does not; at terrible risk if it disengages from the territories and at (in my view) even greater -- because more fundamentally existential -- risk if it does not. Should it talk to Hamas? Of course not. Does it have any choice but to deal with Hamas? Of course not. All Israel’s choices are always terrible ones; all entail a fearful penalty that it is forced to pay. The only question is, as it always has been, which is the least worst of these terrible alternatives.

Is this not also why the Israeli voters are ‘apathetic’? A less politically apathetic people cannot be imagined: fixated upon every political development, glued to the news bulletins every hour, because for them politics is literally the difference between life and death. A more insanely optimistic people cannot also be imagined: seizing upon every hope of peace, every scrap of evidence, however slender, that the Arabs may not really want to kill them or destroy the Jewish state. But it is in fact the optimism born of the deepest possible despair, clutching at any straw in order not to face the possibility that is simply too terrible to be even contemplated -- that there really is no end to this Arab hatred, and that there is no end to the state of siege that Israel has been forced to endure since its inception.

It has defended itself through wars. It has defended itself through negotiating for peace. It has defended itself by dialogue through discreet back-channels with reformist Palestinian Arabs. It has defended itself by the targeted killing of genocidal Palestinian Arabs. It has defended itself by electing warlike expansionist right-wingers. It has defended itself by electing peace-at-any-price left-wingers. Yet whatever it does, nothing brings an end to the agony. Instead, to its bewilderment and incomprehension, much of the free world has decided that it must be treated as a global pariah because it has dared to attempt to defend itself at all.

Now, as it reels punch-drunk round the geopolitical ring, fate has dealt it another cruel twist. No sooner was it presented with another possible escape from the trap – to call the Arab bluff, impose upon the Palestinians the state that is the pretended cause of the conflict and then turn its back upon them until they come to agree that life is preferable to death and economic prosperity preferable to mass murder – than the architect of this vision was felled and the country left leaderless.

Shell-shocked, traumatised and dysfunctional after decades of unremitting abuse for the crime of daring to exist at all; with rockets being fired daily from Hamastan and genocide being invoked from Iran; with people screaming that the government is paving the way to national extinction by coming out of the territories; with people screaming that the government is paving the way to national extinction by not coming out of enough of the territories fast enough; with the ‘greater Israel’ movement having been destroyed by Sharon; with the ‘peace’-camp having been destroyed by Arafat, Hamas and Islamic Jihad; with elderly Israelis scrabbling in refuse heaps for food (!); with a political class that makes Little Piddling borough council look like world statesmen and an electoral system that is a blueprint for permanent national paralysis – is it any wonder that, abruptly finding themselves to be political orphans with the passing of their warrior father, the Israelis lost their confidence in yet another leap into the menacing dark and voted for the Pensioners’ Party instead?

People ask: will the election result make peace more or less likely? Wrong question. The election result is irrelevant to the issue of peace in the Middle East. That is because what the Israelis do cannot affect whether peace comes to the Middle East, because what the Israelis do is not the cause of war in the Middle East. The cause of that war is the fact that Israel exists at all and the drive by the Arab world to eradicate it– and the fact that the free world has refused to acknowledge that simple fact for the past half century is the most important reason why this murderous impasse still continues. Paying lip-service to its ‘right to exist’ – an avowal which calls that right into question merely by articulating it – the so-called civilised west has nevertheless been content to let Israel swing in the wind while its attackers are fawned over, traded with, built up, endorsed, promoted, excused, justified and indulged.

What will make peace more likely? If – and only if -- the free world repairs its busted moral compass and starts treating mass murderers as pariahs and defending their victims, rather than the other way round. The chances of that happening, it has to be said, are remote. As a result, the only question arising from Israel’s election result is whether it will make it easier or harder for Israel to defend itself against the unremitting war waged against it; and to that question, the answer will become clear soon enough.

In an important article in the Wall Street Journal, Amir Taheri reports on the fact that the tentative moves towards reform within the Arab world are stalling and tyrants being emboldened by the widespread impression that, after President Bush departs the White House stage, his doctrine will go with him; and then it will be back to business as normal – ie, pre 9/11 appeasement/blind eye to terror/cut and run realpolitik:

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies...

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister. Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the Mediterranean" thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He used that message to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis the U.N. investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once Mr. Bush is gone, the U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy. "They can pass resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr. Ahmadinejad told a gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran last month. According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered the option of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's anti-American posture. Since last February, however, he has revived Syria's militant rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him with a set of cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight in Iraq and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to frustrate that country's democratic ambitions.

Taheri says the same attitude has taken hold in Pakistan, Turkey and Iraq. The perception that the Bush doctrine is a dead duck even while its eponymous founder is still in the White House is clearly at risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Taheri concludes, however, that the view that America will subsequently revert to its old ways is wrong. This is because whoever succeeds President Bush will have no option but to continue with his policy, because the American public know that the alternative is to roll over before the destruction of their country.

Given the progressive loss of nerve that appears to be gripping America, let’s hope he is right.

Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw delivered a speech at the Muslim News awards. Now, whenever ministers address any minority group it is normal for them to utter cloying platitudes and to sidestep anything that might upset their audience. Such is politics. But even by these standards, Straw’s speech takes some beating for sheer unadulterated cravenness in the face of Islamic terrorism. Pondering the tension between Islam and the modern world, he said:

One explanation for this apparent singling out of Islam might be its reputation as a new European religion. In fact, of course, there have been Muslim communities in Europe for centuries. But it is true that in recent decades those communities have grown in size and that Islam is now the fastest growing religion here. Another reason might be the feeling that many people seem to have that Muslims are in some way more religious than followers of other faiths. Again, I think it is probably undeniable that for most of the Muslims whom I know their faith is more obviously apparent in their daily actions and rituals than it is in the daily lives of the majority of people in Britain.

If people want to argue that God does not exist and faith is not necessary, then that is absolutely their right and I respect that view – though I don't happen to agree with it. Besides, the major world faiths have shown remarkable resilience over the centuries. But what I will take issue with is the idea that any faith community here in Britain – and that includes the Muslim community – is in some way excluded from our modern society simply because of a profound and devout religious belief...

In other words, the responsibility for creating this tension lay not with the jihadists but with European society for its intolerance. One might have thought that the main reason for such tension was obviously Islamic terrorism. Yet at no point in his speech did he even mention Islamic terrorism. The nearest he got to it was a glancing reference to ‘criminal’ behaviour on the fringes. The world-wide outbreak of murder, kidnap, rioting and arson that followed the publication of the Danish cartoons was dismissed as merely a ‘distasteful and unacceptable’ reaction by a handful of Muslims, whose distorting impact upon the way Islam was viewed was to be wholly deplored, as was the publication of the cartoons themselves:

The right to freedom of expression is a broad one and something which this country has long held dear. It was the focus of our human rights work during our recent Presidency of the European Union. But the existence of such a right does not mean that it is right – morally right, politically right, socially right – to exercise that freedom without regard to the feelings of others. A large number of Muslims in this country were – understandably – upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomised the learned, peaceful religion of Islam. In doing so they were not being 'unreasonable' or 'un-European'. They were not threatening anyone’s values...

Thus Islamist violence is sanitised, excused and even airbrushed out of the picture altogether. The crisis in relations between the Islamic and Western worlds is entirely the fault of the West. The protest against clerical fascism represented by the Danish cartoons -- whose target was not Islam but the intimidation practised in its name -- was instead an insult to deeply held religious beliefs. And so it was that protest, rather than the clerical fascism, which should not be tolerated.

In the great fight in which we are engaged to defend life and liberty, just which side is the British Foreign Secretary on?

His speech also contained a further possibly ominous reference:

The release of the British hostage, Norman Kember, and two of his companions has been very prominent in the media over the past few days. I believe the calls by many Muslims in this country and fellow British citizens for the safe release of those kidnapped victims and showing their solidarity with their plight may have contributed to their survival.

Let us remind ourselves who these Muslims were who made these calls for the hostages’ safe release. After consultations with the Foreign Office, the Muslim Association of Britain – the British arm of the Muslim Brotherhood which works for the Islamisation of Britain and Europe -- dispatched its president, Anas al-Tikriti, to Iraq to negotiate with the kidnappers. The MAB also persuaded Sheikh al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s mentor and supporter of human bombs in Iraq and Israel, as well as the leaders of Hamas, Hizbollah and 23 other Muslim organisations, to sign a press release calling for Kember and three other hostages to be freed. The al Qaeda leader Abu Qatada was also pressed into service to appeal for their release from his prison cell, as did Moazzam Begg, the British man who had previously been detained at Guantanamo Bay, while Muslims at Finsbury Park mosque -- now run once more by the Brotherhood -- said prayers for Kember’s safe return which were played on televisions across the world.

The British Foreign Secretary has now said, in effect, that the lives of Norman Kember and the other two hostages were saved thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood. What price will the Brotherhood now exact from Britain in return?

An excellent post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer points out both the mainstream media’s egregious selectivity and bias in reporting the Iraq conflict and the sanitised and misleading way in which the three freed ‘peace activist’ hostages have been described:

Last night I was delighted to post Good Military News from Iraq. Insurgents attacked yet another police station south of Baghdad but this time instead of a one side massacre, the police fought back. Moreover, it cordoned the area and captured 76 insurgents including a Syrian. Finally, I thought. Here is a concrete example that the training of Iraqis is beginning to bear fruit. I was glad to see on Google that the story was reported by the NYT and other MSM. Indeed, I expected it to lead the news this morning. Fat Chance. Befuddled I searched the NYT. It was not on the front page. I could not find even a minor headline. Finally, I discovered it on page 16 buried in the middle of a long story focusing on the day's violence in Iraq. The Headline read ‘Insurgents Shower Iraq Police Center with Mortar Shells: A second day of intense attack against paramilitary forces.’ The fact that a Syrian was amongst the captured went unmentioned.

Why did the editors refer to Iraq police as a paramilitary force? I suspect in order to justify the attack on it. An attack on police may seem immoral to the reader. But the term paramilitary has a kind of illegal aura, something akin to militia. All of which fits well into the story the NYT wishes to promote: Iraq is in the midst of a civil war in which neither side has a superior moral or legal claim.
Which Iraq story could be found on the front page? ‘Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited To Lower Ranks.’ The clear implications the editors wished to give is that the real villain in the Iraq saga is the American army. If the NYT did not announce this openly, the men whom these ‘mendacious’ coalition forces rescued last night did and they were handsomely rewarded for their ‘daring’ ...

I am referring, of course, to the 3 Western Aid Workers in Iraq Rescued in Military Operation" which should have been called the three traitorous ingrates who were liberated from terrorists by over indulgent coalition forces. For they were NOT aid workers, they were a group of agitators who went to Iraq in order to teach Iraqis how to charge coalition forces with humanitarian abuse. I heard this morning one of their members complain that they have no yet succeeded in ‘training’ Iraqis to file such charges without outside help and that is the reason the organization may continue to send people to Iraq. When the BBC questioned the morality of these men putting coalition forces in harms way, a friend of the British hostage said huffily that his group remained active in Germany during the Nazi rule. In other words, he compared the occupation forces with the Nazis on the BBC without the reporter uttering a word of rebuttal.

The freed British hostage Norman Kember is returning to Britain to a swelling chorus of dismay that the hostages and their backers in the Christian Peacemaker Teams have ungratefully refused to thank the soldiers who freed them. (Update: Recognising the looming PR disaster, there now seems to have been a belated and half-hearted attempt to thank the soldiers involved in the rescue.) The word ‘ungrateful’ is what might be called typical British understatement – or more to the point, in these morally upside-down days, further graphic evidence of the state of denial that is the current default position in British public discourse over Iraq. For the language being used to describe these people distorts and sanitises what they are doing. They are referred to as ‘pacifists’. But what they are actually doing is campaigning against coalition forces in Iraq and aiding the enemy in doing so. The CPT website claims that they challenge ‘the injustices of the occupation’ and work ‘for the human rights of Iraqi detainees’. Strangely, however, they issue not a word of challenge to the murderous injustices of those engaged in the terrorist war against the coalition and the murderous injustices of those Sunnis who are trying to murder as many Shia as possible. Despite preying upon the feelings of all Iraqis of whatever denomination who simply want the violence to stop, they are therefore not in fact working for the human rights of the Shia who are thus being murdered, merely for the ‘human rights’ of those Iraqis who are trying to murder them.

Similarly on the West Bank they ‘document the harassment suffered by villagers at the hands of solders and settlers’ because of Israel’s security barrier – but fail conspicuously to document the campaign of mass murder by those West Bank inhabitants which made the security barrier necessary in the first place. Now we learn from the Telegraph that the released hostages refused to co-operate with their intelligence debriefers. They boast of ‘getting in the way’ in these terrible conflicts – but what they are getting in the way of is the defence of life and liberty against terrorist mass murder. In other words, far from being neutral humanitarian campaigners they are taking sides – the wrong side, the side of terrorist murder over life and liberty, the side of injustice over justice, of lies over truth, of wrong over right and of darkness over light.

As far as the west is concerned, there is no terrorism going on against Israel at present. Western intellectuals can therefore continue to attack it for being the source of world evil without the tiresome business of having to somehow wrench the spectacle of Israelis being blown to kingdom come to fit their narrative of the all-powerful global Zionist conspiracy. They think this because there are no reports whatsoever – at least in the British media – of the rocket attacks that have been mounted from Gaza upon Israel ever since disengagement (so far with no fatalities). There have been no reports of the two human bomb attacks in the last few days that were intercepted by the Israelis before they reached their target. This account relates what is actually going on:

Iran has ordered Palestinian terror groups to carry out a large-scale bombing inside Israel before elections here next week, security officials told WorldNetDaily. The information has prompted nationwide alerts and tightened security measures in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. ‘The Tehran regime is looking to disrupt the election process and deteriorate the security situation to distract international attention from the pressure over its nuclear program,’ a senior security official said. Officials say Iran has instructed the Islamic Jihad and West Bank cells of the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror groups to infiltrate immediately an Israeli city and carry out a mass-casualty attack. Israel says both Islamic Jihad and the Brigades receive funding from the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia. Brigades leaders previously have told WorldNetDaily they coordinate with Hezbollah. Islamic Jihad, whose leaders frequently visit Iran, has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel the past 11 months.

