Creating an insult to intelligence

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

The confusion arises partly out of ignorance, with people lazily confusing belief in a Creator with Creationism. But belief in a Creator is common to all people of monotheistic faith – with many scientists amongst them -- the vast majority of whom would regard Creationism as totally ludicrous. In coming to the conclusion that a governing intelligence must have been responsible for the ultimate origin of matter, Intelligent Design proponents are essentially saying there must have been a creator. The difference between them and people of religious faith is that ID proponents do not necessarily believe in a personalised Creator, or God.

As a result, both Creationists and many others of religious faith disdain Intelligent Design, just as ID proponents think Creationism is totally off the wall. Yet the two continue to be conflated. And ignorance is only partly responsible for the confusion, since militant evangelical atheists deliberately conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism in order to smear and discredit ID and its adherents.

On Today, Humphrys perfectly reasonably pressed Miller further. If ID was merely a disguised form of Creationism, he asked, why were so many intelligent people prepared to accept ID but not Creationism? Miller replied:

Intelligent people can sometimes be wrong.

Indeed; and it is Prof Miller who is wrong. Creationism and Intelligent Design are two completely different ways of looking at the world; and you don’t have to subscribe to either to realise the untruth that is being propagated -- and the wrong that is being done to people’s reputations -- by the pretence that they are connected.

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The Truth Delusion of Richard Dawkins

The most famous atheist in the world, biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, poses as the arch-apostle of reason, a scientist who stands for empirical truth in opposition to obscurantism and lies. What follows suggests that in fact he is sloppy and cavalier with both facts and reasoning to a disturbing degree.

I previously wrote about the remarkable debate (which can be seen at this website) between Dawkins and John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics and Fellow in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford.  Lennox is the author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? which demolishes Dawkins by showing not only that there is no inherent conflict between science and faith but that the argument for faith is now being bolstered enormously by the remarkable developments in science. Dawkins was on the back foot because Lennox was attacking him from his own platform of science. He was on safer ground only when, in a further debate between the two at Oxford’s Natural History Museum last October, he attacked Lennox for his Christian faith which he could more easily ridicule. But to Lennox’s core arguments, he seemed to me to have no convincing response.

In a lecture earlier this month to the American Atheists’ Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, Dawkins chose to attack Lennox (about 15 minutes into this video) from the safety of an unchallenged speaking spot in front of a sycophantic audience – but in a manner which inadvertently revealed rather more about himself than he bargained for. Describing Lennox belittlingly as a ‘Christian apologist’ and an ‘Irish mathematician’, he took a comment Lennox had made at a meeting two days after the Oxford debate and tried to debunk it by claiming that Lennox had misrepresented him.

Lennox had observed that, in the Oxford debate, Dawkins appeared to have made a stunning admission by saying that ‘a good case could be made for a deistic god’(a generalised kind of deity as opposed to the personalised God of the Bible). Lennox observed that acknowledgement of a deistic god was the position arrived at recently by the celebrated former atheist philosopher Anthony Flew; and that saying a good case could be made for such a god ‘knocked the heart out’ of Dawkins’s core contention that complex life forms had derived from simple ones.

In response, Dawkins tried to maintain that Lennox had grossly misrepresented him. Pointing out that he had gone on to say that he didn’t accept the deistic argument – which indeed he had said – he claimed that Lennox had selectively quoted him to give an entirely false impression. To make his point, he drew an analogy with the conceit, once employed by a particular astronomer, of ironically disdaining authoritative sources purely as a rhetorical device to underscore the truth of an argument. Just as it would be dishonest to treat such ironic disdain as if it was seriously meant, he said, so by analogy Lennox was being dishonest by treating Dawkins’s remark about deism as if it was seriously meant when in fact he had merely been

making the concession about deism to show up the fatuousness of his [Lennox’s] belief.

But it was Dawkins’ argument which was surely disingenuous. For he had said without any hint of irony, nor with any indication that this was not sincerely meant, that

...you can make a respectable case for deism – not a case that I would accept but I think it is a serious discussion that you could have.

