Thursday, 31st January 2008
9:17am
Even I, who have written constantly about the British government’s lethally flawed strategy of appeasing Islamism, am left breathless by today’s story in the Telegraph:
Private Muslim schools have been given the power to police themselves, despite widespread fears over religious segregation, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. In a controversial move, they have won the right to appoint their own Ofsted-style inspectors. A new independent watchdog has been set up to be more ‘sensitive’ toward Islamic education. The decision comes despite concerns some private Muslim schools are already failing to prepare pupils for life in modern Britain.
Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the Commons schools select committee, told MPs last month local councils were finding it ‘difficult to know what is going on in some faith schools - particularly Muslim schools’. But religious leaders defended the move, saying the curriculum and religious traditions in faith schools demand specialist knowledge. Under present legislation, most state and private schools are inspected by Ofsted, the Government's standards watchdog. The Association of Muslim Schools and the Christian Schools' Trust applied to the Government to set up a separate inspectorate for a small number of private faith schools. The Daily Telegraph has learned the Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF] approved plans for the Bridge Schools' Inspectorate last week, giving it the power to inspect about 60 private Muslim schools and 50 Christian schools.
It really is hard to believe this. There is a crying need for
much more rigorous state inspection of Muslim schools. Ofsted, which is supposedly going to police this new Muslim/Christian inspectorate, is hopeless; having progressively emasculated its inspection processes generally, it has already failed to identify Islamic extremism in the Muslim schools it inspects (see the evidence revealed in the recent
Policy Exchange report of the bigoted teaching materials used at the King Fahad academy in west London, to which Ofsted gave a clean bill of health). The only way to address Islamic extremism is to take the toughest line possible against the dissemination of hatred and incitement. That means that the state must make it its business to find out where children are being thus indoctrinated and stop it. And that means the state must inspect all Muslim teaching institutions and take action against them where it finds that this is happening. To withdraw instead, as the government is now doing, and allow these schools to police themselves is to give a green light to the extremist production line.
Furthermore, it also bows to the Islamist insistence that British Muslims must develop parallel institutions to the British state, a fundamental element of their strategy to Islamise this country. For although this is presented as a Muslim/Christian initiative, no-one can be in any doubt that the main thrust comes from British Muslims. The website of the Christian body involved, the
Christian Schools’ Trust, is being rejigged so information on it is sparse; but it appears to be a marginal fundamentalist body. Certainly there is no indication that Christian schools in general, or Jewish schools for that matter, are pressing for their own inspectorate.
Many people still think that the idea that Britain could ever be ‘Islamised’ is just too preposterous and silly to be taken seriously. It is not. It is well advanced. What it relies upon is three things: the refusal of the British public to take it seriously; the Islamists' ability to manipulate moral and intellectual liberal confusion and the resulting paralysis over ‘Islamophobia’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘minority rights’; and the craven desire by the British government to buy off the implicit and explicit threats of Muslim social unrest and yet more terrorist attacks by giving in to the Islamists’ demands. Truly moderate British Muslims who want to live under the umbrella of British laws and institutions are thus grievously undermined, and the entire country is put at ever greater peril from the pincer movement of cultural and terrorist attack.
Members of Parliament with an elementary sense of national self-preservation simply must not let this pass.
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4:54pm
The one consolation about the defeat of Rudy Giuliani is that anyone who devised such a crackpot strategy as totally ignoring a whole bunch of American voters in order to recklessly gamble upon Florida to deliver the Republican nomination should never have been let loose in the White House.
Well okay, it was a try.
The Clintons are said to fear Mc Cain. I'd have thought instead that the Democrats must be hugging themselves today, even while Hillary and Obama continue to slug it out. For in my view the Republicans have just torn up their strongest potential card: clarity and strength of purpose. John McCain’s political profile is muddy. On domestic issues, he’s a social liberal; on foreign affairs, he may be hawkish on Iraq but he’s also a Europhile and has the usual soggy prejudices about the Middle East. In other words, he reflects the ideological confusion now gripping western conservatism as it becomes progressively disorientated by the culture wars and, under the misleading banner of liberty, goes with the flow of cultural Marxism and the erosion of national identity and moral order. With the exception of gay rights and abortion, on which he is a social liberal, Guiliani stood against all that. Having famously drawn his ‘zero tolerance’ line in the sand in New York, we all knew he would draw it again where it really matters -- defending civilisation, most crucially of all, against the threat from without. For whatever reason, American Republicans didn’t buy it. Alas.
