5:26pm
On the eve of Israel’s day of remembrance for the Holocaust and next week’s 60th anniversary of the restoration of the State of Israel, the eminent historian Walter Laqueur has let his imagination bear his considerable learning aloft to construct a sparkling, witty and above all deeply sad jeu d’esprit on what might have been. Wonderful stuff. Do read it all.
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4:26pm
From the East London Advertiser comes further news of the progressive Islamisation of London’s East End, and the lengths to which Ken Livingstone is going to court the Muslim vote for tomorrow’s mayoral election. This story reveals that Ken has promised to help raise funds for a major revamp of the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid mosque — with a crucial addition:
That would include an overhaul of the interior of the Grade II listed structure, originally built as Huguenot church on the corner of Fournier-street, Spitalfields, in 1743, and later converted to the Jewish Maz'ik Adath synagogue. But the scheme controversially includes a huge new minaret that would tower over the Brick Lane conservation area.
The pavements on the corner of Fournier-street and Brick-lane would also need to be realigned to make room for the minaret. Its construction could also provoke anger among those who fear an irrevocable change in character to a building that has housed all three great monotheistic faiths without alteration for more than 350 years.
The height of this proposed minaret is no incidental matter. The fact that it would tower over Brick Lane is designed to make a powerful symbolic statement of the supremacy of Islam over that area and the subjugation of all non-Islamic creeds. Like the proposed vast Olympic village mosque, also in east London, it is thus in itself an act of jihad against British society. That is what Ken is endorsing.
Another East London Advertiser story reveals that lobbying has started to rename the planned Shoreditch High Street overground railway station ‘Banglatown’. Ken stopped short of endorsing this – but he didn’t oppose it either: ‘It should be up to the local people to decide,’ he said. ‘There should be a consultation and a vote. I think we could go along with that. For me, I don't care what it's called.’
No; but the people of London undoubtedly do.
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3:13pm
Much remains mysterious about the Israeli bombing last September of the Syrian nuclear reactor that was built with the help of North Korea, not least the manner and timing of its disclosure by America last week. (The pictures above show the site first in October and then in January with a new construction the Syrians rushed to build on it, presumably to hide the evidence of what had been bombed). Why was the purpose of this Syrian site kept secret for so long? Why did the Americans decide to talk about it last Friday? Why will the Israelis not talk about it even now? President Bush’s explanation that the secrecy was necessary to reduce the likelihood of a Syrian attack, and that the details had finally been revealed as a warning to North Korea and Iran about the dangers of spreading nuclear weapons, is manifestly inadequate. Was it, as the New York Times suggested, an attempt to scupper a sell-out deal with North Korea in an internal battle within the Bush administration? And why — as the New York Sun reported — did the Syrians themselves, on the very morning of the day that the Americans broke the near eight-month silence over the raid, tell Al-Jazeera that the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had instructed Turkey's prime minister to deliver the message that
Olmert was ready for peace with Syria on the grounds of the return of the Golan Heights in full to Syria.
Was this a coincidence? If not, was America trying to undermine Syria or Syria trying to pre-empt America?
But while this mystery remains, the reaction of the IAEA is simply preposterous. Here is a body which is supposed to monitor adherence to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and has a department of intelligence to enable it to do so, failing totally and utterly to detect the rogue Syrian project — and then having the gall to blame Israel for actually destroying the reactor, thus making the region that much safer, rather than passing its intelligence to the IAEA so that it could ‘verify’ Syria’s rogue nuclear programme and then do nothing about it. As Ephraim Escluai, a former worker in the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, expostulates
here:
One cannot escape the conclusion that the IAEA has continuously failed in its missions, notably in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The IAEA has set up an extensive organization, including a Division of Information, which is really a Division of Intelligence, within its Department of Safeguards. The Syrian episode clearly demonstrates that the division has failed in its task. One does not need such a division if the DG states that he has to rely on external information and chastises the Member States for not providing the information in a timely manner.
