He doesn't get it

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest.

But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in the face -- that this...

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Pull the other one, it's got bells on it

The Washington Post reports that newly released (redacted) transcripts of the FBI interrogation of Saddam Hussein in prison reveal that he said he had allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran.

Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. ...‘The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,’ Piro wrote. ‘Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.’

Ah huh. So let’s get this clear. Saddam was so terrified by Iran, so worried by the threat it posed to Iraq and so convinced that no other country in the region could stand up to it, that he destroyed his own weapons programmes.

Logical!

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The Schools Secretary forgets where he is

A delusion appears to have gripped the Schools Secretary Ed Balls that Britain is East Germany and he is head of the Stasi. First there was his bullying this morning of my fellow Spectator blogger Fraser Nelson, who was astounded to find Balls on the phone instructing him to take down his earlier post accusing Balls of lying about government debt -- and using yet another lie to claim it was not a lie. Now there’s this on ConservativeHome from Greg Hands, Tory MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, within whose constituency Balls and Gordon Brown descended upon a school today as part of the launch of the education White Paper. Hands relates:

As has become traditional with this Government - and contrary to the Commons Conventions and Courtesies - neither Brown nor Balls notified me of

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Out of sight, Iran remains on the brink

The way in which Iran has disappeared from media view is, although predictable, still dismaying. With the exception of small flurries of interest over the seizure and release of British embassy staff and the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, the people’s revolution has pretty well dropped out of sight. This is for two main reasons, one shocking and the other just, well, dispiriting. The shocking one is that the ‘progressive’ western intelligentsia, who don’t stop hollering and stamping their feet and marching and petitioning and boycotting over the perceived crimes by America or Israel (‘torture’, settlements’, ‘rendition’, ‘checkpoints’, ‘warmongering’ ‘repression’) are mute over the brutal crackdown that has been going on in Iran these past three weeks, and totally indifferent to the desperate struggle for freedom that is being waged. Dispiriting because the western media think the story is over, the...

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Quis custodiet ipsum Custodem?

Peter Preston, sometime editor of the Guardian (and my own editor there for some 16 years) now writes about the media for the Observer (owned by the Guardian). Unfortunately, he no longer appears to grasp what he himself has written, let alone the journalists he writes about. In today’s column he writes that I (amongst others) wrongly predicted that Ann Widdecombe would be elected Speaker of the Commons:

If political correspondents (and editorial writers) want to play tipster, maybe you should judge them by Ascot’s standards. So who got the young stallion that the Mail now calls ‘Mr Squeaker Bercow’ right? Not Melanie Phillips in the Mail itself. She napped Widdecombe Fair, who was also the Times’s ‘temporary solution’. The Guardian wanted, but didn’t quite get, Sir George Young. Wherever odds were set and quoted - pretty well

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The third stage for Iranian totalitarianism?

Various people have been pointing out, as if they have only just realised it, that the leader of the Iranian revolt, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is one of the architects of the 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power and is thus a Khomeinist and not much of a reformer at all. They therefore conclude – just like Obama – that there’s nothing to choose between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad and so no-one should support the people on the streets. Some also say that it’s better that Ahmadinejad remains in power so that the full impact of the deranged and menacing nature of the regime is not obscured by a ‘reformer’ who would present a more emollient face to the world but would continue to prosecute the jihad with equal vigour.

There would indeed be a lot in that last argument –...

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