Israeli security services are following leads on more than 50 general and 11 specific terror warnings, including information on attacks in Jerusalem. Yesterday, a suicide bomber was caught trying to infiltrate from Ramallah. On Tuesday, a dramatic high-speed chase on the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway involving police motorcycles and helicopter units ended in the capture of a bomber on his way to blow up a target in central Israel.

‘The coming period is a very tense one in which terrorist organizations will come and try to carry out an attack. We are organizing in a very big way in an attempt to prevent an attack,’ said police chief Gen. Moshe Karadi. National elections are scheduled for this Tuesday. Suicide bombings ahead of previous Israeli elections have tended to bolster the success of more right-wing parties, which espouse tougher defense policies. Israeli security officials say Iran prefers a hard-line Jerusalem leadership more willing to start a confrontation with Palestinian groups.

Both the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been placed under tight military closure for at least the next week due to the security concerns. Police presence throughout Jerusalem has been noticeably boosted. Israel has the past few days conducted anti-terror operations in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus in response to specific threats. Iran long has backed Palestinian terror groups, but Israel has been concerned lately about the increased role Tehran is playing in Palestinian affairs following Hamas' election victory in January.

Iran earlier this month pledged financial support to Hamas to replace an expected halt of European and U.S. aid to the new Palestinian government. Media reports stated Iran would give as much as $250 million to the PA, but Hamas officials said no actual amount had been discussed. Also this month WorldNetDaily broke the story a West Bank Islamic Jihad operative opened what he referred to as an ‘Iranian ideological embassy’ in the Palestinian territories to espouse Shia Muslim beliefs and to help spread Iranian theocracy and rule throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Afterwards, the Al Aqsa Brigades boasted of dedicating a new rocket to be fired at Israeli towns to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘because of his courageous position toward the enemy.’

50 general and 11 specific terror warnings. If America or the UK were facing such an onslaught by Iran, they would call it war. When Israel is the victim, it’s called ‘a period of calm’.

Ruth Gledhill's blog is fast becoming a must-read for the intelligent contribution it is making to the world-wide debate about religion. Here she discusses Prince Charles's comments and the disturbing implications of his ceasing to defend the faith, with some fascinating contributions from readers to the discussion.

On the Civitas website, David Conway writes a sharp comment on the way The Times a couple of days ago interpreted remarks made by the Prince of Wales at al Azhar university in Cairo on his tour of the Arab world. Referring to the appalling case of Abdul Rahman, who is facing trial and possible execution in Afghanistan for having converted from Islam to Christianity, Conway observes:

The story about this man first broke in the English press on Tuesday of this week which was the same day as the Prince of Wales delivered a speech in Egypt, which he is currently visiting as part of an official tour of the Muslim world, in which he will have, reportedly, and quite correctly told his audience that: ‘It’s tolerance, it’s understanding of what other people hold sacred which … is so vital’. The trouble with espousing this sentiment in that part of the world, however, is that, in all too many parts of it today, what is held sacred is intolerance of what others hold sacred. And, when and where it is, anyone who wishes to practice tolerance faces the question of how much religious intolerance may and should be to tolerated.

The Times, which on Tuesday carried reports both about the Prince of Wales’ speech as well as the plight of the poor Afghani, devoted a leader to this subject, which bore the promising title, ‘Faith and Respect: Why religious intolerance must not be tolerated’. Despite its condemning apostasy from Islam, or from any other religion, being anywhere in the world a criminal offence, the newspaper can be condemned for having ducked the serious issue posed by Islam in having asserted that nowhere in the Koran is apostasy prescribed a capital offence. This allowed it to claim that Islam was as tolerant of Christianity and Judaism as these two other religions were of each other and it. ‘The Prince rightly underlines the importance of respect by one religion for another – especially the three Abrahamic religions’ the editorial ran, before adding that: ‘All three religions commend such tolerance.’

This latter claim is most tendentious, and one wonders why on earth it was ever made. It is all too easy for westerners to avoid having to face up to the very harsh and uncomfortable question about how genuinely tolerant a religion Islam truly is and can be by their denying to be integral to it, as the Times leader does, any morally objectionable tenets such as those of its adherents do who think it prescribes and who as a result impose a death penalty upon apostates from it.

However, there is a further point to be made about the princely comments. Although he began by expressing his ‘heavy heart’ at the impact of terrorism and his sadness that no-one had listened to his call for bridges to be built between cultures (so far, so unexceptionable) he went on to criticise the publication of the Danish cartoons:

‘The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons show the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others,’ said the prince. ‘In my view, the true mark of a civilised society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers.’ He continued: ‘I look forward to a world in which we share a vision that acknowledges our differences with respect and understanding, that recognises what others hold sacred, and to a world in which we see that we cannot and must not abuse our great traditions and their teachings as a weapon in the service of selfish worldly power.’

So the worldwide violence, destruction, killings and lootings that followed publication of the cartoons were merely ‘ghastly’ and were caused by ‘our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others’. But this was not so. The uproar was caused by the Islamist world failing to respect the freedom to protest against a clerical threat to life and liberty and then actually attacking life and liberty, thus amply proving the point of the original protest. Publication of the cartoons was therefore a morally justified act which should be defended by all who fight intolerance and bigotry. Yet here was the heir to the throne of England taking the part of the bigots, and blaming the violence instead on the ‘lack of respect’ for the creed that promoted that violence!

How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.

This has been posted on the Free Republic website after it translated one of the Iraqi documents posted up on the Pentagon website:

The documents of pre-war Iraq were published this morning on the Pentagon website, I did a quick search and I found a very interesting document written in Arabic and not yet translated to English. I did the translation and I found the following: This document is a letter written by a member of Saddam Intelligence apparatus (Al Mukabarat) on 9/15/2001 (shortly after 9/11/2001) where he addressed it to someone higher up and he wrote about a conversation between an Iraqi intelligence source and a Taliban Afghani Consul. In the conversation the Afghani Consul spoke of a relationship between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden prior to 9/11/2001, and that the United States was aware of such a relationship and that there is a potential of US strikes against Iraq and Afghanistan if the destructive operations in the US (most probably he is referring to 9/11 attacks) were proven to be connected to Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban.

Below is a translation from Arabic to English of CMPC-2003-001488 document that was posted on Pentagon Website regarding the pre-war Iraq documents.

Text of the document in English translated from Arabic.

In the Name of God the Merciful
Presidency of the Republic
Intelligence Apparatus
To the respectful Mr. M.A.M
Subject: Information

Our source in Afghanistan No 11002 (for information about him see attachment 1) provided us with information that that Afghani Consul Ahmad Dahestani (for information about him see attachment 2) told him the following:

1. That Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan are in contact with Iraq and it that previously a group from Taliban and Osama Bin Laden group visited Iraq.
2. That America has proof that the government of Iraq and Osama Bin Laden group have shown cooperation to hit target within America.
3. That in case it is proven the involvement of Osama Bin Laden group and the Taliban in these destructive operations it is possible that American will conduct strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. That the Afghani Consul heard about the subject of Iraq relation with Osama Bin Laden group during his stay in Iran.
5. In light of this we suggest to write to the Commission of the above information.

Please view...Yours... With regards
Signature:.., Initials : A.M.M, 15/9/2001
Foot note: Immediately send to the Chairman of Commission
Signature:...

On the Engage site, Mark Gardner has written an excellent response to David Clark’s defence of his own article in the Guardian, in which he branded accusations of anti-Jewish hatred on the left ‘poisonous intellectual thuggery’. Gardner, who is gracious about Clark’s second piece, nevertheless hones in on the ‘it’s not antisemitism but anti-Zionism’ canard as well as drawing attention to the anti-Jewish hate-fest being facilitated by the Guardian’s new ‘Comment is Free’ website as well as its Comment pages:

‘Zionist sympathisers are nothing more than devil worshippers, they like to suck your blood dry’, stated a posting on the Guardian’s new blog site on Wednesday 15th March 2006. The posting was removed after I contacted a journalist on the paper and asked how much more ‘shit’ the Guardian would facilitate. I had already emailed the ‘report this comment’ blog moderator to no avail, perhaps because I’d already sent two ‘report this comment’ emails about comments further up the blog thread stating that Zionism and Nazism were indistinguishable.

David Clark is to be warmly thanked for the constructive sincerity of his explanation of his Guardian article: but his paper’s blog illustrates how embedded the problem has become in Farringdon, as well as nearby Islington. The Guardian does not simply ‘criticise’ Israel, rather it facilitates, and part shares, an increasingly hateful mythology against ‘Zionism’ that is now endemic in far left and Islamist circles...

The Guardian’s criticisms of Israel have...been given the most malicious of spins in a Comments section that often panders to the evocative notion that a Zionist conspiracy is driving US foreign policy. The charge is given global urgency by 9/11; the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq; and the looming military actions or nuclear stand off with Iran. This takes the Guardian beyond criticism of Israel, a nation state, and into an anti-Zionist mythology premised upon many traditional anti-Semitic themes codified within the notorious Tsarist forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. This alleges that a global Jewish conspiracy secretly controls the destiny of the world by manufacturing wars and revolutions, in order to divide and rule, and gain further riches and empowerment. The conspiracy is orchestrated via compliant politicians; and the populace is dumbed into accepting it by controlled media.

Gardner lists the tropes of ‘it’s not antisemitism but anti-Zionism’ thus:

• Swapping 'Zionist' for 'Jew' makes you kosher

• 'Zionist pressure' on the global superpower has the same mechanism and importance as that implied by Jewish conspiracy power motifs – it is global, hidden, manipulative and effective.

• Zionists lay traps around the charge of anti-Semitism.

• Don’t believe what you hear about antisemitism.

• Israel is an imperialist and racist state.

• All Jews around the world are to be judged by their attitude to Israel. The best Jews are those who actively oppose the rest of mainstream Jewry.

The warning about where such attitudes can end up was sounded by Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski, in their International Herald Tribune article ‘Israel in the British press: crossing the line from criticism to bigotry.’ This was, ironically, prompted by events at Guardian stable-mate, the Observer, where Richard Ingrams had stated that he usually ignored letters from Jews about Israel. Kosmin and Iganski termed this as ‘institutional Judeophobia’ and stated:

'It is important to be clear: Judeophobia is not the old Nazi style antisemitism. It is an institutional process in which the Jewish community suffers discrimination because of editorial misjudgement, omission and oversight... Institutional Judeophobia does not mean that every Observer journalist or even a majority of them is hostile toward Jews. Nor does it signal an active anti-Jewish conspiracy. It does mean, however, that the outcome of editorial decisions is nevertheless damaging and hurtful to Jews. It is a systematic bias that runs through other liberal media...It is equally important to point out that criticism of Israel’s defence policy per se is not Judeophobia...'.

It cannot be stated too often that no-one is claiming that criticism of Israel is in itself an expression of anti-Jewish hatred. This charge is a straw man. The point is rather that Israel is being singled out for a campaign based on lies, libels, falsehoods, misrepresentations, distortions and deliberate omissions which is designed to demonise it and thus delegitimise its very existence. This is a treatment which is meted out to no other country or people on the planet, and one therefore has to ask what is driving it – particularly when so many of its tropes are drawn directly from anti-Jewish calumnies throughout the centuries.

At the Daily Ablution, the incomparable Scott Burgess fisks heroes and villains in the press coverage of the Shabina Begum case.

Thank goodness I am sitting down. The English Law Lords have actually made a ruling that stands up for common sense! More than that, they have stamped all over the Court of Appeal for its truly appalling, supine, morally back-to-front judgment -- which I commented upon here -- when it ruled against Denbigh High School for forbidding its 16 year-old pupil, Shabina Begum, from wearing a full length jilbab that covered her entire body apart from her face and hands. As I said then, it was clear to all but the Court of Appeal that Ms Begum’s campaign to wear the jilbab to school was a political stunt backed by Hizb ut Tahrir, an act of cultural aggression and intimidation against both moderate Muslims and the British state. The Appeal Court judges, however, who like most of the English judiciary have had their brains addled and their values turned inside out by their obsession with human rights law and victim culture, totally failed to grasp just whose rights were being threatened by whom, and upheld Ms Begum against the school.

Now the Law Lords have restored intellectual and moral order. As they point out at the start of their judgment this was a school with a very high percentage of Muslim pupils, a high proportion of Muslim governors and a Muslim head teacher. This was not a school that was indifferent to the genuine needs and religious requirements of Muslim pupils. It offered girls the option of wearing shalwar kameez as part of its uniform code. Accordingly, it suspended Ms Begum for refusing to comply with this code by insisting on wearing the jilbab, not least because of its perception that wearing this garment would coerce and intimidate other pupils towards religious extremism.

That is why the Appeal Court’s judgment was so pernicious. At a time of extreme threat from religious extremism, English judges took the side of the extremists and left their potential victims defenceless – and all courtesy of ‘human rights’ law. Now the senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham, has put the lesser judges firmly in their place:

On the agreed facts, the school was in my opinion fully justified in acting as it did. It had taken immense pains to devise a uniform policy which respected Muslim beliefs but did so in an inclusive, unthreatening and uncompetitive way. The rules laid down were as far from being mindless as uniform rules could ever be. The school had enjoyed a period of harmony and success to which the uniform policy was thought to contribute. On further enquiry it still appeared that the rules were acceptable to mainstream Muslim opinion. It was feared that acceding to the respondent's request would or might have significant adverse repercussions. It would in my opinion be irresponsible of any court, lacking the experience, background and detailed knowledge of the head teacher, staff and governors, to overrule their judgment on a matter as sensitive as this.

Even Lord Hoffmann (who famously opined in a previous judgment that terrorism was not as great a threat to Britain as laws that were passed to deal with it) agreed, laying into that well known ‘human rights’ lawyer and Prime Ministerial spouse Cherie Booth in the process:

In criticizing the school's decision, Miss Booth QC (who appeared for Shabina) said that the uniform policy was undermined by Muslim girls being allowed to wear headscarves. That identified them as Muslims and it would therefore make no difference if they could wear jilbabs. But that takes no account of the school's wish to avoid clothes which were perceived by some Muslims (rightly or wrongly) as signifying adherence to an extremist version of the Muslim religion and to protect girls against external pressures. These are matters which the school itself was in the best position to weigh and consider.

Those unfamiliar with the English judiciary might wonder what all the fuss is about, since such comments are merely statements of the blindingly obvious and just. So they are. But given the mindset of the English judiciary, to find them issuing statements of the blindingly obvious and just is as startling as finding a house-plant still alive after years of being shut away and forgotten in a broom cupboard.