It was certainly true that he used this ‘respectable case for deism’ to draw a sharp comparison with belief in Jesus, upon which he duly poured scorn. But to say as he did that he was only

making the concession about deism to show up the fatuousness of his belief

was very sharp verbal practice indeed. There was no suggestion at all that he did not mean what he said -- that a respectable scientific case could be made for deism. And so Lennox was entirely justified in expressing astonishment. For even though Dawkins went on to say he did not agree with this case, given his previous absolutism in stating that anything unsupported by evidence is superstitious mumbo-jumbo and that anyone who believes that matter must have had an original creator is a cretin, it should therefore follow that no respectable case could possibly be made for deism.

The fact that he said he thought it could was surely a startling development. And it was very interesting that he should feel so defensive about having said it that this was the one aspect of Lennox’s comprehensive attack on him that he singled out for refutation; and that he tried to do so moreover through disreputable means, by imputing dishonesty to Lennox when it was Dawkins who was employing dubious debating tactics.

Wait – worse was to come.

Dawkins had made much of the fact that Lennox didn’t acknowledge Dawkins’s disagreement with the argument for deism. Dawkins then went on to claim that Lennox – who had not made anything of this whole deism issue during the Oxford debate itself – had been subsequently put up to raising it by me. Yup, your humble blogger.

This was because I had attended that debate – and afterwards had written here of my amazement at hearing Dawkins say a case could be made for deism. This is what I actually wrote about the deism point:

This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said: ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic God’. This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could. Anthony Flew, the celebrated philosopher and former high priest of atheism, spectacularly changed his mind and concluded -- as set out in his book There Is A God --  that life had indeed been created by a governing and purposeful intelligence, a change of mind that occurred because he followed where the scientific evidence led him. The conversion of Flew, whose book contains a cutting critique of Dawkins’s thinking, has been dismissed with unbridled scorn by Dawkins – who now says there is a serious case for the position that Flew now adopts! ...Afterwards, I asked Dawkins whether he had indeed changed his position and become more open to ideas which lay outside the scientific paradigm.  He vehemently denied this and expressed horror that he might have given this impression.

You will see from this that I acknowledged loud and clear that Dawkins had said he did not agree with the case for deism – the very thing Dawkins was accusing Lennox, and therefore by extension myself, of not doing.

But now look at the text that Dawkins proceeded to put up on the screen (about 25 minutes in), saying that this was what I had written in the Spectator and in which I had grossly misrepresented what he had said:

Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins is an evolutionist. But many are now asking whether the dyed-in-the-wool critic of religion may be, well, evolving in his views about God. You see, in a recent debate with theist and Christian John Lennox, he let slip what many would regard as a major blooper: he actually admitted that there might be a case for theism of sorts. This was a worldview change of seismic proportions. It was a most remarkable turnaround. For someone who had spent over five decades championing the atheist cause to all of a sudden renounce it was an incredible achievement.

I read this with astonishment. For these were not my words at all. I had not written them in the Spectator or anywhere else.

They were written in fact by a blogger called Bill Muehlenberg at his Culture Watch site. Muehlenberg, who had read what I had written about the Oxford debate, was himself passing comment upon it. Those were the words Dawkins falsely ascribed to me, reading them out to smirks and guffaws at my expense – and accusing me thereby of distorting what he had said! He thus held me up to ridicule and accused me of lying -- at a public meeting recorded on video which, as you can see, incited hateful comments on the thread below it – on the basis of someone else’s words altogether.

Dawkins then went on to quote some of what I had actually written in my own blog entry, as follows:

Even more jaw-droppingly, Dawkins told me that, rather than believing in God, he was more receptive to the theory that life on earth had indeed been created by a governing intelligence – but one which had resided on another planet. Leave aside the question of where that extra-terrestrial intelligence had itself come from, is it not remarkable that the arch-apostle of reason finds the concept of God more unlikely as an explanation of the universe than the existence and plenipotentiary power of extra-terrestrial little green men?

