The Independent (subscription required: don’t bother) chose today to illustrate a self-serving and repellent Robert Fisk interview with Stephen Walt (as in the infamous Mearsheimer/Walt paper on ‘The [Jewish] Lobby’ in America) with a picture of the American flag in which the stars of the union are replaced by Stars of David, under the headline: 'The United States of Israel?'

The image makes the claim that America is run by the Jews. As such, it is merely a variant on the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theory that has long been a defining feature of anti-Jewish prejudice. In these degraded times this particular trope, which once would have caused any publication which printed it to be treated as racist or a Nazi-style pariah, has become a commonplace of mainstream media discourse because now it is Israel which is treated as a Nazi-style pariah; and so vicious libels against the Jews are regarded as fair comment. (The illustration calls to mind the notorious New Statesman ‘Kosher Conspiracy’ cover which portrayed a Star of David piercing the UK flag, and also a previous illustration in the Independent which was almost identical.) David T at Harry’s Place neatly juxtaposes the Independent illustration with near-identical ones on neo-Nazi and other racist websites. Thus our anti-racist, multicultural media.

With egregious disingenuousness, Walt tries in the interview to wriggle away from the devastating and prolific deconstruction of his paper’s truly lamentable absence of scholarship and clear evidence of prejudice by pretending that it had only suggested there was an Israel/Jewish lobby in America in the same way that there were countless other lobbies. But of course, that was not the thrust of the paper at all. Were it so, it would not have singled out the Jewish/ Israel lobby for particular scrutiny as being of extraordinary power and influence over American foreign policy. That assertion is not true, just as the many statements it made about Israel’s behaviour were not true either. America supports Israel because a) it considers this to be in America’s interests and b) because so many Americans are evangelical Christians, for whom Israel has a special (and for Jews, not always comfortable) significance.

The idea that America’s Jews have had more influence over the policy of the United States than the Arab oil lobby has had is, of course, ludicrous. And as anyone who has addressed an audience of American Jews on the east or west coast rapidly discovers, to support Bush or the war in Iraq is often to provoke a hostile reaction, since American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat (supporting the party that is most lukewarm towards Israel), have views on Bush which are unprintable and did not generally support the war in Iraq. Yes, American Jews do form a lobby. But the idea that they have unparalleled power over the US administration and form a malign conspiracy that spans Jerusalem and Washington merely exists in the imagination of those for whom the Jews pose some kind of problem.

But now there’s an extra twist. Since the Mearsheimer/Walt paper claimed that the hallmark of the Jewish lobby was its incontinent use of the charge of antisemitism whenever Israel was criticised (a claim that is a regular but nevertheless outright lie) -- thus, in effect, concealing the 'crimes' of Israel -- the effect has been to tar any identification of anti-Jewish prejudice with that brush even where the prejudice is actual and blatant, as in the Mearsheimer/Walt paper.

Thus for a Jew to call the libellous assertion of a uniquely powerful Jewish lobby by its proper name of anti-Jewish prejudice is held to demonstrate the power of that very same Jewish lobby, thus proving that the libel was not a libel at all but true. So in Fisk’s article, Walt sighs over the inevitability that his claim of singular power for The [Jewish] Lobby would provoke the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice -- thus proving the truth of his own claim. It therefore follows that no protest can be made by Jews against anti-Jewish prejudice – at least where Israel is concerned -- without this being said to demonstrate that the supposed prejudice is in fact no more than the freshly-revealed truth. QED.

So a perfect circle is joined, and Jews are now faced with the invidious choice: do they call by their proper name the libels that are being used to defame them and uniquely single out Israel for delegitimisation, a response which will inevitably lead to their own further defamation; or do they seek to head off those noxious consequences by keeping quiet, thus allowing bigotry its loathesome victory? Neat, eh? Has there ever been a people in the history of this planet who are thus permanently trapped in such an infernal vice between the rocks and hard places of hatred?

But a simple question for all those Independent readers and others who really, genuinely believe that the Jews wield a sinister global influence of cosmically staggering proportions: if their influence is so vast, how come they remain, uniquely in the world, mired in a fifty-year struggle for survival against people who are determined to exterminate them, who have murdered large numbers of them and who show no sign of ever stopping doing so, due in large measure to the implacable indifference, ambivalence or hatred displayed towards them by the world over which they are reported to wield the said cosmic influence? Just what kind of a two-bit cosmically powerful lobby is this?

As the old joke might have it: two Jewish prisoners starving in a Soviet labour camp are reading an article by Robert Fisk about how the Jews control America (ok, a few liberties have been taken).

The first Jew beams and says, ‘What a wonderful article! I can’t wait to read another one by him! He’s definitely my favourite writer!’

The second Jew says: ‘Are you out of your mind?! The article is a monstrosity! How can you say such a thing?’

‘Because,’ says the first, ‘when I read what he writes it makes me believe for a moment that we Jews run the world’.

A splendid piece by the former Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, reminds us of what a tragic day it was for both Spain and the defence of the free world when the Spanish buckled under the threat of terror and replaced him by an appeasement-minded government. Aznar is one of the few present or former world leaders who really gets it. NATO, he says, needs to articulate a new mission: to combat jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and concentrate its efforts upon fighting terror. Obvious. In pursuit of this aim, he says, it should open its doors to those nations that share its values and invite Japan, Australia, and Israel to become full members. Obvious: but only to some. Israel, as he says, may be in the Middle East but it is defending western values, and its half-century defence against the Arab enemies who have ceaselessly tried to exterminate it has now mutated into a defence against the Islamist extremism which has taken over the Palestinian cause. But as he says, there are many who don’t see it that way:

As you can imagine, many people in Europe and in NATO were shocked by the idea of inviting Israel, although they took as a natural fact the establishment of closer cooperation with Japan and Australia, which indeed is a big change for NATO. Some people from Israel also objected to having Israel as a formal ally in NATO. But treating Israel as if it were not an integral part of the Western world is a big mistake that will affect our ability to prevail in this long war against jihadism. I think it is in our mutual interests to have Israel as a formal ally...