The Syrian reactor episode tells us two things. One, Syria is part of the axis of terror, in bed with Iran and North Korea. Two, the IAEA is useless. Both of which we knew already, of course; but this affair does rather concentrate the mind.
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9:56pm
The Labour MP Kate Hoey is in trouble because she has agreed to work with Tory mayoral candidate Boris Johnson as a ‘non partisan adviser’ on sport if he is elected to office on Thursday. She is supposed to be swearing undying loyalty instead to Labour’s candidate Ken Livingstone, whom she has conspicuously failed to endorse. Yet the East London Advertiser reports that Ken himself is backing…er, George Galloway, the Respect party
Livingstone, who is himself running for a third term next Thursday, said Galloway would compare well to some of the ‘nonentities’ currently sitting on the London Assembly. ‘I would like to think we could work together and he'd form part of a broad coalition with the Greens and us against the Tories and Islamophobes,’ he said…He has taken a very correct line around the consequences for London if Boris Johnson is elected.’
Another Labour politician, Labour's London Assembly Member for City & East John Biggs, who is described as a
sworn enemy of Galloway
nevertheless also takes a very correct line around the consequences for London if any Tories are elected: ‘I'd much rather people vote for Galloway than the Tories. I didn't think I'd ever say that.’
Well, you just did, John. Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn takes a very dim view inded of Kate Hoey because Labour Party rules say that you are not supposed to do anything to support a candidate who is standing against an official Labour candidate.
But if Kate had supported Gorgeous George rather than B***s she’d have been quids in, it seems.
There’s been nothing like it since the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
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7:33pm
There is clearly no limit to British pusillanimity and sheer unadulterated funk when it comes to calling Islamic radicalism by even the most polite and restrained of proper names. The Tablighi Jamaat is an Islamist sect which is funding the proposed mega-mosque on the site of the 2012 Olympics in east London. In my book Londonistan, I described the project and its backers thus:
The cultural significance and symbolism of a project on this scale are unmistakeable. It would make the most powerful statement possible, on the back of the high-visibility Games, about the primacy of Islam in Britain. That is why it is being proposed. ‘It will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape,’ said Abdul Khalique, a senior member of Tablighi Jamaat which is behind the proposal.
Tablighi Jamaat is often described as a ‘worldwide Islamic missionary group’ and is said to be pacific and apolitical. Two years ago, according to The New York Times, a senior FBI anti-terrorism official claimed it was a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. According to the counter-intelligence expert Alex Alexiev, Tablighi Jamaat is a driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide.
For a majority of young Muslim extremists, he says, joining Tablighi Jamaat is the first step on the road to extremism. Perhaps 80 percent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the ‘antechamber of fundamentalism.’ U.S. counter-terrorism officials are increasingly adopting the same attitude. ‘We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,’ the deputy chief of the FBI’s international terrorism section said in 2003, ‘and we have found that al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past.’ Is this really what Britain wants to symbolise its culture at the 2012 Olympics?
Since I wrote that, local Muslims have come out strongly against this mosque. They believe the Tablighi Jamaat is a menace which will target their children for extremism and radicalise countless numbers of British Muslims. Accordingly, more than 2,500 of them have signed a petition against the project. They include Irfan al Allawi, the international director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, co-founder of the Muslim Parliament of Britain, and Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, who has said that the proposed mosque would become ‘the headquarters for radical . . . sectarianism in the UK’ and accused Tablighi Jamaat of preaching ‘a virulent, intolerant version of Islam’.
The campaign against this mosque has been led by a local Newham councillor, Alan Craig (pictured), who is the candidate for the party Christian Choice in this week’s London mayoral election. As the
Times reports today, when Christian Choice submitted the text of a party election broadcast to the BBC and ITV, their wording was censored. So what had they wanted to say that the BBC and ITV deemed too extreme to be broadcast?
