This England

From the Times:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote ‘f*** off’ was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points... The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: ‘It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.’

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The gender bender agenda

So what do you expect if you have something called an ‘Equality Minister’? She will impose gross injustice wherever she can in the interests of a coercive and preposterous ideology. Harriet Harman’s proposal that companies should positively discriminate in favour of women job candidates (ie discriminate against men) is yet another example of the way in which feminism got hijacked and turned from a campaign for fairness for women into an onslaught against men. Her proposal is not only totally unfair -- job candidates should be appointed on grounds of merit, not chromosomes – but is based on the false premise that the gender pay gap proves that women are the victims of systematic discrimination in the workplace.

But this is simply untrue. Granted that there are indeed specific instances of discrimination against women, the generalised claim is false because it ignores the differences in behaviour between women and men at work. As academics such as Professor Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics have long argued, such iconic feminist causes as the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘gender pay gap’ are in very large measure the outcome of the choices made by women themselves.

Of course there are exceptions, but in general women have very different expectations from men about work. That’s because many women have another set of competing priorities – child rearing. As a result, they tend to want to work part-time. Even those who work full-time tend not to put in the same hours of overtime and so forth that men do because they are less interested in getting to the top of their profession -- mainly because unlike men they don’t usually define themselves through work and have less interest in power and status and all those guy things. All these factors mean that even if they are doing the same jobs as men they are not doing it in the same way. So why should they expect to be paid the same?

In fact, women are not exactly going to the barricades over this issue. It’s only Harriet Harperson and the sisterhood who are agitating about this because it’s all part of their anti-man agenda. It’s an economic variation on what they did to rape law, whereby they forced through changes which loaded the legal dice against male defendants in rape cases because the conviction rate in such cases was said to be ‘too low’. But that presupposes that the men in such cases are all guilty and their female accusers never tell a lie – two propositions which have been proved over and over again to be wrong, quite apart from ditching the presumption of innocence which helps define a free society. Nevertheless the law was changed and pressure continues to be applied to make even more changes to get the rape conviction rate up. Because whether in the workplace or the bedroom, as we know, all men are guilty of the oppression of women.

It is a great mistake to write off Harriet Harman, as many do, on grounds of demonstrable stupidity. She is one of this administration’s great survivors. One of the reasons she has survived has been her ruthless use of the woman card against men who haven’t got the cojones to stand up against this gender bullying. Let’s hope that this time, with the business world up in arms, her latest wheeze is dismissed with the contumely it deserves.

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A Caledonian caliphate?

This blog post was originally duplicated on the site. The duplicate has now been deleted and the comments from it moved over to this thread.

Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, has been spectacularly canny and effective as Scotland’s first minister, moving his nationalist pieces across the British constitutional chessboard with stealth and skill. But there’s a dimension to this that has so far passed below the radar – the scimitar slung around the kilt. Tomorrow, the Scottish Islamic Foundation will be launched in Edinburgh in Salmond’s presence. But as the invaluable Centre for Social Cohesion tells us, the leading members of this group and many of those who lead its events are closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose aim is the Islamisation of Britain and Europe.

Its chief executive Osama Saeed, who has worked as Salmond’s researcher and is the SNP’s parliamentary candidate for Glasgow Central, is an Islamist and leading light in the Brotherhood front the Muslim Association of Britain. Saeed follows the usual Brotherhood line of promoting certain limited moderate positions, such as calling for an end to forced marriages or opposing terrorism in Britain, thus enabling him to pass himself off as a moderate while he slips and slides over issues such as sharia. But he is of course an unequivocal supporter of the Brotherhood leader Yusuf Qaradawi who endorses terrorist mass murder in Israel and Iraq -- support which inescapably identifies the holder of such a view as an extremist and terrorist sympathiser.

One of the most recent events advertised on the SIF's website is a residential weekend held on 4-6 April 2008 on the subject of 'Dear Beloved Son', a book by the medieval Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali which has been translated by Kemal Helbawy. The weekend was hosted by Helbawy himself and Ahmed Saad.

