When Ed Husain famously renounced Islamism there were some who warned that, despite his denunciation of Hizb ut Tahrir and Islamist ideology, he remained dangerously confused and should not be treated as a serious reformer. I thought this was too harsh. He had, after all, bravely taken an enormous step out of the darkness; surely he had to be given time and encouragement to adjust properly to the light. Surely it was a good thing that he was encouraging young British Muslims to turn away from Islamic radicalism. The extreme importance of that task was such that, even when he wrote a stupid and ignorant piece about Zionism, I hoped that if he was now told the truth about the history of Israel and the Jewish people, he would realise the error of his thinking on that particular issue. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
I was wrong.
With first this press release from the Quilliam Foundation soon after the start of the current Israeli operation in Gaza, and now his poisonous piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free today, Ed Husain has shown that in the great battle to defend civilisation against barbarism he is on the wrong side.
Disgustingly, he draws a moral equivalence between Palestinian human bomb attacks and Israel’s operation in Gaza, which he calls
Israel’s massacre of innocent Palestinians
But this is totally untrue. The vast majority of Gazans who have been killed were Hamas terrorists. According to today’s UN figures, 364 have been killed of whom only 62 were civilians. Israel has been targeting only the Hamas infrastructure and its terror-masters, as detailed here. While some civilian casualties are unfortunately inevitable, Israel is clearly attempting to minimise them. It is Hamas which deliberately targets Israeli civilians when it fires its rockets and detonates its human bombs specifically at Israeli civilian targets. It is Hamas which deliberately turns its own civilians into targets by siting its rockets and other military equipment under apartment blocks and in centres of densely crowded population. Hamas tries to kill as many Israeli innocents as possible; Israel’s military operation is conducted solely to defend its people against such attack and is designed to minimise the loss of civilian life in Gaza. To draw an equivalence between the two is obscene.
Ed Husain argues that this war will strengthen Hamas in Gaza and radicalise yet more Muslims. It is surely rather more likely that many Palestinians, who have themselves been terrorised by Hamas, will blame Hamas for the current situation, just as Fatah and Egypt have done. Moreover, since any measure Israel takes to defend itself against mass murder – and for that matter, any and every military action in defence of the west by Britain or America -- is used to radicalise Muslims, he is in effect saying that Israel should never take any military action to defend itself, even after being attacked by 5000 rockets in three years.
Indeed, since the very existence of Israel is used to radicalise Muslims, it also implies that Israel should cease to exist at all. Which is implicitly to endorse a second genocide of the Jews. But then Ed Husain comes perilously close to doing just that in this article. Having declared
I’ve spoken out in support of Israel’s right to exist
-- big deal! – he vitiates even this by saying he is now having second thoughts:
But Israel's cold, politically timed killing of more than 300 Palestinians makes me, and millions more, rethink our attitude towards Israel.
‘Cold politically timed killings’? But Israel only launched this offensive because -- as Mahmoud Abbas has said -- Hamas ended its ‘truce’ and started lobbing dozens of rockets at Israel. And the fact that he can even apparently entertain the idea that Israel might no longer have ‘the right to exist’ puts him outside the moral pale altogether. Does he say China has no right to exist on account of Tibet? Syria on account of the thousands it killed in Hama in one weekend in 1982? Iran on account of its barbaric killings of women, gays and political dissidents? No, of course not – only Israel. He goes on:
Israel’s calculated killing and attempts at deception cannot be overlooked. How can the children of Holocaust survivors become such brutal killers? And during the Sabbath?
This takes the blood libel onto another plane still. The implication that the victims of brutal killing have themselves become brutal killers – when all they are doing is trying to prevent another Holocaust, explicitly threatened in the foundational charter of the people against whose genocidal onslaught Israel is merely defending itself – is unconscionable. And the dig at Jewish religious practice is as ignorant as it is gratuitous. Wars of self-defence, as this one is, to save innocent lives threatened by murderous aggression, take precedence in Judaism over sabbath observance. How telling that Ed Husain, ostensibly condemning Israel over the conduct of a war, cannot resist having a sly poke at Judaism itself.