For years, the English courts have been using 'human rights' law to plunge the concepts of right and wrong, truth and lies into darkness. And while one should not exaggerate the significance of this judgment, it surely signals an acknowledgement by the judiciary of the way the climate in Britain has begun to change, especially after the July bombings in London last year. The judges have almost certainly finally become aware that the public takes an exceedingly dim view of the irresponsible role played by an activist judiciary using the weapon of ‘human rights’ law to pass judgment after judgment that has defied common sense and helped make Britain a sitting duck for terrorism.

A new realism? Not yet. But it’s a start.

The US has its own problems with the deadly virus of Jew-hatred, particularly on campus. A particularly ripe example of the ‘global Zionist conspiracy’ libel has now surfaced in a 83-page screed by two professors -- Stephen Walt, the academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, no less, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago -- and published across 14 pages in the London Review of Books (of course). 14 pages! 83 pages! My, those LRB editors and progressive intellectuals at Harvard and Chicago sure have a striking sense of priorities (who said ‘pathological obsession’ at the back there? Must be another member of the conspiracy). Among many other canards, the article claims that the only reason the US supports Israel is the American ‘Israel lobby’; that supporting Israel is not in America’s own interests; that the ‘Israel lobby’ has thus persuaded the US to act against the interests of America in supporting Israel; that this manipulation is unique in America’s history; that this lobby was also critical in persuading the US to go to war in Iraq; and that America’s alliance with Israel brought about 9/11.

Well, I suppose it makes a change from the ‘wicked oil industry lobby’ that George Clooney, Michael Moore et al tell us has hijacked American foreign policy. Doubtless the ‘Israel lobby’ is behind the oil weapon too, and the fact that Israel is its victim is just further proof of the diabolical manipulative powers of AIPAC.

You have to laugh, though, when the authors try to wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic fighters against the attempt by the ‘Israel lobby’ to stifle them:

Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy...stands a good chance of getting labeled an antisemite.

Actually, they stand instead an excellent chance of being published in the London Review of Books, one of the most prestigious publications of the British and English-speaking intelligentsia. Anyone who offers the alternative view doesn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of writing for it at all -- and not a much brighter prospect of getting it published anywhere else, either. But open the Guardian or Independent any day of the week, and these 'stifled' claims of the Israel /Jewish/neocon global conspiracy/world evil pour from their pages in an unstoppable torrent of bile.

Needless to say, reaction to this work of malevolent charlatanry has been voluminous and devastating. Powerline has produced a useful compendium of references which expose the mendacity, ignorance and prejudice of the article:

Among the excellent commentary it has generated on the Internet is a column by Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky at the American Thinker, a statement by Alex Safian at CAMERA, a post by Martin Kramer at Sandstorm, and a personal correction (scroll to bottom) by Daniel Pipes. Among the legion of individuals assigned to the ‘Israel lobby’ by Mearsheimer and Walt are Bernard Lewis, Bill Bennett, George Will, Alan Dershowitz, and Clinton Mideast advisors Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and Aaron Miller. In today's New York Sun, Meghan Clyne quotes Dennis Ross: ‘Also critical of the paper's academic quality was one of the figures mentioned in it as part of the "lobby," President Clinton's special Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, who said the authors displayed "a woeful lack of knowledge on the subject." "The part I've read I find remarkable for its lack of seriousness," Mr. Ross told the Sun yesterday. "It is basically a series of assertions. They quote only those people who basically have this point of view and don't take a serious look at anything in a more profound way. It is masquerading as scholarship."'

The fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in this LRB paper are quite astonishing. Take this claim, for example, that Israeli citizenship

is based on the principle of blood kinship.

This is totally untrue. Arabs and other non-Jews are Israeli citizens. As Alan Dershowitz has observed, the authors have confused Israel's law of return with its criteria for citizenship. According to the New York Sun:

Mr. Walt said on this citizenship point last night that he wanted to check into it.

He wants to check into it? The academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government has published an ‘academic’ work of 83 pages which delegitimises and demonises a country and all those who support it -- and he now wants to ‘check into’ the, ahem, veracity of his own incendiary claim?

But why should Mearsheimer and Walt bother about little details like the truth when, as the New York Sun also reported, they can bask in the warm admiration of white supremacists and Islamist fanatics:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an ‘Israel lobby’ is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke. The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization. Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper ‘a great step forward,’ but he said he was ‘surprised’ that the Kennedy School would publish the report.‘I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is,’ he said in an e-mail. ‘It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.’ Mr. Walt said last night, ‘I have always found Mr. Duke's views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world.’

Tsk! Such ingratitude! Doubtless Duke will now take out a subscription to the LRB.

The big question, however, is how such individuals who break every rule in the scholarly lexicon can be employed as professors -- and even an academic dean -- at Harvard and Chicago. One reason is suggested in the devastating evisceration of these two authors at The American Thinker:

The authors resent Jewish citizens who contribute to universities, Jewish critics of the media, Jewish supporters of think tanks, and, finally it seems, Jewish people in government. However, they seem to have no concern for or even acknowledge the magnitude of foreign (Arab) donations, given by dictators who steal their own people’s wealth to support hate and terror around the world, raining money down on think tanks, colleges, and media outlets in America. On the latter issue, the same Saudi Prince who gave $20 million to Harvard bragged of his recent 5% purchase of News Corporation stock giving him the power to influence news reporting. This is a worrisome development, for he also owned a 30% stake in an Arab TV network, ART TV, that spews forth anti-Semitism and anti-Western agitprop. Foreign money, as long as it is anti-Israel, is worth its weight in gold (or oil). Jewish Americans who support universities are somehow tainted in their worldview...

The Iraq war is a source of much of the Israel-loathing which is just beneath the surface in the Walt/Mearsheimer article. The authors promote the theory that America went to war with Iraq in 2003 because of Israel, and in particular, at the direction of Israel’s Likud Party and Ariel Sharon and their flacks in the American neoconservative movement. There were certainly Jews who supported the war with Iraq, though as even the authors admit, Jewish Americans disproportionately opposed the war, with a far higher percentage opposed to the war than among the general population. So much, one would think, for the proposition that the Jews drove America to war. But the professors want us to ignore the general disapproval of the war by American Jews, for what is important are the powerful neoconservative voices, who pushed Bush and Cheney to war. To believe this theory, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice and Colin Powell were mere pushovers and puppets for the likes of Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby.

Characterizing this as suggesting the cart is pulling the horse is too kind to the authors’ theory. In fact, people such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have always been consistent in their views opposing tyranny. They worked to bring down Communism, acted to save Bosnian Muslims and Iraqi Shiites from genocide, tried to stabilize Somalia and protect its citizens from the depredations of warlords, and have acted to stop the genocide in the Sudan. These actions are not particularly pro-Israel, as much as they are anti-dictatorship and pro-human rights.

The nations that directly benefited from the downfall of Saddam were Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq itself, since all these nations and peoples suffered from the sadism of Saddam. If Israel also benefited (a big 'if'), it certainly was not a prime beneficiary. Perhaps, these experts should be more aware of a basic statistical principle: correlation does not prove causation. Israel may have been aided by Iraq’s liberation, but it does not prove – except in the delusional world of the authors – that tiny Israel (or a tiny minority of American Jews) caused the war to happen.

This LRB travesty is not a one-off. It is but the latest example of a poisonous pathology which has gripped the intelligentsia of the west, centred around a visceral loathing of America, Israel, the neocons and the Jews. Indeed, neo-conservatism seems to have induced a kind of madness, a total eclipse of reason among its political opponents; it is not surprising, therefore, that those within the intelligentsia who have developed such an obsessive loathing of the neo-cons have ended up in bed with white supremacists and clerical fascists.

Our campuses, which should be spreading enlightenment, knowledge and the power of reason are instead spreading hatred, lies and the toxins of murderous prejudice. The intelligentsia have become the fifth columnists of the west, an engine of war that is being deployed by the enemies of life and liberty to sow terminal confusion, self-loathing and de-moralisation that -- with every day that passes -- are progressively sapping the ability of the free world to defend itself. It is not enough for this LRB article to be denounced and for the reputations of these two authors to be deservedly trashed at the bar of international opinion. The university world has got to take a long hard look at itself and start the trek back to proper scholarship, truth and integrity. It has to realise that it is not a disinterested bystander at the current struggle between freedom and genocidal clerical fascism. It is instead an active player -- and on the wrong side. It has to start cleansing its own academic Augean stables, and fast.

Is London’s mayor Ken Livingstone suffering from a form of Jewish Tourette’s Syndrome? Despite the fact that he is in the middle of appealing against his suspension by the Standards Board for an offensive remark made to a Jewish reporter, he couldn’t restrain himself from doing it again today in another extraordinary outburst. At a press conference on the Stratford city redevelopment project in London’s East End, which has been having a few problems, he said of a pair of Jewish property developers involved in the project, David and Simon Reuben:

If they’re not happy here perhaps they could go back to Iran and try it under the Ayatollahs

a remark which he repeated – with slight variations in the wording between the two comments -- when asked to explain himself. As it happens, the Reuben brothers were born in Bombay to Iraqi parents of Jewish descent and have lived in the UK for almost four decades. Had they actually been Iranian, the remark would have been the equivalent to saying to a pair of black property developers: ‘Go back where you came from’ – the defining verbal tic of a racist. Since they are not Iranian, the remark is the equivalent of saying to a pair of Jamaican property developers: ‘Go back to Africa’ – a possibly even more offensive variant on this tic. In any event, suggesting that two Jews should either shut up or push off to a regime which regards them as targets for genocide is simply an expression of a quite visceral prejudice.

There are two possible reasons for this behaviour. The first is that, when presented with Jews doing something that irritates him, Livingstone cannot stop himself from an instinctively and obsessively prejudiced reaction. The second is that he is cynically milking for political advantage the dismaying public support he received over the Standards Board’s ruling. That support derived in part from the view that Livingstone’s remarks to the reporter – comparing him to a ‘war criminal’ and then, upon learning that he was a Jew, to a ‘concentration camp guard’, were no more than Ken being a bit tired and emotional and, well, Ken just being Ken and that altogether far too big a deal was being made of the whole thing, particularly since an unelected quango had had the temerity to suspend the London voters' hero. Livingstone manipulated all this brilliantly, managing to imply that accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice were a Zionist conspiracy (even though the issue of Israel had had absolutely nothing to do with it) and posing as a martyr for democracy. Any prejudice was all coming from the other direction.

With today’s non-alcoholic outburst, however, that defence falls away. One anti-Jewish remark may (to some people) be an accident, but two suggests a pathology. The reaction to this incident will be interesting to observe. Let’s see who stands up for decency here. The London Assembly’s Conservative group is commendably jumping up and down. In a press release, Assembly member Brian Coleman said:

This is the latest antisemitic remark by Livingstone. He clearly has a major problem with the Jewish business community. To suggest that these men should go to Iran is shocking, outrageous and grossly offensive to the entire Jewish community.

That community itself, however, may now be cautious in its response. In Britain, Jewish leaders are neurotically averse to putting their heads above the parapet for fear of making the prejudice against Jews even worse – a stance which they feel was all too horribly vindicated by the backlash against the complaint made by the Board of Deputies of British Jews (and the Commission for Racial Equality and many others, by the way) over the concentration camp guard episode. It would not be surprising, therefore, if the Board were reacting to today’s developments with unalloyed horror – not just at Livingstone’s remarks, but at the prospect of having to raise once again the issue that now dare not speak its name in multicultural Britain.

For there is no doubt that anti-Jewish hatred is now the forbidden prejudice – forbidden, that is, to be complained about. There are many reasons for this, including – ironically – a revolt by the public in general against the tendentious or false accusations of offensiveness which are now routinely deployed by minority groups as weapons against majority values (through intimidating people with accusations of Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia) as in the recent uproar over the Danish cartoons. This has led to an impatience with any minority group complaining about prejudice, even where the complaint is well-founded. People have had it up to here with the delicate sensibilities of minorities, period. So the Jews, who really are victims of true, unprovoked, irrational prejudice based on a visceral and ancient hatred, are being similarly dismissed in the same backlash.

But there’s more, much more to this. Jewish victimhood is simply being systematically expunged from the British narrative. Why? Many reasons; but one of the deepest is that it’s payback time for the guilt that Christian Europe has been made to feel for the way Jews have been treated at its hands – and Israel is their get-out-of-jail-free card. Which is why we can expect Livingstone to claim that the protests against today’s remarks are all a Zionist/Mossad plot. Press the Israel button and silence the British Jews. Which is why the timid, servile, supine boobies who pass for the leaders of the Jewish community should grit their teeth and name this thing for what it is. If they are muted or silenced, the intimidation will have worked and the peddlers of prejudice will have won.

We can never eradicate the oldest hatred. The only question is whether the Jews of Britain choose to deal with it on their knees, or by standing upright and fighting it like a free people. It’s a no-brainer.

After an unconscionable delay, the US authorities have finally started to make available for public inspection some of the thousands of previously classified documents from the Saddam Hussein era which were captured after the fall of Baghdad. Some have been posted up on the Foreign Military Studies website. Needless to say, this is being ignored by the mainstream media but the blogosphere has been getting to work. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, who has consistently produced evidence of Saddam’s connections with terrorism and al Qaeda, now reports:

Saddam Hussein’s regime provided financial support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support- - temporarily, it seems -- after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group...

These documents add to the growing body of evidence confirming the Iraqi regime's longtime support for terrorism abroad. The first of them, a series of memos from the spring of 2001, shows that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, despite the reservations of some IIS officials. The second, an internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on the relationships between the IIS and Saudi opposition groups, records that Osama bin Laden requested Iraqi cooperation on terrorism and propaganda and that in January 1997 the Iraqi regime was eager to continue its relationship with bin Laden. The third, a September 15, 2001, report from an Iraqi Intelligence source in Afghanistan, contains speculation about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and the likely U.S. response to it.

