Sunday, 20th January 2008
9:57pm
The Pentagon’s abrupt removal of its principal expert on Islam, Major Stephen Coughlin, is an extremely serious development that should be of great concern to all defenders of the west. Its significance in marking the steadily widening disintegration of American resolve in identifying and resisting the spread of Islamism within American society is hard to exaggerate. Coughlin was fired because the Defence Department took the side of Hesham Islam, a personal aide to Deputy Defence Secretary Gordon England. Islam called
Coughlin a ‘Christian zealot with a pen’.
And what had Coughlin said to provoke such a claim? According to
Investor’s Business Daily, Coughlin’s crime was to warn the U.S. military that major US Muslim groups were fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood, the global jihadist movement based in Egypt.
Turns out Islam, who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups — the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case…In a 333-page report submitted to the National Defense Intelligence College, he [Coughlin] warned that Islamic law sanctions violence. In fact, he wrote that the Quran and other Islamic texts make clear that it is an obligatory requirement for Muslims to wage jihad when non-Muslim forces enter Muslim lands. ‘So how does one explain the prevailing assumption that Islam does not stand for such violence undertaken in its name with the fact that its law and education materials validate the very acts undertaken by “extremists” in Iraq?’he asked, logically.
The mandate to wage jihad is also taught, still, in Saudi school textbooks, Coughlin says, and explains why the home to Islam's holiest shrines is the No. 1 foreign supplier of suicide bombers in Iraq. ‘The first “radicalizing” lesson that Saudi youth receive that motivates them to travel to Iraq and fight coalition forces does not come from 'extremist' groups like al-Qaida,’ he observed, ‘but rather is taught as part of Saudi Arabia's standard secondary school curriculum.’ Bottom line: ‘The enemy is driven by Islamic law,’ he warned — not poverty, lack of education or other socioeconomic factors often used by official Washington and the punditry to blur the demonstrable link between Islamic devotion and terror. Unfortunately, Coughlin's critical findings were too politically hot for Pentagon brass trying to make nice with Muslim groups at the urging of Muslim aides involved with them. So instead of the aides, he got the boot, which is outrageous but not surprising for Washington.
As the Washington Times observed, if the roles had been reversed and Coughlin had called Islam an ‘Islamic zealot’ all hell would have broken loose in the American media. As it is, a scandal which strikes at the heart of America’s ability and willingness to defend itself has passed almost unremarked. Only a tiny handful of American papers has reported this development.
I guess this really is America’s inconvenient truth -- just as it is in Britain.
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Thursday, 17th January 2008
6:55pm
According to Phil Johnston in the Telegraph:
Ministers have dropped the term ‘war on terror’ and will now refer to jihadis as 'criminals' in an attempt to stop glorifying acts of terrorism. ‘As you disrupt radicalisation you must be aware of how you describe it and must not do so in a way that is inadvertently inflammatory,’ said a Whitehall source.
Yes, the phrase ‘war on terror’ is conceptually incoherent; but the government’s intention is not to describe what we are facing more precisely. On the contrary, its intention is to make it impossible to describe the situation truthfully. We are being subjected to an onslaught from Islamic jihadi terrorism. First the government decided to ban the use of the word ‘Islamic’ in relation to terrorism; now it is banning the word ‘terrorism’ itself.
But what we are facing is not merely criminal activity. It is terrorism, the attempt to murder large numbers of innocent people in the pursuit of a political aim — namely, the Islamisation of Britain. The suggestion that if the British state calls jihadis ‘criminals’ they will feel less glorious about what they are doing is inane. As far as they are concerned they are fighting a jihad, or holy war. By denying that this is what we are up against, and arriving instead at a false analysis that denies the reality of holy war, the government is fatally undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself. By denying the political goal of the violence, it makes it much more likely that it will accede to that goal. You cannot ever defeat a threat that you refuse even to call by its proper name.
This became painfully obvious this morning when the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, delivered her first major speech on the government’s counter-terrorism strategy at a conference on ‘Radicalisation and Political Violence’, to launch the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College, London. The speech was a frightening demonstration of intellectual and moral funk. She said: As so many Muslims in the UK and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorise, nothing Islamic about plotting pain, murder and grief. Indeed, if anything these actions are ‘anti-Islamic’.