 

Helbawy was formerly the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's main spokesman in Europe and co-founded the MAB. During his career, he has frequently denounced the Jews and non-Muslims. For example, in 1992 he told a conference in the US: ‘Do not take Jews and Christians as allies. For they are allies to each other. Oh Brothers, the Palestinian cause is not of conflict of borders and land only. It is not even a conflict of human ideology and not over peace. Rather, it is an absolute clash of civilizations, between truth and falsehood. Between two conducts - one satanic, headed by Jews and their co-conspirators - and the other is religious, carried by Hamas, and the Islamic movement in particular, and the Islamic people in general who are behind it.’

Ahmed Saad, who hosted the SIF's weekend course along with Helbawy, is the imam of the North London mosque (better known as the Finsbury Park mosque). He was appointed imam of the mosque after it was taken away from Abu Hamza's followers and put in charge of a group led by MAB in 2005. The mosque's new management had undertaken to end extremism in the mosque. In fact, the mosque's trustees have reportedly turned a blind eye to recruitment and fund-raising in and around the mosque by members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Somalia's Islamic Courts Union, an extremist group linked to al-Qaeda.

The Salmond/Saeed axis is not merely a disturbing sign of Salmond’s own prejudices. It has a potential strategic significance that goes beyond Scotland. The Brotherhood’s strategy for Britain is to promote separate Islamic development, declare sharia-only enclaves and infiltrate mainstream institutions as a springboard for Islamising the entire society. Since Salmond’s aim is to make Scotland independent from the rest of the United Kingdom, with one leap the Brothers could achieve an Islamised country on England’s border.

Scottish voters might be getting more than they bargained for: a Caledonian caliphate.

Update: The CSC’s director Douglas Murray has posted this extraordinary update on ConservativeHome’s Centre Right:

What is perhaps most worrying is that in February of this year, the Scottish government appointed Saeed -- as the representative of the about-to-launch Scottish Islamic Foundation -- onto its 13-member working group looking into whether or not to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system.

Who would ever have thought that decisions over the future of Britain's nuclear capability would fall into hands the hands of men like these?

Who indeed.

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The jihad of the word

The signs have been ominous for some time but now it has become clear beyond a doubt that those who tell the truth about Islam, Islamism or Islamist terrorism risk having their career, livelihood and maybe even their liberty placed in jeopardy – and all in the name of human rights. In Canada, the columnist Mark Steyn has been arraigned before a kangaroo court for the crime of publishing in Macleans magazine an excerpt from his bestseller, America Alone, in which he argues that demographic change is turning Europe Islamic. Led by the Canadian Islamic Congress, Muslims have taken Steyn and Macleans to a ‘human rights’ tribunal on a charge of ‘hate speech’, a totalitarian statute enforced by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (sic) who are in the business of destroying the freedom to voice perfectly legitimate – indeed, absolutely vital and important – opinions about the need to defend western society against Islamist attack. Bad enough that Islamists browbeat and threaten people who express such opinions. For a body such as the CHRC to do their dirty work for them and act as the enforcers of the jihad against free speech takes us straight into the nightmare landscape of Kafka. Read this article to get a flavour of the terrifying nature of these proceedings, the mixture of gross abuse of power, mad thinking and clownish incompetence which characterises totalitarian regimes and has been playing in a courtroom in downtown British Columbia. Perhaps the most chilling observation of all is this:

The Canadian Human Rights Commission, which enforces the act, has a record of conviction that recalls the awful efficiency of Soviet courts: In over three decades of existence, the commission has yet to find someone innocent.

This article spells out in more detail how the Canadian human rights tribunals have been handed unfettered power to abuse power:

The human-rights tribunals are a censor’s dream. Under Canada’s human-rights act, commissioners can convict if they believe any published material is “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Since they are “remedial” institutions and not real courts, they need not follow strict legal procedures or grant traditional rights of the accused. No one goes to prison, but the panels can fine and silence people at will — and run up the lawyer bills for years. Truth is no defense, and commissioners are authorized to confiscate a computer without a warrant. Evidence can be woefully flimsy.

