No friend to Israel

12:51pm

Clearly, either the Israel embassy in London or the Times has a sense of black humour. In its report of today’s Jewish Chronicle story about how the initial enthusiasm by Prince Charles’s private secretary Sir Michael Peat to accept an offer to visit Israel was slapped down by others in the Prince’s household for fear that HRH might be used to help Israel burnish its international image (heaven forbid), the Times volunteered that the invitation by the Israel embassy had been issued

in the hope of building on the traditionally strong relations between Israel and the British Royal Family.

Such relations have of course been traditionally not just not strong but invisible. As the story makes clear, there has never been an official visit by the Royal Family in the six decades of Israel’s existence. Yet Prince Charles, whose affinities with the Islamic world are well documented, thinks nothing of visiting Saudi Arabia (and formally receiving its King when he visited the UK last month). He bestows royal favour upon one of the most repressive and dictatorial regimes on earth, and which is the wellspring of the war of conquest being waged against his own country, but refuses to visit the one democracy and true ally of this country in the Middle East in case he might ‘burnish its international image’.

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The war to defend the free world

4:47am

The government’s position on combating Islamist extremism now ranges from the farcical to the dangerously flawed. First we had the spectacle of the security minister, Admiral Lord West, saying he didn’t see the need for more than 28 days’ detention before charge for terrorism suspects and then, an hour later, being forced to say that he did. I’m sure that makes us all feel a lot more secure. Then there was Gordon Brown’s statement on beefing up security and dealing with Islamist extremism. In a withering commentary in yesterday’s Telegraph, Michael Burleigh pointed out that the sensible things the Prime Minister said were staggeringly overdue and anyway largely filched from the Tories, while there was still an alarming absence of substance and an even more alarming failure to distinguish between Islamist extremism and those trying to draw attention to its dangers:

Mr Brown also intimated that he will be seeking to persuade senior media figures to tone down reporting that allegedly gives rise to ‘Islamophobia’. This is sinister, especially since it will not be accompanied by attempts to inhibit the expressions of hatred or disgust that Muslims direct at Western society. Nor did Mr Brown have anything to say about organisations such as Hizb-ut Tahrir -- which function as sectarian totalitarian parties bent on dominating institutions they manage to infiltrate -- beyond the pathetic assurance that they would not receive grants from local authorities.

‘Hearts and minds’ cuts two ways. It is not just up to us to avoid giving egregious offence to Muslims. There was nothing in Brown's speech about the plans to build a 25,000-capacity mega-mosque near the 2012 Olympic stadium in West Ham, which is intended to serve as a Muslim quarter for athletes and spectators during the Games, in flagrant violation of everythin the Olympic Games represent. And no categorical rebuttal of insidious attempts by Islamists to introduce Sharia courts, thereby sanctioning what would amount to exclaves outside the law.

What seems to be happening is that the government is adopting some sensible policies on beefing up physical security but is going completely wrong over how to combat the ideas driving the terror. Its ‘hearts and minds’ policy – on which the fingerprints of the security service are clearly visible -- appears to be promoting a kind of twin track approach: tough measures against Islamic extremism while encouraging ‘moderate’ Islam. But the first part of this seems ineffectual, while the second seems to be merely another variation on the disastrous existing strategy of trying to buy off Muslim rage by adopting what is actually an Islamist agenda without the violence. It is beyond depressing that the Prime Minister actually praised the

recent remarkable letter by 138 Muslim scholars from a diversity of traditions within Islam, which paid tribute to the common roots of Islam, Christianity and Judaism and called for deeper dialogue.