This is demonstrably ridiculous. The campaign of terror being mounted against the free world is being perpetrated in the name of Islam, sanctioned and even mandated by leading Islamic scholars around the world, and rooted in Islamic theology — and in the history of violent jihadi conquest to which it gave rise that stretches back to the beginning of Islam in the seventh century. Certainly, there are Muslims and schools of Muslim thought that renounce this interpretation of the religion and want nothing to do with violence, nor with Islamising the societies in which they reside. Such true moderates and Muslim reformers should be given every support and encouragement. But to say therefore that this terrorism is ‘anti-Islamic’ is like saying that the Inquisition was ‘anti-Catholic’.
Does the Home Secretary think that Syed Qutb or Abu ala Maududi, the Islamic scholars who were the principal ideologues of the modern jihad, were ‘anti-Islamic’? Or Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood? Or Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who says human bomb attacks in Iraq and Israel are a Muslim religious duty? Or Hamas? Or the ayatollahs of Iran? Or the Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia who have radicalised Muslims across the globe?
Doubtless it is because the government believes that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam that the leading Muslim scholars and opinion formers
whom Ms Smith said the government was backing to
talk about extremist ideology
to British Muslims in order to counter Islamic radicalisation are themselvesin large measure … Islamist radicals.
Really — you couldn’t make it up.
Much of the problem is that the government’s advisers and civil servants have had their heads filled with the revisionist and ahistorical rubbish about Islam produced by authors such as Karen Armstrong or John Esposito. Their resulting profound ignorance about Islam means they simply haven’t got a clue about what is actually happening.
So the Home Secretary prattles idiotically about ‘shared values’ and ‘consensus’. But there are no shared values in the steady encroachment into British society of sharia law. There are no shared values in the fact that half the stock exchange is now owned by Islamist financiers. There are no shared values in the steady Islamisation of Oxford university, or the totally unconsensual proposal to allow the muezzin of that city's Cowley Road mosque to broadcast on a loudspeaker three times a day his call upon the faithful to prayer. This is not consensus; it is cultural conquest.
Furthermore, Ms Smith even gave a fillip to Islamic terrorism by stating that it did not negate the need to address the ‘grievances’ fuelling it, including British foreign policy. No grievance can justify terrorism. But where grievances are legitimately expressed we are of course prepared to debate then. Terrorism must not drown out dialogue. And where grievances are not only legitimately expressed but well founded we must be prepared to respond. That a cause has been misappropriated by violent extremism does not make it a wrong one. Rather, putting a grievance beyond the reach of a democratic solution is a goal of those who wish to harm us. We should do them no favours.
On the contrary — if a cause has been appropriated by a terrorist campaign, the only principled response is to put it automatically beyond the pale. Anything else is to give terrorism its victory. Can you imagine if, at the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign to bomb Britain into agreeing to a united Ireland, ministers had announced that they were now prepared to ‘enter into a dialogue’ about this ‘grievance’ with those who wanted to discuss it over tea and buns? It would have been rightly seen as a total capitulation to terror.
In its ignorance, panic and confusion over terrorist violence, the government has failed to grasp that Britain is being squeezed by a jihadi pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural aggression, each reinforcing the other and, according to plan, causing the governing class to descend into that state of cultural servitude to Islam known as ‘dhimmitude’.*
The Home Secretary said:
Whether terrorists ultimately succeed or not is up to us, not up to them.
Absolutely. And today she showed that, in accordance with this precept, they are currently succeeding.
Dhimmis, ‘protected people,’ are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur’an’s command that they ‘feel themselves subdued’ (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, is part of the law that global jihadists are laboring to impose everywhere, ultimately on the entire human race.
The dhimmi attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today.
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Wednesday, 16th January 2008
2:51pm
Having brought British education to its knees, the government is now busy trying to destroy or cripple those remaining bastions of high academic standards whose very existence highlights the catastrophic failure in the education system. Thus Brown Labour is trying to squeeze the life out of A-level and now, through the arm’s length vehicle of the Charity Commission, has renewed its ancient pastime of witch-hunting against the independent schools on the grounds that they are ‘socially divisive’. As the Guardian reports:
Private schools will be stripped of their charitable status - along with £100m in tax breaks a year - if they are found to be operating as ‘exclusive clubs’ for the rich, the charities watchdog says today.