In addition, an article in Foreign Affairs, based on declassified documents and interviews with Iraqi officials, also contains the following notable passage:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for ‘special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].’ Preparations for ‘Blessed July,’ a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

There were three interlinked reasons why the US and British governments – along with every other western country at the time – considered Saddam Husein to be such a menace to the west. They were his sponsorship of terrorism, his pursuit of WMD and his aim to become the leader of the Arab world. In Britain the anti-war crowd – now in hysterical overdrive over the continuing war in Iraq – now flatly deny that Saddam was involved in global terror and that he posed any threat to the west at all. The claim that he was in bed with al Qaeda is laughed to scorn. The documents reported by Stephen Hayes show once again that this relationship was not a figment of a crazed neocon imagination; and as the Foreign Affairs paragraph tells us: Preparations for ‘Blessed July,’ a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Whatever the horrors now engulfing Iraq and whatever mistakes were made since the fall of Baghdad, the fact remains that the toppling of Saddam was a necessity for the west. Just because things are bad does not mean they could not have been worse. This simple fact has been all but obliterated from public discourse by the avalanche of lies and distortions from the anti-war crowd who have rewritten both history and present circumstances in order to say ‘I told you so’. The pathological hysteria with which they are doing so, however (see today’s Independent newspaper, for example) suggests that at some level they know they are denying this patently obvious truth.

A story in the Boston Globe chronicles the rising Jew-hatred in France that is being resolutely ignored in the British media:

In the bleak housing project where a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was held captive and tortured before being dumped in a vacant lot to die, there's scant sympathy for the victim.'It's too bad this happened, because we immigrants are always blamed,’ said Ibrahim Ag Ahmalou, a lanky man of West African heritage who shares his girlfriend's apartment in the project. '’But Jews have all the money and power. Everyone knows this and resents them. That's why they have these problems.’

Last week there were three more attacks on Jews by Arab and African immigrants in suburban Paris, according to police. None of the latest victims was seriously injured, but the attacks heightened the nervousness of French Jews. There is alarm that the antipathy of French Muslims toward Jews, long based on opposition to Israel, is reverting to the even more sinister prejudices that once pervaded Europe, making Jews the scapegoats for all social ills. ‘Anti-Semitism is rising in our country,’ said legislator Dominique Strauss-Kahn...

France is no stranger to anti-Semitism. Thousands of French Jews vanished in Nazi death camps with hardly a murmur of protest from their Christian countrymen. Hatred of Jews is the subtext of the shrill ultranationalism that still has a following among white French. Meanwhile, the past decade has seen a surge in ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants -- based on opposition to Israel and support for the Palestinian cause, but often expressed with swastikas spray-painted on synagogues or desecration of Jewish graveyards. But more recently, analysts say, anti-Semitism in France has taken an uglier turn as young Arabs and West Africans have adopted loud hatred of Jews as a proclamation of cool, an attitude powered more by rap music, ultraviolent jihadist videos, and radical Islamic rhetoric -- although with little or no adherence to Islamic religious practice -- than by any coherent stand on events in the Middle East. Equally alarming, the anti-Semitism appears to be spreading among non-Muslim Africans and Caribbean blacks in France, and even gaining ground among white immigrants from European backwaters who find it difficult gaining a place in French society. Said Sammy Ghozlan, a retired police chief and activist against antisemitism: 'It's all mixed up: gang stuff, violence, and a glaze of ideology -- they hate Jews, they hate the West, they hate France. The Jews are the face they put on their generalized anger at the world.’

As some of us predicted, the next sexual frontier to be conquered after gay marriage is...polygamy. From the Netherlands comes this heart-warming news:

The Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals... Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal 'married' both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union.

‘I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I am marrying them both,’ Victor said. He had previously been married to Bianca. Two and a half years ago they met Mirjam Geven through an internet chatbox. Eight weeks later Mirjam deserted her husband and came to live with Victor and Bianca. After Mirjam’s divorce the threesome decided to marry.
Victor: ‘A marriage between three persons is not possible in the Netherlands, but a civil union is. We went to the notary in our marriage costume and exchanged rings. We consider this to be just an ordinary marriage.’ Asked by journalists to tell the secret of their peculiar relationship, Victor explained that there is no jealousy between them. ‘But this is because Mirjam and Bianca are bisexual. I think that with two heterosexual women it would be more difficult.’ Victor stressed, however, that he is ‘a one hundred per cent heterosexual’ and that a fourth person will not be allowed into the ‘marriage.’ They want to take their marriage obligations seriously: ‘to be honest and open with each other and not philander.’

Sure thing! Here's responsibility indeed! What’s not to approve of? Across the pond, Charles Krauthammer has picked up the glad tidings:

With the sweetly titled HBO series ‘Big Love,’ polygamy comes out of the closet. Under the headline ‘Polygamists, Unite!’ Newsweek informs us of ‘polygamy activists emerging in the wake of the gay-marriage movement.'’ Says one evangelical Christian big lover: ‘Polygamy rights is the next civil-rights battle.'’ Polygamy used to be stereotyped as the province of secretive Mormons, primitive Africans and profligate Arabs. With ‘Big Love’ it moves to suburbia as a mere alternative lifestyle.

As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as gay marriage advocates insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice. This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them there.

All absolutely true. Krauthammer, however, sees all these developments merely as the symptom rather than the cause of the breakdown of marriage. As he says, marriage has certainly imploded from within. Some causes: the culture of radical individualism, breakdown of religious and moral norms, consumerism, rise of therapy culture, sexual revolution, erosion of stigma attached to out of wedlock births, and so on. But I think this process is more complex than he suggests. Both causes and symptoms are inextricably fused so that they all reinforce each other. The more alternative lifestyles become ordained as mainstream, with dissidents treated as social pariahs if they try to uphold traditional moral norms, the more those moral norms are undermined.

So now anything goes – and our society is steadily going, as a result. Polyandry, polyamory, polygamy, polymorphism – can paedophilia, necrophilia and bestiality be far behind?

From the Sunday Times:

Gordon Brown is drawing up plans to turn Britain into the most Islam-friendly economy in the western world. The chancellor has given Muslim leaders private assurances that he wants to create a ‘level playing field’ in the economy, so that more and more ‘sharia compliant’ financial products can be offered to British Muslims... ‘Making the UK and London a centre for Islamic finance means putting in place the tax and legislative framework that is supportive of Islamic products,’ said a senior Treasury official. ‘On top of this, we’re also looking at promoting the City abroad as a centre for Islamic finance.’ Officials insist the changes will not compromise the government’s determination to root out and cut off sources of terrorist finance. The Muslim Council of Britain will host a large conference in June to showcase Britain to Muslim investors as a ‘gateway for trade with the Islamic world’. The chancellor will be a keynote speaker at the conference, which is expected to have a delegation from every leading Muslim country.

From the Spectator:

During Dr Rice's recent visit to London, the Secretary of State broke off from her formal engagements to meet Mr [David] Cameron... With Blair firmly in the twilight of his premiership, Washington is keen to establish good relations with his potential successors, and in this spirit Dr Rice was keen to meet the 'new Tony Blair'. But before securing him a coveted invitation to the Oval Office, she first wanted to establish that he was 'sound' on Iraq. 'But he just didn't come through, 'one of Dr Rice's aides told me shortly after the meeting took place in an anteroom at the Savoy Hotel. 'We were looking to him to make some kind of conciliatory gesture over Iraq, but he just wanted to sit on the fence. And that is not the kind of place we expect our allies to be.'

From the Times:

Climate change was a greater threat to the future than terrorism, the Prince of Wales told a meeting of small businessmen in London yesterday.

Ain’t life grand!

The Guardian has now published a riposte to the ghastly rant by David Clark on its pages earlier this month in which he branded accusations of anti-Jewish hatred on the left as ‘poisonous intellectual thuggery’. Today John Mann, chairman of the all party parliamentary group against antisemitism, says robustly that this is rubbish:

It is clear from evidence presented to the inquiry that anti-semitism has not gone away and that its nature is now more varied. Traditional anti-semitism still exists, with fascist leaflets as crude as in the 1930s distributed on the streets of the UK. Attacks on Jews continue...What other community has to spend over £5m annually defending itself because its places of worship, schools and community buildings have been seen as legitimate targets worldwide?...

One aspect that is particularly frightening and unacceptable is the insipid growth of anti-semitism on the left under the cloak of anti-Zionism. Clark is clear that dismissing anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Zionism as antisemitism 'cheapens the term'. However, he does not draw a line beyond which legitimate debate becomes illegitimate, and where hostile becomes offensive. It is a crucial line to draw if language itself is not to become an actor rather than a descriptor.

The imagery and some of the language is familiar. A cabal of Jewish conspirators, well funded, close to or in power, working to their own agenda. It is not just the MP Tam Dalyell who expressed such thoughts, others have done so in private and, increasingly, in public… Clark claims that Dalyell was ‘deservedly condemned’; but what was particularly worrying was that a wider group ignored his comments - as they did with Ken Livingstone, the infamous New Statesman front page, the AUT academic boycott, and others. The trend is unambiguous. Where once there was a clear line between acceptable political argument and unacceptable behaviour or language in relation to anti-semitism, that line has become blurred.

When I commissioned this inquiry, one MP commented with surprise: ‘I didn't realise you were Jewish.’ Neither did I.

Welcome to honorary membership of the world Jewish conspiracy.

This apparently authoritative account in Ha’aretz appears to be what actually happened in Jericho:

According to government sources, Israel has complained repeatedly over the last year that the Palestinians were violating the 2002 agreement. One complaint, accompanied by a threat of Israeli intervention, was even submitted in writing. However, as long as the British and Americans were there, Israel refrained from acting, out of fear that they would be injured.

Then, a few weeks ago, Hamas leaders began saying that they planned to release the Jericho prisoners. Mofaz threatened that if that happened, Israel would re-arrest them. But what finally sparked Israel's operational preparations was when the Palestinian Authority began releasing Islamic Jihad operatives from jails in the territories, and, at about the same time, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said that the PA should consider freeing the Jericho prisoners as well.

Last Wednesday, the British and American consuls in Jerusalem sent a letter to Abbas informing him that they were canceling the 2002 agreement. The Palestinian Authority never fully implemented the agreement, the consuls charged; it ‘consistently failed to comply with core provisions of the Jericho monitoring arrangements regarding visitors, cell searches, telephone access and correspondence. Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority has failed to provide secure conditions for the US and UK personnel working at the Jericho Prison.’

Moreover, the letter implied, Hamas's electoral victory has made the situation even worse: ‘The pending handover of governmental power to a political party that has repeatedly called for the release of the Jericho detainees also calls into question the political sustainability of the monitoring mission.’ They therefore gave Abbas an ultimatum: Either implement the agreement in full, at once, or reach a different agreement with Israel. And should he fail to do either, ‘we will have to terminate our involvement with the Jericho monitoring mission and withdraw our monitors with immediate effect.’

Israel was informed that the British and American jailers would leave Jericho by March 15, but other than that, government sources said, there was no coordination between Jerusalem and Washington and London. Tuesday morning, while Olmert and Mofaz were campaigning in Ariel, they were notified that the British and Americans had left. At that point, the IDF operation began.

It is clear, therefore, that the fault lay with the Palestinians for breaching the agreement. They were warned about this by Britain and the US, who also warned them that if nothing was done to repair this breach and improve security they would have to withdraw their monitors. They informed Israel they would leave by March 15, when they duly left.

The result was mayhem, violence, and kidnapping of Europeans by the Palestinians, who burned down the British Council offices and ransacked an HSBC bank. They also blamed the British for leaving and for ‘collusion’ with the Israelis. In other words, they broke an agreement showing no regard for due process of law or security, ignored warnings about their behaviour, blamed Britain for protecting its own people from their lawlessness, manufactured a spurious conspiracy against themselves and responded to the entirely reasonable action taken against them by behaving like thugs.

For this, many British and European journalists blamed... Israel, for seizing the men suspected of terrorist atrocities who had been shielded by the Palestinian Authority and never brought to justice. Well, there’s a surprise.

So where were the few journalistic voices of moral integrity? Virginia Blackburn wrote in the Daily Express:

But does the world thank Israel for capturing a known terrorist and bringing him to justice? No, it does not. Instead, you’d have thought Israel itself was in the wrong. There’s the usual tutting about heavy handedness and upsetting the rest of the Middle East, much of which, if truth be told, wants to see not only Israel but also the West smashed to smithereens. Not that you would gather that listening to some people, especially those on the Left: in their eyes, nothing Israel does can ever be right...

The reason for this appalling attitude, alas, is because Israel is a Jewish state. Anti-Semitism is as strong as it ever has been: it’s just that, after the events of 60 years ago, most anti-Semites have been shamed into shutting up. So they take out their disgusting little prejudices by blaming Israel for all the world’s problems instead. They should wise up. Israel has, more than once, saved our ungrateful necks. It is Israel that stopped Iraq from becoming a nuclear power by bombing its armaments factories, and the way things are going, it looks as if it may do the same to Iran, too. And will it be praised by a world it has made safer? You guess.

In the New York Sun, Daniel Johnson wrote:

The capture there of Ahmed Saadat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and five other PFLP terrorists will go down in history as one of Israel’s most remarkable military operations, comparable to the Entebbe raid or the abduction of Eichmann… Under the circumstances, it is astonishing that only one prisoner and one guard were killed – proof that Israel wanted their quarries alive, to stand trial.

To judge from the Heinz Kiosks at the BBC, however, you would think that Israel, the United States, and Britain were entirely to blame for the violence that erupted across the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday. Palestinians burned down offices of the British and US cultural missions, as well as the European Commission, in Gaza City and Ramallah, kidnapped Westerners at random, and threatened further reprisals.

The British network’s leading anchorman, Jeremy Paxman, interviewing the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, in his usual aggressive style, was visibly astonished that a leftist Israeli in the midst of an election campaign would offer warm support to a right-of-center government. Mr. Paxman apparently couldn’t get his head round the idea that Israel had acted within its rights, because the Palestinians had never kept to their side of the agreement, and could not sit idly by while the assassins of their cabinet minister were set free to strike again.

Johnson also refers to an interview on the BBC Radio Four Today programme yesterday (0720) which was a little cameo of BBC and British establishment prejudice. Thus Jim Naughtie, talked about

...the crisis which has been caused by [my emphasis] the Israeli storming of the jail in Jericho...

which caused his interviewee, the Conservative MEP Edward Macmillan Scott, to say

The crisis wasn’t actually caused by the Israelis taking the prisoners...

but then go on to say

...it was caused by the US and the UK military withdrawing the cover they provided to that prison for some four years as part of an international agreement...

No, that wasn’t the cause either; the cause was the Palestinian breach of that agreement putting the UK and US monitors in danger. But not one scintilla of criticism of the Palestinians escaped Mr Macmillan-Scott’s lips; quite the contrary:

...[the US and UK breaking of the agreement] was very shocking to the Arab world and to others... it was shocking to me…Mahmoud Abbas had a very difficult time...

