Wednesday 9 July 2008

 

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Liz Anderson

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Tuesday, 13th May 2008

Obama's friends

8:28pm

 

What a lot of people from whom Barack Obama is rapidly having to distance himself!


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:
Ayers was loosely involved in Obama’s election as an Illinois state senator in the late 1990s, when he was introduced to local activists at a meeting in his house. He also donated $200 to Obama’s re-election campaign in 2001. Obama served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic foundation, for three years and shared a platform with him at two academic conferences.

 

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.

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The continued appeasement of Iran

6:42pm

Despite last week’s Appeal Court judgment instructing the British government to de-proscribe the Iranian resistance group the PMOI (also known as the Mujahedin Khalq Organization) which I reported here, Britain is still on its craven knees before the tyrants of Iran. The Tehran Times reports:

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Monday summoned British Ambassador Geoffrey Adams to ‘strongly protest’ against a UK Court of Appeal ruling that supported the removal of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization from Britain’s list of banned terror organizations…

Adams rejected claims that Britain had revised its policy on the MKO, saying, ‘We still regard the organization as a terrorist group.’ He expressed support for Iran’s view on the MKO’s ‘terrorist nature’ and said he would convey Iran’s protest to the British government. ‘As the British secretary for foreign affairs earlier stated, the government believes that the MKO’s terror acts are shameful and Britain’s official policy is based on having no relations with this group,’ the ambassador added.
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.
 

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Do keep up, Minister!

6:04pm

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.

Oh for heaven’s sake -- what an insult to the intelligence. We’re talking here about bog-standard tests to ensure that pupils have achieved the rudimentary basics of education, and we’re being told they are the equivalent of child abuse. If teachers are ‘teaching to the test’, all that shows is that they are rotten, incompetent teachers.

But that of course is precisely the point. The SATs were only introduced in the first place because standards in schools were atrocious due to the gross incompetence of so many teachers, resulting from the ideological malignity of the educationists who teach them — the very same teachers and educationists who from the get-go whined that the SATs would cause schools to ‘teach to the test’ and have campaigned for them to be abolished ever since. On the Today programme (0817) this morning, the fundamental point of the SATs eluded not only their critic, the general secretary of the head teachers' union Mick Brookes, but also the Schools Minister Jim Knight who was supposed to be defending them. Brookes moaned that the SATs didn’t accurately assess the progress of each individual child; Knight, the silly chump, responded that the SATs were useful in preparing children for GCSEs and A-levels. How pathetic is that?!

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.
 
Do keep up, Minister!

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Monday, 12th May 2008

Fighting the last (indefensible) war

9:53pm


I am just astounded by the Labour by-election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich. First, and most disgustingly, as has been ricocheting around the blogosphere, a Labour leaflet pretending to be a Tory party application form (subtle, eh?) asks:

Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?
Since no-one has ever suggested that ID cards would be targeted particularly at foreign nationals, this appears to be a bizarre, indeed incomprehensible, attempt to play the race card.

But what’s really amazing about the Labour campaign is its strategy of portraying the Tory candidate Edward Timpson as a caricature toff, just because his family is wealthy. Reverting to class war like this really does show the depths of the party’s intellectual bankruptcy. It’s as if Blairism never happened. Labour are behaving like the apocryphal person who was stuck in the jungle and didn’t know the war was over decades after it had finished. Stripped of all the Blair triangulation, the party reveals that its motivating idea is just spiteful jealousy of the rich.

Nor is this a one-off in Crewe and Nantwich; it forms the core of Brown’s attack on ‘Old Etonian’ Cameron, the core of Labour’s education policy, the core of its welfare policy. And as the devastating attack on the government by the Labour MP and anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field has so brutally demonstrated, the cynical fleecing of the poor through abolishing the 10p tax band reveals that the purpose of this class war is not to benefit the poor at all but simply to hurt the rich. In the light of this, the idea that Ed Balls can make Frank Field look bad,as he has been attempting to do today, is risible.