As I wrote here, that letter masqueraded as promoting peace through emphasising apparently shared characteristics while actually saying to the Christian church: ‘Peace on our terms’. It suggested that the Christian world was at war with Islam, which is the very opposite of the truth; it made no mention of Islamist aggression and implied instead that the Christian world must abandon its own self-defence; and it implied that the Islamic world would indeed attack Christians if it thought it was justified in doing so. In short, that letter was an example of precisely the kind of Islamist aggression which the government should be robustly exposing and opposing. But instead, Gordon Brown actually praised it and said further that as a result

we stand ready to support new facilities for multi-faith scholarship in Britain

and that he was

inviting the Higher Education Funding Council to investigate the idea of setting up in Britain a European centre of excellence for Islamic studies

and also that the UK would work jointly with the French and German governments

on building an appreciation of the Islamic and Muslim heritage across Britain and Europe.

This is all a bit like responding to Nazism in the 1930s by holding road-shows on German culture. In other words, government policy is to come up with meaningless and empty rhetoric about combating extremism; ignore or even sanitise extremist and aggressive statements by Muslims and praise them instead as moderates; accept their mind-bending dissimulation, and give them what they want.

It is simply astounding that the Prime Minister can make a long and detailed statement about how to respond to the terrorist threat against Britain and the west without once mentioning ‘Islamic extremism’ or indeed religious fanaticism, the actual motivation for that terrorist threat, restricting all mention of Islam or Muslims instead only to positive mentions. Just as it would be wrong to deny that many Muslims derive only spiritual solace from their faith, it is not only wrong but lethal to deny that religious fanaticism is the cause of the terrorist threat. For the British government, however, winning hearts and minds seems to mean delivering British heart and minds to Islamism.

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The al Durah blood libel

6:42pm

I am in Paris where I have attended the Court of Appeal special session called to witness the 27 minutes of hitherto unseen footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah which the court had required France 2 to produce. For readers who are unfamiliar with this scandal, I wrote about it here, here and here.

Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

Well, sort of. What it actually produced was 18 minutes out of the 27 it was required to bring forward. From this footage, which according to France 2’s Palestinian cameraman was filmed during an implausible 45 minutes of continuous shooting by Israeli soldiers, there is no evidence that anyone at all was killed or injured -- including Mohammed al Durah who by the end of the frames in which he figured seemed to be still very much alive and unmarked by any wound whatsoever.

The drama of today’s hearing was enhanced by the appearance of Enderlin himself, who until today had not graced this case with his presence. As the film was shown to a packed and overheated (in every sense) courtroom, Enderlin and Karsenty offered rival interpretations of the images on the screen. If Enderlin thought he would thus demonstrate the inadequacy of Karsenty’s case, he was very much mistaken. On the contrary, parts of his commentary were so absurd that the courtroom several times burst into incredulous laughter.

Enderlin offered only a vague, rambling and unconvincing explanation of why he had only produced 18 minutes of footage rather than the 27 he claimed to have received from his cameraman in Gaza (Enderlin himself was not in Gaza when these events occurred). After the hearing Professor Richard Landes, one of the people who had already seen the contested footage, said that two scenes had been cut out which clearly showed that the violence had been staged -- including one in which a Palestinian preparing to throw a missile is suddenly picked up and carried into an ambulance despite showing no signs of injury. This scene, said Landes, was filmed by Reuters, who actually filmed the France 2 cameraman filming it. Yet there was no sign of it today.

What struck me very forcibly about the 18 minutes overall was that, although this was supposed to have been filmed during continuous firing by the Israelis for 45 minutes, much of the footage consisted merely of a violent demonstration by stone throwing youths, many of whom who appeared to be enjoying the exercise. One child was pictured riding a bicycle through the melee. There was no evidence of any of them being killed or injured. From time to time, to be sure, youths were dragged onto stretchers and into ambulances – but there was no sign of anyone actually being shot, no-one falling under fire, no sign of any blood or injuries whatever. The nearest it got to an injury was a sequence in which a young man coyly pulled his shirt open a little to provide a glimpse of a neat red circle on his stomach, which he claimed was a (rubber?) bullet wound. But since he appeared to be in no pain whatever and was grinning throughout his turn for the camera, this seemed an eminently implausible way for someone who had just been hit by gunfire to behave.