But this appalling development is not confined to Canada. A few days ago the UN decided to outlaw any criticism of Islamism – as defined by the Islamists themselves. Since they classify any criticism whatsoever of Islamist aggression as ‘Islamophobic’, this means that the UN will outlaw all such comment. As Jeffrey Imm has reported on CounterterrorismBlog:

On June 16, 2008 UNHRC president Doru Romulus Costea announced that criticism of Sharia law will not be tolerated by the UNHRC, based on the complaints and pressure by Islamist delegates to the UNHRC. In effect, the Islamist nations represented at the UNHRC have effected a Jihad against freedom of speech at the United Nations when it comes to criticizing Sharia or Islamic supremacist (aka Islamist) theocratic ideologies that threaten the freedom and lives of innocents around the world. This again demonstrates the key imperative of control for Islamists -- in this case in terms of controlling ideas, thoughts, and words of an international organization intended to promote human rights. Outgoing UNHRC Commissioner Louise Arbour subsequently raised concerns about debates on Sharia becoming 'taboo' within the United Nations group, stating that it 'should be, among other things, the guardian of freedom of expression.'

The UNHRC ban on debate regarding Sharia came as a result of a three minute joint statement by the Association for World Education with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) to the Human Rights Council on women's rights and the impact of Sharia law. These NGOs sought to address international issues of violence against women, specifically, the stoning of women, 'honor killings' of women, and female genital mutilation, as a result of Sharia law.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Arab Republic of Egypt vehemently criticized this attempted NGO message, interrupting it via ‘16 points of order’, for an hour and twenty-five minutes per the IEHU. Jihad Watch provides a full transcript of the debate. The Egyptian UNHRC delegate claimed that silencing these NGOs was necessary to ensure ‘that Islam will not be crucified in this Council,’ but the fact is that Islamist forces seek to silence any debate on Sharia at all -- anywhere, any time.

This is of course merely the latest demonstration that the UN is now simply a club of tyranny. But the really frightening thing is the almost total indifference to these developments by the western media. So quick to take up the cause of free speech when the protagonists are the enemies of the west, they are all but silent when the freedom to speak in defence of western values is snuffed out. That of course is because the freedom of speech lobby marches behind the banners of ‘human rights’ and minority victim culture which, despite their mind-bending self-designation as ‘progressive’ attitudes, constitute nothing other than a full-out onslaught against western values by cultural Marxism -- now marching shoulder to shoulder with the Islamists in their common cause to destroy the free world. Their ranks include a distressingly large number of useful idiots, who for a variety of reasons – posturing vanity, conformist inanity, shallow ignorance, careerism, fear, whatever – are helping to further the jihad against the free world, which is predicated upon precisely this kind of cultural and moral confusion.

From the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the burning of his book to the murder and mayhem unleashed over the Mohammed cartoons, it has long been clear that dictating what can and cannot be said is a key salient of the Islamist onslaught. It is thus of the utmost importance that freedom of speech is upheld. But both in the Rushdie affair and over the Mohammed cartoons, alas, much of the free world capitulated and even bought into the rhetoric of Islamist suppression, blaming both Rushdie and the cartoons for stepping over a permitted line. The same kind of people are now turning on Mark Steyn. But he has not stepped over the line. He is trying to hold it. The Canadian thought-police who would bring him down will surely bring the rest of us down with him.

As the pressure group Liberty and its latter-day prophet David Davis prance about Britain with their preposterous assertion that extending detention for terror suspects will destroy ancient liberties, we might well ask why not a peep has been heard from them about these recent developments and the real threat to freedom from the jihad of the word.

Update: The CHRC has now thrown out the case against Mark Steyn, as reported here. Looks like the prospect of world-wide condemnation made them break the habit of a lifetime. But it was still disgraceful that the case was brought at all, and will still cast a chill on journalism around the world.

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The joke turns sour at City Hall

Boris has made a mistake. A very bad mistake. He has announced the resignation of his close aide James McGrath over remarks Mc Grath made to a black activist called Marc Wadsworth. You can read the whole exchange here. This appears to have been the bit that did the damage. Wadsworth writes:

McGrath was far from politically correct, David-Cameron-new- cuddly-Conservative Party, when I pointed out to him a critical comment of Voice columnist Darcus Howe that the election of ‘Boris Johnson, a right-wing Conservative, might just trigger off a mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants back to our homelands’. He retorted: ‘Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.’ McGrath dismissed influential race commentator Howe as ‘shrill’.

So let’s get our heads round this. To Wadsworth, a reported remark by a black columnist smearing Boris as being such a bigot that the mere fact of his election would trigger a mass flight of black Britons back to the Caribbean was apparently quite acceptable. But the robust response by an obviously irritated McGrath to such a deeply unpleasant and unfair comment, an ironic retort which merely picked up and ran with the thought voiced by Darcus Howe himself, is deemed to be racist.