Maybe McCain will now show that he has what it takes to defend western culture, and will establish clear blue water between himself and Hillbama. But in a contest between a left-wing populist moral and cultural relativist and a conservative wannabe populist moral and cultural relativist, the left wins every time. They do it so much better. Why vote for the monkey, after all, when you can have the organ-grinder?
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Wednesday, 30th January 2008
11:59pm
The breaching by Hamas of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt has created a new situation of considerable complexity on the ground. For Israel, the danger from the free flow of terrorist men and materiel in and out of Egypt, and able to penetrate the porous border between Sinai and Israel, is obvious. On the other hand, several commentators are speculating that along with the danger comes an opportunity — that Egypt, which fears Hamas, will no longer be able to rely on Israel to control the violence in Gaza but will now be forced to do the job itself. Some are even suggesting that Gaza should be annexed to Egypt, which makes a certain amount of sense given the close cultural, family and historic ties between Egypt and the Arabs of Gaza. Gaza would thus cease to be Israel's problem and become instead what it actually is, an Arab problem; the issue of Palestinian nationalism would need to be recalibrated in the direction of cultural reality; and finally the Middle East impasse would be broken and proper moves could start towards a peaceful resolution.
Such optimistic day-dreaming, however, assumes that Egypt would swallow Hamas. But there is a significant risk that Hamas would swallow Egypt. It is becoming ever clearer that the breach in the wall with Egypt was far from a spontaneous eruption of desperate need, as the half-witted western media presented it, but was a long-standing and meticulously planned operation. Clearly, Hamas is making a push against weak Egypt, ruled by the near octogenarian President Mubarak who is desperately trying to hold off the Muslim Brotherhood inside his country from turning it into an Islamist state. And probably the most significant player in all this, as ever, is Iran. Despite the fact that Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian Sunni Brotherhood, it is being backed by Iran — which, as Haaretz reports, is now close to resuming ties with Egypt which have been broken for decades. The smashing of the Egyptian wall could therefore be the prelude to an Iranian Hamastan in Egypt, which would threaten not just Israel but the entire region and indeed the free world. On the other hand, Mubarak is ruthless towards his enemies. The shape of this is as yet far from clear.
Update: Daniel Pipes, who suggests that Gaza should be handed over to Egypt, publishes this revealing photograph on his site:
His caption reads:
'Egyptians and Palestinians are one people, not two peoples,' says a sign held by a Palestinian on Jan. 29, 2008.
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Tuesday, 29th January 2008
11:38pm
It will be a shame if David Cameron’s flip-flop over Derek Conway obscures the speech he was flagged up as making today (not yet on line, it seems) about dealing with Islamist extremism. Quite rightly, he deplored the government’s decision to allow into the country Islamist demagogues who support mass murder and preach hatred and incitement:
We are making the same mistakes again – allowing people to enter our country to spout hate. People like Ibrahim Moussawi, head of Hezbollah’s viciously anti-Semitic TV station, Al-Manar. Despite Pauline-Neville Jones asking the Home Secretary to refuse his entry to this country, he was allowed to speak in Manchester in December…and has been invited on a speaking tour of five British cities from the end of next month.
Not to mention Yusuf al Qaradawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is being allowed in for medical treatment:
This is a man who, incidentally, Mayor Ken Livingstone calls the best hope for progress in Islam. He has been banned from the USA since 1999. He is opposed to secularism and who believes that the penalty for homosexuality is death. And he has defended the use of terrorism in Israel and Iraq. Despite this, news reports say that it’s been recommended to the Government that he be given permission to enter the country.
… The Home Secretary can exclude entry on the grounds of national security or that someone’s presence would not be conducive to the public good. And we’ve got a Prime Minister who says has ‘no toleration for preachers of hate who call for violence, who call for murder’ and that he wants to ‘isolate Islamic extremists who… seek to manipulate and divide our society’. So what is the Government waiting for?
A good question. The fact is, as I have said on numerous occasions, the British government’s policy towards Islamist extremism is to obdurately fail to get the point at all times. It comes to something when Pakistan’s President Musharraf, whose own record in the fight to defend civilisation is, shall we say, a little chequered,
skewers Britain’s lamentable lack of a proper counter-terrorism policy:
‘We have adopted a five-point strategy. You need to adopt a similar strategy to curb this kind of tendency in youngsters, who tend to become terrorists, because merely getting hold of them and punishing them legally does not solve the problem or get to the root of the problem,’ he said.
