What coverage there has been has presented this development as yet another round in the schismatic internal politics of Lebanon and of scant concern to us. On the contrary: it is a major development in the war being waged against the free world. Hezbollah is the irregular army of Iran and the means by which Iran intends to turn Lebanon into its proxy, pin Israel down from multiple belligerent fronts as a prelude to its annihilation, impose its domination of the region and thus win its war against the west. The counter-terrorism expert Oliver Guitta writes:

Iran's priority, as mentioned in the past few months by various leaders, is to turn Lebanon into a base from which it could attack Israel and the United States. Hezbollah has been rapidly rearming. It has now close to 45,000 rockets, more than before the onset of the summer 2006 war with Israel. Now that it is becoming clear that Hezbollah and Iran are in charge of Lebanon, what is the international community going to do about it?

What indeed. While Barry Rubin sees an analogy between Lebanon 2008 and Spain 1936:

Does anyone remember the Spanish Civil War? Briefly, a fascist revolt took place against the democratic government. The rebels were motivated by several factors, including anger that their religion had not been given enough respect and regional grievances, but essentially they sought to put their ideology and themselves into power. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the rebels with money and guns. The Western democracies stood by and did nothing. Guess who won? And guess whether that outcome led to peace or world war.

The west has consistently stood by and done next to nothing about Syria and Iran. That’s why the Lebanese are in their desperate situation today (quite apart from the carnage Iran and Syria support and plan eslewhere). Following the fall of Saddam Hussein, 1.5 million brave Lebanese people took to the streets in protest against their Syrian and Iranian occupiers in the short-lived ‘Cedar Revolution’. Walid Phares has spelled out the price these Lebanese democrats paid in blood:

After the Syrian withdrawal, many leaders were assassinated because of their role in the anti-Hezbollah resistance, among them Samir Qassir, George Hawi, and Jebran Tueni, the charismatic leader of the youth and liberal MP. The areas that supported the anti-Hezbollah uprising were subjected to several bombings, leaving many citizens killed and maimed.

But in response America, Britain and the other whited sepulchres of the west did nothing to assist these people. Paying lip-service to the cause of democracy in the Middle East, they appeased its deadly enemies Iran and Syria instead. They never followed through on prosecuting Syria for the murder of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and they never supported or put any muscle behind the popular Lebanese revolt against Syrian and Iranian meddling. America, Britain and Europe left Lebanon to swing in the terrorist wind — just as they have done to the democratic resistance in Iran itself, and to Israel, whose mortal enemies they continue to arm, finance, talk up and encourage. Having so completely betrayed both the Lebanese people and their own loudly-trumpeted principles, America, Britain and Europe now just look on in silence as Lebanese freedom threatens to go under altogether.

There is, however, a small ray of light in this darkness. For some commentators perceive that Hezbollah may have overplayed its hand in Lebanon, particularly against the Druze and the Christians. Walid Phares records the heroic stand being taken by 300 Druze who have succeeded in giving the overwhelmingly superior forces of Hezbollah a bloody nose.Lee Smith agrees that Hezbollah was actually beaten back in the area of the Shouf:

‘And so, the Party of God has achieved the 'great victory' of conquering a few Beiruti streets, terminating the credibility of the army, hastening the prospect of its disintegration, and damaging beyond repair for the foreseeable future, the Shiites' ties to the Lebanese social fabric.’ Hezbollah and its allies have won one small battle in a war that has just begun.

While Michael Young, op-ed editor of the Beirut Daily Star, is even more bullish in declaring that Hezbollah has bitten off far more than it can chew:

In 2005, once the Syrians departed, everything collapsed. The party [Hezbollah] found itself having to justify its private army against a majority of Lebanese that opposed Hezbollah’s state within a state and its lasting allegiance to the Syrian regime. In 2006, as the national dialogue prepared to address the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons, Nasrallah sought to turn the tables by kidnapping Israeli soldiers and imposing his version of Hezbollah’s defense strategy on March 14. The plan backfired when Israel responded by ravaging Lebanon and the Shia in particular. And now, having fully discredited its ‘resistance’ the eyes of its countrymen, having ensured that an antagonistic population will be to its rear in the event of a new war with Israel, having weakened its non-Shia allies, Hezbollah, as both an idea and a driving force, is in its death throes. The party may yet endure, but the national resistance is finished.