Thousands of parents on relatively modest incomes are being driven in desperation to pay the ruinous fees of the independent schools sector solely because excellence has been driven out of the state system. Now the quality of education at those schools may be jeopardised as they are forced to divert yet more of their resources into jumping over a bar that the government raises ever higher to demonstrate they are not socially divisive. And of course, if the Commission’s threat is carried out and schools are stripped of their charitable status, the resulting rise in fees — or closure of the schools — will mean that the independent sector will revert to being the province of the seriously rich and thus become not less exclusive but more so.
The temperature was raised even higher in advance of the Commission’s statements by a bizarre diatribe against independent schools delivered by Dr Anthony Seldon -- himself the headmaster of one such school, Wellington college.
Hosting a conference at his Berkshire school last week, Dr Seldon said independent schools were ‘detached from the mainstream national education system, thereby perpetuating the apartheid which has so dogged education and national life in Britain since the Second World War.’ He added: ‘It isn't right any longer for our schools to cream off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university places.’
Apartheid? Independent schools actually fall over themselves to bring in pupils from impoverished backgrounds. But according to Seldon, this is merely further proof of their ‘apartheid’ since this creams off bright children from poor homes, thus removing them from ‘their own social milieu’. So what is he saying — that independent schools should have no poor pupils at all and become truly enclaves for the truly wealthy?
In fact the real targets for attack seem to be excellence, high academic standards and the middle class. Indeed, Seldon himself implicitly acknowledged this by attacking grammar schools too for being dominated by the middle class and being private schools in all but name. On that basis, as the High Master of St Paul’s Boys’ School,
Dr Martin Stephen,
writes today, all good academic institutions that teach well and achieve good results must therefore plead guilty to the same crime of social divisiveness.
The immediate cause of this current onslaught is an ideologically motivated change in the legal definition of charitable status. Prior to this change in the law in 2006, bodies advancing education or religion or providing for the relief of poverty were automatically assumed to be acting for the public benefit. Now the law says they have to prove that that they are doing so, and it has fallen to the Charity Commission to produce today’s guidance which defines public benefit and says how it is to be proved.
Even though charity does not mean necessarily meeting the needs of poor people but meeting need generally in order to provide public benefit, this requirement to prove the test has provided a stick with which to beat up independent schools for allegedly not benefiting the poor.
In fact, the actual wording of the Commission’s guidance offers rather more leeway to independent schools than might have been thought from its own repeated threats against them. It says: This does not mean, in effect, introducing an element of relieving poverty into all charitable aims. It is not the case that people in poverty actually have to benefit. Or, that charitable aims have to be limited or confined to people in poverty, although the founders of charities can choose to do that if they wish. It merely means that people in poverty must not be excluded from the opportunity to benefit.
Given the ferocious advance billing of this guidance and the controversy it provoked well before it was published, it would seem that the Commission decided to be politically circumspect in its wording. But it has nevertheless provided the wherewithal for a campaign of harassment against the independent schools.
According to Phil Hope, the charities minister:
Providing public benefit is at the heart of charitable activity, and now all charities without exception will have to demonstrate their public benefit in return for charitable status.
That public benefit is already conspicuous to all who are not blinded by the ideological fixation that excellence and high standards are intrinsically divisive. Since the independent schools sector produces the highest academic standards, its contribution to the economy and the running of this country is out of all proportion to the tiny numbers that it educates. In addition, it provides an invaluable benchmark of academic excellence through which Britain’s education system can be measured and its flaws exposed.
Which is why its benefit to the public is incalculable. And it is also why the government wants to kill it off altogether. Charity law? No — class war.