But then, what is so remarkable is that the Brownies actually believe class war is a vote winner. In fact, it's why they are losing. The attack on Etonians is so puerile and out of touch, it’s embarrassing. People couldn’t care less where politicians went to school or whether they had silver spoons protruding from every orifice when they were growing up. What matters to them is how these individuals behave now and how they relate to their own lives. That’s why Boris won.

Apparently, according to a story in Saturday's Daily Mail, Labour have had to be told this strategy is backfiring. How could it not be? It’s crude and insulting — above all, to the intelligence of the electorate. Faced with a Tory party which is repositioning itself in a sophisticated and attractive manner designed to impress and bamboozle the voters -- and which has a good chance of working -- Labour chooses to respond by demonstrating that its knuckles are still scraping the ground.

 

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Tsk, Boris!

2:30pm

 

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.

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Dr Williams gets it right

2:02pm

Credit where credit is due: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, got it absolutely right yesterday in his excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about the iniquitous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which is being debated in the Commons today. The headline row over the Bill during the past few days has been about the abortion amendments, a development which is as regrettable as it was predictable. It was always likely that these amendments — to bring down the upper time limit for abortion from 24 weeks to anything between 20 weeks and twelve — would overshadow other provisions in the Bill which are far worse. In particular, these are the go-ahead for ‘saviour siblings’, where babies are conceived for the sole purpose of using bits of their body to cure their siblings of disease; abolishing the current requirement that a child created through IVF will have a father to help raise it; and the go-ahead for animal-human hybrid embryos to be created for therapeutic purposes.

It’s no use arguing, as supporters of this Bill so disingenuously do, that people have got the wrong end of the stick because the wicked tabloids have told them that this last provision will create monstrous chimeras, which isn’t true because they will be destroyed while they are still mere days-old bundles of cells. It’s no use arguing that anyone with an ounce of compassion for children suffering from appalling diseases must support the ‘saviour siblings’ clause, because after all what’s the problem with taking a few cells which can easily be spared and for such a noble cause. And it’s no use arguing that there’s no real evidence of many babies living below 24 weeks’ gestation and that the whole abortion row actually reflects abhorrence of abortion itself which is confined to a few die-hard Catholics (and how dare they try to influence the debate? Don’t they know that unless people with religious principles keep absolutely silent they are guilty of trying to end other people’s freedoms??) As Dr Williams wrote:
But if you put it another way and talk about creating an embryo that could in principle become a distinctive person - because it is already a distinctive organic unity - could this in the long run encourage a drift towards a new attitude to human life – an attitude that was more and more fuzzy about the absolute right of an individual not to be used for the purposes of another?

…I am yet to be convinced that the measures relating to non-reproductive cloning will not open the way to a less consistently respectful attitude to life or that those concerning 'saviour siblings' similarly protect against a person being treated primarily as a tool for another's ends. These matters need further serious debate. This doesn't mean that we are bound to think of the primitive embryonic material as in every sense a 'person' – but it does mean that we can't lose sight of the fact that this organic unit is a potential person, and that the decisions we make about it are decisions about possible human and personal futures. This is also why I welcome the pressure from some quarters to take this opportunity of reducing the time limits for abortion.

Exactly. It is the further giant stride towards the instrumentalisation of human life represented by this Bill which is so disturbing. And for the government to be pushing this brutalising and amoral Bill through with only the most grudging nod towards the exercise of MPs’ conscience — and even that inadequate concession had to be dragged out of it — is really quite tyrannical.

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Friday, 9th May 2008

The war against the Jews (21)

12:28am

I’ve just caught up with Jeremy Bowen’s documentary on the birth of Israel which was transmitted last Sunday evening.

Sigh.

Most of what I want to say about it is said in this critique by Honest Reporting. I would just make a couple of additional points.