Shrewd insight — or over-optimism? What is surely undeniable is the imperative need to defeat Hezbollah, and that America and Britain will either help bring that about — or will help strengthen it instead through continuing to pursue their lethally misguided strategy of appeasing Syria and Iran.

This spiral of decline therefore cannot begin to be addressed unless this monopoly is busted wide open. The most urgent task for any government which wants to turn Britain round is therefore to open up the public sphere and restore a liberal society. That would involve a systematic re-balancing of public subsidies away from the institutions doing the damage. Top-slicing the BBC licence-fee so that part of it goes to alternative broadcasters, for example, as the Tories have already suggested, would be an excellent start. The same should be done with the quangocracy — the Arts Council or the British Council spring to mind — and the vast fiefdoms of NGOs and the voluntary sector. Reducing the government grant to Drugscope -- the dominant drug advisory body whose 'harm reduction' agenda is a Trojan horse for legalisation --  and giving the money to campaigners who are committed to eradicating drug use would bring evidence into the public domain which would open people’s eyes to the legalising propaganda which at present they have no way of recognising. Similarly, helping build alternatives to such citadels of the nomenklatura as the NSPCC, Friends of the Earth, Stonewall or Liberty would end the free pass currently afforded to the cultural nihilists, arrested adolescents and sub-Gramscian subversives who currently have their thumbs on the British windpipe.

Worse than that, there is evidence of collusion with the Islamists within the police. As a recent report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour violence revealed:

Several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have ran away to escape violence because they cannot trust Asian police officers. Zalikha Ahmed, director of the Apna Haq refuge, says: “We have to be careful with them especially the Asian ones. We don’t visit the station when certain Asian officers are on because some of them are perpetrators, and one of them on record said that he would not arrest someone who used force on his wife. Some of them would just expose us for what we do.” Another worker in a women’s group in the North, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said: “We had instances when a [Asian] chief inspector offered his help to a family by tracking a girl down – we were appalled.” According to some women’s groups such problems appear to be practically common in the West Midlands police force...

 And as the Daily Mail revealed last year:

Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda. Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their names feature on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces. The dossier was drawn up with the help of MI5 amid fears that individuals linked to Islamic extremism are taking advantage of police attempts to increase the proportion of ethnic staff. Astonishingly, many of the alleged jihadists have not been sacked because  -- it is claimed  -- police do not have the 'legal power' to dismiss them. We can also reveal that one suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating Internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq. He is said to have argued that he was trying to 'enhance' debate about the war.

The pubic admission by the West Midlands police and CPS that they made false allegations against Dispatches, and the implications that flow from this, should be discussed in Parliament as a matter of urgency.

 

The Guardian’s hatred of Israel and the Jews truly is a fathomless — and unfathomable — well. The last few days around Israel’s 60^th anniversary have seen a further escalation of its obsessive verbal pogrom. Today it published a piece by Samir el Youssef which turned the Arab attempt to exterminate Israel in 1948 into an attempt by Israel to exterminate Palestinian society (which did not then exist, as many Arabs have attested) but for which he magnanimously suggests Israel should be forgiven.

Today also saw an interview with Daniel Barenboim, who in his moral and intellectual confusion sadly offers himself up as that most prized gift of all to Jew-haters: an Israeli Jew who attacks Israel, thus conferring immunity against the charge of prejudice. Barenboim is convinced that the golden innocence of the Israel of his youth has been replaced by Jewish imperialism and hate-fuelled belligerence which has erased the ‘fabled Jewish intellect’ and created the Palestinian misery of Nablus. No acknowledgement of the fact that the Palestinians of Nablus and elsewhere are the architects of their own misery on account of their hatred of Israel, and that even the ‘fabled Jewish intellect’ needs to defend itself against their unending murderous attacks. No, for Barenboim what eats away at him is this:

We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and build settlements there. The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable - not the means they use to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity - but their ‘no’. We Israelis must finally find the courage to not react to this violence, the courage to stand by our history.