Then there’s his lamentable historical illiteracy. He writes:
I’ve sat in homes of poor, hospitable Palestinians who still yearn to return to their homeland, taken by force from them in the turmoil after Britain hurriedly left Palestine in 1948...At schools across the Arab world children are taught about the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. Here in Britain, we might want to forget this imperial past, but ask any Arab and they will reel off these dates and confirm Britain's involvement in creating Israel. As a country, we have a moral duty to right our historical wrongs. We helped create Israel. We must now help create a Palestine.
For goodness sake! To repeat for the nth time: Israel was never the Palestinians’ ‘homeland’. It was never taken from them ‘by force’. On the contrary, they tried to take the Jews’ homeland from them by force – and are still trying. It was the Jews alone for whom historically ‘Palestine’ was ever their national homeland. On account of that history and the inalienable right to the land that it conferred, Britain was given a mandate to re-establish that national home and establish accordingly ‘close settlement’ of the Jews within the whole of Palestine – which included what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. To appease Arab violence, the Arabs who lived there were offered their own state around the areas where they were concentrated. But they refused and, backed by neighbouring Arab states, went to war to destroy at birth the Jewish state established by the UN under international law – a war that has continued uninterrupted to this day.
There is only one way to de-radicalise people who are being brainwashed by murderous lies, and that is to tell them the truth. If Ed Husain were really interested in de-radicalising Britain’s Muslims, he would tell them that they have been fed a diet of incendiary lies and blood libels about Israel and the Jews, and that justice demands they are taught instead the truth. But instead, he has now adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that are driving Muslims to mass murder.
The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.
The British government has invested huge hopes in Ed Husain as an attractive and plausible antidote to Islamist extremism in Britain. But how can anyone now believe anything he has ever said when he promulgates such a gross libel as the canard of Israel’s ‘massacre’ of hundreds of ‘innocent' Gazans? How can the government believe that Ed Husain will de-radicalise British Muslims when through articles such as this one he is inciting them to yet more hatred of Israel, the west’s forward salient against Islamist aggression?
Of course, his arguments are -- tragically, appallingly -- replicated in large measure amongst the British intelligentsia, media and indeed members of the government itself and the broad political class. Indeed, this is a far, far wider problem than one not-so-reformed-after-all Islamic extremist. It is a profound moral corruption that has infected the British body politic. The fact that so many among Britain’s educated class think like this means that they too are on the wrong side in the great battle to defend civilisation. And it’s not just Israel that in their moral confusion they are thus preparing to throw to the Islamist wolves. It is their own society too.
So there is indeed now a war. In Gaza. Actually, there are two wars going on: one involving rockets and warplanes, and the other involving the media, as Barry Rubin notes:
Nothing is clearer than Hamas’s strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media, and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.’...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
All too predictable – and going to plan, with assistance from the Club of Terror UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who condemned ‘excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians’, and Navi Pillay, the ludicrous UN High Commissioner for ‘Human Rights’, who ‘strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force.’ Of course, the Club of Terror UN has been silent about the actual violations of international law by the Palestinians, as pointed out here by Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell:
The Palestinian attacks violate one of the most basic rules of international humanitarian law: the rule of distinction, which requires combatants to aim all their attacks at legitimate targets - enemy combatants or objects that contribute to enemy military actions. Violations of the rule of distinction - attacks deliberately aimed at civilians or protected objects as such - are war crimes.
Furthermore, say Weiner and Bell, Israel actually has a legal duty to take action against Hamas under the Genocide Convention:
In carrying out their attacks on Israeli Jews as part of a larger aim to kill Jews, as demonstrated by the Hamas Covenant, many of the Palestinian terrorists are also violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, Israel and other signatories are required to ‘prevent and punish’ not only persons who carry out such genocidal acts, but those who conspire with them, incite them to kill and are complicit with their actions. The Convention thus requires Israel to prevent and punish the terrorists themselves, as well as leading figures that have publicly supported the Palestinian attacks. Article 2 of the Convention defines any killing with intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ as an act of genocide.
But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.
If anything has been ‘disproportionate’, it’s been Israel’s refusal to take such action during the years when its southern citizens have been terrorised by rockets and other missiles raining down on them from Gaza. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands for so long in such circumstances. But whenever Israel defends itself militarily, its response is said to be ‘disproportionate’. The malice, ignorance and sheer idiocy of this claim is refuted here comprehensively by Dore Gold, who points out that Israel’s actions in Gaza are wholly in accordance with international law. This permits Israel to launch such an operation to prevent itself from being further attacked. Moreover, it defines ‘disproportionate’ force as when
force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians.
But Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure. UNRWA officials in the Gaza Strip have put the number of deaths at 310, of whom 51 were civilians. The rest were Hamas terrorists.
Certainly, some civilian casualties are regrettably inevitable in any such situation – but particularly so in Gaza, since Hamas has deliberately sited its terrorist infrastructure amongst the civilian population.
Those who scream ‘disproportionate’ think – grotesquely -- that not enough Israelis have been killed. But that’s in part because Israel cares enough about human life to construct air raid shelters where its beleaguered civilians take cover; Hamas deliberately stores its rockets and other apparatus of mass murder below apartment blocks and in centres of population in order to get as many of its own people killed as possible as a propaganda weapon. Hamas is thus guilty of war crimes not just against Israelis but against the Palestinian people. Yet on this there is – fantastically, surreally – almost total silence in the west, which blames Israel instead. Historical resonances, anyone?
In any event, if by ‘disproportionate’ is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims.
The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media. It was telling to witness the sight of British TV camera crews heading out to Israel on Saturday night. The point was that they weren’t already there – because their editors had not thought it necessary to send them to cover the resumed rocket attacks on southern Israel. Indeed, hardly anyone in Britain is aware that Israel is only now finally responding to some 6000 rocket attacks since 2001, with a 500 per cent increase after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. British journalists were only dispatched to the battle zone when Israel finally retaliated – because, appallingly, it is only Jewish violence that is ever the story.
As a result, Israel is painted – wholly unjustly and untruthfully -- as the aggressor. The ineffable BBC reported in radio bulletins on Saturday that Israel’s attack had ‘put back the chance of peace in the region’. Most sane people would think that the reason peace in the region had been put back was that Hamas was continuing to wage aggressive war. And indeed, even now it is still firing rockets at Israel, including Katyushas and Iranian Grads which are reaching as far as Ashkelon and Ashdod. Today they killed another Israeli in Ashkelon and injured many more -- including several Israeli Arabs.
If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate’ Israeli violence. As far as I can see, there has been no mention of the extraordinary fact that on the day prior to the start of the Israeli operation, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip was admitted to hospital in Israel for medical treatment for a severe wound -- inflicted upon him by a stray Hamas rocket which had been fired at Israel.
What other country would treat its enemies in its own hospitals – which Israel does routinely with Palestinians from Gaza -- even when they are wounded as a direct consequence of their own side trying to murder yet more Israelis? What other country would provide or enable the supply of electricity, gas and other essentials to people who use such facilities to continue trying to murder as many of its cititzens as possible? On Sunday, for instance, as Ha’aretz reported, the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened to let through 26 trucks carrying food and medical equipment. Today it was opened again and about 40 trucks had entered with food and medical supplies by midday. Yet organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel's imposition of all ‘blockades’ on the Gaza Strip as ‘collective punishment’, and Jeremy Hobbs, Director of Oxfam International, has called on Israel ‘immediately [to] lift its inhumane and illegal siege’.
Yet it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam’s condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? And might all those from the Foreign Secretary down screaming about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ in Gaza pause for one second and look at the well-fed, healthy Gazans parading across their TV screens? If that’s a ‘humanitarian disaster’ – with supplies constantly pouring through the illegal tunnels from Egypt, along with billions of dollars-worth of missiles with which to commit mass murder -- what do they call what’s happening in Zimbabwe, which for some unaccountable reason inspires among the high-minded merely indifference?
Such bigotry and malice are not confined to British media and NGOs. On Salon, Glenn Greenwald whines about
America’s one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
Oh really? Well, Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire’. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.
Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide?
This blog is taking a break now (wars permitting) until early January. Many thanks for all your contributions, and I wish everyone a happy holiday and a good and peaceful new year.
NGO Monitor details the way in which Christian and other NGOs are using their Christmas message to incite distinctly unseasonal hatred by perpetrating the usual lies, libels and other calumnies against Israel. No mention, of course, of the real abuse of Christians by Muslims, across the third world – as detailed, along with Hindu-Christian violence in India, in the latest bulletin from the Barnabas Fund -- and specifically in the West Bank and Gaza. As Jonathan Speyer reports:
Unremarked upon by the Western media, a systematic campaign of persecution is taking place in the Gaza Strip, and to a lesser extent in the West Bank. The general silence surrounding this campaign aids its perpetrators. The victims are Palestinian Christians, in particular the small Christian community of Gaza. The perpetrators are a variety of Islamist groups, all of which are manifestations of a process of growing Islamic militancy and piety taking place across the region.
