Monday, 31st March 2008
5:39pm
The dilemma for most eurosceptics who oppose British integration into a EU superstate — that political chimaera which is finally being brought into being by the EU constitutional treaty — has always been the assumption that EU membership is a take-it-or-leave-it deal. Our European, ahem, partners have always made it crystal clear that you either sign up to all the terms of the euroclub or you get out. Those opt-outs the UK has previously secured — on the euro, for example — have met with fury because for the eurocracy there can be no halfway house. The UK's perverse attachment to self-government has always been perceived to be as incomprehensible as it is non-communautaire.
It’s that assumption of take-it-or-leave-it that is paralysing the Conservative party over the EU constitution. At present, it is pledged to fight it, but only up to the point at which the constitution becomes a done deal within Europe; at which point the Tories will…
Exactly. Since they assume that the terms of the UK’s membership of the EU are non-negotiable, they know that if they were to commit themselves to hold a referendum after the constitution was set in stone, thus implicitly suggesting that they would renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership of the EU, they would instantly be pilloried as living in cloud-cuckoo land and accused of pursuing a covert agenda of pulling out of Europe altogether. So the Tories are fudging it and hoping no-one will notice.
But suppose the assumption that the eurocracy demands all or nothing from Britain is wrong? Suppose the implacable reluctance of the Brits to be good Europeans like everyone else has now convinced the eurocrats that the Brits will never be anything other than a millstone round the euroneck? A remarkable intervention by the very architect of the constitution himself, the former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, has come my way. Interviewed in the French weekly Le Point on July 5 2007 about the revived constitution, Giscard said there was now a serious problem with the British for whom European integration appeared as an obstacle, a brake, a source of complications. We saw this clearly during the summit negotiations: the British said no to everything that could be said to be in the direction of European integration, or insisted on opt-outs. This attitude signals a new phase which for me is interesting and positive because it leads to an examination of the way in which the UK participates in the process of European construction. No-one thinks the UK will join the eurozone or the Schengen system. From now on there’s strong British exceptionalism in the EU. Should that worry us? I don’t think so. Rather it’s a clarification — not a matter of concern. However, we need to find a structure that reconciles this new British position with the undoubted desire of other European countries to press ahead with integration [my emphasis].
Asked whether there should be a ‘special relationship' — statut particulier — for the UK, Giscard replied: We need to work out with the UK some practical arrangement. Intellectually, it’s fairly easy; in practice, it’s more complicated. The approach could be as follows. In everything to do with the market economy and inter-governmental co-operation, the British would be involved. When it comes to British integration the British, if they wanted, could stay on the fringes. The problem is institutional. How, in this scenario, could they take part in the European Parliament? How could they vote, and on what policies, in the Council of Ministers? So we can readily conceive of a Europe in which there’s a large group of countries — not just an inner core but almost all the others —pursuing integration. And that one country prefers a special relationship.
What Giscard appeared to be suggesting here was precisely the kind of relationship with Europe — economic, co-operative but not integrated — that the vast majority of the British people would undoubtedly want, if given the choice. And it wasn’t the first time he’d done so, having said something similar in an interview with the French radio channel France Inter on June 27 2007. From Giscard, then, of all people, comes the idea that Britain can have precisely what it wants in Europe — a unique relationship befitting the UK’s unique position as the bloody-minded offshore island that stubbornly wants to remain in charge of its own affairs. Giscard of course has long moved on; but since he is so much the spirit of the EU — the grandest possible of fromages — his suggestion is electrifying.
So there you are, William and David — Giscard has handed it to you on a plate. What are you waiting for? Or to put it another way, how come a former French president is suggesting something that's in the fundamental interests of the UK but for which British politicians are too afraid to ask?