The first is that, like so much journalism about Israel, this programme failed to acknowledge the true perfidy of the British in reneging on the terms of the Mandate they were given to (re-)establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. First, in 1921/2 Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of Palestine to the Hashemites to create Jordan; then the UK sought to appease Arab terrorism (so what’s new?) by reneging on its undertaking to encourage Jewish immigration into Palestine, even while the Holocaust was unfolding in Europe, and instead turned a blind eye to mass illegal Arab immigration; then it divided the quarter of Palestine that had been left for the Jews in 1922 and offered half of that to the Arabs — as a response to the terrorist attacks they were carrying out against both Jews and British to prevent the Mandate from being fulfilled. The notion peddled by the programme that the British tried to steer a middle course between the Arabs and the Jews is simply false, as Bernard Wasserstein’s classic book, Britain and the Jews of Europe, makes all too shockingly clear.


The other point is that Bowen’s view that the creation of Israel was a tragedy for the Palestinians — who he so erroneously seems to believe were the indigenous people of the land — was dated to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. He placed great emphasis on the fact that this foundation document, which committed Britain to establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine, also pledged that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…
which he declared constituted the fatal contradiction which lies at the heart of the whole impasse -- the implication being that a Jewish state by definition prejudiced those rights.

But this is simply and demonstrably wrong. The ‘civil and religious’ rights of the Arabs of Palestine have indeed been safeguarded by Israel — far more so, in fact, than in most Arab countries. Bowen is confusing these ‘civil and religious’ rights with political rights — which the Declaration pointedly did not afford to those non-Jewish communities. The reason for that was that it was recognised at that time that the Jews alone had a historic claim to Palestine, because they alone were the people for whom it had been their historic homeland and nation state.


The assertion that Palestinianism is a wholly fabricated national identity, created solely to destroy the Jewish state of Israel, creates apoplexy among the usual suspects who hate Israel. But it is true — and the Arabs themselves have said so time and again. Here are a few such quotes:
‘There is no such country as Palestine. “Palestine” is a term the Zionists invented. [...]Our country was for centuries part of Syria. “Palestine” is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.’
Auni Bey Abdul-Had, Local Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937

‘There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.’
Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian to Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946

‘It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria’.
Ahmed Shukairy, United Nations Security Council, 1956

‘The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.’
Zahir Muhsein, PLO March 31, 1977

‘Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.’
King Hussein 1982

‘Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian? We did not particularly mind Jordanian rule. The teaching of the destruction of Israel was a definite part of the curriculum, but we considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then all of the sudden we were Palestinians - they removed the star from the Jordanian flag and all at once we had a Palestinian flag. When I finally realized the lies and myths I was taught, it is my duty as a righteous person to speak out’.
Walid Shoebat, former PLO terrorist.
These are the facts. When will the west realise the lies and myths? Helloooo, BBC? Is anyone out there??

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Thursday, 8th May 2008

Whoops, what a giveaway

4:45pm

The charge that he is a bigot has clearly got under Johann Hari’s skin. In today’s Independent he writes a riposte to the torrent of criticism apparently provoked by his article last month — including my blog entry here — a rejoinder which he clearly believes boosts his case. On the contrary: he merely digs himself even further into the hole he has created.

He uses the tired device of screaming McCarthyism at anyone who says disobliging things about his views, wholly oblivious to the obvious and absurd paradox.

He cites as authorities for his views those paradigms of reason and decency Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter. Finkelstein calls Holocaust survivors ‘frauds and hucksters’, says American Jews are ‘parasites’ and supports Hezbollah. You can gain some insight into Finkelstein’s fraudulent scholarship and bigoted views here, here and here.

The manifold and egregious errors and distortions in Carter’s book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid are chronicled here, here and here.

Carter’s further claim that Jews control and manipulate public debate for their own ends helped provoke this rebuke from Professor Melvyn Konner at Emory university, home of the Carter Centre; while Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn revealed that, during a March 1980 meeting with his senior political advisers Carter snapped,: ‘If I get back in, I’m going to [expletive] the Jews.’
 
Hari claims his critics have not rebutted what he wrote in his article about sewage in Gaza. But Honest Reporting analysed here the many distortions, selective omissions and misrepresentations in the whole piece.