The West cannot fight this radical tide without Israel. Israelis might decide that for their own security they had better follow the traditional policy of relying just on themselves. But Islamic extremism is more a tsunami than a tide, and in front of this powerful force we better stand together. In Europe, more and more people better understand the Israeli position each day. If you agree that the world faces a global threat, it is necessary to organize a strong response to this threat. For me, Israel is a vital part of the Western world. Israel is becoming more and more important to the Western world for stability, prosperity, and freedom...

I don't believe in appeasement against terrorism. I don't believe in negotiation with terrorism. I believe in the necessity to fight against terrorists. It is a very serious mistake to negotiate with terrorism. Terrorists should be frightened and defeated, and this is possible. No other policy exists for me.

It’s not often one hears a member of the political or intellectual class articulate so clearly and unequivocally such a moral, progressive and eminently realistic position.

There’s been much discussion of the unholy alliance that’s been formed between the left and radical Islamism. Rather less attention has been paid to the fact that this is in fact a three-way alliance – between the left, radical Islamism and neo-Nazism.

The foaming hysteria that the left expresses towards the racist totalitarians whom they call the ‘far right’ is the rage of Caliban looking in the mirror. If one looks at the outpourings of certain individuals on the left, radical Islamists and neo-Nazis or white supremacists, one is struck by similar preoccupations, demonology and even whole phrases, particularly around the issues of Israel and the Jews towards which all three display a visceral hatred. This overlap is somewhat confusing because in Britain, at any rate, the neo-fascist British National Party goes to town on demonising Muslims. The far right is popularly thought to be anti-Muslim because it has a history of racism. Yet the left has a long history of racism too, and as can be seen every day from its demonising of Israel and the Jews, parts of the left are still hard at it.

In any event, is it quite correct to set up the left and the BNP as polar opposites? As Lord Tebbit suggested in a recent letter to the Telegraph, much of the BNP’s platform appears distinctly left-wing:

I have carefully re-read the BNP manifesto of 2005 and am unable to find evidence of Right-wing tendencies. On the other hand, there is plenty of anti-capitalism, opposition to free trade, commitments to ‘use all non-destructive means to reduce income inequality'’, to institute worker ownership, to favour workers' co-operatives, to return parts of the railways to state ownership, to nationalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and to withdraw from Nato. That sounds pretty Left-wing to me.

Certainly the BNP poses as a patriotic party opposed to multiculturalism, and it has racist overtones, but there is no lack of patriotic Left-wing regimes; opposition to multiculturalism is now mainstream and racialism was not unknown even in the Soviet Union. So what is ‘extreme Right-wing’ about the BNP?

In today’s Times, Oliver Kamm writes a terrific piece exploring these conundrums. Pointing out that the Trotskyite/Islamist party Respect is just as bad as the BNP and yet is never considered as such -- even though both are anti-Jewish, for example, and both have antecedents in totalitarian movements -- he reminds us that there have been many historical instances where the left has allied itself with fascism. And just such an association of ideas – which both sides would doubtless strenuously deny – has emerged today too:

There is a common thread in the politics of the totalitarian Left and the far Right, which is to make people’s wishes secondary to pseudo-scientific abstractions such as race and historical forces. The far Left and far Right increasingly talk the same language: division, nativism and even deference to religious fanaticism. The BNP’s cult of violence was once expressed in support for the Islamic Republics of Iran and Libya. It matters that political debate lacks a language for this phenomenon.

The fact is, surely, that the old cliché is true: the old categories of left and right are meaningless. Fascism and communism have common roots going back at least to our old friend, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the romantic counter-enlightenment and, later, the French Revolution. The Nazis were, after all, National Socialists.

What Lord Tebbit was picking up was the BNP’s strongly anti-capitalist bent, which derives from a romantic hatred of free markets for destroying rooted communities. That, of course, is not a right-wing position – it is found also among liberals and on the communitarian left, and should more properly be thought of therefore as a ubiquitous position. In the case of the BNP, however, it is overlaid by a strong racial prejudice, which in turn has the effect of demonising everyone else who values rooted communities. Hence the impossibility in Britain of talking about the need for immigration controls or the dangers of multiculturalism without being vilified as a neo-Nazi.

The BNP’s one-time flirtation with Libya and Iran is of course particularly intriguing, given its current rampant anti-Islamism. The explanation is surely the reason why Trotskyites and neo-Nazis share some of the same preoccupations, and why they share them again with Islamist fascists: that the common thread that links them is a totalitarian mindset, an obsession with power and a determination to destroy freedom and democracy and the moral order of the western world. This is probably why -- at least in part -- they both hate Jews so much, because Jewish moral order is at the heart of western freedom and civilisation.

With all this in mind, it was particularly illuminating -- if horrifying -- to read in the Times yesterday about the latest grand guignol addition to Britain’s Islamist army – a neo-Nazi convert. David Myatt, a founder of the British National Socialist Movement (NSM) who has been jailed for racist attacks, has changed his name to Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt and become a radical Islamist. He has thus embraced the very thing he previously hated. Myatt, who was jailed for leading a gang of skinheads in a fight against Muslims, now supports the setting up of a Muslim superstate and the killing of any Muslim who breaks his oath of loyalty to Islam. He said:

‘I spent several decades of my life fighting for what I regarded as my people, my race and my nation, and endured two terms of imprisonment arising out of my political activities.’ But his belief is now that: ‘The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy. They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created. This may well be a long war, of decades or more — and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad — to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.’