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2:36pm
A propos the Wilders film Fitna, another longer film is now on line which does a much better job at informing people about Islam and exposing the absurd (early) claims by Tony Blair and George W Bush that Islamic terrorism apparently had nothing to do with Islam. Called What the West Needs to Know, it explains in a scholarly, authoritative but nevertheless accessible and balanced manner how the basic tenets of Islam have given rise to the global jihad, their implications and consequences and how they are the principal motor behind major conflicts around the world (the defining battle of Vienna in 1683 which is pictured above and where Europe repulsed the Islamic advance took place on...September 11); and it also explains, not at all comfortingly, how the many millions of Muslims who live entirely peaceful lives relate to these precepts (they are either ignorant of them, says Robert Spencer, or else they reject them on flimsy theological grounds; let's hope that's not the whole story).
Particularly transfixing for me are the observations made by the former Palestinian terrorist Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim who has converted to Christianity and who states categorically that the Arab war against Israel is driven by religion just as it is in Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere — and in Israel is directed not against ‘Israelis’ but against Jews. He describes how he had to ‘kill my first Jew’ in Israel to show himself a ‘worthy Muslim’. Elsewhere another expert observes that what the west simply doesn’t understand is that the Arab war against Israel is driven not by nationalism but by the religious drive to reconquer that territory for Islam, as a part of the medieval Islamic empire that is to rise once again from the ashes of the free world. The war against Israel is not a boundary dispute. It’s a religious war of conquest.
Many Israelis don’t grasp that either.
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11:07am
A very welcome and desperately-needed initiative has just been launched to monitor distortions, bias and prejudice in British media coverage of the Middle East. Just Journalism says on its home page:
We believe that core journalistic principles are regularly being compromised, and that reporting is often far from impartial, accurate or balanced. This makes it harder for viewers and readers to develop an educated and informed opinion of Israel and the Middle East. Just Journalism’s mission is to heighten awareness of the fundamental journalistic principles underlying the media’s responsibility to the public in this area.
This is the first organisation in Britain set up to monitor and analyse media coverage of the Middle East on a systematic, forensic and objective basis. Its notable characteristic is the transparency of its methodology, so that everyone can judge both the material under scrutiny and the way JJ is conducting that scrutiny. Its director is Adel Darwish, a veteran British commentator on the Middle East.
I wish it every success.
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10:37am
Ken Livingstone’s chum Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, is known to be in cahoots with Iran and has given free passage to people associated with al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah. Which makes him a pretty dangerous kind of guy. But a few days ago Reuters reported something which raises the stakes and should ring the loudest possible alarm bells: that the authorities in Columbia have seized at least 30 kg of uranium from the FARC terrorists — who have received financial support from Chavez.
Since the FARC revolutionaries don’t themselves appear to want to make a nuclear bomb to incinerate Bogota, it is most likely that the uranium stash was destined to be sold to a bidder who did want to make such a bomb. So to where was it destined — and where might other uranium from the same source have ended up?
This article on World-Check suggests that the answer may lie with Syrian-born Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, an al Qaeda man indicted in Spain for involvement in 9/11 and suspected of masterminding the Madrid train bombings.
Nasar lived openly in Venezuela for several months, traveling at all time with his Venezuelan government bodyguard, all the while wanted by Interpol for Spain, visiting Caracas' most important mosque, and holding meetings with Hizballah, ETA, FARC, ELN, and Cuban G-2members, amongst others, in support of their criminal and political activities in Latin America. He shows up on my radar holding meetings with one of Venezuela's most notorious terrorists, Carlos Rafael Lanz Rodriguez [UID 248222], a career Communist infamous for once kidnapping and holding an American businessman for six long years, part of which time he tied the executive to a tree.
What do these two terrorists have in common, you ask? Lanz is presently the president of Venezuela's state-owned aluminium company, Alcasa, which has been accused by former Venezuela government mining engineers of covertly mining Uranium for export to Iran, under the cover of aluminium production.
