Tuesday, 6th May 2008
11:02am
Boris’s first move as Mayor of London is a seriously good one. He has appointed Ray Lewis as a deputy mayor with responsibility for tackling youth violence. The Telegraph describes Lewis as ‘inspirational’; I can certainly endorse that. I wrote here in 2005 about his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which takes gifted young black boys who are already well on track for a life of crime, drugs and mayhem and turns them into high-achieving solid citizens. He does so by giving these boys a combination of military-style discipline and profound belief in their potential, and by holding their (overwhelmingly single) mothers to account for their own inadequate parenting. He is tough, loving, uncompromising, charismatic and achieves astounding success in turning round some of the most difficult boys around. But because he identifies the slop and sentimentality in the schools and youth justice circles as the problem, he has been scorned, vilified and ostracised by the usual suspects as ‘authoritarian’. Thus the tragedy of our times. The fact that Boris has plucked him out of this obscurity and given him the task of spreading his insights over the whole of London is the best news I’ve heard for some time.
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Monday, 5th May 2008
3:35pm
For all those (including Haaretz afficionados) who are either ignorant of or deny the true history of the Jewish claim to what was once called Palestine, and who believe the West Bank (and until 2005 Gaza) is territory that is ‘illegally occupied’ by Israel, this admirable and well-informed resume should be required reading (along with this article by Efraim Karsh in Commentary). Look first at the two maps at the beginning, and certain facts immediately leap out. The first is that in 1920 Mandatory Palestine, which was established in order to set up within it the restored Jewish national home, comprised present day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. The second is that by 1922, this territory had shrunk with the creation of Transjordan, after Churchill unilaterally gave three quarters of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty as part of the realpolitik of the times.
This still left Palestine comprising present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In other words, the so-called ‘occupied territories’ were to be part of the Jewish national home, all in explicit recognition of the unique historical claim to that entire territory by the Jews -- the only people for whom it had ever been their nation state. Accordingly the Mandate required the encouragement of '…close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes’
and conferred an obligation to ensure
‘…that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the government of any foreign power.’
Since the UN charter requires the UN to uphold the terms of this Mandate in perpetuity, the right of the Jews to settle anywhere between the Jordan and the Mediterranean exists under international law to this day.
As it happens, I have been opposed to the Jewish settlements in these territories from the start because I always thought they would turn into a deadly geopolitical and demographic trap for Israel. But the fact is that Jews are entitled to settle in them twice over under international law — once under the terms of the Mandate, and twice because all countries are permitted to hold onto land in self-defence against a continued belligerency.
Given the fact that Condi Rice, President Bush, Tony Blair, the governments of Europe and the entire weight of ‘enlightened’ western opinion, not to mention the Arab and Muslim world and the Haaretz crowd, are bending every sinew to force Jews out of the West Bank (as has already happened in Gaza) and place it under foreign control instead, the question has to be asked: why are all these people attempting to break international law?
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3:17pm
I have often referred to the baleful influence of Haaretz on Israel’s reputation through the writings of a number of its correspondents who promulgate the most vicious distortions about their country. Yet even I am left open mouthed by this account of the lies it published recently in a story by Gideon Levy about Palestinian children being deprived of swimming pools, to the extent that allegedly none of them could swim without life preservers. As you will see from the CAMERA article, a multitude of pictures in themselves (similar to the one above of a swimming pool in Jenin) tell a very different story, as did a previous piece in Haaretz itself:
As Levy's own colleague at Ha'aretz, Avi Issacharoff wrote on Aug. 8, 2007: Nowadays, every city in the West Bank has a pool or a recreational complex: Bethlehem has one similar to Al-Khaluf [a clover-leaf-shaped pool in Dura, near Hebron], while Ramallah has more than 10.One of Jenin's swimming champs committed a suicide bombing at Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant in August 2001. Nablus has a pool reserved for women, and an Olympic pool. Another pool and recreation complex sits between Nablus and Tubas. Al Khaluf draws more than 2,500 people on an average weekend day, [lifeguard Ahmed] Rajoub says. (‘West Bank swimming pools help Palestinians brave the heat’).
I really cannot fathom such journalistic wickedness and pathological national self-hatred as displayed by Haaretz, to the extent that its own output becomes totally incoherent and indeed absurd.
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Thursday, 1st May 2008
11:14pm
The excellent Harry's Place has a stylish new look (goodbye to the cod cyrillic logo, which says something). Invaluable for its open-eyed critiques of the left, from the left, now it looks great too.
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8:25pm
It is, we are told, as inevitable and inexorable as night follows day that, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, so too does the temperature of the world. Inconveniently for this axiomatic truth, however, while carbon dioxide has continued to increase the temperature of the planet has stayed flat over the past decade and even recently dropped like a stone. Never mind: man-made global warming turns out to be the most obliging of theories because now we are told that this inexorable process of heating is now to take a ten-year pause.
The
Telegraph tells us that global warming is to stop
while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions… This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature
but only until 2015, apparently, when it will start up again.