And now look at why he embraced Islam. His neo-Nazi NSM, he said,

considered the creation of a revolutionary situation in this country as necessary since it wished to build an entirely new society, based upon personal honour, and believed this could only be done by destroying the dishonourable and corrupt society of the present… Myatt said recently that he had given up hope of a breakthrough by the far Right and believed that Muslims were the best hope for combating Zionism and the West. ‘There will not be an uprising, a revolution, in any Western nation, by nationalists, racial nationalists, or National Socialists — because these people lack the desire, the motivation, the ethos, to do this and because they do not have the support of even a large minority of their own folk,’ he said.

When it comes to the destruction of the west, therefore, the important thing is to make use of those who actually mean to achieve it, regardless of what each side thinks of the other. That’s why the Socialist Workers’ Party has climbed into bed with Islamist fascism; that’s why this neo-Nazi has reached the same conclusion. That’s why all three movements are in this terrible, hideous thing together: a totalitarian triple of red, green and black united in violent, pathological hatred against the free world.

There is no longer any left or right. There are those who are for life and liberty; and there are those who are for death and slavery. Those who cling to the old categories had better decide which of these two sides they are on.

There’s a must-read analysis of the recent speech by Bin Laden (or whoever) by Walid Phares on Counterterrorism blog. Phares says the speech is as important as the 1998 declaration of war upon America. Here’s his summary of its major themes:

Twenty ‘marching orders’:

* One, a long attack on the Cartoons crisis: Blood is needed to cleanse the matter.

* Two, there is a Western war on Muslims and Islam.

*Three, Western policy towards Hamas proves this aggression.

* Four, the United Nations is an infidel and criminal institution.

* Five, there is a Western-infidel aggression against Muslim Sudan. The Black southerners are bandits and the Darfur Blacks are agents of the infidels

* Six, Iraq’s Jihad is to stop future US military bases

* Seven, a cultural invasion is underway: Arab TVs are to be stopped, Muslim liberals to be killed

* Eight, France is to be punished for the female Hijab affair

* Nine, Bosnia’s Muslims were not salvaged by the West

* Ten, The independence of East Timor is a defeat to the Muslims

* Eleven, India and the Hindus are the enemies in Kashmir

* Twelve, Pakistan’s Musharraf is to be killed

* Thirteen, Russia must be punished

* Fourteen: Salman Rushdie is not to be forgotten

* Fifteen: The masses in the infidel lands think like their leaders.
Their public (enemies) is responsible

* Sixteen: Calls for Dialogue with the West are to be rejected

* Seventeen: Do not trust the “traitors” including Muftis and moderate clerics

* Eighteen: King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia ignores world realities

* Nineteen: (Western) civilization is attacking ours

* Twenty: It is of the duty of all members of the Umma to offer everything for Jihad, including their lives.

What does this show? That the notion that this agenda is about discrete grievances, such as Saudi Arabia or ‘Palestine’, is absurd. It is a world war to impose Islamic fascism.

The vice appears to be closing on Europe. As Patrick Goodenough reports on Townhall.com:

Islamic groups and governments are pressing ahead with a campaign to have international organizations take steps, including legal ones, to provide protection for their religion in the wake of the Mohammed cartoon controversy. In a drive pursued largely away from the headlines, the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) is promoting the issue at the United Nations and European Union, and having some success.

The executive council of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) this month approved an agenda item entitled ‘respect for freedom of expression, sacred beliefs, values and religious and cultural symbols.’ Introduced by more than 30 Islamic states and the subject of considerable debate, the motion explicitly tied freedom of expression to ‘respect for cultural diversity, religious beliefs and religious symbols.’

...The UNESCO move is just the latest illustration of the way the OIC and its 56 member states are using the cartoon episode to apply pressure on the West to comply with Islamic norms… In another development, it was reported last week that E.U. bureaucrats are drawing up a ‘lexicon’ of terminology to use when referring to Islam. Words like ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihad’ are under review, as is the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism.’

So we are about to be censored, stifled, gagged, prevented from naming and discussing the greatest contemporary threat to our lives and liberty. All thanks to the cravenness of the Europeans. But there is one country more craven still: Britain.

As the Daily Mail reported today, UK ministers are considering extending the blasphemy law to cover Islam. At present, this law only covers Christianity, on the grounds that this is the religion of the country and therefore must be protected. In practice, it has fallen into disuse because any attempt to suppress freedom of speech about Christianity would create uproar. If there is a case for reform it is surely to abolish this law; it serves no useful purpose. To actually extend its reach would be an entirely retrograde step, and raises the spectre that – after the proposed law against incitement to religious hatred which could have criminalised debate about Islam was restricted following ferocious opposition (and a bungle in Parliament) -- censorship of debate about Islam will be brought in by a different route.

And what do we learn has provoked this? A desire by the British to appease Turkey, whose aim is to belong to the EU. Thus the Mail tells us that Turkey

...wants EU-wide blasphemy regulations...

Is this the same Turkey which, we are told, is a worthy candidate for EU membership because it is so, ahem, moderate and European? It would appear that being a good European, in Turkish eyes, means that Europe must bow to Islamic requirements. The Europeans themselves apparently

...flatly refused the Turkish request...