McGrath’s real crime in Wadsworth’s eyes appears to have been to say

that City Hall’s new administration is not into this politically correct race relations stuff. He stated firmly: ‘Boris’s main priority is fighting crime.’

To which any sane person, black or white, would surely say ‘Hoorah!’ After all, perceiving that the race grievance industry does nothing to help black people hardly makes one a racist – quite the opposite, one might think. But no. Mc Grath’s recognition that he was up against the race inquisition sealed his fate at the hands of that inquisition:

Curtly, he added: ‘I get where you are on the radar, sunshine.’ Again, not a politically correct thing to say to a Black person.

Why in heaven’s name not?

But, hey, these Tories have not yet been running the show in London for a 100 days. They will have to learn quicker than the London traffic or fall on their sword.

Within a very short space of time McGrath appears to have been pushed onto his sword by Boris, either with or without prompting by Tory high command. This is utterly shameful. Faced with a grotesque demonstration of grievance-culture bullying, Boris has shown that he has the spine and moral clarity of a blancmange. Instead of denouncing it, he capitulated to it. Moreover, he subsequently issued a statement which added total absurdity and incoherence to insult:

James is not a racist. I know that. He shares my passionate belief that racism is vile, repulsive and has no place in modern Britain. But his response to a silly and hostile suggestion put to him by Marc Wadsworth, allowed doubts to be raised about that commitment...James's remark was taken out of context and distorted, but he recognises the need for crystal clarity on a vital issue like this. We both agree that he could not stay on as my political adviser without providing ammunition for those who wish to deliberately misrepresent our clear and unambiguous opposition to any racist tendencies.

So a decent man has been forced out of his job and had his reputation traduced effectively for being the victim of a false accusation of racism. Which Boris, the man who did the forcing, has acknowledged!

What on earth are the Tories for if they aren’t prepared to defend us against this chilling witch-hunting but instead throw us into the flames?

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The smirking hard-liners of Tehran

The Telegraph has reported that Iran appears to be making more emollient noises about its nuclear programme,

indicating its willingness to find a diplomatic solution to the confrontation with the international community.

The fact is that the threat they pose to us all may be even more terrifying than we thought. Last Sunday, the Washington Post reported that, according to the former UN weapons inspector David Albright, Iran might have obtained the blueprints for a nuclear warhead small enough to fit onto its ballistic missiles from designs passed to rogue states by an international smuggling ring once headed by the father of the Pakistan nuclear bomb and rogue scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The A.Q. Khan smuggling ring was previously known to have provided Libya with design information for a nuclear bomb. But the blueprints found in 2006 are far more troubling, Albright said in his report... ‘To many of these countries, it's all about size and weight,’ Albright said in an interview. ‘They need to be able to fit the device on the missiles they have.’ The Swiss government acknowledged this month that it destroyed nuclear-related documents, including weapons-design details, under the direction of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to keep them from falling into terrorists' hands. However, it has not been previously reported that the documents included hundreds of pages of specifications for a second, more advanced nuclear bomb. ‘These would have been ideal for two of Khan's other major customers, Iran and North Korea,’ wrote Albright, now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. ‘They both faced struggles in building a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop their ballistic missiles, and these designs were for a warhead that would fit.’

Meanwhile, the western media has almost completely ignored the fact that the extreme hard-liners in Tehran have routed the relatively reformist tendencies within the clerical establishment. In the run up to next year’s presidential elections in Iran, increased tensions between the hard line revolutionaries, led by Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards on the one hand and the (relatively) reformist clerical establishment led by Rafsanjani on the other have broken out into the open. The reformists have been routed by the hard-liners who, in the last three months, have openly attacked, mocked and humiliated them.

This has shown itself in a number of ways. First there were the rigged Parliamentary elections this year in which the hardliners banned any reformists of note from running and now dominate the Majlis (Parliament). They now control every significant body of political power in Iran – the Revolutionary Guards, parliament, presidency and the Office of Supreme Leader with the only remaining areas of contention being the conservative Clerical Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts.