...Islamist organizations, empowered by the indifference of the authorities, have begun to target Christian institutions and individuals in Gaza with increasing impunity. Intimidation, assault and the threat of kidnapping are now part of daily reality for Christians. The trend became noticeable with a series of attacks on the Palestinian Bible Society’s ‘Teacher's Bookshop’ in Gaza City last year. The shop was the subject of a bomb attack in April 2007. Its owner, Rami Khader Ayyad, was abducted in broad daylight, and found dead on October 7, 2007.
Over the following year, a series of bomb attacks on Christian institutions in Gaza took place. Particular attention was paid to places of education. The Rahabat al-Wardia school run by nuns in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, and the American International School in Beit Lahiya were both bombed, [pictured] most recently in May 2008. The Zahwa Rosary Sisters School and the El-Manara school, both in Gaza City, were also attacked this summer. The YMCA Library was bombed, as was the Commonwealth War Cemetery.
...A recent article in the Palestinian Al-Ayyam newspaper drew attention to the long-simmering issue of ‘compulsory purchase’ of land owned by Christians. This trend has been particularly noticeable in the Bethlehem, Ramallah and al-Bireh areas. Individuals with close links to the Palestinian Authority security forces, or to powerful clans, have adopted a variety of means to lay their hands on Christian-owned land.
You will hear nothing about this from the western media, and the excellent Khaled abu Toameh, the Jerusalem Post’s correspondent in the West Bank, provides us with one reason here:
Over the past two years Palestinian journalists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been subjected to a systematic campaign of intimidation that has resulted in the death of some and the detention of others. The campaign, which is being waged by both Hamas and Fatah, has received almost no attention from human rights groups and advocates of the freedom of expression throughout the world. By contrast, when a Palestinian journalist is accidentally wounded by Israeli gunfire during clashes with Palestinians, the incident makes headlines in major media outlets in the US and EU.
What is most disturbing about the campaign of intimidation is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. This is the same authority that is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from American and European taxpayers’ money every month to build a proper judicial system and promote democracy and transparency among the Palestinians...
What is particularly disturbing is the fact that the Western journalists based in Israel tend to turn a blind eye to the assaults against their Palestinian colleagues. Some of these foreigners say they are afraid of the repercussions if they dare to anger Abbas or Hamas. Others claim that their editors are interested in such stories only if the perpetrators are Israeli soldiers. As one foreign correspondent recently remarked, ‘The more anti-Israeli stories I send to my editor, the more popular I become and my chances of winning an award are much higher.’
But what the Western journalists need to understand is that the campaign against the Palestinian journalists is also affecting their work. Foreign journalists rely heavily on Palestinian journalists when it comes to covering Palestinian affairs. So when a Palestinian journalist is afraid and under threat, he or she will think twice before they tell the Western correspondent what they know.
The result is the Big Lie about Israel – and never more noxious is the theological resonance of such scapegoating than at this particular time of year.
In the current issue of the Shalem Centre’s magazine Azure, Michael Oren has written a fine article using the subtle anti-Zionist message of the hit movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan to point out the key fact – which the bigoted morons who believe there’s a Jewish conspiracy stretching from Jerusalem to Washington fail to grasp – that American Jews are deeply ambivalent about Israel.
As I noted here about Steven Spielberg’s disgusting movie Munich, for the majority of American Jews it has always been America, not Israel, that is the 'goldene medina' or ‘promised land’. Israel makes them uneasy for a variety of reasons, including – as with British Jews – the visceral fear of being accused of dual loyalty ( a taunt, incidentally, that Jew-haters have used throughout history, centuries before the re-creation of the State of Israel). For a brief period after the Six-Day War, in the intense emotion generated by what appeared to be a miraculous deliverance from annihilation, this ambivalence was masked by pride in Israel’s heroic defence of itself against apparently superior odds. But in recent years, as the western (and Israeli) intelligentsia have spread the Arab poison about Israel’s alleged original sin, ambivalence has returned with a vengeance. As Oren writes:
The trend is especially pronounced among those American Jews too young to remember the Six Day War and pummeled with images of intifadas and Israeli incursions into Lebanon. Only about half of them, according to one recent study, expressed comfort with the idea of a Jewish state, and even fewer said they would be traumatized by Israel’s annihilation. It is not surprising, then, that Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, garnered such a passionate reception among American Jews: The heroes of the novel, set in 1948, are two American Jewish cartoonists, but there is no mention of the 600,000 real-life Jewish heroes who struggled for statehood that year.14 American Jews also celebrated Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union with its fantasy of a world in which Israel does not exist but is nonetheless plagued by Zionist conspiracies.