My main thought-crime appears to have been comments I made here about an anti-Israel outfit called Independent Jewish Voices. You can read my further explanation of my views about this group here and here.

Hari thinks it outrageous that I say such demonisation of Israel, including his own, creates a climate in which British Jews are attacked. But this is what the Parliamentary Committee on Antisemitism concluded in its 2006 report:
…criticism of Zionism is not in itself antisemitic. However, in some quarters an antisemitic discourse has developed that is in effect antisemitic because it views Zionism itself as a global force of unlimited power and malevolence throughout history. This definition of Zionism bears no relation to the understanding that most Jews have of the concept; that is, a movement of Jewish national liberation, born in the late nineteenth century, with a geographical focus limited to Israel. Having re-defined Zionism in this way, traditional antisemitic notions of Jewish conspiratorial power, manipulation and subversion are then transferred from Jews (a religious or racial group) on to Zionism (a political movement). This is at the core of the ‘New Antisemitism’ on which so much has been written. Many witnesses described how anti-Zionism has become the ‘lingua franca of antisemitic movements’.

…It is increasingly the case that, because anger over Israel’s policies can provide the pretext, condemnation [of ethnically and religiously motivated hatred] is often too slow and increasingly conditional. Regardless of the expressed motive, Jewish people and Jewish institutions are being targeted…the correlation between conflict in the Middle East and attacks on the Jewish community must be better understood if the problem is to be tackled.
But the most remarkable and revealing comment of all by Hari is this:
Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right.
‘Sent in’, eh? By whom, exactly? By the world-wide Jewish/Zionist/Likudnik conspiracy, of course. Yup, it’s those Protocols again. Whoops, what a giveaway. Case proved, I think.

 

Update, 10 May: Howard Jacobson weighs in here; while Hari provides an jaw-dropping gloss on what he wrote here.
Yup: still digging.

Update 11 May:  The Hari update appears to have vanished but can be accessed on the Google cache  here.

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Wednesday, 7th May 2008

A great victory -- but at what terrible price?

6:43pm


It was eminently predictable, but it is still a great victory. Today the Court of Appeal unanimously and emphatically declared that the ban under the Terrorism Act of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahideen of Iran (PMOI), was illegal. Since the judges also refused to allow the Home Secretary even the possibility of an appeal, the government must now de-proscribe the PMOI as ordered by the court.

This not only brings to an end a shameful chapter in Britain’s long appeasement of the tyrannical Iranian regime but also offers a sliver of hope that that regime might now be toppled. One might have thought that this was an outcome devoutly to be wished for by the governments of the west. Far better, after all, that the ayatollahs should be deposed by popular will of the Iranian people than that the west should be forced to go to war to prevent Iran from going nuclear and thus holding the entire world to ransom in pursuit of the mullahs’ aim of bringing about an apocalypse and the defeat of the west. But the proscription of the PMOI, not only by the UK but also by the EU and the US, has meant that it has been unable to raise money and organise resistance to help the Iranian people to rise up against the regime that enslaves them.

That regime is weak, as can be seen from the (almost totally unreported in the UK) atrocities against dissidents who are being hanged or gruesomely mutilated almost every week. If the PMOI had been able to campaign publicly against the regime and to bring its atrocities to light, the pressure might already have brought about its demise. But far from helping bring this about, the UK government shamefully chose to suck up to the mullahs when, in 2001, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw banned the PMOI as a terrorist organisation at the request of the Iranian government — the true terrorists of Iran.

Yes, the PMOI has a past history of violence (renounced in 2001) but never against the west, only in defence of life and liberty in Iran — first against the cruel repression of the Shah’s regime, and then against the unspeakable savagery of the ayatollahs. Forced to establish a base in Saddam’s Iraq, the PMOI — Shia Muslims who are committed to uphold human rights, to renounce the death penalty and medieval Islamic punishment and to separate mosque and state, thus replacing Islamic theocracy by secular democracy — are now using that base in Ashraf to encourage the Iraqi Shia to repel Iran and al Qaeda and to work with America in stabilising the country.