Second, the hard-liners have been exposing the debauchery and corruption at the highest ranks of the clerical establishment. As was reported on Pajamas Media:

General Reza Zarei, Tehran’s chief of police and a member of the Revolutionary Guard, has resigned under a cloud of scandal after he was caught and arrested naked, with no fewer than six nude women, during a government raid on a brothel. General Zarei had spearheaded recent police operations targeting the enforcement of Islamic dress for women to promote public morality, which have resulted in thousands of arrests. In courthouses across the country, but especially in Tehran — among lawyers, judges, court clerks, and police — there is talk of little else. The story, which the Iranian regime has done its utmost to keep out of the press, first leaked out on the leftist Farsi website Peiknet more than a week ago...

According to these multiple reports, the raid and arrest were the result of a direct order from the head of judicial authorities, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, and was executed under strictest secrecy, without informing or notifying the judiciary’s chief prosecutor Said Mortazavi . Shahroudi was aware of the very close relationship between Zarei, who had served as Tehran police chief for four years, and Mortazavi, and suspected that if he was informed, Judge Mortazavi would tip off his friend in advance. It has been reported that Shahroudi was so worried this could happen that he fired an administrator in one courthouse who was close to Mortazavi in order to block any possible leak of information about this arrest to Mortazavi and his people. Mortazavi is said to be furious about the whole operation.

More recently, Abbas Palizdar, a member of Iran’s Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission has been exposing multi-billion dollar embezzlements by the clerical establishment. In a speech to students at Hamedan university, he claimed that Iran's wealth was being plundered on a daily basis by such individuals. Palizdar himself was subsequently arrested. According to Iranian blogger Hamid Tehrani:

He offered details of many illegal business deals and accused several of Iran's leading political figures, including former president and chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Interim Friday Prayer Leader of Tehran, Emami Kashani, and the head of the Imam Reza Shrine Foundation, Ayatollah Vaez Tabbasi, of illegally accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars. Several other Iranian bloggers published parts of his speech and commented on this exceptional event. After the speech, the university’s Islamic Society of Students was allegedly shut down.

The point about these revelations is that such washing of dirty linen in public would have been unthinkable in the past and underscores the new confidence and ascendancy of the hard-liners. Those exposing this corruption and debauchery are hardly doing so out of a sense of democratic outrage but in order to win power for the most repressive faction within the regime against the relatively less extreme elements. As is also recorded by Hamid Tehrani,

Islamic historian Abdollah Shabazi says that the ‘owners of the revolution’, according to the definition of the Islamic Republic leadership, face a dilemma between either

… the status quo, continuing the present situation and making Iran a second Pakistan, or renewing the Islamic Republic. There is no third option. The choice is either to accept institutionalised corruption, or fight against it to realise the goals of late Ayathollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution.

The ascendancy of the hard-liners has also produced a rise in overt antisemitism, as we have seen from the wild Holocaust-denial of Ahmadinejad and whose manifestations on Iranian blogs are analysed here by Tehrani.

Clearly, the ascendancy of the Iranian hard-liners has serious implications for the rest of the world, since this is the faction that is closely tied to Hezbollah and believes in ‘exporting the revolution’ – which in plain speech means war. The ‘emollient’ noises the regime has recently been making should therefore be seen as nothing other than an even wider smile on the face of the tiger.

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A breathing space for terror

The ‘peace at any price’ brigade are purring as expected over the Hamas /Israel six-month‘ceasefire’. As exemplified by a particularly feeble-minded editorial in today’s Times, they believe it’s a hopeful development. What they seem unable to grasp is that, as far as Hamas is concerned, this is not a cease-fire as understood by the west but a ‘hudna’ or 'tahdiya' which is a tactical pause in the fighting to allow breathing space in which to re-arm, replenish one’s forces and then resume the war with even greater ferocity. The reason Hamas was so desperate for this tahdiya was that Israel was doing it damage – not serious enough, but nonetheless debilitating. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on the other hand, was very reluctant to do what should have been done in these circumstances by inflicting even more damage upon Hamas. Instead, driven by political imperatives such as the need to stop the bombardment by Hamas of southern Israel, pressure from America and the EU, and above all by the necessity to have a peace ‘achievement’ to parade as his corrupt administration staggers towards a general election, Olmert has managed to send a catastrophic signal of Israel’s weakness and manifest inability to do what has to be done to protect its citizens, strengthen Hamas not only in Gaza but the West Bank too, and thus hand yet another tactical victory to Iran – putting all of us in yet greater peril. As Michael Oren writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The Egyptian-brokered cease-fire yields Hamas greater benefits than it might have obtained in direct negotiations. In exchange for giving its word to halt rocket attacks and weapons smuggling, Hamas receives the right to monitor the main border crossings into Gaza and to enforce a truce in the West Bank, where Fatah retains formal control. If quiet is maintained, then Israel will be required to accept a cease-fire in the West Bank as well. The blockade will be incrementally lifted while Cpl. Shalit remains in captivity. Hamas can regroup and rearm.