This passage had been quoted on the Muehlenberg blog – suggesting that what Dawkins had done was carelessly to run together Muehlenberg’s remarks with my own quoted comments. What remarkable sloppiness. And what arrogance. Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL, the former Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, whose website advertises ‘clear thinking’ and who poses as the indefatiguable champion of intellectual integrity, can’t even be bothered to check that he is actually quoting the person he thinks he is quoting -- even while attacking her for dishonesty. It's easy enough to muddle up similar sounding quotes on a page -- we all make mistakes -- but falsely to impute malice as a result of such a muddle, and to do so with such public fanfare, suggests a hubristic disregard for scrupulousness.*

Wait – there was worse still. For the next slide he put up, immediately after -- this time -- correctly quoting my words, read:

Lying for Jesus.

Lying for Jesus! Oh dear oh dear. Not only did Dawkins falsely accuse me of distorting his position, but he accused me of doing so because he assumed I was a Christian. Five minutes’ research maximum would have told him that I am a Jew. Either he thought that all the stuff written on Culture Watch by Bill Muehlenberg, who appears to be a devout Christian, was written by me; or he assumed that, since John Lennox is a Christian, anyone who supports John Lennox must also be a Christian. Either way, the man who has made a global reputation out of scorning anyone who makes an assumption not grounded in empirical evidence has assumed to be true something that can easily be ascertained to be totally false – thus suggesting that the mind that is so addled by prejudice it cannot deal with demonstrable reality is none other than his own.

Finally, he rounded off this jeering display of intellectual sloppiness, error, ignorance and prejudice with a piece of spite. Telling his American audience that they wouldn’t have heard of Melanie Phillips, he informed them that she was

infamous as one of the most bigoted and unpleasant journalists in the whole of Britain.

When someone resorts to such gratuitous insults you know they know they have lost the argument. Indeed, Dawkins’s whole presentation in Atlanta surely betrayed unconsciously a note of desperation. For the effort he expended on attempting to rubbish both the deism point and my mockery of him for appearing to believe that ‘little green men’ were a more plausible explanation for the origin of matter than God suggested that this had really got under his skin.

The way he chose to defend himself, through insults and sneers which tried to cover his tracks as he attempted to retreat from what he had said, furthermore merely emphasised his notable reluctance to address the many arguments of substance against his pseudo-scientific attack on religion which were made by John Lennox on the grounds of scientific reason and accuracy – arguments which Dawkins most tellingly chose to ignore altogether. Instead, he went for what he thought were the soft targets -- a credulous Irish Christian and a ‘dreadful woman’ journalist – and substituted smears and jeers for proper debate.

Unfortunately, he fell flat on his face. From this attempt to tarnish his opponents with the charge of dishonesty, we learn instead that for Richard Dawkins truth is a delusion. Who other than the similarly deluded can ever take him seriously again?

 
*Update: Muehlenberg points out here that Dawkins has even misquoted him by spatchcocking two separate remarks to create a misleading statement.

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The torture of the Revealed Truth

In the Sunday Times yesterday Andrew Sullivan claimed, in respect of the controversy over the alleged use of torture by counter-terrorist investigators under the Bush administration, that a senior al Qaeda suspect named abu Zubeydah had given false information under torture that there had been an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda – furthermore, that he had been tortured specifically to get him to make that statement in order to help justify the war in Iraq. Sullivan wrote:

This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for sure.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether such ill-treatment (most or all of which is apparently used on US military personnel during their training) indeed constitutes torture and if so can ever be justified, Sullivan’s claim rests on two core propositions: that Bush had said there was an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, a claim that Sullivan said had been part of the justification for the war in Iraq; and that abu Zubeydah had made this claim under torture but it was false.