Which prompted Naughtie to venture that perhaps it was the Palestinians who had broken the agreement; to which EM-S replied:

...the situation in Palestine is not very orderly...people around President Abbas are very angry indeed.

Uh-huh. Would that be the same President Abbas who had previously indicated he was minded to release the Jericho prisoners, in breach of the agreement?

A propos the BBC, Tom Gross points out a curious and fascinating fact:

Armed gunmen also raided the offices of the German TV station ARD, shooting in the air. But what is interesting is that the BBC is housed in the same building as ARD in Gaza, and yet the Palestinian militant groups – who are much better organized and more sophisticated in their choice of targets than some in the media would have us believe – deliberately did not enter the BBC offices. It seems that even on a day of widespread attacks on western targets in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian gunmen know who their friends are.

And they have another comrade at the Guardian, where Seumas Milne (fisked here by Adloyada) wrote:

Jack Straw has brought Britain's standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds to its lowest point for half a century. By withdrawing British monitors from a Palestinian jail in Jericho on Tuesday, the government as good as handed over to Israel the prisoners it had made an international agreement to protect. In doing so, it colluded with its American co-sponsor and - at the very least tacitly - with the Israeli occupation regime in an armed attack on the prison and the seizure of an elected political leader regarded by many Palestinians as a national hero.

As the ruins of the British Council building in Gaza smoulder, the foreign secretary can reflect on his contribution this week to peace in the Middle East: the humiliation of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, the undermining of efforts to form a viable Palestinian administration and the confirmation in Arab and Muslim eyes that Britain cannot plausibly be regarded as an honest broker in the region.

You couldn’t make it up.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh characteristically pares away the multiple layers of self-deception to expose a wry reality:

Ironically, the IDF operation against the murderers of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi will make life much easier for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas's Prime Minister designate Ismail Haniyeh. Ever since he was elected as chairman of the PA more than a year ago, Abbas has been under immense pressure to release Ahmed Saadat, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and his colleagues...

The last thing the new Hamas regime wants is to alienate the international community over a bunch of communist activists suspected of involvement in the assassination of an Israeli minister. In addition, Hamas did not consider the PFLP, a tiny group, a major partner in the new coalition.

For the past four years, the case of the Ze'evi assassins was a source of headache for the PA. Many Palestinians were unhappy with the deal that resulted in their transfer to a Jericho prison and accused former PA officials of conspiring with Israel and the US. The case was also threatening to bring more trouble for the Hamas cabinet. Now both Hamas and the PA have good reason to stop worrying about the fate of Saadat and his friends.

Another crazy episode in the tragic farce that is the Middle East impasse and its response by the moral imbeciles of the western intelligentsia.

Here’s a useful corrective to some of the myths about Iraq:

Consider just a few of the inaccuracies served up by the media:

Claims of civil war. In the wake of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a flurry of sectarian attacks inspired wild media claims of a collapse into civil war. It didn't happen. Driving and walking the streets of Baghdad, I found children playing and, in most neighborhoods, business as usual. Iraq can be deadly, but, more often, it's just dreary.

Iraqi disunity. Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting. Few Iraqis support calls for religious violence. After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance.

Expanding terrorism. On the contrary, foreign terrorists, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have lost ground. They've alienated Iraqis of every stripe. Iraqis regard the foreigners as murderers, wreckers and blasphemers, and they want them gone. The Samarra attack may, indeed, have been a tipping point--against the terrorists.

Hatred of the U.S. military. If anything surprised me in the streets of Baghdad, it was the surge in the popularity of U.S. troops among both Shias and Sunnis. In one slum, amid friendly adult waves, children and teenagers cheered a U.S. Army patrol as we passed. Instead of being viewed as occupiers, we're increasingly seen as impartial and well-intentioned.

The appeal of the religious militias.
They're viewed as mafias. Iraqis want them disarmed and disbanded. Just ask the average citizen.

The failure of the Iraqi army. Instead, the past month saw a major milestone in the maturation of Iraq's military. During the mini-crisis that followed the Samarra bombing, the Iraqi army put over 100,000 soldiers into the country's streets. They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian. And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success.

Reconstruction efforts have failed. Just not true. The American goal was never to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure in its entirety. Iraqis have to do that. Meanwhile, slum-dwellers utterly neglected by Saddam Hussein's regime are getting running water and sewage systems for the first time. The Baathist regime left the country in a desolate state while Saddam built palaces. The squalor has to be seen to be believed. But the hopeless now have hope.

The electricity system is worse than before the war. Untrue again. The condition of the electric grid under the old regime was appalling. Yet, despite insurgent attacks, the newly revamped system produced 5,300 megawatts last summer--a full thousand megawatts more than the peak under Saddam Hussein. Shortages continue because demand soared--newly free Iraqis went on a buying spree, filling their homes with air conditioners, appliances and the new national symbol, the satellite dish. Nonetheless, satellite photos taken during the hours of darkness show Baghdad as bright as Damascus.

Plenty of serious problems remain in Iraq, from bloodthirsty terrorism to the unreliability of the police. Iran and Syria indulge in deadly mischief. The infrastructure lags generations behind the country's needs. Corruption is widespread. Tribal culture is pernicious. Women's rights are threatened. And there's no shortage of trouble-making demagogues. Nonetheless, the real story of the civil-war-that-wasn't is one of the dog that didn't bark. Iraqis resisted the summons to retributive violence. Mundane life prevailed. After a day and a half of squabbling, the political factions returned to the negotiating table. Iraqis increasingly take responsibility for their own security, easing the burden on U.S. forces. And the people of Iraq want peace, not a reign of terror. But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

An understatement, surely? The western media are a vital weapon in the war against the west.

Last Thursday, BBC TV Newsnight transmitted an item which, even by the standards of today’s poisonous climate, left an extraordinarily bad taste in the mouth -- to put it mildly. The item by reporter Michael Crick and producer Meirion Jones, which was tied to a report in the New Statesman, excitedly claimed a sensational exclusive – the discovery that British civil servants had secretly colluded with a Middle Eastern country to enable it to develop nuclear weapons, in flagrant contradiction of UK government policy. The only problem with this sensational exclusive was that the alleged policy breach occurred in the 1960s during Harold Wilson's government; and that the Middle Eastern country was Israel.

The purpose of running this item, itself a follow-up to a previous Newsnight ‘exclusive’ last summer about alleged British help in developing Israel’s nuclear weapons, was clearly highly political and acutely tendentious. It was to make the point that, at a time when the ‘Bush-poodle’ in 10 Downing Street is telling us that a nuclear-armed Iran is a danger to the world which cannot be allowed to develop, Britain itself is guilty of having started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The true guilty party in the world today, therefore, is not Iran but Britain – and the true danger to the world is Israel. For the item not only blamed Israel for starting the arms race, but equated its development of a nuclear weapon with the behaviour of Iran.

This is moral equivalence at its most sickening. We can all deplore nuclear proliferation and wish that Israel did not have nuclear weapons, just as we can wish that Britain, America or anyone else did not have nuclear weapons. But there is all the difference in the world between Israel’s bomb – developed solely to prevent itself from being annihilated – and Iran’s bomb – being developed in order to threaten the annihilation of Israel and points west. Moreover, such equivalence immediately turns into moral inversion, because it implicitly denies the victimisation of Israel – indeed, en passant Crick sneered that while Israel appeared to be heroically fighting for its life in the Six-Day War, it had the insurance policy of nuclear weapons all the time.

Well, it is far from clear that in 1967 it possessed a usable nuclear weapon; and in any event, since that war was over almost as soon as it began, the perception of ‘plucky little Israel’ derived not so much from the way that it fought than from the then overwhelmingly obvious fact that a tiny blameless country was surrounded by millions of people in hostile states who were trying to exterminate it. It is that fact, of course, that Newsnight was so keen to deny. For the real purpose of this item was to deny that Israel was the potential target for genocide that it is, and blame it instead for being the root cause of Iran’s desire to get the bomb -- and thus, by extension, the root cause of the danger in which we have all now been placed.

To rub home the alleged iniquity of Israel, the programme interviewed that dispassionate expert Mordechai Vanunu, who duly stuck Israel with the charge of nuclear proliferation as he was set up to do – although interestingly, even he balked at the BBC’s suggestion that, in going after Iran (if only), Britain was pursuing the wrong target; for he understood, unlike the BBC, that a nuclear Iran is absolutely not a good idea. It was left to a somewhat bemused Israeli author, however, to make the screamingly obvious point that back in the 1960s the need to stop nuclear proliferation was simply not on the global agenda, and that Israel was perceived to be fighting for its existence and needing all the help it could get. In other words, the context then was radically different from what it is now. To draw a parallel between then and now, as Newsnight was doing, was therefore grotesque. To seek to equate the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a terrorist state that openly threatens genocide and world domination with a nuclear deterrent developed by an ally of this country was moral imbecility of a high order.

However, worse was to come. Far worse. For the centrepiece of this ‘investigation’ was the unearthing of a superannuated former analyst from the Defence Intelligence Staff, Peter Kelly, who apparently had been the one man in Whitehall who, upon seeing photographs of Dimona back in the 1960s, realised that the Israeli cover story was false and that this was a nuclear weapons installation. And the centrepiece of his testimony to Newsnight was that the impact of his dramatic insight at the time had been blocked by another civil servant, who had not only knowingly provided a false report to HMG that Israel was not developing nuclear weapons but had helped Israel secure materials to make these weapons in direct contravention of the declared policy of the British government. The name of this civil servant was Michael Michaels, who for 14 years had been Britain’s representative on the IAEA.

And now we got to the real rotten nub of this ‘exclusive’. For what Newsnight alleged was that Michaels had behaved in this treacherous way because he was a Jew who was a keen supporter of Israel. ‘Indeed’, Crick reported breathlessly, ‘his middle name was actually Israel’. Oh dear. The implication was that Michael Israel Michaels was actually named after the state – whereas, of course, quite apart from the fact that when Michaels was born the state of Israel didn't exist, 'Israel' has always been a common first name for a Jew, for reasons that would be obvious to anyone who knew any of the history of the Children of Israel. No matter. The nub of this singularly obnoxious revelation was that Michaels was a Jew, and that therefore at the very core of the behaviour by Israel that had made the world the unsafe place it is today lay an act of Jewish treachery by someone who purported to be a patriotic Englishman at the heart of the British government.

Why did Kelly think that Michaels had gone along with Israel’s deception, asked Crick. ‘Well his middle name was Israel’, Kelly replied. ‘You think there was an element of dual loyalties here?’ pressed Crick. ‘Yes’, said Kelly. And what had this Jew, thus posthumously smeared by the accusation of treachery, actually done? According to Crick, he had not only borne false witness but had secured the provision of plutonium for Israel which had helped it make the bomb, in contravention of British government policy and in the teeth of opposition by the Foreign Office.

Let’s look at all this a little more closely. The first point is that the claim that Britain’s plutonium helped make Israel’s bomb is absurdly over the top. As Crick himself acknowledged en passant, the amount Israel asked for was 10 mg, whereas 4 kg of plutonium would have been needed to make a bomb. The second point is that the story does not add up. It is extremely implausible that a middle ranking official such as Michaels would have had the power to reverse government policy in this way. Indeed, as Crick mentioned even more en passant, the Foreign Office – which we were told was originally dead against the deal – eventually agreed. There would almost certainly have been other, more significant actors playing a role in this drama. Indeed, since the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a very strong supporter of Israel, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he himself pursued a policy which was not declared in public. Who knows? All we have to go on is the connection made in the mind of one retired former defence intelligence analyst between his perception of a colleague’s behaviour and the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’.

In another context, the suggestion that a middle-ranking official could reverse policy by himself would be ludicrous. But in the context of this item, it was something else entirely. For Michael Israel Michaels was not only presented as a deus ex machina covertly manipulating events behind the scenes so that the world was put in danger; he was specifically accused of having done so because he was a Jew. To hear the BBC single out, as the clinching proof of a perfidious disloyalty to the state by a British citizen, the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’ is to strike a chill to the very bone. For of course the unspoken implication here goes far beyond this particular civil servant. The real message of that Newsnight item was surely this: forget Iran; forget the worry over thousands of Islamist terror supporters in Britain; the real danger to the world is Israel, and the real British fifth columnists are those Jews who support it.

Vicious, vicious stuff.

The following account has been sent to me of an episode in an Israeli hospital:

I went to our pediatric ICU in search of M.Z.(the father) from Gaza. I heard that his baby daughter was flown here from Southern Israel by helicopter after our medical team connected her to the ECMO machine that temporarily takes over the functioning of the heart and lungs. Our mobile ECMO team is the only of its kind in Israel. I saw a large group of Arabs relaxing on the grass outside the department and asked if M.Z. was among them. They answered me that they were Israeli Bedouins and not from Gaza.

I found M.Z. sitting alone outside on the other side of the building ... smoking and looking dazed. Thus our conversation began. After introducing myself and shaking his hand, I asked about his daughter. ‘She's only one year and eight months old ... and the only one of my eight children who looks like me.’ His eyes were red, tired and reflected great pain. M.Z. told me how the little girl one day could not breathe and how he rushed her, without incident, from Gaza to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva. After several days there her condition rapidly and seriously deteriorated and that's when our team flew to hopefully rescue her. M.Z. was angry at the fateful turn of events that had befallen his daughter and could only refer to Allah (God) for mercy. He was grateful hat our people were doing everything possible to save his child.

We began discussing politics and the direction our two peoples were heading. There we were ... a Jewish grandfather (me) and a Muslim father of a gravely ill child from Gaza ... talking like old friends ... almost like family. The mere fact that he was here while our physicians fought to save the life of his little girl is noteworthy these days.

That first encounter with M.Z. was on a Thursday. The following Sunday I learned from the attending physician, Dr. Merzel, that there was no change in the little girl’s condition. Her name … Hadil. I again walked across the hospital campus to find her father and this time I found him in the simple room where parents of critically ill children could sleep. The Pediatric ICU is not a happy place and he was not a happy man. The gravity of Hadil’s condition was etched in his face as he murmured over and over, ‘Hum-Dulelah’ (blessed be the name of the Lord). In Hebrew we say, ‘Baruch- Hashem’ and he flipped between the two languages. We greeted each other with a sincere Middle Eastern hug and kisses on the cheek. M.Z. was alone and it was important to me, in the name of humanity and of my people, to provide him with some personalized contact. ‘Come, my friend, let me buy you some coffee, something to eat and we’ll go to my office. You need a change of scenery.’