Not an unbroken line, then, between Washington and Jerusalem – more a grey mist of ambiguity and unease.
The Daily Mail reports that the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Khan, is recommending even more drastic action to prevent the British and other leading economies from spiralling into a yet more disastrous recession: Billions more will have to be pumped into the economy to avoid it spiralling into an even 'darker' recession, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned...Opening the spending taps in this way would run the risk of blowing an even bigger hole in the public finances, experts warned. But the IMF believes racking up more debt is the lesser of two evils - and that Britain’s collapse will dwarf those in the U.S., Germany, France, Spain, Russia and Brazil. In other words, Gordon Brown’s fiscal stimulus has been too cautious. And so this leaves the Tories saying...what, precisely? I await their denunciation of the IMF for its stunning profligacy, recklessness, imprudence, irresponsibility, etc etc...
The Centre for Social Cohesion has noticed that Asghar Bukhari, the extremist who runs the Islamist Muslim Public Affairs Committee website, has now been openly glorifying terrorism (now a crime on the statute book). On a public facebook discussion forum, he said:
Muslims who fight against the occupation of their lands are ‘Mujahadeen’ and are blessed by Allah. And any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise. The concept of Jihad is a beautiful thing, and logical to those with a sincere heart. It tells the human being to stand up and fight against those who bring evil and oppression on this earth, and by standing up - roll back that oppression until the people are free from it. There is no greater oppressor on this earth then [sic] the Zionists, who murder little children for sport...Any public attack on Islam and the Ummah is not going to be tolerated by men like me. I have dealt with these Zionists before, a veneer of reason, below which lies a crooked mind plotting and planning to extend their hatred against us.
As the CSC notes, Bukhari has also funded the Holocaust denier David Irving. Despite his attempts to remove what he considers to be unambiguous examples of Jew-hatred from his site whenever they are spotted, MPACUK is suffused with such bigotry, so much so that the National Union of Students has banned it from campuses on account of this Jew-hatred. Nevertheless, as CSC researcher Robin Simcox points out, the BBC still treats the MPACUK as legitimate interlocutors:
‘Concern has previously been expressed to the BBC and other media about their continuing use of Bukhari and his organization. Despite this, they are regularly treated by the BBC and other mainstream media as representative of mainstream Muslim opinion,’ Simcox said.
Surely there are now clear grounds for prosecuting Bukhari – even if the BBC will never get the point?
The indispensable Walid Phares reflects upon the way in which the useuful idiots of the western media have, in their ineffable ignorance and stupidity, not to mention malice, once again done the jihadists’ dirty work for them in the way they have responded to the bloke who threw his shoe at President Bush:
Minutes after the incident took place and was captured by the media feed and aired worldwide, a snowball flurry of releases, special shows with commentators - gathered too fast for the circumstance - were on the airwaves. Interestingly al Baghdadiya TV issued – faster than the speed of light - a long press release calling for struggle. Minutes after, a vast magma of satellite channel sympathizers of Jihadism, and of sites virulently anti-democracy, exploded with incitement and calls for mobilization - and some were even as provocative as characterizing the ballistic exercise by al Zaidi as an ‘act of Jihad.’
Within six hours, the airwaves in the region were invaded by the ‘shoe Jihad.’ Within 12 hours, friendly voices beaming from Western networks joined the orchestra in aggrandizing the matter. ‘A shoe in the Arab culture is the worst epithet one can use, it expresses so deep an anger,’ blasted one of the oldest international media out of Europe. More seasoning was added on this side of the Atlantic. ‘Analysts’ for mainstream networks - most of whom can’t speak the language - began lecturing the stunned public on the ‘lessons to be learned and on the pain felt in those lands at the sight of President Bush.’ And the framing continued on. By the second day, both the Arab satellite cohorts and the ‘specialists’ on ‘how to understand the region’ were breaking to the world the grandiose news: a new hero was born in the Muslim world, the shoe thrower. Give it a few weeks and Hollywood will buy the story and make a movie out of it. Give it a year and it will be taught as a course by our academic cinema.