There were many very strange things about this footage which just didn’t add up. When it came to the footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, the following stood out:

* This sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes from the demonstration

* Although the France 2 cameraman had told a German film-maker, Esther Schapira, that he had filmed six minutes of the al Durah father and son under continuous Israeli fire, the footage of them lasted for less than one minute

* There was a camera tripod next to them

* There was no evidence of the boy actually being hit

* At one point, people in the crowd cried out that the boy was dead, while he was sitting up large as life clinging onto his father with his mouth wide open

 

 

* After he was said to be dead, he moved his arm (the sequence I have already reported which has been available on the web for years).

The Appeal Court is not due to give its verdict in this case until next February. As of today, such are the fresh contradictions and questions thrown up by the showing of this footage it would seem that France 2 has painted itself into a corner from which it will find it increasingly hard to escape.

But this scandal goes far beyond France 2. Soon after it transmitted the 55 seconds which showed the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, it helpfully sent various news agencies three minutes of the footage of this incident – including the frames in which the ‘dead’ child is seen moving, but which of course it had not broadcast. For reasons which invite speculation, not one of these agencies broadcast it either. Had they done so, there would have been no ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah and untold numbers of subsequent deaths would have been avoided.

It is therefore not surprising, but no less shocking, that with a couple of heroic exceptions the mainstream media has until very recently ignored the evidence suggesting that a monumental and deadly fraud was perpetrated here, indicators which have been around for years. As of today, the Karsenty case has been totally ignored by the mainstream French media. It is also deeply troubling that the Israel government ignored this evidence for seven years, that it is only very recently that its press spokesman Danny Seaman said the incident was staged, and that even now certain representatives of the Israel government are playing a most ambiguous role in defending their country against this modern blood libel.

The ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah was swallowed uncritically by the western media, despite the manifold unlikeliness and contradictions which were apparent from the start, because it accorded with the murderous prejudice against Israel which is the prism through which the Middle East conflict is habitually refracted. This scandal has the most profound implications not just for the media, not just for the Middle East conflict but for the western world’s relationship to reason, which seems to grow more tenuous by the day.

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Whitehall farce

8:32am

Yet another Home Secretary appears to be about to bite the political dust. The hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is but the latest incumbent to discover the truth of her department’s reputation as a political graveyard as we digest the way in which she tried to conceal the fact that more than 9,000 illegal immigrants have been cleared to work in the private security industry, some of them guarding sensitive Whitehall locations and some even under Metropolitan Police contracts.

What this reveals more clearly than ever before is the fathomless depths of incompetence to which British public administration has now descended. The fact that this has now jeopardised national security should surprise no-one. A country which has lost control of its own borders, whose immigration and asylum processes have been known for years to be a shambles about which nothing has been done, is a country whose government has simply lost control, period. Immigration and security are but the sharpest end of this. There is scarcely a department of state or public service which does not present a spectacle of serial incompetence.

There are various interlocked reasons for this, of which I would suggest the most significant are the politicisation of the British civil service and the resulting collapse of its integrity and efficacy, which were seamlessly linked; the undermining of our entire political, administrative and intellectual class by the depredations of moral and cultural relativism; and the ultimate cause of all of this, the loss of Britain’s belief and confidence in itself as a nation.

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The third destruction of the Temple

7:54pm

Further to Ahad Ha'amoratzim’s excellent and most pertinent comment on my post below (8:09pm) in which he accurately describes how, when the Jordanians illegally occupied Jerusalem until 1967, they desecrated Jewish holy sites and barred all Jews from the Old City -- all while it was supposedly under ‘international’ protection -- a review by Emmanuel Navon in the current issue of Azure describes something no less horrifying: the indifference of the Israeli government to the vandalism of the Temple Mount which is currently being perpetrated by its Arab custodians.