We ate and drank together, sitting on opposite sides of my desk and once again spoke as if we had known each other for years. So natural, so right. I then accompanied him back to the ICU where he could be near his daughter. When I left him, we both glanced skywards and opened our hands, acknowledging that Hadil’s fate rested with Allah, God or whatever name we mortals choose to give our Creator.

The next morning Dr. Merzel informed me that Hadil’s condition was extremely grave and that she was not responding. The end was near. With a heavy heart, I walked over to find M.Z. He was not there so I looked into the room to see his daughter, jaundiced, so very small and vulnerable, attached to the ECMO that pumped blood and oxygen through her failing body. A moment later, M.Z. entered the hallway with his wife who had been rushed here from Gaza, accompanied by his cousin. She could not bring herself to turn the corner to look upon her daughter... to say goodbye. I respectfully stood well off to the side, as did the nurses, as M.Z. encouraged her forward. Tragedy is any parent having to experience such a moment in their lives.

Later, in the hallway, M.Z. introduced me to his wife and cousin. I held her hand between my own and we looked into one another’s eyes. Nothing needed to be said.

Later that afternoon as I was leaving to return home, M.Z. and his cousin stopped me with urgency on their faces. ‘Please...’ pleaded M.Z. ‘My cousin and wife were only given permission by the authorities to enter Israel for twelve hours. They want to stay with me tonight because the end of Hadil is very near. Can you help us?’

What a macabre situation I was faced with...not really knowing how to attain the permission they needed. I immediately contacted the head of our security who then put me in touch with a uniformed policeman, Reuven, who was stationed permanently at the hospital. Reuven is an Ethiopian who speaks Hebrew and Arabic as well as his native tongue. ‘How do you know Arabic?’ I asked him. ‘I spent some time in Sudan,’ he answered in his typically gentle Ethiopian manner.

So began a myriad of telephone calls to first the central police authority and then to the army who was ultimately responsible for any Palestinian entering Israel from either Gaza or the West Bank. The hours were ticking by. If we did not succeed in getting to the right person, then the cousin and wife, when attempting to cross back into Gaza, would be arrested and interrogated as to their whereabouts beyond the time that was allotted them. Such a scenario was incomprehensible to me considering the nightmare they were living.

We had run smack into the steel reinforced concrete wall of military bureaucracy. It was then late in the afternoon and I realized that I was in deep water far over my head. I suggested to the cousin that he take a taxi back to Gaza to avoid his being unjustifiably arrested and that we would find a solution for the mother of little Hadil. They all agreed.

M.Z. later remembered the name of the Palestinian liaison officer at the governmental level in Gaza who helped negotiate matters of extenuating circumstances... but he did not have his phone number. He tried calling a relative in Gaza who might have that number, but his mobile phone could not make the necessary connection. I took him to our administration office where the only international phone line was located. We were successful in finding his relative and in getting that final phone number.

I spoke with the liaison officer who was familiar with the story and he thanked me for intervening on behalf of the family. He also said that he would personally handle the contacts with his Israeli counterpart to guarantee the safe passage of the family when they returned to Gaza. I handed the phone to M.Z. who spoke and shed tears as he thanked the man for his help.

I returned home later that evening, several hours after being stopped by those people who needed some help. Palestinians from Gaza.

The next day at 9:40 AM, Hadil passed away. With a heavy heart, I walked over to face the bereaved parents. The three of us sat quietly together in their room … as the mother, dazed and broken, mumbled repeatedly ... ‘Hum-Dulelah, Hum-Dulelah.’ M.Z. cried as we parted with a long hug and kisses on both cheeks. We stared long, hard into each other’s eyes and just nodded.

Our hospital arranged for an ambulance from Gaza to come and take M.Z., his wife and the body of Hadil back home.

Many people complain that an Israeli would never be given an equal opportunity if the situation were reversed. That is not what this is all about. This sad story graphically illustrates a reality of life here that is hidden from the world’s media. Israeli technology, medical expertise and human kindness are available to Palestinians in need. We were not able to save little Hadil, but we tried. Just another example of life in Israel at eye level ... far beyond the media.

Those desirous of peace in the Middle East might care to ponder this analysis of what Palestinian children are currently being taught about Israel and the Jews:

To undermine the ideological foundation of the Zionist movement, the book authors keep ignoring the Israeli people’s profound historic connection with the Land of Israel. They do so by almost completely disregarding the ancient Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, and by defining the ancient inhabitants of the region as Arab peoples. As for the Palestinians’ attitude towards Israel, the books, as in the past, deal with war, violent confrontation, what they refer to as ‘the martyrdom of the Palestinian warriors’, and the refugees’ “right of return’ to those places in Israel they left.

An innovation of grave significance found in one of the 2004-2005 textbooks is the use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a means to besmirch the Zionist movement, reiterating antisemitic myths on the Jews’ intention to take over the entire world (note: the authors of the book chose to omit that section from this page in another edition of the book). Furthermore, even though the subject of World War II and its consequences is covered in one of the textbooks, its authors chose to totally ignore the Holocaust.

In the previous year (2003-2004), a positive change was observed in the textbooks, which indicated the Green Line and mentioned the agreements between the Palestinians and Israel. The 2004-2005 textbooks, however, show a regression, which is reflected in ignoring the agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and in renewing the practice of referring to population centers in Israel proper (within its pre-1967 borders) as ‘settlements’ (the purpose being to portray them as illegitimate and temporary). Moreover, the textbooks also make use of anti-Semitic motifs as a means to attack the Zionist movement.

These negative findings are characteristic of the Palestinian curriculum, based on an educational policy striving to indoctrinate the young generation of Palestinians with hatred against the State of Israel. It is reflected in the denial of Israel’s legitimacy, unwillingness to peacefully coexist with it, cultivation of hostility against Israel (and against the Jews, albeit to a lesser extent), attempt to refute the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel by rewriting history, and inculcation of the concept of violent struggle as a positive national and religious value. This ‘education’, conducted in the Palestinian Authority’s education institutions, gives rise to new generations of students instilled with hatred against Israel, making peaceful coexistence between the two peoples highly difficult to achieve.

Reminder: this incitement is being promulgated by the ‘moderates’ of the Palestinian Authority -- who of course are so very different from Hamas.

It is hard to exaggerate the courage of Dr Wafa Sultan. A psychiatrist who was raised in Syria, she became an overnight sensation after she delivered an extraordinary broadcast on al Jazeera TV in which she told the Arab world the truth about itself. As the New York Times reported:

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries. She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence...

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, ‘The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling.’ She went on, ‘We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people.’ She concluded, ‘Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.’

...‘The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations,’ Dr. Sultan said. ‘It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.’

For a former Muslim woman to say such things to a Muslim audience is an act of the most astonishing bravery. Subsequently she gave a scarcely less remarkable interview on Israel radio, in which she described the way she had been brought up to think:

Up to the very very first day I emigrated to the United States I used to believe that Jewish people are not human creatures: they had different features; they had different voices than humans. Unfortunately, this was the way I had been raised. By getting to know and work with them here, in the States, I have discovered how wrong we were. And the more I work with them, the more I believe we are all human beings. You know, Mr. Singer, there is a common saying: ‘Get to know your enemy in order to be able to fight him.’ Far from this saying, I would say to both sides, ‘Get to know your enemy in order to be able to befriend him.’ Because once you know how much suffering your enemy is going through you would be more compassionate - and eventually more tolerant. Get people at both sides - know each other, communicate with each other, and this is the way to become tolerant and more compassionate.

Now Dr Sultan is receiving death threats. The free world must protect and support her, and others like her -- not just by preventing any harm from coming to her but by spreading what she is saying as far and as widely as possible. Lies and hatred survive and fester in direct proportion to the silence with which they are received. The truth, by contrast, drives them out. This monster that we are facing is driven by the lies -- and the hatred and murderous hysteria that are fostered by those lies -- that have taken up residence in people’s heads. By nurturing the Dr Sultans of this world, by putting them on TV and radio and publishing what they are saying, the great weapon of truth can be mobilised to defeat this hatred and this madness.

The BBC political editor Nick Robinson reports apparently dirty verbal tricks at the Downing Street crossroads ahead of tomorrow’s crunch vote on the Education Bill:

One reporter asked the prime minister about Guantanamo Bay and also this question: ‘Do you think it is sustainable for you to remain in office when a piece of flagship legislation is passed with the help of an opposition party?’

The official transcript of Mr Blair's reply reads: 'I think I have said what I have said on Guantanamo. And on the first part, you know if you look at the school system at the moment...' before he goes on to talk about the school reforms.

What Tony Blair actually said - we've checked the tape - was:
'Look as you say I am hopeful we will get the vast majority of Labour MPs behind us, in fact I am absolutely sure we will get the vast majority. The question is whether we manage to get enough to get it through with Labour votes alone. But in a sense the issue is doing the right thing for the country, it's what the country expects and of course I want to do it with Labour MPs in full support. Look I think this is a very, very critical issue for the Labour Party for its instincts, for what it's about, for what it is trying to do.'

I'm sure it was just a typing error and that Number 10 will be happy to put it straight.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed a prominent advertisement for my new book, Londonistan, on the home page of this website. The book, which is being published in the US at the end of April, is an attempt to explain how Britain managed to become the principal hub of Islamist terrorism in Europe.

It is an analysis of the cultural, political and social developments that allowed this extraordinary development to occur. It is a story in which institutions across British society – the judiciary, security circles, the Church of England, the universities, the media – have all been complicit in creating a climate of moral inversion, intellectual confusion and deeply prejudiced irrationality which has allowed clerical fascism progressively to colonise what has become a moral and cultural vacuum.

Far from Britain learning at long last the lessons of this debacle, the book concludes that it is still heavily into a state of potentially lethal denial and appeasement of extremism. This has cut the ground from under the feet of truly moderate British Muslims and, most dangerous of all, failed to engage with what is principally a repudiation of reason and the bedrock values of liberal democracy. The result is that, despite Tony Blair’s image as a cheerleader for America, Britain is now the weak link in the defence of the west.

To order a copy of the book, click on the image of the cover on the home page and you will be linked to amazon.co.uk.

The little French town of Saint-Genis-Pouilly has not previously figured conspicuously in the annals of world events. Until now. While much of Europe cowers spinelessly over the Danish cartoons, Saint-Genis-Pouilly has bravely stood up for Voltaire against the very religious fanaticism that he fought. As the Wall Street Journal reports, a cultural centre in the town organised a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, which is not an attack on Islam per se but lampoons all forms of religious intolerance. Islamist activists immediately demanded that this reading be cancelled.

Instead, Mayor Hubert Bertrand called in police reinforcements to protect the theater. On the night of the December reading, a small riot broke out involving several dozen people and youths who set fire to a car and garbage cans. It was ‘the most excitement we've ever had down here,’ says the socialist mayor.

Herve Loichemol, a French theater director who produced the recent readings of Voltaire's play in Saint-Genis-Pouilly and Geneva, says he wasn't trying to provoke Muslims but knew from experience his production might anger some. He pushed ahead anyway. Banning blasphemy ‘admits private beliefs into public space,’ he says. ‘This is how catastrophe starts.'

Amazing! A member of the intellectual elite with moral intelligence! The WSJ story goes on to record a previously less glorious response to this play by authorities in Switzerland. Those who follow with keen interest the career of Tariq Ramadan, the iconic ‘moderate’ and super-cool pin-up of the appeasement crowd, might be particularly interested in one aspect of this part of the story:

In the early 1990s, Mr. Loichemol had proposed staging the play to mark the 300th anniversary of Voltaire's birth in 1694. Islamic activists objected, among them Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist movement in Egypt. Mr. Ramadan wrote an open letter in October 1993 warning that performing Voltaire's play would ‘be another brick in an edifice of hatred and rejection in which Muslims feel they are being enclosed.’

After weeks of debate, Geneva authorities dropped the play, citing financial reasons. Mr. Loichemol, who lives near Voltaire's old chateau outside Geneva, denounced the decision as a revival of intolerance. Mr. Ramadan, who has become one of Europe's most influential Muslim intellectuals, has since tried to distance himself from the campaign to censor Voltaire, saying he admires the writer and has taught ‘Fanaticism’ to students. In an interview last year with the French magazine Medias, he said he was in Egypt when the play got canned and ‘;was not even aware of this affair.’

Now read the sequel:

Last spring, Mr. Loichemol decided to take another stab at reviving the play and persuaded Saint-Genis-Pouilly to include it in a program of cultural events, along with Flamenco dancers and a lowbrow farce. Mr. Akhrouf, the cafe owner and activist, says that in early December, he got an agitated phone call from a friend who had just received a leaflet advertising the event. Mr. Akhrouf found a copy of the play on the Internet and started shaking with rage as he read the portrayal of Muhammad as a fanatic.

Shortly afterward, he attended Friday prayers at a big mosque in Geneva and talked about his concerns with Hafid Ouardiri, a mosque official and veteran of the earlier anti-Voltaire campaign. They drafted a letter to the mayor demanding the play be cancelled ‘in order to preserve peace.’ Mr. Ouardiri, an Algerian-born former leftist radical, came to France in the 1960s and says he used to chant the 1968 student slogan, ‘It is forbidden to forbid.’ Now a devout Muslim, he says he champions ‘the need to forbid.’ Algeria and other Muslim countries, he says, were colonized by Europeans ‘nourished by Voltaire.’

Mayor Bertrand considered dropping the play. But after talking to aides and voters, he decided to stand by Voltaire. A meeting two days later to defuse the crisis got nowhere. Mr. Bertrand, flanked by officials from France's security service and other state bodies, quoted a section of France's constitution that guarantees free speech. Mr. Akhrouf and Mr. Ouardiri pleaded with authorities to try to understand Muslim feelings. Mr. Akhrouf broke down in tears. ‘I was very emotional,’ he says.

The night of the reading, riot police took up positions outside Saint-Genis-Pouilly's cultural center. An hour into the performance, the mayor got called out of the hall because of street disturbances. The mayor says the mood was ‘quasi-insurrectional,’ but damage was minor. Police chased Muslim youths through the streets. Now that tempers have calmed, Mayor Bertrand says he is proud his town took a stand by refusing to cave in under pressure to call off the reading. Free speech is modern Europe's ‘foundation stone,’ he says. ‘For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them.’

He does have one regret: He found the play, five acts in archaic verse, ‘deeply boring.’