The Olmert government will have to go vast lengths to portray this arrangement as anything other than a strategic and moral defeat. Hamas initiated a vicious war against Israel, destroyed and disrupted myriad Israeli lives, and has been rewarded with economic salvation and international prestige.

Tellingly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who once declared Hamas illegal, will soon travel to Gaza for reconciliation talks. Mr. Abbas's move signifies the degree to which Hamas, with Israel's help, now dominates Palestinian politics. It testifies, moreover, to another Iranian triumph. As the primary sponsor of Hamas, Iran is the cease-fire's ultimate beneficiary. Having already surrounded Israel on three of its borders -- Gaza, Lebanon, Syria -- Iran is poised to penetrate the West Bank. By activating these fronts, Tehran can divert attention from its nuclear program and block any diplomatic effort. The advocates of peace between Israelis and Palestinians should recognize that fact when applauding quiet at any price. The cost of this truce may well be war.

Echoing this analysis Noam Shalit, father of the kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit, has threatened to sue the Israel government for failing to make the cease-fire conditional on his son’s release -- and further endangering his life because Israel’s consent to the reopening of the Gaza crossings will enable his son’s abductors to smuggle him out to an unknown destination.

The Israeli defence official who brokered the ceasefire, Amos Gilad says however that the crossing will only be re-opened if Shalit is returned; but his statements about what this ceasefire consists of and the part played within it by the re-opening of the crossing are highly ambiguous. That is because, like so many in Israel’s military and security establishment, he is almost certainly horrified by what his political masters are forcing him to do. As Amos Harel observes in Haaretz:

What Gilad cannot say is that the choice of tahadiyeh was first and foremost a political one. From the moment Olmert and Barak reached the conclusion that they did not have public support or political breathing room for a large ground offensive in Gaza, the die was cast.

Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi understands the coalition picture, but there are quite a number of senior officers below him who see the agreement as a big mistake. In their eyes, Israel has not even attempted to try a long list of measured operations that are less than an conquest of the Gaza Strip, but if tried, might have forced Hamas to accept a cease-fire from a completely different position. Brigade-level operations in the strip were halted a long time ago, and no attempt has been made in recent times to threaten the lives of senior Hamas officials.

A broken-backed Israeli Prime Minister trying to dodge the fall-out from corruption charges; a broken-backed American President trying to tick a spurious box on his office score-card; a morally and culturally eviscerated Europe in thrall to the belief that appeasement avoids war; no wonder Iran is thumbing its nose at all of us.

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Why is this man not prosecuted here?

On Centre Right, Douglas Murray makes the point that has been missed about the release of abu Qatada. He has been held under immigration law pending deportation to Jordan—but there would appear to be ample reason to charge him with offences under anti-terrorism law which have been committed in this country. The Centre for Social Cohesion has put up on its website partial transcripts of some of abu Qatada’s jihadi rants in Britain, delivered in Arabic and obtained by the Centre from an extremist website. Its press release reveals for example that

in one lecture ‘Wajib al-Muslim’ (‘The Duty of Muslims’) obtained by the CSC, Abu Qatada explicitly calls on Muslims to murder non-Muslims, saying that: ‘Our countries have been infiltrated by kaffirs [non-Muslims]. It is farid [duty] for us to turn our swords on to them and kill them.’

 

He adds: ‘We must fight the kaffirs. We can't reason with them. We can't reach a compromise and we can't be friends.’ In another recorded speech entitled ‘Seerah’(‘The Path’) he launches a tirade against Christians and Jews while outlining his apocalyptic visions of the future, describing Christianity and Judaism as ‘devil worshipping’ and saying: ‘There will be a great battle against the wathaniyah [Jews and Christians] where the saviour will come back to this earth, the king with an army in the sky, killing the Jews, wipe them out, and rid of the planet of the Jews. Esa [Jesus] will return and spread peace; the majority that remain are those who believe in Esa.’