At long last, the issue of libel tourism has come out into the open. The Labour MP Denis MacShane instigated a debate in the House of Commons two days ago to draw attention to the fact that Britain, the cradle of free speech and political liberty, has become the epicentre of the attempt to shut down discussion of terrorism and other noxious activities which involve certain wealthy foreigners, who are taking advantage of Britain’s ferocious libel laws to silence all those who try to write about them. Remarkably, American legislatures are being forced to pass bills to stop British courts punishing American writers for publishing books and articles that may be freely read in the United States but about which foreigners with deep enough pockets can sue them in the British courts.
So pernicious is this phenomenon that even to draw attention to it is to risk a libel suit. But whatever is said in Parliament can be reported. So for the first time many can learn, as MacShane said,
...the Kafkaesque position of the writer Rachel Ehrenfeld, whose book, entitled ‘Funding Evil’, examined the flow of money towards extremist organisations that preach the ideology of hate associated with Wahhabism and other democracy-denying aspects of fundamentalist Islamic ideology. It is not exactly a secret that a great deal of the money that has financed fundamentalist extremist organisations that support jihad has come from Saudi Arabia. Ms Ehrenfeld’s book, which was published in America, not Britain, named a Saudi billionaire called Mr. Khalid bin Mahfouz. Although the book was published in the United States, and was not on sale in any British bookshop, he found lawyers to sue in Britain. A British judge imposed a fine and costs on Ms Ehrenfeld, and said that her book should be destroyed, even though she was not in the court. No American court would have entertained such overt censorship.
The fullest examination is vital of those raising money, sometimes ostensibly for charitable work, but which ends up promoting fundamentalist ideology that scrambles young men’s and boys’ minds and leads them to become terrorists. There is no freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia, so it is the duty of others to expose what is happening. With the help of British libel lawyers, Mr. Mahfouz has launched 33 suits against those who are investigating this important area of public concern. Cambridge University Press was obliged to pulp its book ‘Alms for Jihad’, written by Robert Collins and J. Millard Burr, rather than face a libel action in British courts, which seem at the moment to side with those who finance extremism rather than those who seek to curb it. The case of Mr. Nadhmi Auchi also comes to mind. What is happening when Cambridge University Press, not some odd, little, obsessive publishing house, but one of the flowers of British publishing for centuries, has to pulp a book because British courts will not uphold freedom of expression?
A Tunisian has used the British courts to sue the Dubai television network, al-Arabiya, which broadcasts in Arabic. Last November, a British judge awarded the man £165,000 without al-Arabiya being in court. Mr. Mohammed Sawalha attacked this summer’s celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel and referred to the ‘Jewish evil’ in Britain. That was reported on the political website, Harry’s place, and immediately Mr. Sawalha threatened to sue. At a time when we need the maximum examination of who is financing ideology that leads to terrorism, we find that British courts, judges and lawyers are acting in the opposite direction to silence investigations. I doubt whether any of the lawyers, the judge or court officials in question can read Arabic or have any real acquaintance with Wahhabism or Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and yet they act as defenders of those who promote extremist ideology, not those who try to expose it.
... the surreal nature of libel tourism can be found in the case of the Danish paper, Ekstra Bladet, which found itself being sued by the Iceland-based bank, Kaupthing, after it criticised it. Kaupthing’s default has caused distress to British savers, and every Member will have a constituent who has lost money and is very concerned. The collapse and wrongdoing of Kaupthing might be about to return Iceland to a rural economy. One would have thought, therefore, that exposure of the bank’s practices would have been in the widest public interest, but no. The British libel firm, Schilling and Lom [now called Schillings] —it certainly made plenty of shillings out of this case—which seems to specialise in touting for business, along with the infamous Carter-Ruck, acted for Kaupthing in London on the grounds that the articles critical of Kaupthing were available on the web... It would be helpful if the Law Society investigated the behaviour of firms such as Schilling and Lom and Carter-Ruck, because actively touting for business is a serious problem.