Bravo, M.le maire!

The Jerusalem Post reports that Professor Robert Wistrich, author of the classic book about antisemitism The Longest Hatred, has said that England is exhibiting classic ‘obsessive’ antisemitism of a kind that was once confined to mainland Europe:

Robert Wistrich, who heads the Hebrew University's Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, pointed to recent characterizations of Jews as the cabal behind the Iraq war and anti-Israel rhetoric leading to activities such as boycotts. Historically, Wistrich explained at a lecture Wednesday night, British Jew-hatred has been less ideological, less violent and less successful in influencing government policies than in places such as Germany, Russia and Poland...He attributed England’s less ‘compulsive’ anti-Semitism in part to British ‘self-confidence’ as a prosperous empire with no need to feel threatened by a small minority, which started to change in the 20th century as the empire began to fall apart...

Another speaker at this meeting, Brenda Katten, chairman of the Israel, Britain and the Commonwealth Association, put her finger on another particularly troubling aspect of this phenomenon:

She said that members of the Jewish community, who face regular antisemitism, were beginning to blame themselves.

As with all previous such outbreaks of this longest hatred, there are now some Jews – mainly those prominent in intellectual circles and other areas of public life, and mainly those with only a tangential connection to the Jewish community – who are turning on their own people by regurgitating the tropes of anti-Jewish scapegoating, which masquerade under the apparently respectable soubriquet of anti-Zionism and which are being deployed by their enemies. Although historically a commonplace, this development is nevertheless currently a source of the most intense division, concern and grief within the Jewish community. A new book edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, entitled The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders brings it out into the open. You can read about this book, with many references to much other related material, here.

Has there ever been a more ridiculous public intellectual than Francis Fukuyama? First, he famously pronounced the ‘end of history’ and that democracy was now happily spreading across the entire planet. Then he decided that, far from history having ended, civilisation was in mortal danger and he became a prominent neo-conservative. Now, the Independent gloats, he has recanted neo-conservatism too:

This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Mr Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement...Thus chastened, Mr Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it ‘realistic Wilsonianism’.

Fukuyama thus joins the swelling band of fair-weather fainthearts who originally supported the defence of the west but have turned tail and run for their reputations now the going has turned tough. He has written yet another book apparently to demonstrate that the history of Fukuyama has not ended but is going backwards. A period of silence from this particular thinker would surely be preferable.

On a website called muslim wakeup.com, Adam Hanieh, Hazem Jamjoum, and Rafeef Ziadah -- who are described as being

‘active in a variety of groups in Toronto, Canada, including Al Awda (Toronto), Sumoud Political Prisoners Group, the Arab Students Collective (University of Toronto), and the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid’

-- furnish a telling insight into the aims and strategy of the Palestinians to bring about the destruction of Israel. They gloat at the astonishing success of the strategy of associating Israel with apartheid:

The Palestinian solidarity movement has made significant gains since the onset of the Second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000. Over the last five years, a new generation of Palestinian solidarity activists has mobilized in the streets, campuses, and schools across North America. Among the left and progressive movements, there is broad acceptance of the proposition that US foreign policy in the Middle East is based on support for Israel as a ‘colonial-settler’ state, to draw upon the title of Maxime Rodinson’s classic work. Every major mobilization against the war in Iraq has seen the Palestinian struggle placed up front in opposing the US war machine, and most activists new to the movement are introduced to the Palestinian struggle and history through an anti-Zionist perspective. This is an unprecedented achievement. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, radical and progressive movements in the advanced capitalist countries generally refused to take an unequivocal stance in support of Palestinian liberation. Zionist organizations were active in the movements against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, and other progressive causes. Palestinian solidarity was marginal to the large mass struggles that took place in the latter half of the 20th century, and the left commonly countenanced a supposedly ‘progressive Zionist’ stance.

An unprecedented achievement indeed, to demonise Jews for merely defending themselves against annihilation and successfully smear them throughout the western hemisphere by means of one of the biggest and most disgusting lies in history. Israel was not, of course, the ‘colonial, settler state’ they claim it to be. Israel is the ancient homeland of the Jewish nation, which was itself colonised by Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and the British before being eventually restored to the Jews by the world in belated recognition of the overwhelming justice and dire necessity of their cause.

What is more interesting, however, is that flushed with this diabolical success in turning justice and truth on their heads, these authors feel confident enough to let the mask slip. The election of Hamas, they say, means that the Palestinians must now drop the concept of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza -- an aspiration which had been allowed to ‘narrow’ the Palestinian question -- and aim for the destruction of Israel instead. The Jewish state must not be allowed to exist because the concept of a Jewish state itself amounts to ‘apartheid’.

Leave aside for the moment the little matter of the actual nature of apartheid, which a moment’s informed thought will reveal bears no relation whatsoever to the democratic state of Israel in which Israeli Arabs have full civil rights. What these writers are saying is that Jewish national self-determination is illegitimate. For why? Because:

The Israeli state defines itself as a Jewish state and, therefore, cannot be a state for all its citizens.

This from people who themselves want a state that is defined as a Palestinian state – and which would have no place for the Jews, who are targeted for extermination in the genocidal rhetoric of Hamas, in a region from which Jews were ethnically cleansed during the last century. Grotesque as all this is, the authors can barely contain their excitement that this might be brought to pass by the concerted delegitimisation of Israel that is now under way:

There is a powerful momentum building around the world for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign. On July 9, 2005 a call was made by over 170 Palestinian organizations to launch a global BDS campaign. Churches in North America have begun to investigate the possibility of divestment. In Norway, the first provincial council to have adopted a boycott of South African apartheid recently did the same in regards to Israel. Twenty Quebec organizations, including the Fédération des Femmes du Québec (FFQ) and the provincial union of CEGEP teachers, have endorsed a new campaign to boycott Israeli products and companies supporting Israeli apartheid...

A boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign based upon an apartheid analysis can provide an overarching framework for our other Palestine work. It doesn’t replace the need for outreach, education, and action around the myriad of issues connected to Palestine such as refugees, the apartheid wall, or prisoners. Rather, a BDS campaign can answer the question: what to do next? It provides a concrete strategic focus that raises consciousness around Palestine as we carry it out. Pushing a divestment motion through a union requires sustained work to convince the membership of Israel’s apartheid character. Recent successes show that these demands are winnable and can provide tangible gains...

The important steps made in the last five years towards strengthening popular solidarity for the Palestinian struggle lay the groundwork for future victories. The possibility of building a successful campaign to isolate and end Israeli apartheid is probably more likely today than at any other time since the establishment of the Israeli state.

This makes it clear beyond doubt. The boycott and divestment campaigns, built upon lies and libels disseminated by western intellectuals who demonise Israel for defending itself against mass slaughter, are themselves the forward arm of a strategy not to remedy ‘injustices’ but to exterminate a nation – not because of anything it has done, but because its very existence as a Jewish state is not to be permitted. Those promoting these campaigns, in the universities, the churches, the NGOs and -- God help us -- ‘human rights' organisations, are thus doing the work of the genocidal fascists of Hamas and Iran.

The Church of England has now pulled back from the brink of its own divestment deringolade. Its Ethical Investment Advisory Group has decided not to disinvest from Caterpillar Inc. But the reasons it has given in its statement do nothing to begin to restore the Church’s shattered moral integrity:

•The purpose of the ethical investment policy of the Church of England is to avoid profiting from enterprises engaged in activities which are either wrong or so controversial among Christians as to undermine the credibility and unity of the Church’s witness. The EIAG decision was taken in the specific context that there are no current or projected sales of Caterpillar equipment for use by the Israeli government; Caterpillar sold its equipment to a US Government body and had no direct sales to the Israeli Government; and the EIAG could find no compelling evidence that Caterpillar is or has been complicit in human rights abuses.

•The purpose of the ethical investment policy is not to engage in punitive action or to make public gestures, however much individuals might in other contexts support such actions.

•Disinvestment is by definition a last resort action, ending the possibility of engagement with the company. While engagement carries risks – not least a charge that engagement is only for show – the EIAG concluded that the engagement we have had with this company is productive, and justifies the intensive effort that has been, and will continue to be, expended. In particular, the company is very well aware that if sales were to resume the matter would immediately have to be brought back to the Group for very active reconsideration, and that the risks to the company’s reputation are real.

•The EIAG will continue to reach its own conclusions on whether the Church of England is profiting from continuing sales of equipment for purposes contrary to our general ethical investment policy and whether therefore to recommend disinvestment at some future date.

So the only reason why the Church is not disinvesting in Caterpillar is that Caterpillar may not be being used by the Israelis at all and therefore divestment would be pointless grandstanding – and if Caterpillar does sell equipment to the Israelis again, the threat remains that divestment will march smartly back onto the agenda. So the reason why disinvestment was such a disgusting course of action for the Church to take not only remains unaddressed but has even been reinforced. That reason is the Church’s obsessional hatred of Israel, its wholesale acceptance of the lies told about it and the moral inversion that frames them, and its condemnation of a country under existential threat simply because it takes action to defend itself. Indeed, the divestment agenda is all about translating that existential threat into a hideous reality.

Ethical investment policy? This remains persistent moral bankruptcy in a church that has totally lost its way.

Evidence in the Sunday Telegraph of how Iran has played the west for suckers over its nuclear programme – and how the Europeans were the most suckered of the lot (surprise, surprise):

The man who for two years led Iran's nuclear negotiations has laid out in unprecedented detail how the regime took advantage of talks with Britain, France and Germany to forge ahead with its secret atomic programme. In a speech to a closed meeting of leading Islamic clerics and academics, Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with the so-called EU3 until last year, revealed how Teheran played for time and tried to dupe the West after its secret nuclear programme was uncovered by the Iranian opposition in 2002.

He boasted that while talks were taking place in Teheran, Iran was able to complete the installation of equipment for conversion of yellowcake - a key stage in the nuclear fuel process - at its Isfahan plant but at the same time convince European diplomats that nothing was afoot.

‘From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, “The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.” The Europeans used to respond, “We trust them,”’ he said.

Now there's a surprise.

A reader writes:

Your observations about the antisemitic madness now sweeping the country are all too accurate. Two of my relatives report that they recently walked out of social events in reaction to blatant antisemitic diatribes. In the second case, the offender explicitly stated that ‘the Jews rule America.’ In neither instance did anyone else object to the outburst; and in neither instance did the culprit understand that he/she had said anything objectionable.

Last night my mother was at a dinner party with a long-time friend, an academic she's known for 30 years. All of a sudden, this individual began expressing his respect for the ‘historian’ David Irving, questioned whether millions of Jews had really been murdered by the Nazis and added that the Holocaust is only discussed because Jewish groups such as the Board of Deputies see fit to exploit it for their own nefarious purposes.

What is interesting is that in none of these incidents was there any pretence of ‘criticism of Israeli government policy’; the targets, quite explicitly, were Jews as such. My mother believes that antisemitism has now become publicly acceptable in this country.

It’s a relief that none of the current crop of Hollywood’s west-flagellating, terrorist-sanitising hate-movies – Paradise Now, Munich, Syriana -- won best picture at the Oscars. Charles Krauthammer hits the nail on the head about Syriana’s moral and political illiteracy:

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women's rights and democracy. What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less — at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish 'oilman of the year' celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans. What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today concerns America's excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote — against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism — local leaders like the Good Prince.

While Amir Taheri points out how the market for national and cultural self-loathing into which Syriana taps is acting as a potent recruiting sergeant for the war against the west:

I received more than a dozen emails from Arab friends throughout the Middle East citing the film as, in the word of one of them, another ‘sure proof’ that the US will never tolerate democratic leaders in that neck of the wood... The fact that the CIA is little more than a costly leaking device used by rival groups within the US establishment to lurch accusations and counter accusations at each other need not bother the makers of ‘Syriana’...

The self-loathing party in the US would do well to ponder the above mentioned second part of the quotation from Waugh: ‘The more elaborate the society the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat.’

I agree totally with all these points. And yet, when I saw Syriana at the weekend, I had a slightly different reaction. The message of the film, that the oil companies form an axis of corruption at the centre of which squats the CIA and which has a vested interest in frustrating moves to democracy in the Arab world, is clearly a morally inverted agitprop attack on Bush’s America, and as ludicrous as its other message that human bomb warfare is caused by unemployment. And yet, if you pare away the partisan politics, the message that the combination of big oil and politics has had a lethal impact on global order is surely correct. It’s just that the film miscasts the principal villains and victims. After all, why else has Israel been left to swing in the genocidal wind for more than fifty years if not for the fact that oil runs global politics? Why else was Saudi Arabia indulged by the US, even while the oil-soaked kingdom was busy creating the Wahhabi threat to world peace, if not through the close connections with the Saudi oil princes? And so on.

Peter Nolan and Sacha Kumaria in the Sunday Times explain this conundrum by pointing out that Syriana grossly misses the point of the book upon which it is based: 'See No Evil', the memoirs of a CIA veteran, Bob Baer. His book describes how weak leadership, bureaucratic infighting and corruption left the terrorists to go unpunished and blinded America to the rising threat of Al-Qaeda. The point is, however, that this was an attack upon the Clinton White House:

The movie’s slogan, ‘Everything is connected’, belies the film’s main failing: that it is not at all reflective of the contents of Baer’s book, which describes how he saw the Clinton White House put out the welcome mat for the very dirtiest people in the oil business in return for campaign donations and fat payments to the president’s cronies. Roger Tamraz, then a fugitive from an outstanding Interpol arrest warrant for fraud, got to pitch his plan for an oil pipeline face-to-face with Bill Clinton over coffee in the Oval Office. He began his career, Baer tells us, by working to channel millions of dollars in kickbacks from an oil pipeline deal to Kamal Adham, the long-time head of Saudi intelligence, and went on to partner everyone from the Sicilian mafia to Colonel Gadaffi of Libya. Another notorious businessman benefiting from Clinton’s interventions was the commodity broker Marc Rich, who spent over a decade on the run from American justice before Clinton pardoned him just before leaving office.

Instead of depicting this history, we get a political fairytale pushing the anti-business agenda of Clooney and Stephen Gaghan, Syriana’s writer and director. Imagine if the story of the journalists who investigated Richard Nixon’s cover-up of Watergate, All the President’s Men, had been filmed to show Jimmy Carter as the villain and you might get some idea of the liberties they take with the facts.