The first proposition is untrue. Bush did not at any time say there was an operational link. He said rather that there had been high level contacts, a statement that was repeated in its essence over and over again by Bush, Cheney and Powell -- and confirmed in official reports on the intelligence behind the case for war, which said there was no evidence for an ‘operational’ link but plenty of evidence of repeated contacts.

The anti-Bush lobby has consistently peddled the lie that Bush took the west to war in Iraq on the ‘lie’ that Saddam was operationally linked to al Qaeda -- and even that he claimed Saddam had been involved in 9/11. This claim was always false. Bush said no such thing. What he actually said was that, in the wake of 9/11, Saddam had to be considered a particular threat to America because of a specific combination of factors: his refusal to show he had disposed of the WMD that the UN weapons inspectors said was still unaccounted for in Iraq and which he had had no compunction about using on his own people; his known connections and contacts with terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, suggesting that his WMD might end up in the hands of terrorists; and his unabated aggression towards the west. In his speech on October 8 2002 making the case for war, Bush said of the threat from Iraq:

It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions, its history of aggression and its drive toward an arsenal of terror...The entire world has witnessed Iraq’s 11-year history of defiance, deception, and bad faith. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September 11, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America. Members of the Congress of both political parties, and members of the United Nations Security Council, agree that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace and must disarm. We agree that the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons, and diseases, and gases, and atomic weapons.

... While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone -- because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant, who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility towards the United States. By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime, Iraq is unique...

And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems are not required for a chemical or biological attack -- all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it. And that is the source of our urgent concern about Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorist groups. Over the years, Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than ninety terrorist attacks in twenty countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans. Iraq has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger. And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror, and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace.

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We have learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making, poisons, and deadly gases. And we know that after September 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliances with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

So the claim that Bush lied about Saddam’s ‘operational’ link to al Qaeda to bamboozle us into war is itself untrue.

The second of Sullivan’s claims, that to stop his ‘torture’ abu Zubeydah had falsely told his American interrogators what Bush and Cheney desperately wanted to hear -- that Saddam and al Qaeda had had an operational relationship -- also appears to be undermined by other evidence. Sullivan wrote:

What did the Bush administration gain from torturing Zubaydah? As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair magazine last year, the result of the torture was a confession by Zubaydah that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had a working relationship, the key casus belli for the Iraq war. Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: ‘Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.’

But that doesn’t square with another account of abu Zubeydah’s interrogation. According to Stephen Hayes in his book The Connection, the interrogators drew from abu Zubeydah a very different conclusion. He had given them a ‘mixed bag’ of claims -- which included a denial that Saddam had worked with al Qaeda in any kind of formal alliance. Indeed, as Hayes observed, a highly partial account of this debriefing was used by the New York Times to give the (in turn) misleading impression that – far from telling the White House ‘warmongers’ what they wanted to hear --  abu Zubeydah under interrogation had given the lie to the Bush administration’s claim of links between Saddam and al Qaeda. The NYT said:  

Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr Hussein’s government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency’s classified report on the interrogation. In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said. Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said. The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.

In fact, as Hayes writes, that New York Times spin was misleading. Abu Zubeydah had not denied there had been any links between Saddam and al Qaeda, merely that there had been any formal links – the very conclusion arrived at in the 9/11 and other official reports.  Nevertheless, this was the very opposite of what the malevolent CIA torturers are said to have succeeded in extracting from him. And from Hayes’s account, it appeared that what he told them was rather more subtle. Hayes wrote:

Abu Zubeydah, one of the detainees cited in the Times piece, did indeed tell US interrogators that bin Laden has misgivings about working with Saddam. But he also provided a host of hollow warnings and other reports that investigators later concluded were false and designed to cause panic. Even if Zubeydah was not flatly lying about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, his statements were far more nuanced than the Times story indicated. Zubaydah told his interrogators that bin Laden had rejected the idea of a ‘formal’ alliance with Saddam. But the absence of such an arrangement hardly precludes co-operation.