But Britain would not lightly pass up an appeasement opportunity; and so

Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland said she would be ‘content’ to listen to their case. She invited Muslims and other faith groups to come forward and lobby the Government.

The phrase turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind; but no doubt that would be banned by an EU regulation.

I was not a million miles away from Tel Aviv when last week’s Palestinian human bomb murdered nine Israelis and injured scores more at a falafel bar. So I didn’t have the pleasure of witnessing the British press treatment of this atrocity.

So bad was the Independent’s coverage that its media commentator, Stephen Glover, was moved to write this in its very own pages today, under the headline:

Not how to report a suicide bombing

Perhaps the reader will believe me when I say that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I am as neutral as it is possible to be. So last Tuesday I was a little dismayed by the manner in which the Independent - though it was not alone - reported the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The opening paragraphs of the piece were entirely devoted to the youth of the bomber, Samer Samih Hamad, and to the anti-Israeli remarks of his relatives, who sought to justify the bombing. There was little description of the horrors that the bomber had inflicted, and scant details about the nine victims. Generally, I do not go along with suggestions by members of the Jewish lobby that reporting of Israel is skewed. On this occasion, I could see their point.

Now we know things are bad.

I have returned from holiday to find that the British Conservative party has passed beyond parody. While lesser political beings were doing tedious things like preside over the disintegration of the health service, have their collars felt by the police over political corruption, fail to deal with the fact that people are being murdered by those notionally being supervised by state-funded officials and other boring little things like that, the Tory party leader David Cameron dressed as a polar explorer and posed with a sled drawn by huskies on the Scott-Tuner glacier in Svalbard in Norway to show how cool he was... er, sorry, the grievous effects of global warming in shrinking the Arctic ice. Alas for Mr Cameron – he was indeed sledging on thin ice, but not in the way he thought. As Michael Hanlon wrote in the Daily Mail last Friday:

...while there are many places in the world where the ice is disappearing, Svalbard, where Cameron has trekked to, doesn’t appear to be one of them. In fact, the relationship between climate change, the weather in the Arctic and the shrinking of its glaciers is far more complex than many people realise. Paal Myrvold, second in command on a Norwegian Navy icebreaker which patrols the seas around Svalbard, knows the mountains, glaciers and ice of his home islands rather better than the back of his hand. ‘When these scientists talk about glaciers retreating,’ he told me, ‘they always forget about Svalbard.’

Yes, many of the glaciers on these remote, beautiful islands are in retreat, but by no means all. The Negribreen glacier, Bakaninbreen and Fridjovbreen glaciers have all surged forward in recent years, bucking the general trend.

Not only are some glaciers increasing while others are retreating, thus suggesting a far more complex picture than the icy apocalypse he intended to dramatise, but the Tories’ eco-evangelist flew to Svalbard in a private jet, thus disgorging a further 20 tonnes of evil carbon dioxide into the atmosphere upon which he claims it is having so catastrophic an effect.

Oh dear.

Today he was proudly showing off his new environmentally friendly official car, a Lexus, which he boasted produced fewer carbon emissions than his previous model (so much for the bicycle, ridden for precisely one photo-op at the start of his leadership for the iconic image, and then discarded). Alas again for Mr Cameron – his new car apparently produces more carbon emissions than the Prius favoured by government ministers.

Oh dear oh dear.

And while others see disaster in global warming, Mr Cameron only sees a radiant future in the apocalypse. We all have to ‘get positive’, apparently, about ecological meltdown.

‘When I think about climate change and our response to it, I don't think of doom and gloom, costs and sacrifice,’ he said. ‘I think of a cleaner, greener world for our children to enjoy and inherit, I think of the almost unlimited power of innovation, the new technologies, the new products and services and the progress they can bring for our planet and all mankind.’

No carbon, no pain! We can still have our consumer society and save the planet!

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

And to make this totally surreal, all this effort is to promote something that is not even true. Mr Cameron claimed that the nineties were the hottest years on record. Eh? The world was two degrees hotter in the Middle Ages. Today he went further still and claimed that scientists had proved that global warming was happening. Excuse me? Not even the deepest Green claims that it’s been proved.

The fact is that not only has man-made global warming not been proved but it remains extremely unlikely; the major research underpinning the claim (the hockey-stick curve, for example) has been shown to be fatally flawed; and the whole absurd scam is based on computer modelling which is no more than manipulated guesswork which does not take account of the literally millions of bio-feedback mechanisms (such as the behaviour of clouds) which make such supposition worse than useless.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about Greenland melting, as this article suggests. Moreover, the calving of glaciers is said to be a sign that they may actually be expanding. As mathematical ecologist Dr. Craig Loehle has written:

How do we reconcile one report showing increased dumping of ice from Greenland into the ocean (which supposedly means the ice is melting) with another showing the ice sheet thickening? Simple. Glaciers move because of increased pressure from above. If you increase the amount of snow in the interior, it will increase movement downslope. It can be simultaneously true that there is more loss at the ocean and more build up in the interior because the snow input is large enough for both. We would not conclude from increase river flow that an upstream lake was draining--usually both lake levels and river levels rise together (in extreme cases we call this a flood). The same is true for rivers of ice.

Meanwhile, a sign that maybe a degree of rationality is at last being allowed to creep into the global warming debate was provided by a recent BBC Radio Four programme, Battle for Influence: Overselling Climate Change. As can be seen from the related article here on BBC Online (with a facility to listen to the programme again), scientists who believe that man-made global warming is happening are nevertheless alarmed that its supposed effects are being exaggerated and misrepresented. Although the programme emphasised that it would provide no comfort to global warming sceptics because all the scientists who took part firmly believed that the phenomenon was occurring, the evidence it unearthed of wholesale distortions and myth-making by global warming proponents revealed nothing less than a totally anti-science, anti-evidence and anti-rational mindset among so-called scientists who simply fitted ‘facts’ to support their prejudices.