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The judges lose the plot (again)

Once again England’s judiciary has shown that when it comes to defending this country against jihadi terrorism it is unfortunately living on another planet. Not one but two judgments yesterday beggar belief. In fairness, the decision to release abu Qatada was all but inevitable given the earlier decision by the Court of Appeal to reverse the ruling by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission that he should be deported to Jordan to face trial there for further terrorist offences. Although the Home Secretary has applied for leave to appeal that decision to the House of Lords, as things stand at present abu Qatada is not to be deported from Britain – and not to be prosecuted either, there apparently being (amazing as it may seem) no evidence with which to charge him in this country of any offences, despite his being al Qaeda’s top man in Europe and the fulcrum of many European terrorist conspiracies. As a result, the court decided that there were no grounds under immigration law to continue to keep him locked up. So now he is out on bail under virtual house arrest, at some staggering cost to the public purse which is having to fork out for the cost of his house, welfare benefits for his family and the large number of police officers required to ensure that he adheres to the unprecedented restrictions placed upon him through his bail conditions.

The whole thing is mad beyond belief; but the root of the problem was the Appeal Court’s decision to reverse SIAC. Developing to a yet further extreme the English judiciary’s driving obsession that it is not enough to outlaw torture but the English courts must have nothing to do with any judicial process anywhere in the world which might at any time have any connection with anything that might be construed as ill-treatment of someone connected however tangentially with the case before them, the judges decided that, since they could not trust Jordan to keep its promise that its court case against abu Qatada would use no information which might have been obtained through the ill-treatment of a witness (there is no suggestion, please note, that abu Qatada himself has been or might be tortured) abu Qatada could not be deported to Jordan ‘on human rights grounds’. One can only cling to the vain hope that the Law Lords will realise that it really is the height of arrogance to assume that Jordan will break its own law against ill-treatment of witnesses, not to mention extending the human right to be protected from torture to a degree that is quite preposterously perverse.

The second of yesterday’s judgments, the quashing of the conviction of the so-called ‘lyrical terrorist’ Samina Malik, was if anything even more bizarre and disturbing. As her misleading soubriquet implies, it was put about at the time of her conviction that Malik had been prosecuted for writing poetry whose ideas were now forbidden. In other words, she had been convicted of ‘thought crime’ and was a martyr of the ‘police state’ under whose oppressive yoke, we are now being told by the Liberty camp and its new standard-bearer David Davis, we are all groaning.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Malik was prosecuted for having in her possession jihadi literature including terrorism manuals such as The Terrorists’ Handbook, The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook and operators’ manuals for various firearms including an anti-tank weapon. She was convicted of collecting ‘information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’ for which she received a suspended prison sentence.

Her conviction was quashed because -- as the Telegraph's excellent legal editor* tells us -- the Appeal Court had decided earlier this year to narrow the definition in this offence of ‘useful’ to ‘providing practical assistance’ to a would-be terrorist. And yesterday the Court headed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips (no relation!) further decided that, since unlike the terrorism manuals in Malik’s possession her additional jihadi literature did not provide such ‘practical assistance’, there was a risk that the jury had been ‘confused’ and convicted her wrongly of committing an offence by possessing this material, as opposed to convicting her for possessing the terrorism manuals which did constitute an offence. But since the jury convicted her on account of her possessing all the material including the terrorism manuals, is it really likely -- or indeed conceivable -- that it would have done so on the basis of the jihadi literature alone, ignoring the terrorism manuals altogether?

In other words, the judges’ reasoning appears to be stark, staring mad.

There is another disturbing element to this farce, and that is the original decision not to prosecute her for what would appear to be a far more serious offence. For Malik had provided information on security measures at Heathrow airport – where she worked airside – to Sohail Qureshi, a dentist from east London who had been trained by al Qaeda. Qureshi was arrested at Heathrow and jailed last January after he admitted preparing to commit an act of terrorism in Pakistan. In an email to Malik ten days before his arrest Qureshi said:

Sis, I hope u get this email before anyone else does...Wat is the situation like at work? Is the checking still very harsh? Or have things cooled down a bit? (sic)

In her reply, Malik gave Qureshi details of the latest security measures at the airport before signing herself ‘Umm Musab al-Garib’ – translated as ‘a stranger awaiting martyrdom’. She left her job on the day he was arrested.