So from this it appears that abu Zubeydah a) told his interrogators inter alia precisely the opposite of what the anti-Bush lobby now claim that torture induced him to say and b) that what he did say about the Saddam/al Qaeda connection in no way contradicted what the Bush administration said at any time about that connection.

Of course, it may be that Hayes himself is mistaken. In this world of claim and counter-claim by people with shadowy and often deeply partisan agendas, one has to be wary about everything that is said or written. To navigate a path through such a minefield, it is necessary to test all such claims against the reliability and track record of the people saying or writing them, and in the light what is already known to be the case.

And it is the anti-Bush lobby that continues to misrepresent the repeated statements by the Bush administration that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and also to ignore or even deny the evidence stretching back more than a decade of repeated contacts between Saddam and al Qaeda. It is also surely highly significant that the claims rubbishing the value of the information gathered in these interrogations under supposed torture have come from current or former intelligence operatives. Within that most murky world, there has been a group who from 9/11 onwards set out to destabilise the Bush administration through a manipulative campaign of disinformation and selective briefing, either to conceal their own incompetence in having failed to grasp the true danger of Saddam’s regime and the extent of his deceptions, or who are determined to exact revenge for the up-ending of the working assumption underpinning that failure -- that Saddam may have been a bad man but he was our bad man and the world was safer with him remaining in place.

And so we have arrived at the situation where the anti-Bush lobby maintains that abu Zubeydah’s statements under interrogation that there was no link between Saddam and al Qaeda were deliberately suppressed by the Bush administration in order to make its mendacious case for war, and that abu Zubeydah’s statements under interrogation that there was a link between Saddam and al Qaeda were procured by the Bush administration through torture in order to make its mendacious case for war.

But hey, what the hell -- ‘Bush lied, people died’ is the Revealed Truth, and all facts correspondingly have to be wrenched to fit it.

 
The picture above is 'Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy' by Francois Lemoyne, 1737

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Selective moral outrage

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens asks a very simple and very obvious question. Observing the fact that while some 6000 Palestinians (many if not most of them terrorists) have been killed by Israeli fire since the beginning of their Second Intifada against Israel compared with between 25,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians (in a population about one third or one quarter the size of the Palestinians) who have been killed by the Russians during that period, he wonders why the world merely shrugs in indifference at the brutalities in Chechnya while dwelling incessantly and obsessively upon Israel. He asks:

Why, for instance, do high-profile Western writers like Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago make ‘solidarity’ pilgrimages to Ramallah, but not to the Chechen capital of Grozny? Why do British academics organize boycotts of their Israeli counterparts, but not their Russian ones? Why is Palestinian statehood considered a global moral imperative, but statehood for Chechnya is not? Why does every Israeli prime minister invariably become a global pariah, when not one person in a thousand knows the name of Chechen ‘President’ Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who, by many accounts, keeps a dungeon near his house in order to personally torture his political opponents? And why does the fact that Mr. Kadyrov is Vladimir Putin's handpicked enforcer in Chechnya not cause a shudder of revulsion as the Obama administration reaches for the ‘reset’ button with Russia?

 I have a hypothesis. Maybe the world attends to Palestinian grievances but not Chechen ones for the sole reason that Palestinians are, uniquely, the perceived victims of the Jewish state. That is, when they are not being victimized by other Palestinians. Or being expelled en masse from Kuwait. Or being excluded from the labor force in Lebanon. Things you probably didn't know about, either.

Twenty seven years ago, when I was an editorial writer at the Guardian, I asked my senior colleagues there the same question – except that rather than Chechnya I wondered why the paper scarcely covered Arab atrocities against other Arabs. It’s because, they said, third world cultures don’t have the same respect for human life that we do in the west. So it would be wrong for us to expect the same standards from them that we do from ourselves. Which was another way of saying that people who happen to live in the third world do not have the same rights to life and liberty as those in the west; which was to say the lives of people in the third world were worth less than the lives of people in the west.