He listed the five elements of Pakistan's counter-terrorist strategy: curbing the propagation of extremism in mosques; restricting the publication of extremist literature; banning extremist organisations; stopping the teaching of militant Islam in schools; and bringing madrasas (religious schools) into the mainstream.
He singled out the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. ‘We have banned them in Pakistan, yet we are blamed [and they say] we are doing nothing,’ he complained. ‘You haven't banned them yet. So why blame us?’ British officials say there is no evidence that Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain is involved in terrorism. A Downing Street source said: ‘We need to find the balance between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and the need to prevent violence.’
Yup, just makes Musharraf’s point for him. Same old, same old from a Downing Street in denial, even now.
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9:04pm
The best line in Martin Amis’s otherwise defensive and uncomfortable interview with the Independent today is this:
The reason that America is the only First World country with a non-declining birth rate is because of all those things we hate about it, you know – [it's] patriarchal, church-going. I'm going to take this up because I think it's such an enormous question – has feminism cost us Europe?
Way to go, Martin.
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9:00pm
A belter of an article by Victor Davis Hansen savages the double standards of the world over Israel. Here's a taster:
The Russians during the second Chechnyan War of 1999-2000 reportedly sent tactical missiles into the very core of Grozny, and may have killed tens of thousands of civilians in their hunt for Chechnyan terrorists — explaining why the United Nations later called that city the most destroyed city on earth. Syria has never admitted to the complete destruction of Hama, once home to Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. The city suffered the fate of Carthage and was completely obliterated in 1982 by the al-Assad government, with over 30,000 missing or killed. Did the Indian government look the other way in 2002 when hundreds of Muslim civilians in Gujarat were killed in reprisal for Islamic violence against Hindus? The lessons learned in this final session might reassure a world still furious over the 52 Palestinians lost in Jenin.
Do read it all.
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8:49pm
You can tell a lot about people from the individuals whom they choose to eulogise, lionise or sanitise. George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, died last weekend in Jordan. This is what he did:
· 1968: Hijacking of El Al flight from Rome to Lod airport in Israel, diverted to Algiers, where 21 passengers and 11 crew members were held for
39 days.
· 1968: Firing on an El Al passenger jet in Athens about to take off for New York, killing an Israeli mechanic.
· 1969: Attack on El Al airliner at Zürich airport, killing the co-pilot and wounding the pilot.
· 1969: Bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two Israelis and wounding twenty others.
· 1969: Hijacking of a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Damascus by a PFLP cell led by Leila Khaled. Two Israeli passengers were held for 44 days.
· 1970: Attacks a bus containing El Al passengers at Munich airport, killing one passenger and wounding 11.
· 1970: Bombs in mid-air a Swissair flight bound for Israel, killing all 47 people on board.
· 1970: Hijacks four passenger aircraft from Pan Am, TWA and Swissair, diverting them to Cairo and Zarqa, Jordan and then blowing them up in front of the world media.
· 1972: PFLP terrorists massacre 27 Israelis, including Professor Aharon Katzir, at Israel's Lod (later Ben Gurion) Airport.
· 1975: In a raid led by Carlos the Jackal, PFLP seizes the OPEC office in Vienna, taking 60 hostages before being flown to safety in the
Arab world.
· 1976: PFLP and Baader-Meinhof terrorists seize an Air France flight and hold its passengers and crew hostage at Entebbe, Uganda, until the latter are rescued by Israeli commandos. Seized OPEC leaders meeting in
Vienna.
· 1981: Abducted and threatened four American journalists in Beirut in 1981.
· 2001: Murders Meir Lixenberg, councillor and head of security in four Israeli settlements, who was shot while travelling in his car.
· 2001: PFLP terrorists assassinated Rehavam Ze'evi, Israeli Minister of Tourism.
· 2001 Carries out suicide bombing in Karnei Shomron, killing three.
· 2001: Carries out suicide bombing in a Netanya market, killing three.
· 2003: Carries out a suicide bombing in the bus station at Geha Junction in Petah Tiqva, killing four.
· 2004: Carries out a suicide bombing in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, killing three.