As this article also asks, in the light of such facts why the hell isn’t the IAEA crawling all over Venezuela? And when is the mainstream western media, which as far as I can see has scarcely registered the Colombian uranium seizure (the only reference I’ve found in Britain was 52 words on page 27 of the London Evening Standard on March 27) going to get off its collectively parked backside and start looking at this?
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Sunday, 30th March 2008
11:04pm
So what did I think of the Geert Wilders film Fitna?
I thought it was very effective, and very shocking, in showing that the inspiration for the evil acts of which it showed such horrifying glimpses lay in the Koran. It shows very clearly the precise nature of what the civilised world is up against, a war of religion with striking similarities to Nazi ideology and murderous mass hysteria.
It was, however, very careful not to call for the Koran or Islam to be banned. Instead it confined itself to calling for Muslims to reform their faith by removing the bad bits of the Koran, and for an end to the Islamising of Europe. To that extent it was not extreme at all, and indeed reformist Muslims themselves say much the same thing.
On the other hand, it did not make any acknowledgement of those Muslims around the world who do not subscribe to the application of their religion as represented in the film, and who live pacific and unthreatening lives in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries.
It was nevertheless accurate in its depiction of the religion and therefore could not be considered insulting. As a result, reaction from the Muslim world has so far been muted (although that may change). As the Financial Times reported:
Omar Bakri, the Libyan-based radical Muslim cleric who is barred from Britain, did not think the film was very offensive. ‘On the contrary, if we leave out the first images and the sound of the page being torn, it could be a film by the [Islamist] Mujahideen,’ he said.
Quite so. Which leaves people like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon looking pretty damn stupid: I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film. There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here.
Ah yes, Wilders has obviously incited the threats to his own life. Thanks, Ban, for that ever-handy insight!
It was left to al Qaeda to use the film as another pretext to whip up some more anti-Islamic jihadi feeling and, in order not to disappoint us, it came up with this: ‘The correct Sharia (Islamic law) response is to cut (off) his head and let him follow his predecessor, van Gogh, to hell,’ a member of Al-Ekhlaas wrote on the al-Qaeda affiliated forum, according to the SITE Institute, a US-based terrorism monitoring service.
Yup, as Ban has so helpfully already told us Wilders’s crime is to incite hatred and violence by Islamists through saying that they practise hatred and violence. Or to put it another way, they are saying to us: ‘If you insult my faith by saying it’s violent, I’ll kill you’ and we're supposed to endorse the logic.
There’s a comedy in here somewhere underneath the horror.
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Thursday, 27th March 2008
4:51pm
Trevor Asserson is a British lawyer (who now lives in Israel) who for years has campaigned against the BBC’s bias against Israel. He has now produced an even more serious charge against the BBC — that during the 2006 Lebanon war, the BBC’s Arabic service provided a platform for the campaign by Hezbollah and Iran to delegitimise and demonise both the USA and Israel in the eyes of the Arabic speaking world.
With Deena Pinson, he recorded, translated and transcribed the BBC’s principal news analysis programme, Hadeeth Al-Sa’a, for a period of four weeks from 19 July to 20 August 2006. Their report (you can down load the pdf at number 6) says that during that period the programme put on 17 spokespeople for Hizbollah and Iran amongst programme guests but only 5 for Israel. It comments:
Many programme guests expressed blatantly and viciously anti American positions… In addition we came across a number of quite extreme statements. For example we were told that the bombing of an electricity station was a ‘crime’ which is ‘unprecedented historically’ and we learn that it is US policy ‘to crush the Palestinians completely and to take all of their lands.’ When comments as extreme as this go uncorrected and unchallenged, the BBC appears to have tossed its moral compass into the waves and completely to have lost its bearings…
The BBC Arabic gives little indication of the destruction, the evacuations and the deaths (often of Israeli Arabs), caused by the thousands of Hizbollah rockets fired into Israel. By contrast some of the language used to describe Israel is hysterical in tone and the translated transcript reads like an Islamist extremist tract.
