Wednesday, 21st May 2008
12:09pm
Blogger Israel Matzav has picked up an address delivered by George Galloway MP in Amman, Jordan which was shown on al Jazeera on May 15. In it, Galloway expresses admiration of Saddam Hussein and Gamal Abd al Nasser, refers to George Bush and Tony Blair as ‘dogs’ and accuses Blair of dripping with the blood of the people of Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. However, that was just the warm-up. The more notable passage is this:
All my life I believed that Palestine could be liberated by the Kalashnikov and the armed struggle alone. This was a mistake. We need the Kalashnikov. We need the armed struggle. This is the hammer. But we need also an anvil. The hammer is necessary to defend yourself, to strike your enemy. You must never let it down, never let it fall from your hand. But it cannot make something alone. What is needed is an anvil, and that anvil has to be mass movements of the population, of the people. The most inspiring event, of the last – we can say – 40 years, since Karameh, was when the people of Gaza, with their bare hands, in their thousands tore down the walls of their prison, and poured out of the siege into Egypt.
Now I’m no lawyer, but this seems to me pretty damn near incitement to murder, not to mention glorification of terrorism. Helloo, PC Metropolitan Counter-Terrorist Plod! Wake up in the back there!! And even if our sensitive police/crown prosecutors won’t proceed against the Mosley of Mesopotamia, how can a man who incites mass murder be an MP? Shouldn’t the Speaker throw him out of the House of Commons? Doesn’t his presence there bring Parliament into gross disrepute? Why are MPs ignoring this? What does this tell us about a country that is supposed to be defending the values of civilisation against their attackers?
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Tuesday, 20th May 2008
6:34pm
Yesterday’s Times published a cryptic but nevertheless alarming story:
Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit has been stripped of its control over covert surveillance teams in an attempt to ward off further criticism over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, The Times has learnt. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ordered the overhaul of undercover policing, despite stiff opposition from inside the force. Senior sources are concerned that the loss of dedicated counter-terrorism surveillance units, which can be deployed anywhere in the country, might undermine future security operations.
You bet it would. Hiving off control over surveillance on terrorist suspects from the unit gathering intelligence on those suspects is a sure-fire recipe for a total breakdown in communication and accountability – the very thing which led to the mistaken shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes. That fiasco – which I have written about here, here and here came about because of an operational shambles which has never properly been accounted for but which ultimately surely has to be laid at the door of the Metropolitan Commissioner himself, Sir Ian Blair. Whatever else went wrong that day, one of the most important points that has emerged was that there was no operational commander on the ground who, having been properly briefed, had the authority to take operational decisions. Without such a designated on-the-spot commander, the resulting shambles was almost inevitable. That is a systemic, procedural failing in the structure of Met operations – and the buck for that stops squarely with the Commissioner.
Blair has insisted throughout that there were no 'systemic' errors which led to the killing of de Menezes – in other words, ‘not my fault’. As the Times story says, he is desperate to carve this apologia in stone before the inquest into de Menezes’s death opens in September. This latest move looks like Blair trying to pin the blame firmly onto the anti-terror unit by removing its surveillance control as a kind of punishment. The result is that the people of London will be made significantly less safe through a reckless and cynical move to save the Commissioner’s reputation. When Scotland Yard says:
We will be enhancing our surveillance response through the coordinated management and deployment of these teams
it’s time to make for the exit.
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5:00pm
I have previously written about the work of Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s National Post. He has been regularly charting in his column the ever-increasing number of climate scientists around the world who have been either crying foul about the man-made global warming scam or, having initially signed up to it, have been having second thoughts about it. This was a journey of discovery for him, to put it mildly; he had previously been inclined to believe the claims that ‘deniers’ were oil industry stooges, since he himself had worked for an anti-nuclear energy group and so was duly cynical about the way that industry’s scientists could twist the truth to suit their paymasters. But then to his astonishment he discovered that, when it came to MMGW, the scientists who were corrupt weren’t pushing the boat out for big business but for its holier-than-thou green challengers.
Now he has written a book, provocatively entitled The Deniers, in which he shows that not only is the fabled climate change ‘consensus’ itself a sham but the so-called MMGW ‘deniers’ are by far the more accomplished and distinguished scientists than those pushing the theory as a settled and incontrovertible truth. A number of them indeed, are so eminent they were used as experts by the IPCC – but then came to realise that this was an innately corrupted process and that even some of their own work was being abused and distorted in order to promulgate the false doctrine of MMGW.