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Tuesday, 15th January 2008
7:15pm
Now what exactly was it that President Bush
said about Mahmoud Abbas? Ah yes:
President Abbas was elected on a platform of peace. In other words, he just wasn't somebody who starts talking about it lately, he campaigned on it…We talked about the need to fight off the extremists…And the President understands the ideological struggle. He knows that a handful of people want to dash the aspirations of the Palestinian people by creating chaos and violence…the President has a vision that he can lay out to the people of Gaza that says, here's your choice: Do you want those who have created chaos to run your country, or do you want those of us who negotiated a settlement with the Israelis that will lead to lasting peace?...I'm impressed by the President's understanding about how a vision and a hopeful future will help clearly define the stakes amongst the Palestinian people.
This morning, a 20 year-old Ecuadorean volunteer, Carlos Chavez, was murdered by a Palestinian sniper who shot him while he was working in a potato field on a kibbutz near the border with Gaza. During the day, 26 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, a barrage which left four people wounded in the beseiged Israeli town of Sderot. Another rocket hit Ashkelon. Rockets are being fired without remission at Israel. Last year, almost 1500 rocket and mortar attacks were fired from Gaza at Israel. To stop this onslaught, Israel is killing Hamas terrorists. Today it killed at least 18 people in Gaza, almost all of them Hamas terrorists.
One of the men who was killed was the son of the former Hamas ‘foreign minister’, Mahmoud Zahar. Last summer, Zahar was asked in an interview why Hamas had chosen to stop suicide bombings two years previously. He replied:
Which do you think is more effective, martyrdom operations or rockets against Sderot? Rockets against Sderot will cause mass migration, greatly disrupt daily lives and government administration and can make a much huger impact on the government. We are using the methods that convince the Israelis that their occupation is costing them too much. We are succeeding with the rockets. We have no losses and the impact on the Israeli side is so much.
And so what did Mahmoud Abbas, the man who stands on a ‘platform of peace’ and who is committed to defeating Hamas,
say in response to today’s events?
There was a massacre today against our people, and we say to the world that our people will not remain silent against such crimes,’ said Abbas. In a statement, the West Bank-based Palestinian government said Israel’s ‘ugly crimes were a slap in the face’ to efforts by Bush and the international community to resume peacemaking that would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
The murder of Carlos Chavez, it seems, was not a ‘slap in the face’ to peace. Of that murder and the attacks on Israeli civilians, the visionary of peace made no mention whatever and, of course, no commitment to stop the Hamas men of violence. Instead, he raved that Israel’s attempt to 'fight off extremists' and thus defend its people from further murderous onslaught was a ‘massacre’. So Abbas defends Hamas, represents them as innocent victims and thus incites more murderous hysteria, hatred and violence against Israeli civilians.
Just run those Bush quotes by me again?
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Monday, 14th January 2008
6:43pm
Not content with accelerating the total meltdown of British education standards, not content with forcing pupils to stay at schools which teach them less and less for two more years until they are 18 in order to massage the unemployment figures downwards, and not content with ever more prescriptively dictating what is on the curriculum and replacing knowledge by indoctrination, the government is now even interposing its coercive self between teacher and pupil, thus destroying the very basis of that relationship. The Sunday Telegraph reported:
The Government is to outlaw ‘sexist’ career advice which directs girls into jobs such as hairdressing and boys into careers such as engineering. Schools will have to show that pupils are getting ‘impartial’ support and are not being encouraged to take up stereotypical jobs. Young people will be also be offered ‘taster’ sessions in careers they may not otherwise have considered.
And today’s
Times splashed with this:
Teachers are to be banned from encouraging their pupils to study A-levels rather than the Government’s controversial new vocational diploma qualifications under legislation that is going through Parliament. A clause in the Education and Skills Bill, to be debated in Parliament today, says that schools will be forbidden from ‘unduly promoting any particular options’ to teenagers seeking advice on courses.
The move has been criticised by academics, who say that the Government is desperate for the diplomas to succeed at all costs. Others fear that the new and ‘impartial’ mortgage-style advice will not be in the best interests of pupils as teachers unconvinced of the worth of the diplomas will be unable to pass on their concerns to either them or their parents.
So teachers are to be forbidden by law from giving their pupils advice about their educational or career options that serves their pupils’ best interests. All to further the government’s purposes of reshaping society according to ideological dogma and giving the impression that education standards are going up by using a rubbishy diploma to squeeze the life out academic A-level, thus forcing those standards down.