The implications of such findings are clearly far more serious than merely transgressing the BBC’s own impartiality guidelines. When such propaganda is transmitted back into the Arabic-speaking world – and with the kite-mark of BBC journalistic integrity, no less -- this is bound to incite yet more violence and aggression, turning the BBC effectively into an accomplice of Iran against America and Israel. As the report comments: It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the BBC has in fact become detached from democratic principles and has become a proactive participant in the war of ideas, reflecting back to the Arabic speaking world some if its nastiest views.
Furthermore, since the Arabic service is funded by the Foreign Office it is the British taxpayer who is being turned by the BBC into an unwitting accomplice of Iran in its war against the free world -- and because this is an Arabic service, no-one knows about it. One would have thought that the British government would be using every means possible to broadcast truth into the Arabic-speaking world in order to combat the lies that are inciting the masses against the west. Instead, its principal organ appears to be transmitting to that Arabic-speaking world exactly the same lies and incitement.
Given the current state of world affairs – and with the BBC just having launched an Arabic TV service to rival al Jazeera -- surely these revelations should now be raised in the House of Commons as a matter of urgency?
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2:59pm
I have just finished reading Michael Burleigh’s splendid new book Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, a worthy successor to his equally magisterial Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes. Burleigh builds a most formidable case by the (nowadays) almost revolutionary academic expedient of allowing the facts to speak for themselves. He does not analyse the various ideologies of the many terrorist causes he itemises; he chooses instead to relate what these terrorists did and the reaction they provoked, in order to show that terrorism has certain universal characteristics. First, all terrorism, without exception, is unequivocally morally unconscionable, whether committed by Irish republicans, Russian nihilists, Zionist Jews, German anarchists or radical Islamists; the glib cliché that ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ finds no quarter whatever in these pages. And second, all terrorists are ‘morally insane without being clinically psychotic’ — while their victims are united by their desire to live settled lives
without some resentful radical loser —who can be a millionaire harbouring delusions of victimhood — wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants.
Through an unremitting barrage of facts, Burleigh dissects and shreds the pretensions of terrorists and their sympathisers. He provides many details that I never knew — such as that Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two, was on the periphery of the successful plot to assassinate Egypt’s President Sadat and was subsequently further radicalised by his experiences in prison, where he was presumably tortured, to emerge as one of the world’s principal jihadi terror-masters.
Burleigh takes aim, however, not just at the terrorists but at a western culture that excuses, condones and encourages them. His targets include multiculturalism; the useful idiots in the liberal elites who have glamorised terrorism ever since Sartre, whom he skewers gloriously as
that loathsome academic enthusiast for the purifying effects of political violence;
human rights lawyers whose
cynical occupation of the moral high ground
over the Baader Meinhof gang forty-odd years ago meant they themselves escaped press scrutiny, or the human rights lawyers of today who,
while prepared to believe the [terrorist] detainees innocent of every charge of abuse, reflexively believe the worst of the US military and CIA
along with the rest of the international left
who preposterously claimed in their ignorance of socialism’s grim record that Guantanamo was a new gulag.
Yet even-handedly, Burleigh also disapproves of America's creation of such
little pools of extra-legal darkness.
It is when he moves into the area of
Islamist terror that he becomes most animated and exercised about the lethal wrong turnings that have been taken, and offers a range of suggestions about what should be done instead. Lamenting the wider failure to educate the British public about what is at stake and help them join up the dots between the global jihad and home grown terrorism, he identifies the worst possible combination at which the west has arrived in appeasing terrorism at home, sucking up to it abroad and meanwhile torturing those who are suspected of being involved in it. By contrast, he draws attention to the success Saudi Arabia has had in weaning radicals off terrorism by treating them as members of a cult who have to be systematically deprogrammed. He also identifies our era of high frivolity and the cult of the trivial as bringing about a state of philistinism and ignorance which leaves politicians quite unable to defend a civilisation they no longer even comprehend. One reason for the problem of jihadism, he says, is that the ‘massive political bias’ of various western institutions and professions is never questioned but accepted as a given. Thus …already highly politicised universities are allowed to use free speech arguments to defend sinister Islamist organisations active on campuses rather than challenged about their greed for high overseas fees.