For example, the programme examined how climate change was being blamed for an increase in malaria in Africa. Upon discovering there was simply no evidence for this, the claim boiled down – incredibly – to the belief that because the increase couldn’t be measured, it was undoubtedly happening. The global warming scientists were so convinced that climate change was causing malaria, they were certain that one day it would be proved. They therefore made their claim on that basis -- ie, on the basis of nothing at all.

Then there was the decline of the golden toad, said to be the first victim of climate change. This claim was based – risibly – on a correlation between rising temperatures and the decline of these frogs. It is of course an elementary howler to confuse correlation with cause and effect. Nevertheless, global warming was blamed for creating the conditions for a fungus to thrive which killed off the frogs. But other scientists pointed out that this fungus didn’t need high temperatures to kill the frogs, because it was doing so in different areas with different climates.

The programme also said that it had spoken to many climate scientists who agreed that climate change was being exaggerated but didn’t want to say so publicly – because the issue was so ‘polarised’, which seemed to mean that to admit it might hand a moral and intellectual victory to the Americans. Horrors! No worse fate could there be, clearly. What the programme did not do was to follow its own logic and subject the central claims of climate change to the same empirical analysis. That might have led the programme–makers to the same ghastly, unthinkable fate.

But hey, what are mere facts compared to the politics of image? Even Gordon Brown is now desperately trying to paint himself green. So what if the whole thing is rubbish on stilts? Since the middle classes have alighted upon green politics as the latest painless path to moral virtue for the happy denizens of our most complacent circles, politicians must follow.

Who among them would dare say that suckers are green?

This website is now resting until the end of next week. I wish everyone a happy and peaceful Easter and Passover.

In London yesterday, I met General Georges Sada. An Iraqi Christian, he was Air Vice Marshal in Saddam’s Iraq and, despite being an Assyrian and not a member of the Ba’ath party, was by his own account a close adviser to Saddam and was very much at the heart of the action during Saddam’s regime. Somehow he survived and became, among other things, the President of the National Presbyterian Church in Baghdad and head of the Iraqi branch of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, whose headquarters are based at Coventry Cathedral and whose bishop bestowed upon him the Prize for International Peace and Reconciliation.

Last year, an American Christian organisation that raises funds for needy Iraqi children invited Sada to a conference. At that conference, he raised eyebrows when he announced that he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Saddam had hidden his weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3 by transporting them to Syria. He was persuaded to set down his account in a book, Saddam’s Secrets, which was published in America earlier this year by a small Christian publisher, Integrity. This is what Sada says in his book about Saddam’s WMD.

The UN inspectors found and destroyed thousands of tons of weapons in Saddam’s Iraq.

But I can assure you, they didn’t find everything. Because of his rapid rebuilding capabilities, Saddam managed to hide many of these weapons, along with the raw materials for building weapons of mass destruction. During the times when these weapons were not actually in production – mainly because of the threat posed by the United Nations inspectors – Saddam gave orders that the scientists who had been working on these programmes were to keep their plans, diagrams, formulas, raw materials and everything else in highly secure underground vaults so that they could continue their work the minute they were no longer being observed...

If Saddam ever suspected that there was any chance the inspectors would find something, he would have everything destroyed. But even then, nothing was really destroyed: the scientists had the knowledge and the budget, and when the time was right they would simply begin again. This was even true in the nuclear weapons programme. Even though we had not yet developed actual nuclear warheads, we were working on them. We had some components, and Saddam had developed sources in Europe, Asia and America who were willing to supply whatever we needed.

As Sada says, prior to the Iraq war no-one in Europe or America ever doubted that Saddam possessed WMD. So what happened to it?

...there is a tremendous volume of intelligence on these matters and mountains of anecdotal evidence. These are issues the Americans would likely have pursued diplomatically. But if they did, they have not wanted to make any of that information known to the media or the public. I am in quite a different situation, however, as a former general officer who not only saw these weapons but witnessed them being used on orders from the air force commanders and the president of the country.

Furthermore, I know the names of some of those who were involved in smuggling WMDs out of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I know the names of officers of the front company, SES, who received the weapons from Saddam. I know how and when they were transported and shipped out of Iraq. And I know how many aircraft were actually used and what types of planes they were, as well as a number of other facts of this nature...

Everyone in the international arms community knew that Saddam had them and that he was spending like a sailor to buy more…The point is that when Saddam finally grasped the fact that it was just a matter of time until Iraq would be invaded by American and coalition forces, he knew he would have to take special measures to destroy, hide or at least disguise his stashes of biological and chemical weapons, along with the laboratories, equipment and plans associated with nuclear weapons development...

Saddam had ordered our weapons teams to hide the WMDs in places no military commander or United Nations weapons inspector would expect to find them. So they hid them in schools, private homes, banks, business offices and even on trucks that were kept constantly moving back and forth from one end of the country to the other. And then fate stepped in...

On June 4 2002, a three-mile long dam collapsed in Syria, causing a disaster over 40 square miles. When Syria asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam seized his opportunity.

For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq’s WMDs. Weapons and equipment were transferred both by land and by air. The only aircraft available at the time were one Boeing 747 jumbo jet and a group of Boeing 727s. But this turned out to be the perfect solution to Saddam’s problem. Who would suspect commercial airliners of carrying deadly toxins and contraband technology out of the country? So the planes were quickly reconfigured...