The LibDem MP Norman Lamb then added:
The case involves Nadhmi Auchi, whom the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. He is a British citizen—an Iraqi exile—and he is reported to be a multi-billionaire. He was convicted in France in 2003 of fraud in a trial involving the oil company Elf. Importantly, he continues to assert his innocence of the charges—there was a conviction, but he is pursuing routes of appeal against it. He was barred from entering the United States in 2005. My interest in the matter is in his connections to Tony Rezco, who was convicted of fraud, money laundering and bribe-related charges in Illinois, and who is currently in prison pending sentencing. We understand that sentencing has been delayed, and it has been suggested that he should talk to federal prosecutors, especially about allegations against Illinois Governor Blagojevich, which are being investigated. There is political interest in the US because of the connections between Rezko and President-elect Obama. I make no allegation at all relating to the latter.
There have been reports that a company related to Mr. Auchi registered a loan of $3.5 million to Tony Rezko on 23 May 2005. That and other alleged connections are obviously of great interest to investigative journalists and others. More to the point, it is legitimate to investigate such a matter, given that Mr. Auchi is a prominent British citizen with political connections in this country and overseas. As I said, it is not appropriate to go into more detail, but it is alleged that Mr. Auchi and his lawyers, Carter-Ruck, have been making strenuous efforts to close down public debate. Of course, it is absolutely legitimate for any citizen to demand accurate and rigorous investigation and reporting. The question is whether UK libel laws have the disproportionate effect of discouraging legitimate reporting. Many believe that they do.
On 28 June, Private Eye reported Mr. Auchi’s instructions to Carter-Ruck. The article states:
‘Carter-Ruck’s first target was a series of revelatory articles’—
concerning Mr. Auchi—
‘printed in the Observer in 2003, which American bloggers and journalists were starting to notice.’
Later, however, the article states:
‘You will search in vain now, however, to find most of the Observer’s reports.’
Those reports were from five years ago. It has been reported in the US that Carter-Ruck has been writing to US and British newspapers and websites demanding removal of the material that it deems defamatory of its client. Many are concerned about the fact that creating a link on a blog to a newspaper article, which may have been available for several years to anyone searching the internet, can result in action being threatened or taken. Is that legitimate? Alternatively, should a blogger be able to rely on the journalistic integrity of reliable news sources when a story has already been published and when it has existed for several years?
Indeed. The development of libel tourism has become an absolute scandal. The most sinister thing of all is that – by definition -- people don’t know what it is they aren’t being allowed to know. And some of that information raises questions of the most acute importance concerning both the integrity of our politicians and others in public life, and the security of this country when it is under threat of attack. The debate was a most welcome first step in getting this scandal into the public domain at all. MPs should not let it rest there.
The rather splendid blogger at Venerable Beads is shocked to the core, as well he might be, by the astounding bias, bigotry and bile pullulating through the pages of the London Review of Books. In particular, he is struck by the obsessional and vicious hatred of... you guessed. In horror, he writes:
How terrible to think of the number of people that lap this stuff up without query or complaint... Adam Shatz gets half a page to rubbish the documentary Obsession, a scrupulously fair warning against the march of Islamist fascism, and manages to come up with nothing that disproves a single one of its assertions or discredits any of its aims, other than the apparently sufficient in itself point that it was financed by Jews and backed by ‘the real estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as ‘the world’s richest Jew’” thus disproving and accounting for its thesis at a stroke.
I had no idea who Shatz was - I doubt if you do, either - but a quick Google finds him loitering in all the expected places, including The Guardian, where he had the following to say about Mearsheimer and Walt's notorious paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy:
There is nothing particularly novel in its assertion that Israel undermines America's relations with the Arab and Muslim world, that the occupation of Palestinian land is a, if not the chief, recruiting tool of terrorist or resistance groups in the region, and that Israel is more of a liability than an asset...Having said that, their contribution is welcome in that it smashes a number of taboos, notably the claim that the alliance reflects America’s support of the region’s ‘sole democracy.’ As Palestinian citizens of Israel have joked, Israel is a democratic state for Jews, and a Jewish state for Arabs!
I find that exclamation mark especially stomach-churning, don't you? But I bet you can't guess who’s to blame for Iran’s mad rush to nuclear oblivion...
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a
panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over
God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.
For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here
The Daily Mail 
The Centre for Social Cohesion has 
