Why on earth not?

In line with my own comments here about the need to support, promote, encourage and generally put rocket fuel behind the Iranian resistance in order to topple the terrorist regime in Tehran, Michael Ledeen makes the following observation about the Bush presidency:

This administration has said many things critical of Iran, but it has never said it wants, and will support, peaceful democratic change.

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Witchfinder Balls

The victimisation of faith schools by the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls is a real shocker, even by the standards of this administration. Balls has repeatedly claimed that dozens of faith schools have broken the admission rules. One in six state schools is guilty of selecting pupils by the back door, he says, and claims in particular that such schools even made places conditional on parents agreeing to pay for various services. Even though Balls subsequently admitted he hadn’t checked his facts when he first made this claim, he continues to make it and indeed has even stepped up the rhetoric.

In total 7 primary schools made reference to voluntary contributions on their form. Four Jewish primary schools asked for contributions for Jewish Studies and Security and three other faith primary schools asked for voluntary contributions to support contributions to the Diocese. However the seven primary schools involved confirm that information about voluntary contributions has not been used in the allocation of places. Voluntary contributions have therefore had no bearing on admission to any of Barnet's primary schools.

In relation to community schools three issues were raised. Two related to oversubscription criteria in relation to children in care applying for entry into the sixth form in two schools. Barnet Council can confirm that all looked after children in the care of Barnet, or any other authority, were given their first choice of placement both for the sixth form and when starting secondary school.

The remaining issue was that one school included reference to an ‘interview’ for the performing arts programme. The selection process does include an audition and as part of that process staff do meet applicants but this does not constitute an interview as we understand the term to be used in the Schools Admission code. The term interview has been removed for the 2009 selection and we can confirm that no interviews have taken place and no child has been disadvantaged.

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Why is the UK appeasing Iran?

Yesterday evening I joined members of the Iranian resistance and their parliamentary supporters at a House of Commons reception to celebrate the Iranian new year. These dissidents are anxiously awaiting the imminent decision by the Court of Appeal on whether the Home Secretary can appeal against the ruling by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) that the proscription of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) — a ban it described as ‘perverse’ — must be lifted.

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The war against the Jews (15)

The New York Times has published a piece by its former Jerusalem bureau chief, Steve Erlanger, detailing the incitement against the Jews routinely promoted by Hamas. Most disgusting — and most ominous — is the way in which Palestinian children are taught from the cradle to hate and to murder Jews:

Another children’s program, ‘Tomorrow’s Pioneers,’ has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. ‘We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,’ Assud said recently. ‘We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,’ cities now in Israel proper. ‘We will liberate the whole homeland.’

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died ‘a martyr’s death’ from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows ‘to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.’

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: ‘We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?’ She responded: ‘Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland.'

This Nazi-style indoctrination in hatred of the Jews and incitement to murder, fired by the rocket fuel of purportedly divine authority to produce mass genocidal hysteria, is the real cause of the Middle East impasse. And before anyone leaps up to say that the west still (just about, but don’t count on it) regards Hamas as beyond the pale, the so-called ‘moderates’ of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority— even though they are now generally more careful not to use such openly anti-Jewish language —also continue to promote and support violence, terror and the destruction of Israel through their media. As the US Middle East reporting monitor CAMERA reports:

On March 14, 2008, the Palestinian Authority controlled newspaper, Al Hayat-Al Jadida, described the terrorist who massacred eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem on March as a ‘groom,’ and called his burial a ‘wedding celebration.’ PMW [Palestinian Media Watch] reported: ‘The story in Mahmoud Abbas’ Al Hayat-Al Jadida goes on to evoke the neighborhood Jabal Mukbar's “week of anticipation . . . preparing themselves for the wedding procession.” The term ‘wedding’ is the expression commonly used in PA society, and in schoolbooks as well, to describe the death of Shahids – Martyrs for Allah…

A new music video began to appear on PA-controlled television in October 2007 promising the ‘liberation’ of cities within Israel – in other words, the destruction of Israel. The lyrics include:

From Jerusalem and Acre and from Haifa and Jericho and Gaza and Ramallah

From Bethlehem and Jaffa and Be'er Sheva and Ramle

And from Nablus to the Galilee, and from Tiberias to Hebron

The message of this PA music video is identical to that of Hamas’ Assud the rabbit, mentioned above.

While Roz Rothstein, international director of StandWithUs, reveals these images of war on display in the PA-controlled West Bank town of Dheisheh.

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The war against the Jews (14)

A reader, Kevin O'Sullivan, has sent me the following message, which I reproduce here with his permission:

Having just read your very interesting article in the Spectator about anti-Israeli bias in the media, especially the BBC, I thought you might like to see my recent complaint to the BBC, with reference to yet another highly anti-Semitic broadcast.

Alas, I have now become quite blasé about the constant anti-West, pro-Muslim propaganda broadcast by the BBC, but even I just had to respond to the most recent example, transmitted on the Radio 4 program, From Our Own Correspondent. If I stood on any street corner in London, holding anti-Semitic placards vilifying Jewish people, and encouraging hatred towards the most persecuted race in the history of man, I would rightly be arrested and hopefully prosecuted under any number of race hate laws, but the BBC can commit exactly the same crime day after day, and absolutely nothing is done.