Eventually there were fifty-six sorties. He [Saddam] arranged for most of these shipments to be taken to Syria and handed over to ordnance specialists there who promised to hold everything for as long as necessary. Subsequently I spoke at length to a former civilian airline captain who had detailed information about those flights. At the time he held an important position at Iraqi airways, which is the commercial airline in Baghdad...

In addition to the shipments that went by air, there were also truckloads of weapons, chemicals and other supplies that were taken into Syria at that time. These weren’t government vehicles or military equipment but large cargo trucks and eighteen-wheelers made to look like ordinary commercial operators...

To keep all these transfers under wraps, the operators worked through a false company called SES.

This company played a key role in transporting equipment back and forth between Syria and Iraq, as well as in smuggling many former government officials out of Iraq prior to and immediately after the US invasion in March 2003.

When I spoke to Sada yesterday, he told me the pilots involved were now terrified for their lives. As a result, he has undertaken not to name them. This obviously makes verifying his account very difficult.

He told me that the pilots told him that they saw yellow barrels with a skull and crossbones motif being loaded onto the planes. Comical as this sounds, he says the skull and crossbones is a recognised signal of dangerous contents, and yellow signals the presence of chemicals.

He also says that he lived and worked with the ever-present daily reality of Saddam’s tactics of hiding his WMD from the weapons inspectors. Whole environments were transformed and rebuilt – buildings, whole factories – in the largely successful strategy of hiding the stuff. The idea that Saddam suddenly stopped hiding it and secretly destroyed it instead, he says, is utterly ludicrous. Hiding WMD was the unchanging pattern of his regime.

He has listened to the tapes that recently surfaced of Saddam’s discussions with his top brass about the problems being caused by the UN weapons inspectors. He says the translations that have so far been made of these tapes are inadequate because the translators, who are of course Arabic speakers, do not however speak Tikriti Arabic, the dialect in which these discussions were conducted. Sada does speak Tikriti. He has translated a crucial three and a half minutes of these tapes, he says, in which Saddam and his generals are discussing how to outwit the UN inspectors; in which they say that the problem of the chemical weapons is solved but the biological are still causing a problem; that this problem will probably be solved with the help of the Russians and the French; and in which Saddam says: ‘In the future the terrorism will be with WMD’.

In April 2004, a group of al Qaeda terrorists was caught in Jordan with 20 tons of Sarin gas. When Sada heard of this, he says, his blood ran cold. There was only one place which was capable of producing 20 tons of Sarin: Saddam’s Iraq. To his horror, he says, he realised at that moment that Saddam’s WMD had got into the hands of al Qaeda.

Earlier this year, Sada was interrogated about his claims by the American House Intelligence committee, to whom he gave the names of the Iraqi pilots. Subsequently, he says, the Committee went to Iraq and spoke to the pilots. The result, he says, is that a major American investigative and diplomatic effort is now under way to finally locate the missing WMD.

But in Britain, I say, people now firmly believe that there were no WMD and that we were taken to war on a lie. Sada looks utterly flabbergasted. ‘How can they possibly think that?’ he asks in bewilderment and anger, and puts his head in his hands.

In the Washington Post, Eliot Cohen calls the Mearsheimer/Walt thing by its proper name:

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran’s fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

Quite so. Cohen’s robust assertion that this is indeed the Prejudice That Dare Not Speak Its Name addresses head on one of the most twisted aspects of this whole phenomenon of Judeophobia dressed up lightly as Israel-hatred. It is the claim made by these Judeophobes that they are being persecuted for daring to criticise Israel.

This is based on the further assertion that anyone who criticises Israel is accused of antisemitism. This is demonstrably untrue and is itself a smear designed to stifle the exposure of Judeophobia. On the basis of this monotonously repeated calumny, anyone who accuses a Judeophobe of expressing prejudice towards Jews is declared guilty of stifling freedom of speech. So people like Mearsheimer and Walt can come up with the most egregious libels against American Jews – accusing them of being agents of a foreign power and a conspiracy to subvert America, the tropes of classical antisemitism -- but as long as they are demonising either Israel or Jewish support for Israel they believe they are immune from such a label.

They are the enemies of the enemies of Judeophobia, and Israel is their get-out-of-Judeophobia-jail-free card. Thus protected, they can then accuse the Jews who cry foul at such prejudice of persecuting them. Thus it becomes impossible for a Jew to identify the canard -- as in Mearsheimer and Walt -- that the Jews are a global conspiracy, without such an identification proving by definition that they are indeed such a conspiracy. Merely stating that the claim of a Jewish conspiracy is a vile Judeophobic canard proves that such a conspiracy is true. QED.

It was this thinking that lay behind the disgusting debate put on by the Economist magazine in London a while back on the motion ‘The enemies of antisemitism are the new McCarthyites’. Yup, that’s right – anyone who called attention to the outbreak of Judeophobia was a McCarthyite, because they were trying to sanitise the crimes of Israel. It was at this debate that the view was also expressed that any British Jew who supported Israel’s policies was guilty of ‘dual loyalty’ and not properly British. Clearly, if anyone was in danger of being intimidated here, it was precisely such a Jew; yet according to the Economist motion’s proposers, it was those making such a vile smear who were the ‘victims’ of an attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Thus hate speech becomes a ‘human right’; and its victims must be condemned for attacking freedom of speech if they dare protest at being thus smeared or libelled.

The fact is, of course, that those Judeophobes who so noisily proclaim on every possible platform that they are being silenced cannot support their claim because it is self-evidently absurd. As Cohen observes of Mearsheimer and Walt:

Reporting persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic journals that turned them down.