This is what Mahmoud Abbas, of whom President Bush said in his State of the Union address today:
Palestinians have elected a president who recognizes that confronting terror is essential to achieving a state where his people can live in dignity and at peace with Israel,
said of George Habash:
The death of this historic leader is a great loss for the Palestinian cause and for the Palestinian people for whom he fought for 60 years
and he ordered Palestinian Authority flags to be flown at half mast for three days.
This is what three loyal and patriotic Israeli Arab members of Israel's parliament, Ahmed Tibi, Jamal Zahalka, and Wassal Taha did: they attended the funeral of Habash, the arch-enemy of the state in whose parliament they sit, with Tibi declaring:
I have come to pay my respects to a leader who has become a symbol of the struggle for freedom and national liberty
although Zahalka, who called Habash
one of the most important Palestinian leaders of the 20th century
did add that
the bloodshed should be stopped. Our party always opposed attacks on civilians
but not enough, apparently, to cause him to stay away from the funeral.
This is what the moderate statesmen of the Palestinian General Delegation to the UK sent out on email:
Subject: Condolences for Dr George Habash
The Palestinian ambassador and members of the Palestinian General Delegation to the UK received with deep sadness the news of the loss of a great Palestinian leader—Dr George Habash. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family, the Palestinian people and all freedom loving people in the world. A pillar of Palestine’s national movement who spent his entire life defending his people’s cause, Dr Habash’s legacy is an inspiration to the many generations to come. We salute him.
Written condolences are received at the Palestinian General Delegation to the UK.
And not forgetting of course the BBC, whose hagiography obituary of Habash described him as one of the most important Palestinian militant leaders
whose PFLP
would carry out some of the defining attacks of the era. These catapulted the Palestinian cause onto the international news agenda, but did not always generate sympathy for the Palestinians. Many people in Israel and the West thought that George Habash was a terrorist. For many Palestinians and Arabs he was a patriot.
By their eulogies shall ye know them…
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Monday, 28th January 2008
2:12pm
It had to happen. After McJobs, Britain now has McQualifications. The Times splashed today on the fact that McDonald’s and other big businesses will award their own qualifications equal to GCSEs, A levels and degrees, in subjects such as fast-food restaurant management... McDonald’s will train employees for a certificate in basic shift management, recognised by the QCA as equal to an A-level. [My emphasis] Trainees will learn about the day-to-day running of a restaurant, including finance, hygiene and human resources.
Someone once wrote a terrific book in the 1990s about the destruction of Britain’s education system (ok, it was me). It was called All Must Have Prizes (after the Dodo’s ruling, at the end of the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, that ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’) because at the very core of this disaster is the belief that everyone must be a winner and no-one a loser for fear of destroying children’s ‘self-esteem’; and so in order to ensure that everyone achieves equal esteem, academic and vocational qualifications must be given equal status and failure must be written out of the picture altogether. So now we have Mickey Mouse ‘university’ courses, students being awarded degrees when they have scored zero in their exams because they have never even turned up (as was told to me by an academic at that particular university) , standards across the board in both academic and vocational courses plummeting, graduates who can’t string a sentence together, young people who know little and can’t think for themselves, record school truancy rates and social mobility going backwards with fewer pupils from poor backgrounds going to good universities.
Their self-esteem, however, is doubtless top-notch.
But hey, look on the bright side. As the Tories have pointed out, the McLevels may be of a higher standard than the dodgy vocational courses currently on offer. Education? Forget it. It’s all about flipping skills.
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12:12am
Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. A lot of worthy things were said about the need to remember the Holocaust to ensure that such a thing never happens again — in a country which demonstrates every day that, by blaming the intended victims of a planned second Holocaust of the Jews and minimising or denying the threat posed by the Iranian deniers of the first, it is repeating the lesson of its own history in refusing to recognise what is happening and thus making it more likely that it will happen again.
Some years ago, the Holocaust Educational Trust was established to ensure that schools were adequately equipped to teach the lessons of the Holocaust. I think there is now an urgent need for a similar organisation to teach British children the true history of Israel and the Jewish people. I hear alarming reports from horrified parents of schools teaching their pupils the falsehood that, as a result of European guilt over the Holocaust, the modern State of Israel was created by the importation of European Jews with no connection to the land, thus displacing the rightful Arab Muslim inhabitants whose land it had been since time immemorial. Every part of that account is untrue. The result of such teaching — and worse —which I suspect is now routine in British schools is that British schoolchildren are being fed a diet of propaganda lies which is inciting them to hatred of Israel and the Jews who support its existence. On those occasions when some brave and well-informed pupil tells them the truth — the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before the Arab conquest —their perspective immediately changes.