Why was Malik not prosecuted for aiding and abetting a terrorist and only prosecuted for the lesser offence of possessing materials which might be useful to a terrorist? Why do the British authorities appear to be going out of their way to thwart efforts properly and effectively to fight and defeat jihadi terror? Why has the English judiciary lost its marbles in this way?

*Author's spouse

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The dangerous naivety of the well-intentioned

The conference in Berlin which I’ve been attending, organised by the Weidenfeld Foundation and the Axel Springer corporation, was about relations between the EU and Israel. It was simultaneously encouraging — touching, even -- and dismaying. Encouraging because here was a Europe which – in the form of the German and Czech foreign and interior ministers at least, along with sundry diplomats and business people -- had stopped hectoring Israel for its crimes and instead was pledging never to abandon it to its enemies; and it was touching to see the painful awareness of the Germans of their duty to ensure that their own history should never again be repeated elsewhere in the world. (Indeed, on the very day of this meeting the EU-Israel Association Council – the body headed by foreign ministers which conducts the bilateral relations between Israel and European Union member states – announced an upgrade in relations between Israel and the EU.) What a difference from poisonous Britannia. The reason for the change in the European attitude is said to be twofold. First, and most important, the perspective of Europe’s elite has changed under the pressure of its own crisis of Islamist colonisation. As a result, it looks upon Israel, the front line of defence against this attack, in a new and more sympathetic light. Second, it approves of Israel’s apparent determination to hammer out a ‘two-state solution’ with the Palestinians.

But here was the rub. Speaker after speaker extolled Israel’s negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas and spoke of the 'sparks of hope' from such talks that must not be extinguished. But this hope was based on a high level of wishful thinking, not to say historical amnesia. For the two-state solution can hardly be a solution, given that two-states was the original compromise proposition put forward in the 1930s to appease Arab rejectionism of the proposed restored Jewish state – which is still rejected to this day, not just by Hamas but by the ‘moderate’ Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Abbas. Only recently he declared that the Palestinians would never accept Israel as a Jewish state; and yet he is being feted by Israel, America and Europe as a genuine interlocutor for peace. Moreover, as I have noted before, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would mean that Iran was at the doorstep of Jordan and Egypt – a fact that causes the ‘two-state solution’ to fill them with undiluted horror. Far from providing ‘sparks of hope’ therefore, the ‘two-state solution’ would more likely spark a conflagration with an Iran whose quest for regional domination poses such a threat to the wider world.

The fact is that these ‘peace talks’ are a farce, whose main purpose is to provide America with the semblance of an agreement – however hollow -- to put on President Bush’s valedictory score-card. There’s a real feeling that Israel is now being forced to play its tragic-comic role in this theatre of the absurd not merely by American pressure but also by its own anxiety that, if it were to abandon this appeasement process, the new European warmth would rapidly cool. Between America on one side and Europe on the other, Israel is thus being forced to make the unenviable choice between offering suicidal concessions which jeopardise its own fragile security and jeopardising the support of its desperately-needed allies.

The other supreme absurdity was the belief expressed by speaker after speaker that the key to peace lay in the improvement of the Palestinian economy ( a view shared by Gordon Brown). With a straight face they declared that if Palestinian youths had jobs they would be less inclined to blow up Israelis. This is the delusion that poverty and deprivation drive Arabs to become suicide bombers. On an individual level, we know this has been shown time and again to be the opposite of the truth. On a broader level, it is yet another example of historical amnesia. Before the Oslo 'peace process' bestowed upon the Palestinians the freedom, the money and the arms with which to inflict their campaign of mass murder upon Israel, Palestinian GDP was amongst the highest, infant mortality amongst the lowest and life expectancy rising the fastest of any Arab country. But they threw all that away in order to wage war by intifada instead against Israel – the source of their previous economic prosperity through the close economic links between these two warring neighbours.

The belief that economic improvement is the road to peace is yet another example of the arrogance and ignorance of a west that insists on filtering the Middle East through the prism of western values – and thus persists in catastrophically mis-diagnosing and perpetuating the very problem it so earnestly tries to solve.

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