Among those he cites are Dr Edward Wegman, chairman of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and the granddaddy of statisticians, who administered the definitive coup de grace to the ‘hockey stick curve’ research that underpinned the whole IPCC doomsday prognosis by showing that its author Dr Michael Mann (an impressive authority in his own field of paleoclimatology) had made a catastrophic statistical error (and had thus managed to ‘lose’ several hundred years of climate history including the Little Ice Age) which vitiated his entire study; Dr Richard Tol, an author with all three IPCC working groups and who called the Stern review of the economics of climate change ‘preposterous’; Dr Christopher Landsea, a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones and another IPCC author, who discovered that the IPCC was telling lies about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes; Dr Duncan Wingham, Director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, who revealed that Antarctic ice was expanding, not contracting; Dr Robert Carter, former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University Queensland, who says science was never about ‘consensus’ and that there are many sides to the climate change debate; Dr Richard Lindzen, a much garlanded professor of meteorology at MIT and another IPCC author, who says that the IPCC’s politicised summary of its defining 2001 report created the false impression that climate models were reliable when the report itself indicated precisely the opposite, with numerous problems with the models including those arising from the effects of clouds and water vapour; Dr Vincent Gray, a participant in the IPCC science reviews who has described the IPCC process as a ‘swindle’; Dr Syun-Ichi Akasofu, founding director of the International Arctic Research Centre of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who says the world’s temperature has shown a linear progression since the 17th century and that 20th century warming was nothing to do with carbon dioxide but the planet’s emergence from the Little Ice Age; Zbigniew Jaworowski, former chairman of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, who says the IPCC’s ice-core research is wrong and that therefore it has
based its global warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false;
David Bromwich, head of the Polar Meteorology Group of the Byrd Polar Research Centre, who says
It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now;
Hendrik Tennekes, former director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who says climate change computer models are profoundly flawed and that
blind adherence to the harebrained idea that climate models can generate ‘realistic’ simulations of climate is the principal reason why I remain a climate sceptic... There exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies;
Dr Antonino Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, who says the IPCC models are
incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view;
and Dr Tom Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and another IPCC reviewer, who says
most leading geologists throughout the world know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible
and that climate change scientists have launched
a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil-fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction’.
Ouch.
And now this nonsense is beginning to exact a political price as the public – who have a talent for sniffing out bogus assertions even when (or perhaps because) the entire nomenklatura is pumping out propaganda and smearing any dissidents – begin to exact their revenge on the politicians who have gone along with it. Philip Stott notes on his blog that Labour is about to be greenwhacked in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election:
In attempting to appear 'Green', Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, and Mr. Brown are having to defend the indefensible, a retrogressive, retrospective tax change which will especially hit poorer members of society and less well-off families, with no environmental benefits.
While Richard Rahn in the Washington Times observes:
What do you think was the most costly intelligence failure of all time? No, was is not the world's leading intelligence agencies' failure to notice that Saddam had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction. It was the failure of many leading climate model builders to be modest enough about their predictions, and the politicians' and media's failure to ask the tough questions of these climate experts. As a consequence of what we now know was an overblown global-warming scare, everyone on the planet is paying substantially more for food and fuel than is necessary.
Meanwhile, the carbon really has hit the fan with the highly inconvenient truth that global temperatures are not only currently static but are predicted not to rise at all for the next decade. Andrew Bolt links to a debate on the Politics and Environment blog between climate change believers who are trying to reconcile the IPCC predictions with reality. Officially, the greens are claiming that the prediction that rising CO2 inevitably meant rising temperatures always allowed for, er, pauses. Of a decade. But in the P&E debate, there is the distant clang of a spade being called a spade:
The IPCC projections remain falsified.
Where now is that fabled ‘consensus’ when it is urgently needed to defend all those reputations which depend upon it?
You’d have to have a heart of Antarctic ice not to laugh.
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Monday, 19th May 2008
10:32am
I never had sex with that woman! said President Clinton about Monica Lewinsky.
I never said I would talk to terrorists! protested presidential hopeful Barack Obama, after President Bush said in his address to Israel’s Knesset:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
How dare he! shrieked the Obamanables, who for some reason seemed to think that a course of action which they all support was a grievous insult when applied to their hero (whose name had never in fact passed Bush’s lips). But in any event Obama has said he would talk to Iran, a key sponsor of terrorism and whose terrorist activities are even now killing American soldiers in Iraq. Watch the video here to see Obama’s lips move. Indeed, Obama’s own website boasts:
Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.
But that’s ok cos as we all know, if you’re a Democrat what you say doesn’t have to correspond to reality — reality has to correspond to you.
Bush may or may not have been talking about Obama; but he could equally have been addressing the ‘realists’ in his very own administration who are pressing to talk to Iran and Hamas. Like for instance his very own Defence Secretary, Robert Gates who, the Washington Times reported,
said in a speech Wednesday that he agreed with liberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that ‘we need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them.
Indeed, the President could even have been talking about himself. For although he declared to the Knesset that
no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to its destruction
that’s exactly what he is forcing Israel to do with Fatah: indeed not just forcing Israel to talk to killers pledged to its destruction, but to give them a state of their own from which to do it.
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10:19am
In the New Statesman, Martin Bright asks the big question: why do liberals hate Israel so much?