This is simply state coercion. There is much wrong with our education establishment and teaching profession. But if teachers are to be proscribed by law from guiding their pupils in their best interests, teaching stops being a profession and becomes instead an agency to further state control of individual lives. This is not how a democracy behaves.
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8:48am
When the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, wrote the other day that in some of Britain’s Muslim communities there were now no-go areas, the great and the not-so-good rose as one to denounce him for talking nonsense. From William Hague to Hazel Blears, people said they simply didn’t recognise what on earth he was talking about. There were no no-go areas, they cried. All a figment of the Bishop’s over-active imagination, apparently.
Sigh.
The
Sunday Telegraph, which ran an opinion poll on the subject, also reported the following:
Church leaders in communities with large concentrations of Muslims said that Christians were being targeted. An east London vicar who had delivered Christmas leaflets in his parish said he was told to stay away from ‘Muslim areas’. He said: ‘Despite this being a mixed area, where Muslims make up only about 15 per cent of the population, I was told that the leaflets were offensive and could make people angry.’Another churchman said his path had been blocked by Muslim youths as he drove through a district of Oldham, Lancashire, last year. ‘They wanted to know why I was coming into “their” area,’ he said.
A priest ministering in the Manchester district of Rusholme said he knew of ‘dozens of cases’ in which Muslim converts to Christianity had been attacked. Another church leader said that Asian Christians in Leicester feared being identified when leaving churches. ‘They are scared of being stopped and beaten up if they are found carrying Bibles,’ he said. None of the church leaders we spoke to wished to be identified for fear of retaliation, but Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said: ‘It's increasingly difficult for non-Muslims to live in areas of high Muslim density, especially if they are practising Christians.’
The issue is not merely the ‘no-go areas of the mind’ caused by radical Islamism, to which a number of reformist Muslims have attested in the past few days. Nor is it ‘living increasingly separate lives’, troubling as that may be in such areas. Much worse than that, in some Muslim-dominated areas non-Muslims are being intimidated or attacked on the grounds that they have trespassed into 'Muslim territory'. That is something that should cause the most acute alarm, so much so that any normally functioning government and police force should take swift and strong measures to stamp it out. Instead they are ignoring it -- thus also acting as a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party, which is exploiting this legitimate grievance to mask its true agenda of prejudice against all racial or ethnic minorities.
A society which allows the development of religious and cultural no-go areas for its citizens ceases to function as a society. The fact that our establishment is not only ignoring this development but is even trying to deny that it is happening is the surest sign that this sorry outcome is indeed coming to pass.
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8:19am
It appears that the Democratic party is about to test to destruction the idea that American voters are fed up with the old adversarial politics of negative campaigning, character assassination and sectarian politicking. According to news stories, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are polishing both their knuckles and their haloes. Newspapers today and yesterday have reported a burgeoning race row between the candidates, with suggestions that the Obama camp was quietly whipping it up while publicly saying it wished to remain above the fray. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, reported in the Sunday Times that Hillary’s camp was about to go seriously negative against Obama with a range of personally damaging allegations.
The question is, though, whether the mud that each of them may now be starting to throw at each other will stick on its intended victim — or will blow back upon themselves. Hillary — who, as many commentators have noted, in the wake of her Iowa debacle switched both her strategy, from posing as the candidate of ‘stability’ to the candidate of ‘change’, and her pitch, from being cold and strident to warm, funny and human — would seem to be taking a risk in reverting to type; while Obama, whose principal claim to fame is as an antidote to the old discredited politics, risks courting cynicism and disillusionment the instant he is associated with any of that stuff.
Round three.
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Sunday, 13th January 2008
11:50pm
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The Sunday Express has now caught up with the reported al Qaeda plot to assassinate the Queen in Uganda, which I noted here a few days ago. It fleshes it out with some official comments which confirm the substance of the story:
Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, the Uganda Minister of Internal Affairs, said: ‘We received information that a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, the Allied Democratic Forces, was planning to carry out terrorist activities at the Commonwealth meeting. The security services in Uganda neutralised these threats.’