The broadcast on March 15th was a complete travesty of the truth, and was provocative in the extreme. It deliberately set out to inflame impressionable young Muslim men, already full of hatred and vitriol towards the West, and especially the Jewish community both here and abroad. This hideously distorted view of events can only serve those vested interests at the BBC, who deliberately fan the flames of anti-Jewish feelings whenever they see the embers of hatred towards Israel dying out. And, to make matters worse, a transcript and recorded download of the programme are now available Worldwide on the BBC website.

Complaint to the BBC, sent on 16th March.

Subject: From Our Own Correspondent. BBC Radio 4. 15^th Match 2008.

Sir.

Yet again, the BBC has decided to distort a relatively straightforward news item from Gaza, in order to inflame anti-Israeli sentiment, and to portray Palestinians as innocent grief stricken victims of a war they have no responsibility for. This politically bias nonsense would be laughable if it were not for the serious anti-Semitic repercussions that are felt both in the UK, and throughout the Islamic world after such broadcasts.

Your Palestinian correspondent Aleem Maqbool, stated that Mr. Nael al Kurdi, “ a softly spoken young man” was receiving treatment for cancer at a hospital in Egypt, and that his treatment ceased soon after HAMAS sized control of the Gaza Strip, because Israeli action was to ‘all but seal off the territory. Nael was trapped inside Gaza and his tumor rapidly started to increase in size again. Weak and bedridden, he told us he had applied several times to the Israeli authorities to be allowed to leave but had been denied each time. Less than a week after we spoke to him, Nael died. He was 21’.

Your correspondent Mr. Maqbool, then decided to blame stringent Israeli border controls for the sad plight of this young man, completely ignoring the fact that as Mr. al Kurdi was receiving treatment for his cancer in Egypt not Israel, he would have needed to use the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza at Rafah, which is now closed due to HAMAS inspired violence.

The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza [the picture above shows Egyptian solders securing the border fence; MP] has been under joint Palestinian Authority and Egyptian control since November 2005; therefore if anyone was responsible for the untimely death of Mr. al Kerdi, it was either HAMAS, the PA and Egypt, or perhaps just fate, but certainly NOT Israel.

The BBC’s dangerous pro Islamic / Palestinian stance is well known and deplored by those of us who remember the days when the BBC was a truly impartial and a totally non-political organization. The fact that Israel has been under constant attack from anti-Semitic Muslim Arabs for over half a centaury is obviously seen by the BBC as well deserved. This distorted and highly inflammatory view of events in the Middle East, seeks only to justify and condone Islamic terrorism against Israel and the West, and can only serve to inspire more young men to seek revenge for what the BBC provocatively proclaims to be an injustice.

Kevin O'Sullivan.

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A Britain without honour or shame

At a Civitas lunchtime seminar today Nazir Afzal, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service for West London, spoke forcefully about the appalling persecution of Muslim women in Britain through forced marriages and honour-based violence. Such violence is based on a cultural assumption that women are of low worth and their lives must be controlled, and that if they break free of that control they may bring shame upon the family honour for which they are punished by violence and murder. He said:

The greatest fear of Muslim women [in Britain] is not of Islamophobia or being arrested by the police — it is of being attacked in their own homes.

I grew up listening to these shocking stories. There were women students twenty, thirty years ago who just disappeared [to the Indian subcontinent to be married against their will]. All this time Muslim women have been treated as if they don’t exist. We were given an interpretation of the Koran by people we didn’t question, and because we didn’t speak Arabic we just accepted it. Now we British-born Muslim women have to break our silence about all this.

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The war against the Jews (13)

Professor Robert Wistrich, the British born academic at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who is the doyen of the study of antisemitism, yesterday delivered a blistering and devastating denunciation of Britain as the contemporary epicentre of antisemitism in Europe. As the Jerusalem Post reports, Wistrich said that the problem is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots.

In his address, Wistrich said that today's British media had taken an almost universally anti-Israel bias, especially but not exclusively on the BBC, with context removed from description of Israeli military actions, and Islamic jihadist activity such as suicide bombing never connected to ideology. ‘Under no circumstance will a Palestinian act of terrorism be referred to as terrorist, They are militants similar to the floor-shop dispute in Liverpool whose workers have decided to go on strike,’ he said.

‘Palestinian terrorism is portrayed as a minor pin-prick compared to 'massive' retaliation of this “rogue” state [Israel],’ he said. ‘You cannot read a British newspaper without encountering a variant of the libel that Zionism is racism or Zionism is Nazism,’ he said, describing a culture of ‘barely disguised hatred’ when the subject of Zionism of British Jewry or Anglo-Israel relations is broached, unless they are ‘the good anti-Zionists.’

With the media and the elites skewed against Israel — aided by former Israeli academics who routinely condemn the Jewish state and who have attained ‘historic dissident status and are listened to as the authentic voice of Israel’ —the whole discussion of anti-Semitism had become distorted in Britain, with the accuser becoming the accused, he said. ‘The self-proclaimed anti-racists of the [London Mayor Ken] Livingstone brand lead the pack when it comes to the prevailing discourse about Israel and by implication Jews. If you bring up the subject of anti-Semitism you are playing the anti-Semitism card and you are [seen as] a dishonest deceitful manipulative Jew or lover of Jews who is using the language of anti-Semitism to disguise hide or silence criticism of Israel,’ he said.

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