The Israel issue has become a terrible fault line on the British left…The internet has flushed out a whole subculture of left-wing hostility to Israel that should make even Marqusee uncomfortable. This has a regular and willing outlet on the Guardian's Comment is Free website and the New Statesman also suffers from it whenever we publish articles on Israel. Postings on our blog casually link Zionism to fascism or South African apartheid. The language is so unpleasant that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that many of the comments are driven by anti-Semitism.
…For a long time Israel has been accused of crying wolf over surrounding countries that want to ‘drive it into the sea’. Now it has a neighbour whose president has not only made that threat explicit, but who intends to develop the capacity to do it. In such a conflict, which has already begun for the people of southern Israel, on whose side will British left-liberal opinion be?
Bright will not thank me for saying this, but his blog entry is an act of conspicuous courage. He remains a left-wing person, and he still clearly has major reservations about Israel’s behaviour. But he has a solid core of decency which has enabled him to understand that something vile has been released on the left which totally vitiates its claim to moral principle. Martin has already shown considerable courage in exposing the penetration of Whitehall by radical Islamism, bringing down on his head the wrath and scorn of some of his comrades. That’s nothing to what he will encounter now.
Update: The appalling comments by readers posted underneath Martin's article amply make his case for him.
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Friday, 16th May 2008
3:35pm
The most important global event in the past week has been the attempted Hezbollah putsch in Lebanon. Accordingly it has received next to no coverage in Britain, where as the citizenry so insightfully informed the world in 2006: ‘We are all Hezbollah now’. Those who rant obsessively about Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories are completely silent about Hezbollah’s invasion of Lebanon, its creeping state-within-a-state and its near-annihilation of Lebanon’s government which tried to stop the putsch and failed — despite that government being backed, as Walid Phares points out here, by an overwhelming sector of the public including most of the Sunnis, Christians and Druze plus a minority among the Shia, two thirds of the Lebanese Army, and a majority in Parliament.
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 elsewhere). 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.
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11:08am
Anthony Browne has an excellent piece in this week’s Spectator saying that what Britain needs is US-style think-tanks whose size enables them to do what the far more modest British think-tanks cannot do and for which there is a crying need — to challenge the intellectual stranglehold of the universities. Indeed, we need to go much further than that. At the heart of Britain’s spiral of intellectual, moral, social and political disintegration (yes, I am indeed understating the case) lies the intellectual hegemony of the left, enforced through bullying, intimidation, character assassination and the whole bag of tricks used to stifle an open society.
The result is a public discourse from which truth, evidence and rationality have been exiled, a society where normative values have been replaced by the transgressive or alien, and a national culture which is losing the will to live. In America, these pressures certainly exist, particularly in the academy and its outriders in the media; but at least there a culture war is in progress with the fightback being conducted by the big think-tanks, publications like the Weekly Standard, City Journal or Commentary, talk radio and Fox News, and the evangelical churches. In Britain, the absence of any such alternative discourse means there has been no culture war here but a culture rout.
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.
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Thursday, 15th May 2008
5:29pm
The public apology and libel damages awarded to Channel Four’s Dispatches programme over Undercover Mosque, its investigation showing Islamic preachers in UK mosques preaching jihad and calling for the murder of non-believers, amount to much more than merely a victory for the programme and a complete vindication of its integrity. For the people who are having to pay the six-figure damages and costs are the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. This was a programme which uncovered disturbing evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques. But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the WM police and the CPS turned on the Dispatches producers, accusing them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion. The police then referred the programme to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, who threw out the complaint. Today, as the Times reported, the West Midlands Police and CPS were due to
apologise unreservedly for comments that they accept were incorrect and unjustified. They said that there was ‘no evidence that the broadcaster or programme-makers had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity'.
This matter should not end here. The reason the police and CPS failed to investigate people accused of inciting murder and mayhem and turned instead on the broadcasters who exposed them was almost certainly due to the official police and establishment policy of turning a blind eye to Islamic extremism — as long as there is no evidence of an actual plot to kill people. This disastrous strategy arises from the refusal of the British authorities to acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is a religious war being waged against this country. The outcome is that, while the police are intercepting or monitoring actual terrorist plots and terrorist suspects, they refuse to take action against the radicalisation that creates the poisoned sea in which those suspects and plots can swim.
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.
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Wednesday, 14th May 2008
5:13pm
The Guardian’s hatred of Israel and the Jews truly is a fathomless — and unfathomable — well. The last few days around Israel’s 60th 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.
This follows a previous modest proposal by Ahmad Samih Khalidi of the need to choose between never-ending conflict and a new form of power sharing beyond the two state solution (ie the end of Israel); a series on Gaza’s heartbreaking human tragedies (Israel’s fault) plus a series of even more heartbreaking videos on the same; and for good measure the ex-editor of Haaretz, David Landau, (who recently shot to fame by telling Condoleezza Rice that Israel wanted to be ‘raped’ by the US to impose a settlement with the Palestinians) bemoaning the ‘chasm' within Israeli society at the bottom of which were the indigenous poor.
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.
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4:54pm
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.
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