The Financial Times -- of all papers -- has been taking a deeply unpleasant position on this controversy. In a leader on April 1 (subscription only) it wrote:

Moral blackmail - the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and US support for it will lead to charges of antisemitism - is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views. It is also leading to the silencing of policy debate on American university campuses, partly as the result of targeted campaigns against the dissenters. Judgment of the precise value of the Walt-Mearscheimer paper has been swept aside by a wave of condemnation. Their scholarship has been derided and their motives impugned, while Harvard has energetically disassociated itself from their views. Mr Walt's position as academic dean of the Kennedy School is in doubt.* Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and progress and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd when dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or reduced to the status of samizdat. On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow.

In the FT two days later Mark Mazower claimed – in an article in which he did not question or criticise the Mearsheimer and Walt smear of a Zionist /Jewish conspiracy and lobbed some additional stink-bombs of his own – that fear of being tarred an antisemite meant that criticism of Israel was being

put under surveillance and inhibited.

Where? How? What are he and the FT editor talking about? There’s no evidence of this happening at all. On the contrary, one can hardly open a newspaper or political magazine or go to a public meeting without being assailed by claims of the perfidy of the global Zionist/Jewish conspiracy. What these FT writers are saying is that any protest against such claims is somehow illegitimate. Hate speech against Jews must not be criticised. Is it not therefore they themselves who are therefore seeking to shut down debate?

Those on the left who spew out their vile calumnies about the global Zionist/Jewish conspiracy do not lose their jobs, or fail to get published in academic journals, or find their media appearances curtailed. Au contraire – such views are a positive requirement for a stellar position in the most fashionable circles. It is those who defend Israel’s right to defend itself against mass murder and who insist on identifying the Judeophobia that is currently rampant who find they can’t get published, or are denied the airwaves or restricted to their ‘voice of lunacy’ slot, and are generally treated as pariahs – and most particularly if they are Jews.

For Jews in Britain, the price of admission to the counsels of the powerful is to dump on Israel big-time. A similar situation is surely occurring in the rest of what passes for the civilised world; which is at least partly why so many Israeli academics and other Jews are in the very forefront of the new Judeophobia. It was ever thus; many of the fathers of 19th and 20th century antisemitism were Jews, and before that medieval Christian Jew-hatred was promulgated by conversos who yielded to none in their infliction of anti-Jewish terror. Doing the dirty work of the enemies of the Jewish people is, for some, the price of Jewish survival. It is a pathological defence mechanism against an apparently endless cosmic hatred; it is disgusting; it is lethal.

But then of course, to say this is to be guilty of trying to shut down debate -- and is therefore an opinion the utterance of which must not be allowed.

*Update: three days after its leader appeared, the FT published the following letter:

From Prof Stephen M. Walt.

Sir, Your editorial ("America and Israel", April 1/2) on our article analysing the impact of the Israel lobby was a welcome call for a serious discussion of these issues. Unfortunately, it also contained a factual error regarding the end of my term as academic dean of the Kennedy School.

I began a three-year term in July 2002, and agreed to a one-year extension last year. The faculty was officially notified in mid-February that I would step down at the end of the academic year. This announcement was sent nearly a month before the article in question appeared. There is, in short, no connection whatsoever between these events. Harvard University and the University of Chicago (where my co-author, John Mearsheimer, teaches) have behaved admirably throughout, and have consistently defended the core principles of academic freedom and scholarly debate.

Two stories at the weekend suggested that the security world has decided that the London bombings last July were caused by Muslim anger over the war in Iraq, which is acting as the biggest recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda among Britain’s Muslims. Rejoicing among the anti-war camp has already broken out over such a politically useful analysis. But if these stories are true, what they in fact illustrate is surely the fatal inability of the security world even now to grasp the nature and severity of the threat facing this country.

The Observer reported that a Home Office inquiry has concluded that the London bombings were inspired by UK foreign policy, principally the decision to invade Iraq. The Sunday Times reported in addition:

A leaked top-secret memo from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) says the war in Iraq has ‘exacerbated’ the threat by radicalising British Muslims and attracting new recruits to anti-western terror attacks. The four-page memo, entitled International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq, contradicts Blair’s public assurances by concluding that the invasion of Iraq has fomented a jihad or holy war against Britain. It states: ‘It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.’ It adds: ‘Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalisation of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the UK as legitimate.’

Much is already being made of the fact that such assessments appear to contradict Tony Blair’s (unwisely sloppy) assertion that the London bombings were not caused by the war in Iraq. In fact, Blair went on to qualify his remarks by saying that the Iraq war was nevertheless being used cynically to incite Muslims to violence.

It seems to me as futile to deny that there is any connection between Islamist terrorism and the Iraq war as to claim that it is the cause of Islamist terrorism. That cause is simply jihad: a war by Islamists who believe that that they are on a holy mission to Islamicise the world and thus avenge the impotence and humiliation they think has been visited upon them by the dominant global culture of the west. This war is thus being waged upon countries which opposed the war on Iraq as well as countries which supported it, because its root cause lies not in any geopolitical grievance but in religious fanaticism, a cosmic and lethal manicheism and a desire for global domination.

But equally, geopolitical conflicts are being used -- as Blair said -- to whip up the hysteria and inflame the madness still further. Seeing themselves not as aggressors but as defenders of a victimised culture, the Islamists seize on any defence the west may mount to protect itself, citing such action as further proof of its perfidy in order to incite hatred and recruit yet more to the cause. This is the trap that terrorism always sets for its victims -- and there is no escape from it. A response by terrorism’s victims creates more terrorists; but not to respond is to surrender to terror. Thus, to follow the anti-war argument to its logical conclusion, the west must do nothing to defend itself against murderous aggression because this will in turn be used to recruit still more to the cause of terrorism. This is, of course, a recipe for cultural suicide.