The tragedy is that Barenboim himself is falsifying that history, of which he seems to be totally unaware. Whatever one thinks should now happen to the disputed territories, the idea that in the ‘West Bank’ the Jews are building on land that never belonged to them is preposterous. Much of the land in question did indeed belong to them; indeed, some of Judaism’s holiest sites are in Judea and Samaria. Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism, is the site of the oldest Jewish community in the world where Jews lived continuously until the Arab pogrom of 1929, when 69 were murdered and the rest forced to flee. That is why the international community concluded in 1922 that the Jews were entitled to re-establish their national home within territory that included this ‘West Bank’ land.

So the Arab ‘no’ is absolutely not understandable. Indeed, even if Hebron and Nablus and the rest of Judea and Samaria were to become a state of Palestine, why should there be no Jews living in such a state? Why does Barenboim agree that Jews must be ethnically cleansed from within it as a condition of its establishment? Why does he, and the legions of the left who agree with him, think that this is a moral position?

The Guardian’s frenzy of hatred is now so great that it is getting quite careless about concealing its deeper prejudices against the Jews. On Tuesday, readers may have been a trifle puzzled by the prominence it gave to a story about the discovery of a letter written by Albert Einstein. An interesting story, certainly — but not interesting enough, surely, to justify the full-page display it was given towards the front of the paper. Half way down, we got to the reason why a minor historical curiosity had got the Guardian so excited:

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people. ‘For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.’

Aha! So even Einstein himself said the Jews were nothing other than a jumped-up bunch of knuckle-draggers — and who were only prevented from being a global disease by their absence of political power ! No wonder the Guardian gave this story pride of place. In fact Einstein’s sense of his Jewish identity and his views about Judaism and Zionism, to which he showed consistent respect, were immensely complex. For this complicated but passionately felt affinity to be reduced to an insulting slight to his own people is a disgusting and malicious travesty.

Such prejudice is repeated today in the picture accompanying a characteristically absurd piece by Jonathan Steele,who finds it deeply alarming that the US presidential candidates — including Princess Obama —should suggest that the Middle East crisis is

one in which Israel is an innocent victim of outside forces.

Good heavens, no! Jews as victims? How could that possibly be the case when, as the illustration to his piece (shown above) so brazenly suggests through its replacement of the stars on the US flag by the Star of David, the Jews control America?

Yup, it’s those Protocols yet again. The infamous Tsarist forgery may have been discredited, but the eternal lie it proclaimed of the global Jewish conspiracy is now an article of faith that unites neo-Nazis, Islamists and the western left.

 

The Australian prints a story that you won’t see in the British media. It reports:

Children with a step-parent or no biological parent are significantly more at risk than those with a single parent or both biological parents…Dr Tooley's study found that children with a step-parent were at least 17 times more likely to die from intentional violence or accident. A limited version of the study found that the rate could be as high as 77 times. It found the risk was higher if there were no biological parents, such children being at least 22 times more prone. Most at risk were children under five.

Very similar findings were reported in Britain some two decades ago. The evidence that shattered or reconstituted families pose vastly greater risks to children than traditional two-parent families has always been overwhelming. But in Britain, the government simply stopped collecting statistics that broke down families by type which enabled researchers to compare violence and other ill-effects in different types of household. This blurred the distinction between parents and  parent-substitutes, and enabled the lie to be told that children were in more danger from their parents than from strangers. The truth is that natural parents provide the greatest safety for children, and it is the reconstituted family which poses the greatest danger. The deliberate concealment of that truth has been used to justify the breakdown of family life whose catastrophic ill-effects are only now beginning to be acknowledged.

First there was his grandmother. Famously, he said he could no more divorce himself from his controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright than he could his white grandmother. But since he went on to say about that grandmother that she was

a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe

he did not so much divorce her as chuck her onto the trash. Then there was the indicted Chicago developer and political fundraiser Tony Rezko, his one-time friend with whom he had been involved in a land transaction. When this came to light, all of a sudden Obama realised

that it had been

a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor.

Then there was William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department in the 1970s. The Sunday Times reported:

Obama’s supporters say in response:

'…he was an 8-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous.’

Yeah, right. Somehow I doubt Ayers would be invited onto the platform at the possible coronation of Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate. Then there were the Palestinians.

Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people

Obama told Iowa voters in March. Two months later he was avowing:

…my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves.