As a result, the US now affords the PMOI protected status in Ashraf. Yet in 2003, the US and the UK actually bombed the PMOI bases in Ashraf — having pledged to do so before the start of hostilities in Iraq as a quid pro quo for Iran staying out of the war. In the aftermath, however, coalition forces signed an agreement of ‘mutual understanding and co-ordination’ with the PMOI. This prompted General Odierno — then commander of the US Army 4th division and now the designated successor to General Petraeus as commander of the coalition — to say that the PMOI appeared to be committed to democracy in Iran and its cooperation with the coalition should prompt a review of its terrorist status. Yet although in Iraq the PMOI are now ‘protected persons’, the group is still proscribed in the US and EU.

War, as we all know, should only ever be a last resort; but sometimes that last resort is unavoidable. So it is with Iran. A nuclear Iran is — or should be — simply unthinkable and in the last resort war may therefore be unavoidable. But if that war should indeed come about, the governments of Britain, America and Europe will bear a very heavy responsibility indeed. Because such a war could have been avoided had they done everything in their power to bring about the end of the mullahs’ regime by peaceful means. They did not do that; instead they tried to appease it by outlawing and even bombing the very people who offered the best chance of bringing about its end — and who also, incidentally, stand for the democratic and secular Islamic society which the western world purports to be so desperate to see develop.

The result has been the continued oppression and misery of the people of Iran; the death, torture and mutilation of tens of thousands of brave Iranian dissidents fighting for freedom; and a gift to the Iranian regime of that most precious of all commodities — time to build its nuclear arsenal while continuing to blow up western soldiers and attack western interests. Now, with the Israelis warning that Iran may be as little as one year away from building a nuclear bomb, time may simply have run out for the possibility of toppling the regime. If so, history will record the behaviour of the UK, US and Europe towards Iran ever since the revolution of 1979 as one of the most shameful, cowardly and lethal episodes of appeasement in western history.

One of the most distressing aspects of the war of civilisation is the way in which the west persists in appeasing its enemies while cutting off its allies at the knees. Today the English judiciary (for once) struck a blow for freedom and against tyranny and its appeasement. The beleaguered people of Iran who yearn to live in peace and freedom should know that today at least, Britain has said: ‘We are with you’.

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Tuesday, 6th May 2008

Who could know?

3:54pm

 

The UN has long effectively behaved as a club of terror, excusing, ignoring or condoning acts of terrorism and tyranny while repeatedly singling out their principal state victim, Israel, for grotesque condemnation. The role of its relief agency UNWRA in supervising ‘refugee camps’ which are factories of terrorism has long been deeply compromised. Israel has repeatedly claimed that terrorists operate under the cover of UNWRA vehicles and facilities. The UN however has always strenuously denied any involvement whatsoever in such activities. Now however Reuters tells us that the headmaster of a UN school in Gaza, Awad al-Qiq who was killed last week in an Israeli air strike on a 'mechanic's workshop', taught by day and made rockets for Islamic Jihad by night. Wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag, he was buried as a terrorist hero.

Who knew?

Not his family, not the slightest suspicion apparently, all a terrible shock. And not the UN, good gracious no, not a clue, natch.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher's surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter. ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy towards politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people's minds,’ he said.
Of course not! How could anyone expect the UN to know that one of its paid officials was — never mind the contents of his mind — actually making rockets and mortars on a regular basis for Hamas? For the UN, clearly, ‘zero tolerance’ of terrorism means zero scrutiny.
He added that staff were also regularly instructed not to engage in political or militant activities of any kind.
Yersss, Hamas must really be quaking in its boots. Doubtless such pieties will continue to put the minds of the American donors of UNWRA fully at rest.

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Melanie's Published Articles

Sleepwalking into Islamisation

Can we afford to lose this expertise?

The silence of complicity

British education? Expletive deleted!

Why British judges are freeing terrorists

The Westminster scam factory

Faking a killing

Reading the runes on selective amnesia

The curious case of the Waterloo files

The eleuphant in the room

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here

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