So let’s get this right. More carbon dioxide means more global warming — except when, er, ‘natural variations in climate’ which are apparently immune to this immutable process (fancy!) get in the way. With a precision of prediction which would have caused medieval sorcerers to strike crystal balls off their wedding present lists, these scientists can foretell precisely when these ‘natural climate variations’ will subside — even though at the very same time Richard Wood of the Hadley Centre confides:
…climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain…
Always uncertain, eh? But isn’t the prediction that the planet is about to fry so certain that, as the Royal Society so memorably told us, the argument is over?
Truly, a most flexible theory indeed. One can only marvel.
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6:53pm
Not before time, a family judge has fired a broadside at the way in which the English family courts enable decent fathers to be persecuted by vengeful estranged mothers. The Times reports that Lord Justice Ward gave vent to his feelings after telling a father that there was nothing he could do to help him to re-establish contact with his teenage daughter who had been turned against him by her ‘vicious’ mother.
The ‘drip, drip, drip of venom’ poured into the daughter’s ears by the mother included accusations of sexual abuse against the innocent father after the couple divorced, the judge said. The former wife’s tactics were so successful that the daughter wrote to her father when she was 9 saying that she wished he was dead… Lord Justice Ward told the father that the case was bordering on scandalous but the court was compelled to act solely in the best interests of the child. The girl would be too distressed if she was forced to spend time with her father after her mother’s ‘corrupting’ campaign, he said.
‘The father complains bitterly, passionately and with every justification that the law is sterile, impotent and utterly useless — we have to acknowledge there is a degree of force in what he says,’ the judge told the Court of Appeal Civil Division. ‘But the question is what can this court do? The answer is nothing. This is a truly distressing case. It may not be untypical of many, but in some ways it borders on the scandalous. It certainly is tragic.’
As I wrote back in 1999 in my book The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (published by the Social Market Foundation) such abuses (surely the human equivalent to the female mantis eating her mate as in the picture above) most certainly are not atypical of the family courts. But no-one listened then —and with politicians of all parties still either signed up to or cowed by gender politics, they are unlikely to listen now.
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6:07pm
What an idiotic response by the police to the government’s reported determination to reclassify cannabis as a class B prohibited drug in an attempt to reverse the significant damage done by downgrading it to the relatively anodyne class C. According to the Guardian, the police have stamped their size twelves and declared that they will not adopt a tougher approach to cases of simple possession of cannabis if the drug is upgraded. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said:
The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting.
But by declaring that they will refuse to arrest and charge anyone caught in possession of cannabis, they are ruling out the use of such discretion. Furthermore, the issue is not — as the legalisers would have us believe and the police are here mindlessly echoing—the criminalisation of young people. It is about, first and foremost, telling the truth about the dangerousness of this drug both to potential users and their parents -- thus equipping the latter to advise and deal with their spliff-puffing offspring before their brains are destroyed by cannabis-induced psychosis. And upgrading would also mean that cannabis trafficking would once again surface on the policing radar, from where it so disastrously fell off
when downgrading caused both police and customs officers to stop targeting cannabis imports, causing the market to be flooded, the price of cannabis to go through the floor and rocket fuel put behind the trade in other drugs.
It should not be forgotten that, with some honourable exceptions, the police have been amongst the loudest voices calling for decriminalisation of cannabis and other drugs. That is because, having failed to get on top of the drugs problem years ago, they drew precisely the wrong conclusion. Instead of realising that their own strategy of trying to pursue dealers while largely ignoring users was exacerbating the problem (not least because for every Mr Big there’s always a Mr Bigger) and that the only way to get on top of it was zero tolerance towards dealers and users, they decided that the issue was not their own rubbishy law enforcement but the nature of the law itself.
They appear to have learned nothing.
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5:17pm
I really can’t bring myself to wade into those sewers known as the Guardian and Independent, but Tom Gross, who has a strong stomach, provides samples here of the poisonous effluent they are pumping out about Israel — thanks in part to the usual suspects whose Jewishness is not so much ancestry as pathology. Vile beyond measure — and beyond all reason.
The Independent’s Johann Hari, who figures prominently in this catalogue of shame, recently won the Orwell Prize for journalism. Tom Gross notes that Hari cited a fabricated quote by the Israel-hating Israeli academic Ilan Pappe. This was actually the second time he had done so, despite the fact that the first occasion 18 months ago provoked the (himself controversial) Israeli ‘New Historian’ Benny Morris to write this
letter to the paper denouncing the quote as a fabrication. And
here is another informed critique of Hari’s piece. Maybe someone should ask the organisers of the Orwell Prize (which I myself have won in the past) how they reached their decision.
Meanwhile, the Hendon Times reports that two orthodox Jews were stabbed in two separate, random and unprovoked incidents in Golders Green last Friday. A man called Mohamed Jama Ahmed was arrested. And yet the Metropolitan Police said these attacks were
not being treated as faith hate crimes.
Of course not! Just another coincidence, wasn't it, in Britain’s decent, rational and principled society, whose elevated tone is set by its up-market media and the completely unbigoted people who work for it.
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10:02am
I have a piece in the Spectator magazine itself today marking Israel’s 60th anniversary next week. You can access it here.
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