As a result of the Israeli government’s inaction, vindicated by the High Court of Justice, the Waqf was able, in November 1999, to open a ‘small emergency exit’ for the enormous mosque built in Solomon’s Stables that required the digging of a 1,600-square meter, fifteen-meter deep pit at the site, and the removal of more than ten thousand tons of archaeological rubble containing artifacts dating back to the First Temple period. Decorations and inscriptions were polished away from ancient stones, and stones with Hebrew writings and Hasmonean stars were thrown into Jerusalem’s municipal garbage dump. The ‘small emergency exit’ became a new mosque named Al Aksa Al-Qadim.

Berkovits relates that he visited the Al Aksa Al-Qadim mosque in November 2004 together with his students:

On the ceiling were four domes. Two of them still bore rare artistic inscriptions, which are the work of Jewish artists from the Second Temple period. I noticed that those inscriptions had been covered with plaster, and reported this to the Antiquities Authority after the tour. A senior representative of the Antiquities Authority told me that he was aware of the plaster that had been used to cover the Jewish inscriptions. When I asked him why he didn’t send workers with a ladder to remove the plaster, he replied that whoever climbs up the ladder will never be able to climb it down.

Thus do the Palestinians publicly deny the Temple’s existence even as they actively erase proofs to the contrary; thus does Israel’s High Court of Justice acquiesce to the destruction of evidence of the Temple’s Jewish past for fear of upsetting Muslim sensitivities. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Waqf has succeeded over the past decade in building, illegally, two enormous mosques underneath the Temple Mount (the Solomon’s Stables mosque and the Al Aksa Al-Qadim mosque), and plans to connect them with underground tunnels, thus effectively turning the Temple Mount into an exclusively Muslim site. Should this state of affairs continue unimpeded, in the near future the last remnants of the Jerusalem Temple will effectively disappear, and the Palestinians will be able to deny its existence without having to be burdened by new archaeological counterevidence.

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The special relationship cools a little more

9:10am

There’s only one thing that will make Iran realise the seriousness of Britain’s purpose. That’s if Britain makes it plain that if sanctions fail, war will follow. But on that, the Prime Minister was conspicuously silent. The British position is that military action is an option that can’t be ruled out, no more than that. This will do little to warm up relations with Washington. As the Telegraph reported yesterday:

The Bush administration is losing patience with Gordon Brown over Iran, with senior American diplomats frustrated by his reluctance to declare bluntly that the Islamic state must never be allowed nuclear weapons. Allies of Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, have told The Sunday Telegraph that the Prime Minister should emulate France's President Nicolas Sarkozy and warn that Iran may face military action, in order to help avert a new war in the Middle East.

 The concerns reflect growing irritation in Washington, from the White House down, that Mr Brown will not match his more robust private conversations on Iran with hard-hitting public statements that would put pressure on the Teheran regime. Ms Rice's inner circle argue that unless Iran believes that its defiance of the international community will lead to serious economic and military consequences, there is little hope of diplomacy succeeding. They regard Britain as a key to that effort…. American diplomats believe any chance of persuading Russia, China and other European nations to support tougher sanctions on Iran is undermined if Britain appears publicly queasy about the consequences of failure. An official said: ‘I'd like to see more stick from Europe if any carrot from us is to work.’

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The war against the Jews

6:49pm

Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, has a reputation as a ‘moderate’ Palestinian. Ha’aretz reports:

Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, rejected on Monday the government's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. In an interview with Israel Radio, Erekat said that ‘no state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity.'

Well that seems clear enough to me. End of discussion, surely?

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The rape of Tory justice

6:39pm

Having briefly returned from Planet Gramsci to the real world and turned round the fortunes of his leadership and his party as a result, David Cameron has unfortunately veered back again into the ideological quicksands of victim culture and gesture politics. Apparently in pursuit of the women’s vote, he has called for tougher sentences for rapists on the grounds that the conviction rate is too low. This is because England and Wales have the lowest conviction rate among leading European countries.

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Some mistake, surely

5:23pm

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It stinks

12:10pm

 

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