In my book that’s racism, pure and simple. But it’s the default calibration on the morally relativised, ‘anti-racist’ left. Factor in on top of that the particular bundle of resentments and prejudices towards Jews, and you go a long way towards explaining the pathological obsession with Israel and routine neglect of the world’s actual tyrannies and persecutions, which is such a bizarre feature of public discourse in the west.   

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Another fine anti-terror mess

It’s some small comfort at least that Lord Carlile, the sensible terrorism law watchdog, has taken a personal decision to conduct a review of the debacle in which twelve men, eleven of them Pakistani students plus one British national, were arrested a fortnight ago in Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire amid claims of an enormous Easter terrorist bomb plot, but are not to be charged at all and with the eleven facing instead deportation on national security grounds.

This looks like a fiasco of no small proportion. The police operation appeared to founder when the former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terror Command, Bob Quick, inadvertently revealed details of the impending arrests on a carelessly exposed folder as he emerged from his car. He promptly fell upon his truncheon, and the story was that as a result of his carelessness the arrests had to be brought forward by twelve hours, thus causing police and intelligence officials to scramble to reel in all twelve suspects in what was described by the Prime Minister as

a very big terrorist plot.

But now this whole operation has unravelled. The police have no evidence against any of these men, it seems, that could stand up in court. As a result they will not be charged but instead all but one are to be deported – and predictably, their lawyers are already digging in for a major legal fight on the grounds that their clients pose no threat to national security at all. Given the extreme difficulty in deporting any terror suspects anywhere thanks to the fanatical obstructionism of the ‘human rights’ obsessed English judges (although there are signs that under the pressure of public fury their attitudes might just be changing) we could be in for another judicial and security farce. And meanwhile –equally predictably – Muslims in these northern towns are seizing on the fiasco to claim that the men are totally innocent and that the whole thing was ‘political’.

So was Bob Quick’s blunder responsible for the collapse of this operation? Not necessarily; the real story may well be far worse. A further story which surfaced soon after the arrests suggested that the ‘twelve hours’ line had been a blind thrown out by the police to cover up major disagreements about the conduct of the operation and the timing of the arrests amongst the various police and intelligence agencies involved – the Met, Greater Manchester Police and the Security Service. Today’s Times blog Crime Central is repeating this line:

The blame game over the North-West terror arrest fiasco is in full swing. The intelligence folks say the cops went too early. Scotland Yard says that despite Bob Quick's infamous blunder all the operational decisions were down to Greater Manchester Police, who run the North-West Counter-terrorism Unit. Greater Manchester says there are no disagreements and it acted to protect the public.

This morning’s Times, meanwhile, carried a piece by Andy Hayman, the Met’s former Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, who suggested something else again – that the police had made the arrests before having enough evidence to stand up in court because they feared an atrocity was about to happen:

The difficulty with investigating the threat posed by al-Qaeda, as I found it, is knowing when to make your move. It is one thing to eavesdrop on telephone calls or e-mails. It is a completely different discipline to turn those conversations, which are not admissible in court, into evidence that passes the jury test.

The huge responsibility that goes with the job of fighting terror is judging the balance between when to intervene to stop a possible attack and when to wait, to allow events to unfold so that incriminating evidence can be collected. If you wait too long, there is the danger that public safety is threatened; but waiting that extra hour could be the key to getting the golden nugget that secures a conviction. It is a test of nerve...In this case, it appears that the authorities moved to the arrest phase because they thought that an attack was imminent. That was at the expense of waiting a little bit longer to collect evidence, or to establish the lack of it.

This of course was precisely the argument made by the police to support the introduction of a ’90-days’  period of detention before charge. The point they made then was that, given the unprecedented character of Islamic terrorism, they feared situations where they might have no time to collect court-ready evidence because of the literally suicidal and thus much more volatile and unpredictable nature of the attacks. That was why they wanted more time to assemble court-ready evidence after arrest. That argument was widely scorned in the enormous row that blew up over '90 days' (later reduced) in which the civil liberties lobby ridiculed the proposal as an attempt to terrify the public in order to advance towards a police state – but not scorned, interestingly, by Lord Carlile, who understood that this was indeed a very real dilemma and concern.