The Christian Choice election broadcast would have described Tablighi Jamaat as ‘a separatist Islamic group’ before welcoming that some ‘moderate Muslims’ were opposed to the mosque complex…The BBC refused to accept ‘separatist’ — the corporation asked for ‘controversial’ instead — and barred the use of ‘moderate Muslims’ because the phrase implied that Tablighi Jamaat was less than moderate. ITV went a step farther, demanding that the adjective ‘controversial’ be used merely to describe the planned mosque and not the group itself.
This censorship has simply prevented Christian Choice from telling the truth in a moderate, restrained and responsible manner. Of course Tablighi Jamaat is separatist. As the Times also reports:
One of its British advocates has said that it aims to rescue Muslims from the culture and civilisation of Jews and Christians by creating ‘such hatred for their ways as human beings have for urine and excreta’.
How can the BBC think that such a view is moderate? And if the TJ is not controversial, what does that make the 2500 Muslims who condemn it as extreme and dangerous? ‘Islamophobes’??
Christian Choice, which says it was pressured into amending its broadcast as required under the threat that otherwise it wouldn’t be shown at all, is now seeking judicial review of the BBC’s decision. Is it too much to hope that, somewhere in the bowels of the Law Courts, there exists an English judge who will stand up for sanity and backbone in the face of all this?
UPDATE, APRIL 30: Well, they lost their application for judicial review today on procedural grounds. The judge, Mr Justice Collins, said they should have taken legal action before the broadcast was transmitted. However, he also made the following observations: the Tablighi Jamaat could properly be described as 'extremist'; that it was 'responsible for imbuing ideas leading to terrorist activities'; and that it was 'understandable that Cllr Craig should have concerns'.
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10:21am
More on the way Hamas manipulates world opinion. While the gullible/Israel-hating west bays that Israel is starving the inhabitants of Gaza by shutting off the supply routes, Hamas are busy blowing up the crossing points in order to ensure that Israel does precisely that. They say it is to break the ‘siege’ but since a) they are not under siege by Israel which is letting through most of Gaza’s supplies most of the time and b) if there is one thing which does force Israel to shut the crossings it’s blowing them up, the opposite would appear to be the truth. (The picture shows a Hamas demonstration on April 25 against the Israeli 'siege' -- at the border wall with Egypt at Rafah. Go figure. And even the EU has now blamed Hamas in part for Gaza's fuel crisis.) They are also stealing for themselves supplies destined for the general population. As Khaled abu Toameh reports:
Eyewitnesses in Gaza City said that at least on four occasions over the past few weeks, Hamas militiamen confiscated trucks loaded with fuel shortly as they were on their way from Nahal Oz to the city. They added that the fuel supplies were taken to Hamas-controlled security installations throughout the city. ‘Hamas is taking the fuel for it the vehicles of is leaders and security forces,’ the eyewitnesses said. ‘Because of Hamas's actions, some hospitals have been forced to stop the work of ambulances and generators.’
PA officials in Ramallah said Hamas's measures were aimed at creating a crisis in the Gaza Strip with the hope that the international community would intervene and force Israel to reopen the border crossings. ‘As far as we know, there is enough fuel reaching the Gaza Strip,’ the officials said. ‘But Hamas's measures are aimed at creating a crisis. Hamas is either stealing or blocking most of the fuel supplies.’
They pointed out that last week Hamas dispatched hundreds of its supporters to Nahal Oz to block the fuel supplies from Israel. Hamas claimed that the protest was organized by farmers and fishermen demanding an end to the blockade on the Gaza Strip… Hamas has also been exerting pressure on the Gaza Petrol Station Owners Association to close down their businesses so as to aggravate the crisis. Some of the station owners and workers said they were afraid to return to work after receiving death threats from Hamas militiamen and ordinary residents desperate to purchase gas and diesel for their vehicles.