His doorstep of a book which tells a story of unremitting grimness and moral squalor is studded on almost every page with witticisms and sardonic one-liners which on occasion made me laugh out loud. He takes aim at all the right targets — and as a result has inevitably turned himself into a target for all the right people who are so terribly wrong on everything.
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Wednesday, 26th March 2008
5:44pm
Any day now, a film made by the controversial Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders is due to be released which it is feared will unleash a new wave of violence in the Netherlands and around the Islamic world to rival the reaction against the Danish cartoons. In this film ‘Fitna’, Wilders reportedly tears a page from the Koran and, denouncing it as akin to Mein Kampf, calls for it to be banned. This deliberate act of provocation is designed to throw down the gauntlet on behalf of the principle of freedom of speech within a free world which has been progressively cowed into sacrificing this principle under threat from radical Islamism.
In the Wall Street Journal Pete Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, robustly defends Wilders’s right to say something deeply offensive and disrespectful about religion on the basis that, if such expression is suppressed freedom dies. And having itemised the violence around the world associated with the Danish cartoons and the onslaught against human rights by radical Islamism in general, he voices his dismay at the supine response by the western intelligentsia to such developments:
What is particularly disturbing about these assaults against modern society is how the West has reacted with appeasement, wilful ignorance, and a lack of journalistic criticism. Last year PBS tried to suppress ‘Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,’ a hard-hitting documentary that contained criticism of radical jihadists. Fortunately, Fox News agreed to air the film.
Even if the new Wilders film proves newsworthy, it is likely that few members of the Western media will air it, perhaps because they have been intimidated by radical jihadist threats. The only major U.S. newspaper to reprint any of the controversial 2005 Danish cartoons was Denver's Rocky Mountain News. You can be sure that if these cartoons had mocked Christianity or Judaism, major American newspapers would not have hesitated to print them…
I do not defend the right of Geert Wilders to air his film because I agree with it. I expect I will not. (I have not yet seen the film). I defend the right of Mr. Wilders and the media to air this film because free speech is a fundamental right that is the foundation of modern society. Western governments and media outlets cannot allow themselves to be bullied into giving up this precious right due to threats of violence. We must not fool ourselves into believing that we can appease the radical jihadist movement by allowing them to set up parallel societies and separate legal systems, or by granting them special protection from criticism.
Mr Hoekstra was sorely needed at a conference in London that I attended yesterday to discuss issues arising from the presence of Muslims in Europe. A more stellar display of brazen sophistry on the one hand and intellectual cravenness on the other would be hard to imagine. It was a collection of big-wigs in the dialogue-of-civilisations business, convened by the Community of West and Islam Dialogue of the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Georgetown University and co-chaired by a Saudi princess, HRH Princess Lolowah al Faisal al Saud, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey. The glittering list of invitees included such luminaries as the leader of the Italian Muslim community, Yahya Pallavicini; Mounir Azzaoui of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany; Gunnar Stalsett of the World Conference of Religions for Peace; Ahmed Younis of the Gallup Organisation; Avraham Soetendorp of the Jewish Institute for Human Values; and many others of similar distinction.
I was only present for part of the meeting, but much of what I heard was — with a few brave exceptions, such as a statement that Saudi Arabia was responsible for funding extremist mosques in Britain and promulgating hatred of other faiths, and another statement that radical Islamism was the ‘default position’ among British Muslims prominent in public life including those working in government — an unchallenged sanitising by both Muslims and non-Muslims of the utterly unacceptable. There was the usual outrage that Islam was being demonised as ‘threatening’ to European values when it was, we were assured, nothing of the kind. Yet in the next breath, on the core issue of freedom of speech, Wilders’s film and the Danish cartoons were represented over and over again as acts disrespectful of Islam that should not be permitted. One speaker stated that the issue had
nothing to do with freedom of speech; it comes within the orbit of cultural disrespect.