He refused to comment on the precise nature of the planned attacks or reports that Ugandan armed forces had seized a speedboat loaded with arms and homemade bombs. A number of suspected ADF guerrillas aboard the boat on Lake Victoria are understood to have been taken into custody. Dr Rugunda added: ‘A number of suspects have been arrested but I cannot comment on the specifics of this case. What I can say is that we stepped up security because of the Al Qaeda threat but it was neutralised by our security services.’ Ugandan army spokesman Paddy Ankunda said: ‘Plans to cause havoc were curtailed, fortunately. There were intentions to disrupt the meeting and to target delegates and the Royal Family but the security agencies worked well together to ensure nothing happened.’
This Express item is a 100 per cent improvement on the msm’s record so far in investigating this story. Who knows — maybe someone else might rub the sleep out of their eyes soon.
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11:24pm
Rarely has a moral compass been so completely and publicly destroyed by its owner. George W Bush’s presidency has been defined by the moral position he took, under the impetus of 9/11, to repudiate the amoral realpolitik of his predecessors in appeasing and rewarding aggression while ignoring or even punishing its victims. Instead he would hold the aggressor’s feet to the fire and support and promote those who stood for freedom and democracy. Controversial as this doctrine undoubtedly was in the eyes of many in the US and around the world, it was at least consistent — with one niggling exception. On the Israel Arab impasse, Bush veered between making extraordinarily impressive speeches which correctly identified Arab aggression and incitement to hatred of Israel as the core problem to be addressed, and the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ which, by detailing the steps both Israel and the Palestinians had to take, descended into the kind of moral equivalence — and thus negation of the centrality of Arab aggression — which has kept this conflict alive for the past sixty years. At the time, however, it seemed that the Road Map was no more or less than a sop to Tony Blair — who has always failed grievously to grasp that the Palestinians don’t want a state, they want the Jewish state — as a gesture of thanks for his support over Iraq.
With Bush’s visit to the Middle East this week, however, any such residual excuse is blown away along with the last shreds of his claim to moral integrity. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he said blithely, was eminently possible this year. But everything he then said was about pushing Israel to make ‘painful concessions’ rather than the Palestinians. Since the sole obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Arab rejection of the Jews’ right to their own ancestral home — the fact that Mahmoud Abbas not only has consistently refused to halt the continuing violence against Israel by both Hamas and his own Fatah affiliates, not only has refused to halt the incitement to hatred of Israel perpetrated daily by his own education system and PA controlled media, but has also repeatedly and consistently demanded the right of mass Palestinian immigration to Israel, thus showing his ‘aspiration’ for a Palestinian homeland existing peacefully alongside Israel to be totally bogus as was underlined by his chief negotiator’s recent declaration that the Palestinians would never recognised Israel as a Jewish state — Bush’s position is tantamount to pushing Israel to surrender to an enemy still hell-bent upon Israel’s annihilation.
In this context, some of what Bush said in Israel was deeply shocking and, in the implications of such moral and intellectual obtuseness, very frightening. Here, for example, although he nodded towards the Arab need to
reach out to Israel, a step that is long overdue
and also to
ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders,
he said this:
The point of departure for permanent status negotiations to realize this vision seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent.
Well no, actually: the point of departure is not the ‘occupation that began in 1967’ (not least because Sinai and
Gaza have now been relinquished by
Israel, in return for… er, what, exactly, from
Egypt and the Palestinians? Why, the uninterrupted importation of arms by the Palestinians from
Egypt into
Gaza for further attacks on Israeli civilians; and from the Palestinians themselves, merely more and more attacks upon
Israel). The point of departure for peace has to be the point of departure for the war — the Palestinians’ refusal to allow
Israel to survive. And that is not even mentioned by Bush. Instead:
The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.
Why? Which other body of people whose identity is formed from their aspiration to ethnically cleanse a nation from its historic homeland, and who have never stopped trying to do so for almost a century, ‘deserve’ to be rewarded with a state of their own?
And it will enhance the stability of the region, and it will contribute to the security of the people of Israel.