Then there was his pastor Jeremiah Wright — the one for whom he would sooner divorce his grandmother than him. After Wright repeated his incendiary opinions, however, Obama suddenly discovered that Wright’s comments about the United States

over the last several months and over the last several years … are contrary to what I stand for and who I am… The person I saw yesterday was not the person I had come to know over 20 years…To some degree, I know one thing he said was true, he was never my spiritual adviser; he was never my spiritual mentor…

Most recently there was Robert Malley. As the Times reported:

One of Barack Obama’s Middle East policy advisers disclosed yesterday that he had held meetings with the militant Palestinian group Hamas – prompting the likely Democratic nominee to sever all links with him. Robert Malley told The Times that he had been in regular contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza and is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think-tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama’s Middle East advisory council. ‘I’ve never hidden the fact that in my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people,’ he added. Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr Obama, responded swiftly: ‘Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.’

Oh dear: Obama nevertheless has a very special fan club. Hamas leader Ahmed Yousef said:

'We like Mr. Obama and we hope that he will win the election.’

Aaargh! But wait -- no surprise here, surely, since Obama’s very own church bulletin last year re-published this encomium to Hamas, which sought to justify the genocidal Hamas charter as

an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.

Oh, sorry — that was on the mag's Pastor's Page which was written by Jeremiah Wright; and of course, Obama has now distanced himself from Pastor Wright (but not the church); and so the newly Wright-less Obama says of Hamas:

I’ve repeatedly said, and I mean what I say: since they are a terrorist organization, we should not be dealing with them until they recognize Israel, renounce terrorism, and abide by previous agreements.

I expect Hamas will be inconsolable.

Unfazed by the gowing pile of discards amonst Obama's friends and familiars, the Democratic party seems all but certain to crown Princess Obama as their presidential candidate. And then we'll see whether the American people will be played for suckers too.

To repeat: the Court of Appeal upheld the decision by POAC (the Proscribed Organisations Appeals Commission) that the PMOI should be de-proscribed on the grounds that it renounced violence altogether in 2001; POAC found the government’s decision to proscribe it ‘perverse’. Among other things, POAC said:

That the repressive nature of the present regime in Iran and its sponsorship of terrorism was something that the Secretary of State should take into account, certainly in the exercise of his discretion as to whether or not to maintain the proscription...That the democratic nature of the PMOI and the fact that the PMOI has provided information in relation to the Iranian regime’s nuclear projects should be given account and its importance should not be underestimated.

Indeed. In light of the fact that Iran declared war upon the west in 1979, has been pursuing that war ever since through acts of state-sponsored terrorism against western interests, has been killing British and coalition soldiers in Iraq, has announced its intention to destroy Israel and is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons to hold the west to ransom, the grovelling of the British ambassador in front of a dressing-down by that enemy — indeed, the very fact that we still have an ambassador to Iran — is beyond shameful. It is treacherous to this country's own interests.

 

The invariably idiotic Commons Schools Select Committee says school tests at 7, 11 and 14 (SATs) are damaging children’s education. As the Telegraph reported, apparently the SATs have meant that not only are teachers ‘teaching to the test’ by focusing on SATs at the expense of education but, according to evidence to the committee from educationists, they make children feel so inadequate they destroy pupils' self-esteem, cause them to drop out of school and become mentally ill.

Homework assignment for Schools Minister: write out twenty times, The SATs are not a test for pupils. Their sole purpose is to test the teachers. We must try harder.

 

The Evening Standard reports:

Boris Johnson today promised to be more careful on his bike after he was filmed cycling through six red lights, failing to stop at a zebra crossing and mounting the pavement.

I have lost count of the times I have been forced to fling myself out of the way of cyclists jumping red lights or failing to stop for pedestrians on crossings. Their antisocial and dangerous, not to say unlawful, behaviour is exceeded in awfulness only by their arrogance. The belief that unchallengeable (if self-appointed) moral superiority precludes any possibility of doing anything wrong, thus putting a halo on harmful behaviour, is a defining characteristic of the left. But here is the People’s Boris (not to mention Leader Dave, another cycling sinner) descending into this self-same pit of moral blackness. Just goes to show — put a cycle helmet on someone and the inner lunatic is suddenly revealed.