If only the admirable Khaled abu Toameh’s reports were published in a British media outlet…
Meanwhile, those who still harbour Dhimmi Carter-esque fantasies about a new mood of pragmatism gripping Hamas would do well to watch this clip of a televised sermon by Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas MP and cleric. In it he declares that Islam would soon conquer Rome.
the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and which has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam…[Rome would become] an advanced post for the Islamic conquests which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe…Allah has chosen you for himself and for his religion, so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security, and consolidation of power, and even to conquests through da'wa [preaching] and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world.
It’s not about Israel. It’s the western world, stupid.
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9:59pm
Blistering piece in City Journal by Bruce Bawer – author of While Europe Slept – about the progressive crumbling of European resistance in the face of creeping sharia-isation. These Westerners have begun, he says, to internalise the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis -- infidels living in Muslim societies as second-class citizens:
The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys… In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This ‘stunning whitewash of radical Islam,’ as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, ‘helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses’ in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police… So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are ‘moderate’ (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are ‘Islamophobes.’
He understates the position, of course.
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9:35pm
Question: when is a ceasefire not a ceasefire?Answer: When it is a tactic of war.
Khaled abu Toameh reports in the Jerusalem Post that the head of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, said of his six month hudna, or ‘truce’, offer:
'…it is a tactic in conducting the struggle. ... It is normal for any resistance that operates in its people's interest ... to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit. ... The battle is to be run this way and Hamas is known for that.’ He also warned of an explosion of violence in Gaza if Israel rejected the truce.
Elsewhere, more of Mashaal’s remarks were reported: Hamas has been negotiating with Egyptian officials for a six-month ceasefire period during which Hamas would halt its terrorist attacks and Israel would stop all counterterrorism operations. Nothing would prevent Hamas from continuing to import and manufacture weapons and train terrorists.
Of course not. It’s only the dimmest dhimmi dummies such as Jimmy Carter who fail to grasp that a hudna is actually a hudwinka.
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1:29pm
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s infamous lecture on sharia was the launch event of a series of discussions at Temple Church under the heading ‘Islam in English law’. The very title of this series might well raise an eyebrow among those who believe naively that the law of the land is the law for all minorities, since it assumes by definition that the extent to which Islam may or may not be accommodated by English law is an issue to be discussed. Now Temple Church – the church of the Inner and Middle Temple, the Inns of Court -- is publicising its next event in this series:
Can Moral or Religious Obligation ever justify the Use of Force Inadmissible under Secular Law?
The line up is as follows:
Chair: Sir James Craig
(Ambassador to Saudi Arabia 1979-1984)
Introduction and Summary:
Dr Lynn Welchman
(Head of the Law School, School of Oriental and African Studies, and
described as 'an authority on honour codes in Islamic societies and on anti-terrorism law in Arab societies)
Speakers:
Prof Abdullahi An-Na'im (Professor of law at Emory University, and described as an 'internationally recognised scholar of Islam and human rights,human rights in cross-cultural perspectives and Islam and politics)
Prof Tariq Ramadan (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)
It really is deeply troubling that the Inner Temple should be associated with such an event. First and foremost, it is shocking that such a question should even be posed. Even if the answer from each participant is 'no', the question should not be asked. There should simply never be instances where the use of force which is forbidden under English law is justified. The law of the land is, or should be, the law. Of course, under tyranny an entirely different set of norms applies; but this is not some abstract discussion about a hypothetical situation. It is a discussion about the relationship between Islam and English law. And merely asking the question presupposes the possibility that there might be circumstances where force mandated by sharia (killing of apostates? Stoning of adulterers? Jihad against unbelievers?) would be justified in Britain.
Moreover, given the line-up I somehow don't think that the argument for the robust defence of western civilisation will be on prominent display at this event -- ie, I doubt very much whether any of the participants will object to the terms of the discussion on the grounds that this question would not be asked in respect of any other minority culture in Britain.
Whatever has happened to the Temple?
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1:00pm
For a flavour of the thuggish atmosphere on campus in Britain today as renewed attempts are made to introduce an academic boycott of Israel, this guest post on Harry’s Place (along with some of the readers' comments) provides a shocking taster.
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