Syriana portrays the giant American oil companies as villains, a collection of crude Texas cowboys who cheerfully admit to bribery while presenting themselves as patriots and Christians. The international middlemen, wheeler-dealers like Tamraz and Rich, who operate with shell companies, post office boxes and a complete lack of scruples, are conspicuous by their absence. The tragedy of the film is the missed opportunity it represents. Clooney and Gaghan are right to recognise corruption in the oil industry. But by attempting to score domestic political points they miss the bigger picture.

In the cartoon world of Bush-hating luvviedom, of course, Bill Clinton cannot ever be a villain. Thus our current terrifying predicament is reduced to stereotypes as reassuring to their creators as they are lethal to the rest of us.

A must-read by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in New Republic on the world war that is currently under way. Here’s a taste:

...Within a blink of the political eye, we have witnessed political Islam's most widespread social mobilization -- from Europe, through the Middle East, and into Asia -- in response to the cartoons; political Islam's most significant assumption of political power since the Iranian Revolution a quarter-century ago, in the Palestinian community; and political Islam's most threatening military development since Saddam Hussein's attempt to put a stranglehold on the Gulf (and thereby the world), with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and contemporaneous nuclear weapons program.

Political Islam is on the march in the three loci of politics: the street, the halls of power, and the field of battle. Its targets are both domestic (to suppress freedom and dissent within Islamic countries; sharia is already becoming the rule in Gaza) and international (to spread its sway and impose its orthodoxy abroad). While its international power is still circumscribed, political Islam's ambitions are extensive, violent, and frightening--with its members sensing its growing potential (fuelled also by America's geostrategic weakening in the Iraq quagmire). Political Islam's leaders and masses watch a Western world in evident disarray about what to do regarding each aspect of this partly coordinated, partly fortuitous offensive. We must consider that we are witnessing the beginning of political Islam's intensifying social and political mobilization into a new multipronged, intercontinental intifada. A Sunni Muslim cleric, having helped organize anti-cartoon protests in his hometown and in Beirut, explained the protests' significance: ‘The way I see it, the war [with the West] has already started.’

...This is not normal politics. This is not even the normal excess of normal politics. Imagine what European and American commentators would say if tens of thousands of Americans, Britons, Germans, or Israelis marched with calls for the murder of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, or Muslims in response to a few anti-American, anti-European, or anti-Semitic cartoons appearing in one, or a few, Arab or Islamic newspapers. Yet Western politicians and commentators have mostly indulged this outpouring of violent hatred. Even when decrying it, they blame the cartoons' publishers and express pious regret that the cartoons insulted the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims, as if there is any normal political cause and effect (let alone a proportionate one) operating here. This Western indulgence is extremely wrongheaded and self-injurious. It cloaks the political Islamic proto-intifada in a measure of legitimacy. It emboldens its instigators and its shock troops in the street, revealing the West's unwillingness to respond resolutely to these verbal and physical assaults with moral, rhetorical, and political clarity, and to convey the unapologetic message that the West's people and polities refuse to be attacked, intimidated, and cowed...

What is political Islam's game plan for triumphing? In Iran -- political Islam's greatest power -- the leadership's pronouncements lay out the contours of its aims. Like Al Qaeda, the current Iranian regime, led by Ahmadinejad, thirsts for revenge against the 'arrogant' West. To them, the West has, for centuries, constricted, humiliated, divided, and dominated the Muslim nations. Ahmadinejad's desire for revenge is coupled with a belligerent and global missionary zeal. A renascent and ascendant Muslim world would first acquire nuclear weapons and thus attain parity of power with the West. Then it would annihilate Israel. Aided by global Islamic forces (there are an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world), which are already showing their strength in Europe, political Islam would proceed to assail the West, weaken it, and ultimately subdue it. In his speeches, Ahmadinejad sets forth his overarching ambition in unabashedly taunting and insulting terms. Western nations, he proclaims, 'have stood against [the] resurrection movement of Islam. They think that they can undermine the world nations' faith in Islam with desecration of Islamic sanctities. But the Muslim nations will give them a good lesson!' Ahmadinejad boasts of 'a wave of Muslim awakening and the gradual collapse of the hegemony of the West.' Eventually, he foresees a world 'without the United States and without Zionism.'

The idea of Iran -- together with sundry Islamic regimes, scattered bands of terrorists, and an activated Muslim street in Europe -- defeating the West should not be dismissed as a Lilliputian megalomaniacal fantasy. Obviously, many Muslims and their countries will not sign on, and, in the end, political Islam cannot prevail against a resolute West. But, in the meantime, it can do enormous damage. The really bad news is that Al Qaeda is not the main problem. Iran is...

The fight, it cannot be emphasized enough, is not a 'clash of civilizations' with Muslims or Arab or Muslim countries. Rather, the fight is with annihilationist and totalitarian political Islam, its political leaders and regimes, and its unknown millions of political adherents across the Islamic world (who, let us not forget, broadly celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Center). The West must make it clear that it will not treat totalitarian political Islam as legitimate, though it is happy to conduct normal, friendly, and mutually beneficial relations with the many Islamic peoples and countries that are not intolerant and bellicose. Political Islam must not be emboldened by appeasement. Its rhetorical and physical violence must not be tolerated at all.

Do read the whole thing.

I have only just got round to reading Douglas Murray’s excellent book, ‘Neoconservatism: Why We Need It’ (Social Affairs Unit). At a time when neoconservatism is said to be in eclipse, the value of this book lies in setting the facts straight about what it actually is and is not and then showing why it is the only truly moral response to the times in which we live. Murray points out:

•The politically motivated distortion of the work of the US political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the way in which his alleged influence in creating neoconservatism was vastly exaggerated;

•The fact that neoconservatism isn’t at root conservatism at all but was originally a liberal attack on social collectivism;

•Its defining characteristic is moral clarity, and its recognition of the evils of moral collapse both in the domestic agenda of moral relativism and abroad in the morally inverted agenda of anti-Zionism and the appeasement of communism;

•US foreign policy after 9/11 was not dictated by neoconservatism but brought about a confluence of thinking between neocons and old-style conservatives such as George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld;

•The vilification of neoconservatism by so-called liberals in Europe and the US derived from desperation that only the neocons had coherent policies for tackling genocide, dictatorships and human rights abuses while the liberals had none;

•Opposition to the Iraq war was fuelled by moral equivalence, hatred of Israel and a media vendetta which was biased against the west;

•Last but by no means least, neoconservatism is the way forward for the British Conservative party. The Tories must confront the attitude of national slump and fight to preserve what is good in the nation as well as get rid of the bad. As Murray observes, this offensive position appears to have been forgotten by British Conservatives. Indeed it has. The party now marches under the banner of loving Britain ‘as it is’. No more reactionary doctrine can there be. Yet the Tories appear intent at present on taking the path of least resistance to everything, out of terror that they may be thought to be out of tune with the times -- even though those times stand for moral disorder, a flight from reason, cultural self-loathing and appeasement of evil. The current Tory party, indeed, is currently the very antithesisis of the neoconservative ideal.

Murray also delivered a fine address to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam a week ago, in which he pointed out that the unprecedented nature and unfamiliarity of what we are facing in the west was making us blind to its dangers:

The conflict which we are now in – which we have been most visibly engaged in for five years, but which had in truth opened far earlier - is not a conflict which looks familiar to the people of Europe. It barely resembles conflicts of their past. And just as this war does not much look like earlier wars, so victory in this war will not look like earlier victories. This poses a problem: what will victory in the war on terror – the war against Islamic extremism - look like? How will we know when it is over? How will we know when we've won?

The only, and deeply imperfect, guide may be time - the length of time in which we are not hit, seriously threatened or cowed. If we are to have victory then it will emerge as an almost imperceptible victory: it will be a diminuendo towards victory. Only historians will then be capable of determining which battles were vital, which significant, and which illusory triumphs of their time.

The flip-side of this is that defeat in the war on terror – the war on Islamic extremism - will not happen in a familiar manner either. Defeat will not look as defeat would have looked last time. It will rather, I suggest, consist of a gradual accretion of hurts on our society, a wearying accumulation of often minor humiliations: death by a thousand cuts. Rather than waking up one day and finding troops rolling into our cities, we will simply become aware, with a growing sense of numbness, that what we had has slipped away, that what we relied on for support and succour has eroded and washed beyond our reach. If we end in darkness this time, it will be because we shuffled, rather than fell, into it.

You have to look hard to find such moral clarity within today’s British Conservative party -- or indeed most of the British establishment.

This story appeared two weeks ago on NewsMax.com. It quotes a senior Pentagon official telling a meeting of intelligence specialists that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Syria and Lebanon by the Russians – but that the intelligence on this was brushed aside in an inter-agency turf war:

‘The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon,' former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John. A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored 'Intelligence Summit' in Alexandria, Va. They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence,’ he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred. He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles ‘a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighbouring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship.’

Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France. He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions - roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. ‘The origins of these weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place.’

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got ‘a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London’ via non-U.S. government contacts.

‘The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty,’ he said. Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.

The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts ‘provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut.’

But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response. ‘My report on the convoys was brushed off as Israeli disinformation,’ he said. One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA ‘rice bowl.’ It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had committed the unpardonable sin of violating another agency's turf.

The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. ‘They trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community,’ Shaw said. ‘We got constant indicators that Langley was aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian American and me in Kiev,’ in addition to his other sources.

But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual contact. His Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David Nicholas, a Western ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of Ukrainian intelligence. Smesko had been a military attaché in Washington in the early 1990s when Ukraine first became independent and Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. ‘Smesko had told Cheney that when Ukraine became free of Russia he wanted to show his friendship for the United States.’

Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion. ‘Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of the Geospacial Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA,’ Shaw said. But it was Shaw's own friendship with the head of Britain's MI6 that brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that included Smeshko's people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles.

In the end, here is what Shaw learned:

In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was ‘WMD free.’

Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as ‘Sarandar,’ or ‘emergency exit,’ has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice. In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003, ‘two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean,’ where Shaw believes they ‘deep-sixed’ additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

The Russian ‘clean-up’ operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq ‘under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants.’
Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003. Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to ‘push back’ against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election. The press sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear weapons program had ‘gone missing’ after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.

The two Russian generals ‘had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the preceding five to six years,’ Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew ‘the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad.’ The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, ‘laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD.’

Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives ‘were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb,’ Shaw said. ‘The Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement that ‘only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad.’ That was the ‘only true statement’ the Russians made, Shaw said.

The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon ‘was an entirely controlled Russian GRU operation,’ Shaw said. ‘It was the brainchild of General Yevgenuy Primakov.’ The goal of the clean-up was ’to erase all trace of Russian involvement’ in Saddam's WMD programs, and ‘was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception.’

Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by Bush administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence information he brought to light. ‘Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs,’ Shaw said. ‘He whispered sotto voce to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind.’ Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had
systematically ‘ignored Russia's involvement’ in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles' could be much bigger than anyone has thought,’ but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran. ‘With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs,’ he told NewsMax, ‘the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad.’

McInerney agreed that there was ‘clear evidence’ that Saddam had WMD. ‘Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how.’

Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear campaign against the Bush White House and the war in Iraq. ‘The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the beginning,’ he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on Saturday. He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House ‘cherry-picked’ intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.

‘Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views known, if that is indeed what he believed,’ Perle said. ‘He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could have voiced them at that time.’ But according to officials briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never did.

Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents ‘that remain untranslated’ among those seized from Saddam Hussein's intelligence services. ‘I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited,’ he said. Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's palace conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.

‘What was most disturbing in those tapes,’ Tierney said, ‘was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission.’ In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam discussed with his aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been dismissed as ‘old programs’ disbanded years earlier, according to the final CIA report on Iraq's weapons programs, presented in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group. ‘When I first heard those tapes’ about the uranium plasma program, ‘it completely floored me,’ Tierney said.

I don’t know whether any of this is true. But there’s a lot of detail in what Shaw has said. What is startling is that as far as I know no other media outlet has even reported this. Shouldn’t the mainstream media be beating a path to former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John. A. Shaw and sticking a microphone under his nose? Shouldn’t they at least be asking questions about this?

What’s keeping them?

Ken Livingstone, whose defence of his abuse of mayoral office steadily becomes more and more bizarre, resorts to the usual knee-jerk smear in a self-serving article in the Guardian:

For far too long the accusation of anti-semitism has been used against anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government, as I have been.

Au contraire. For far too long, the claim that any critic of Israel is accused of antisemitism has been used to smear anyone who protests at the way in which Jewish peoplehood is being singled out for delegitimisation. To repeat for the nth time: the issue is not criticism of Israel, to which no-one objects. The issue is a process of demonisation, dehumanisation and delegitimisation, based on lies and libels, in which Israel alone of all the countries of the world is singled out through such lies and distortions to be a scapegoat, which is a way of softening up the world for its destruction; and then to cap it all, the vilification of Jews who protest at this monstrosity, for which they are accused in a further distortion of doing something that they are not doing, ie claiming that all critics of Israel are antisemites.

At Engage, David Hirsh provides an effective analysis of the Livingstone affair from the beginning:

What if it had been a black journalist? ‘What did you do before, were you a plantation owner?’ ‘No, and I’m quite offended by that.’ ‘Well you might be black but actually you’re just like a plantation owner...’

What if it had been a Muslim journalist? ‘What did you do before, were you a suicide bomber?’ ‘No, and I’m quite offended by that.’ ‘Well you might be Muslim but actually you’re just like a suicide bomber...’

But no. Ken doesn’t apologise for his low-level racist abuse. After he’s had two weeks to think about it, he explains that his responses to Finegold were 100% appropriate and reasonable...

Livingstone does more than ‘criticise the policies of the Israeli government’. For thirty years now, he has been part of a movement in the UK that seeks to demonize Israel as a pariah state and that seeks to hold ‘the Zionists’ responsible for much that goes wrong in the world. In the 1980s Livingstone was associated with the Workers Revolutionary Party – a party that railed against global Zionist conspiracies and that was partly financed by the Libyan state.

This is why Livingstone is happy to treat the antisemite Qaradawi as an honoured guest. This is why Livingstone is happy to employ low-level racist abuse against a Jewish journalist even when he has been told that the journalist finds this offensive. This is why Livingstone chose to make such a big issue out of this story rather than back down quickly and pragmatically. This is why he reacted with a tirade against Sharon to claims that his conduct was offensive. This is why he opposes suicide bombing of buses in London but excuses the suicide bombing of buses in Tel Aviv.

And this is in no small measure why the British media are taking his part.