So was this just such a situation – or was it simply yet another example of crossed wires and institutional incompetence? We eagerly await Lord Carlile’s verdict.

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An unconscionable farce

Word reaches me that my criticisms below of the approach taken by UK Jewish leaders in the Jewish Human Rights Coalition towards the ‘Durban II’ farce in Geneva have produced a state of near-apoplexy among certain JHRC members and their hangers-on, who believe I have failed to recognise the heroic role these leaders have been playing behind the scenes at this meeting and the terrific results they have achieved. They thus underline how grievously they fail to get the point.

On one particular matter, however, I may have inadvertently giving the wrong impression. I wrote that it was only last Friday, when the JHRC fruitlessly implored Foreign Secretary David Miliband three times to withdraw from the conference, that they appeared to have realised that the event was indeed a travesty and that there were ‘serious concerns’ that could not be overcome. This has been taken to mean in some quarters that I was saying it was the first time the JHRC had asked the government to withdraw. Actually, I didn’t mean that. I meant precisely what I said -- that only on Friday did the JHRC realise the game was now up. But now I realise that this is not so. They still haven’t realised it.

Let’s look first at what the JHRC had actually said about withdrawal before its ‘three phone-call’ agony with Miliband last Friday. Its supporters claim that it had previously urged the government to withdraw.  On March 19, the Jewish Chronicle reported that the President of the Board of Deputies and JHRC member Henry Grunwald had told the BofD the previous weekend that he had

lobbied the British government to withdraw.

But the same story went on:

‘There are ‘red lines’ and we think those lines have been crossed. I wrote to him [Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch Brown] and I am seeking a meeting with him. If they have been crossed, the government should keep the word it has given to us on many occasions and we will keep up the pressure,’ said Mr Grunwald. ‘The arguments are continuing. The Board is actively involved with other Jewish organisations in this country in trying to see if anything can be salvaged from what should be a very important international conference,’ he added. ‘But we are coming to the conclusion that it is beyond redemption.’

‘Coming to the conclusion’ that it was beyond redemption? ‘If’ the red lines had been crossed the government should withdraw? The requested meeting was, it was also reported, to ask the government

to clarify its position.

None of that is the same as having

lobbied the British government to withdraw.

It’s possible, of course, that Grunwald may have done so in his actual letter to Malloch Brown; but that’s not what was reported. Moreover, on March 20, the day after having that meeting with Malloch Brown, Grunwald’s tone had completely changed. The Jewish Chronicle now reported that Grunwald had hailed the newly sanitised draft Declaration for ‘Durban II’ as 

a vast improvement on anything that has been considered before

and that, despite certain problems remaining with the text, it had given him ‘a degree of cautious optimism’ that the Geneva conference would not turn into a repeat of the Durban 2001 anti-Israel hate-fest.

All this ambiguity underlines the main point that I was making – that throughout this whole episode, the UK Jewish leaders have failed to understand the true sting of the ‘very important ‘ Geneva ‘Durban II’ conference and have adopted therefore deeply misguided tactics. In particular, they have repeatedly drawn a distinction between the potential undesirability of the UK government being involved in Geneva – which they accepted -- and the extreme desirability of themselves being involved. They failed to grasp the incoherence of their position: after all, if their own participation could improve matters, why did that not apply also to the government?

They thought they could help remove the worst aspects of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice from the text and prevent a re-run of the Durban 2001 hate-fest. But what they principally wanted to avoid was the vicious anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that had poured out of the NGOs at the 2001 Durban meeting. They didn’t seem to grasp that the real problem was the official Declaration produced at that conference which singled out Israel for defamation as part of the UN’s campaign to delegitimise it. Indeed, some months ago I was told by one prominent JHRC member that there had been no problem with that Declaration, only with the NGOs.