What makes this so much worse, however, is that the west is actively promoting precisely this recipe, aiding the terrorist inversion of victim and aggressor and without a shadow of a doubt thus helping fuel the hysteria which is recruiting terrorists to the cause. Day in, day out, the British media bombard us with a relentless and wholly distorted narrative of the war in Iraq, which presents America as devils committing worse atrocities than Saddam Hussein and producing only carnage and making Muslims the victims of western aggression.

It is absolutely obvious that such incendiary falsehoods will inflame an already roaring grievance against the west and push particularly vulnerable young Muslims into the arms of al Qaeda. A moment’s thought would suggest that this particular variant upon the grievance is absurd, since what the British are actually doing in Iraq, along with the Americans, is trying to prevent Muslims from being slaughtered by other Muslims, and trying to help them to live in freedom and prosperity – an attempt that has been mired in bloody carnage partly through coalition incompetence, but that’s another story.

The war in Iraq in itself didn’t cause the London bombers to blow up the Tube and a bus last summer. It was rather the story that the western media is promulgating, that the Iraqis are victims of the west rather than of their real persecutors in al Qaeda and the remnants of the Ba’ath party, that surely gave the death cult which for various reasons finds such purchase among certain Muslim youths its point of detonation. It is that utterly mendacious presentation which is the recruiting sergeant for terrorism – the climate of sheer raving irrationality about the war, the comprehensive re-writing of history and the spitting hatred towards America that have poured petrol onto the flames of jihad. In exactly the same way it is not Israel’s actual behaviour towards the Palestinians which so enrages Muslims across the world -- they have, in fact, precious little idea of the reality on the ground there because of the lies they are told. It is instead the false and malevolent portrayal of that behaviour, which both fabricates the past and so distorts the present, to an extent which could hardly do other than foment intense hatred and violence in response.

Next, one has to look at the motivation behind these conclusions reached by the security world. What should be uppermost in all our minds is that the London bombings represented a massive failure by that world. MI5 was caught with its trousers below its ankles. It had no idea, we were told, that Britain was at imminent risk from its own people. It was, in short, utterly incompetent. As the Observer acknowledged in its story:

Leaks last week from the intelligence and security committee similarly confirmed how Khan, the mastermind of July 7, slipped through a security net. MI5 called off surveillance on him in the months before the bombings, in which 52 people were killed.

However:

The Home Office narrative supports the parliamentary committee's general view that the security services are not to blame. Despite the trips abroad, however, the narrative says that the London suicide bombers were only ever peripheral players in terrorist organisations and that, on the whole, there was 'nothing exceptional' about them before the attack.

Eh? ‘Only peripheral players in terrorist organisations’? These ‘peripheral players’ murdered more than fifty British citizens and injured and maimed scores more. Another quartet tried to do the same two weeks later and failed only through their own uselessness – which mirrored that displayed by the service we entrust to protect us. The fact is that MI5 failed to detect these terrorists, and possibly even let them slip through its own dragnet. In other words these reports are snow jobs, exculpating the Security Service from its own patent and demonstrable failure.

That incompetence is almost certainly the result of the refusal by the security establishment to acknowledge the nature of the threat that this country is facing. Another detail in the Observer’s story gives us a clue. The Home Office document says:

Alongside Iraq, other ‘motivating factors’ for the bombers, three of whom came from west Yorkshire and one from Buckinghamshire, are identified. These include economic deprivation, social exclusion and a disaffection with society in general, as well as community elders.

This is demonstrably nonsense on stilts. The London bombers – like so many Islamist terrorists – were middle class boys with university degrees and good jobs. The claim that poverty or ‘social exclusion’ are factors in propelling such boys into the arms of al Qaeda is ludicrous. Much of its recruitment is taking place on British university campuses. It’s the ideology, stupid – not this sub-Marxist claptrap.

This whole litany of excuses – blaming Islamist terrorism on British foreign policy, the Iraq war, poverty and social exclusion – is the identical propaganda line being peddled by Muslims who are intent upon loading the blame for Islamist terrorism onto its victims and washing their own hands of the whole business. And it comes as no surprise that the British establishment in turn is parroting this rubbish. As I discovered to my shock when researching my forthcoming book Londonistan (see my home page and click on the cover picture to get to Amazon) the British security and political establishment is still in deep denial about the nature of the threat, and simply refuses point blank to accept that it is rooted in religion. But those who cannot even bring themselves to name what it is that they are fighting will never defeat it. Through its own incompetence, Britain’s establishment left its country vulnerable to last year’s atrocity – and even now is still leaving it exposed to danger by failing to grasp that it must tackle not merely the people entering terrorist cells but also what is entering people’s brain cells.

This secret establishment will use every trick at its disposal to cover its compromised tracks – including the priceless gift of a credulous intelligentsia, that has been so lobotomised by its hatred of America/ Israel/Blair that it has utterly suspended its normal cynicism about the secret state and now believes every word being so artfully planted by these masters of public manipulation. The secret state in America has successfully covered its tracks over its serial incompetence in failing to deal with the risks posed by al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein during the 1990s. It has done so by brilliantly manipulating the useful idiots and fellow travellers in the intelligentsia, so that all the blame for these terrible events has been successfully attached to the Bush administration and none to the CIA. Now watch MI5 and the rest of the security establishment pull the same trick in Britain.