In the absence of a proper education in Jewish and Israeli history, and in today's dreadful climate of prejudice, I’m afraid that teaching the Holocaust often merely confirms British schoolchildren in the poisonous belief that the victims of the Nazis turned into Nazis. The need for an initiative to ensure that schools teach children the truth about the Jews has never been more urgent.
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Sunday, 27th January 2008
11:43pm
The Observer’s
report today on recent events in Gaza was an object lesson in how group-think creates reporting which is as demonstrably absurd as it is egregiously offensive. Reporter Peter Beaumont, describing the breaching of the wall separating Egypt from Gaza, nevertheless represented this as a means of escaping a blockade imposed solely by Israel. Despite recording the undoubted fact that the breach of the Egyptian barrier had created a seismic and unstoppable reordering of the facts of the Middle East
along with a brief reference to
the attempt by Egyptian riot police who moved later in the week to try to reseal the border
the flow of Gazans into Egypt through the breached barrier was represented as an escape from the stranglehold imposed by Israel — with no acknowledgement at all that the breached barrier represented Egypt’s own ‘stranglehold’. This fact was totally ignored. Instead the ‘wall in the mind’ that had come down belonged to Israel, not to Egypt; the breach had resulted in
a holiday from the oppressive conditions of Gaza under Israeli siege
not ‘Egyptian’ siege; despite the Egyptian barrier it was Israel alone that had ‘declared Hamas a hostile entity’, thus
further strangling a sealed off Gaza Strip and leading to severe shortages of cement, cigarettes and other basic goods
and tightening the noose on the innocent Gazans causing them to suffer every ill from economic ruin to domestic violence, divorce and child abuse.
I think this is called cognitive dissonance.
At least, however, Beaumont recognised not only Egypt’s undoubted consternation at having Hamas pouring across its border but the naivety of those Israeli politicians, for whom the wish is father to the thought, who have proposed that Egypt should now be forced to assume responsibility for Gaza altogether. Not so
Ahdaf Soueif who, in a sidebar to Beaumont’s piece, claimed that Israel was deliberately pushing Egypt to open its Rafah border with Gaza so that it could itself finally separate from Gaza and thus destroy the peace process.
Uh, wait a minute… isn’t the complaint against Israel that it is supposed not to have separated from Gaza? Hmmn, bit of a problem, that complaint, when Israel continues to supply Gaza with electricity, food fuel and other necessities of life (thus enabling Gazans to continue to try to kill Israelis through war by rockets and terror). As for the idea that Israel actually wants the border between Egypt and Hamastan to be open, this is grotesque.Such an opening means a free flow of explosives, rockets and other weapons into Gaza to be used against Israel -- not to mention a free flow of terrorists who can then enter Israel through Egypt’s porous border in Sinai.
Meanwhile I searched the British media in vain for any reference to the terror attacks carried out against Israelis in the last few days. As Haaretz reports:
A knife-wielding Palestinian stabbed a Border Police officer on duty near the Atarot industrial area in northern Jerusalem, Israel Radio reported on Saturday. Policemen nearby opened fire at the Palestinian, who was seriously wounded.
The stabbed policeman, who suffered light to moderate wounds, and the Palestinian are currently receiving treatment at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem… The attack is the third to take place in the Jerusalem area within the last 48 hours. On Thursday night, two armed Palestinians infiltrated a yeshiva in the nearby settlement of Kfar Etzion, wounding three civilians.
In a separate incident that occurred around the same time Thursday, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on the Border Police officers stationed at the Ras Hamis checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, killing a Border Police officer and wounding another. The two armed Palestinians who infiltrated the Kfar Etzion yeshiva were recently released from an Israeli prison after serving time for criminal violations, Palestinian and Israeli security officials said Friday.
The yeshiva attackers were Hamas; the others were terrorists affiliated to Fatah. You know, Fatah — yes, those same good-hearted guys who America tells us are committed to making peace with Israel.
Needless to say, as far as I can see none of these incidents has been reported in the British media.
I think this is called wilful blindness.
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