Run that by me again?? As things stand, these are precisely what such a state will
not do. Without
Israel’s presence, it will quickly fall entirely to Hamas and directly threaten not merely
Israel but the entire region, which it will help Islamise, and thus the free world.
There was, however, one good point about the wretched Road Map, which was that at least it stated that the very first condition had to be the Palestinians’ dismantling of their infrastructure of terror. But now just look at what Condoleezza Rice blurted out aboard Air Force One during the President’s Israel trip:
The ‘road map’ for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the ‘core issues’: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border and the future of Jerusalem.
The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,’ Miss Rice said. Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was ‘break that tight sequentiality ... to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.’
But the core issue is nothing other than never-ending Palestinian aggression against Israel, which not only continues but increases with every concession Israel makes. Indeed, while one can think of many ‘painful concessions’ made by Israel — relinquishing Sinai and Gaza, getting out of Lebanon, offering to give up the whole of the West Bank (after the 1967 war), more than 90 per cent of the West Bank (in 2000), releasing scores of Palestinian prisoners in order to ‘shore up’ Mahmoud Abbas — one is hard put to think of any ‘painful concessions’ by the Palestinians at all. Nevertheless, Rice is a worshipper in the T Blair church of diplomacy whose cardinal doctrine is that nothing must ever, ever jeopardise a peace process, including the fact that the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so. Since the ‘peace process’ is inviolable and sacrosanct, it follows that any attempt to stop aggression is totally unhelpful since it brings the peace process to a grinding halt. So the one plus point in the Road Map, that it acknowledged that the Palestinians had to stop making war before there could be peace — a universal precept — has had to be ditched.
This powerful signal threatens to bring about the peace of the grave as Israel is delivered to its enemies. So why is Bush doing this? Almost certainly because he himself and/or the advisers who have effectively imprisoned him within his own waning power believe that they can make a deal with the devil: offering the bound and inert body of the Jewish state in exchange for a Saudi-led Sunni alliance against Iran. If this is so, American amorality is outdone only by its stupidity, since Saudi — which was banking on the US bombing Iran into regime change — has now concluded that the US has lost its bottle and is busy making nice with Iran as the next best alternative.
As for Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who appears to be going along with all of this, and whose Israeli critics ascribe to him every dubious motive under the sun ranging from a venal attempt to evade corruption charges to a desire to suck up to fashionable Israeli lefties, he appears to be actually motivated by two things which contradict each other: the belief that Israel must divest itself of the West Bank in order to retain its Jewish identity; and the belief that he can enter into his own Faustian pact with America by trading 'peace in our time' with Mahmoud Abbas for American support for an attack on Iran, on the assumption that such a deal with the Palestinians will never be struck because the last thing their leadership and their backers actually want is peace with Israel.
Such speculation, however, can only be just that. We cannot know for sure what motivates any of these players at this time. What we do know, because history tells us this over and over again, is that appeasement invariably brings not peace but war; and that when the world favours aggressors and further victimises their victims, countless more foot-soldiers are recruited to the cause of violence.
In that known context, the damage done by Bush’s visit to Israel is incalculable as a signal of surrender to the whole Arab and Muslim world, which understands what it means better than the Americans do themselves; and just off-stage, Iran is waiting, watching and preparing.
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Thursday, 10th January 2008
11:24pm
A story in the
Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in the
National Journal, which reveals startling information about the infamous 2006 Lancet ‘study’ which purported to show that Iraqi casualties had totalled more than 650,000 in the three years since the fall of Saddam in 2003. The figure was clearly absurd. The NJ authors say they have now learned that this ‘research’ was funded by George Soros, the financier who has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush. They also discovered that the person responsible for collecting the data for the study, Riyadh Lafta, was hardly an objective or reliable source.
Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, ‘We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the non-humanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions.’
In other words, the Lancet relied for its data upon assertions made by one of Saddam’s apologists, who had previously manipulated information in order to evade UN sanctions, about the alleged effects of the toppling of Saddam. This in a medical journal which hitherto was regarded as utterly authoritative — and which, because it played to the anti-war narrative, was swallowed uncritically by the ‘Bush lied people died’ crowd and was treated as holy writ.
Whatever happened to peer review? Who can take the Lancet seriously ever again?
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