Publication of such material was thus said to be ‘hate speech’ which would have terrible consequences. Yet how absurd is this! For the truly terrible consequences and eruption of hatred which followed from the Danish cartoons (and which are so feared in connection with the Wilders film) were not directed
at Muslims but emanated
from Muslims. The Islamic violence that erupted, the riots murders and kidnappings, did in turn inflame people against the Islamic world; but this was on account of what that world was itself doing, not on account of some drawings — which were in any event in themselves a protest against Islamic violence in the first place. To say that a protest against violence committed in the name of a religion is to display hatred towards that religion is an attempt to shut down legitimate and indeed neccessary debate.
There were a couple of brave souls at yesterday’s meeting who tried to put the other side of the argument, but they were outnumbered. With facts, reason and logic turned on their heads over and over again by people deemed to be ‘moderate’ and endorsed by others deemed to be ‘enlightened’, the discussion felt like a dialogue of the demented. This kind of establishment initiative which is so typical is itself part of the problem rather than the solution, because it provides a high-level platform for yet more mind-bending dissimulation. There were repeated statements at this meeting that Europe no longer stood for any recognisable values. They should have been howled down; but apart from some rather feeble disagreement, too many Europeans present either seemed to agree or kept their mouths zipped.
This is surely how a civilisation dies — with a whimper.
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Thursday, 27th March 2008
7:08pm
As regular readers know, I have been running some blog entries on certain issues in series with titles such as ‘War against the Jews’ or ‘War against the west’. Some readers find it helpful to have the title signposting such entries as a linked series in this way; others find it off-putting. I’d be glad to know more readers’ views on this, which you can post up below in the usual way.
PS: Thanks to all!
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Tuesday, 25th March 2008
6:58pm
There was only one thing worse than the astounding and disgraceful bias displayed by John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning (0810) when he interviewed the Justice Secretary Jack Straw about Iraq — and that was the astoundingly lamentable response by Straw himself. Humphrys came out with a stream of prejudice against the Iraq war: Parliament was given false and misleading information about the threat from Saddam, he had never posed any threat to us, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction, the war had been a total and unmitigated disaster — and then the astonishing claim that
many more people have died since the war than died under Saddam Hussein
which as
Con Coughlin has pointed out is demonstrably untrue:
If you bring together the number of Iraqis who died during the wars Saddam started in Iran and Kuwait, plus the victims of his various genocidal campaigns he waged against the Kurds and Shia you get a figure approaching one million. By contrast the official Iraqi estimate of fatalities during the past five years is about 150,000.
But Straw didn’t correct this falsehood. Nor did he correct the false claim that Saddam had posed no threat to the free world. He could have referred to the evidence that has recently emerged of Saddam’s multitudinous connections with international terrorism (see posts below). He could have said that the claim that ‘we know’ Saddam had no WMD is untrue, that various official reports since the war (such as the interim report by the former chief weapons inspector David Kay) have revealed evidence of WMD programmes under Saddam, and that the belief that since no weapons stocks have been found none ever existed is irrational. He could have said that the fact that mistakes were made after the invasion did not negate the necessity for toppling Saddam in the first place. He could have said that to ask whether the war in Iraq is a disaster is as fatuous as asking in 1940 whether declaring war on Hitler had been a disaster. He could have said that what Humphrys inescapably would prefer would be for Saddam to be still in power in Iraq, probably with a nuclear weapon to rival the nukes being developed by Iran.
But he didn’t. Instead he came up with toe-curlingly lame responses which made him sound as if he was defending a war which he no longer supported — and maybe never had done from the start.
Surely this — given Jack Straw’s history of, ahem, rock-like principle and consistency—cannot possibly be the case?
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