Thus they doubly and triply miscalculated. For the whole point of this week’s Geneva conference, as its own Declaration makes clear, is to reaffirm the official text of Durban 2001. So any improvements to the text of the Geneva Declaration would therefore be worse than useless because they would merely serve to sanitise the process whose core mission is to reaffirm Durban 2001, thus institutionalising within the UN the libellous delegitimisation of Israel as a racist state.  Worse even than that, by taking part they actually helped legitimise the entire process -- and thus made it easier for the British government to take its own appalling decision to attend the conference.

True, the British delegation took part in yesterday’s walk-out when Ahmadinejad embarked on his demented anti-Jewish rant. But this mass walk-out was little more than a shallow stunt since, with the exception of the Czech Republic, everyone promptly went back into the conference after Ahmadinejad left. And as Obama (to his credit)  finally recognised, that conference remains unconscionable because it reaffirms the racist declaration of Durban 2001.

The fact is that even if Ahmadinejad had not turned up the Geneva conference was always going to be a travesty of human rights. With Iran as its vice-chair, Libya as the chair of the ‘Main Committee’ running the conference and Cuba acting as rapporteur, how could this ‘anti-racism’ meeting ever be anything other than a two-finger gesture by some of the world’s leading tyrannies to the cause of freedom and true human rights? It should have been shunned; and if it had been from the outset, the chances are that it would not have taken place at all.

Grotesquely, activists such as those protesting at my remarks are now actually congratulating themselves for ‘achieving a lot’ at Geneva, which they seem to think represents some kind of victory. They thus appear unable to see beyond their own enormous egos. Taking the credit for lobbying, arranging interviews, ‘gathering information on hostile NGOs’, monitoring antisemitic incidents around the complex and helping the noisy protests during Ahmadinejad’s speech is simply grandstanding on the back of an obscene event which should never have been allowed to happen.

The fact remains that Geneva provided a platform for Ahmadinejad -- on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday and the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day -- to pose hideously as a champion of human rights while implicitly denying the Holocaust once again and defaming Israel – which he has repeatedly threatened to wipe out -- as a destroyer of those rights. And what was the mass walk-out other than an utterly hypocritical act of gesture politics? After all, it’s not as if anyone can have been surprised at what Ahmadinejad said. Every single person who turned up to hear him had a pretty good idea of what he was going to say. His appearance did not reduce the Geneva conference to a farce: it simply exposed it for the farce that it already was and rubbed the participants’ noses in it.

While the JHRC was congratulating itself for helping organise the protests against him, the Arab states sat there and applauded. The prestige and legitimacy thus afforded to Ahmadinejad’s foaming hatred towards Israel and the Jewish people will have been amplified throughout the Arab and Muslim world; and so too will the power and danger of the Iranian revolutionary regime. The BBC reports that the Iranian state media described Ahmadinejad as the

superstar of the conference... One pro-government paper said the president had shot the last bullet into the brain of the West.

If the free nations had shunned Geneva from the start, this damaging outcome could have been averted.  As it is, Ahmadinejad’s remarks are today front page news around the world. The UK and US governments (despite the last-minute American withdrawal, its previous ambiguous attitude prevented other countries from following the lead of Canada and Israel in refusing to have anything to do with ‘Durban II’) along with the other participants in this travesty all helped make this happen -- and have thus helped strengthen the clenched Iranian fist yet further.

Nor have the British Jews apparently yet learned their lesson even now. The reason  I wrote that on Friday they finally realised the whole thing was a travesty was that I thought they were finally calling it a day. Not so. For as they are now boasting to each other, they are still working behind the scenes to sanitise the Declaration yet further:

In parallel with all of the activity around the Ahmadinejad speech work on securing the best possible text in the document has continued quietly in the background.

Even now they still fail to grasp that ‘securing the best possible text’ will merely legitimise a process that should have been placed unambiguously beyond the pale.

Ten countries are now boycotting Geneva altogether: Israel, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The British government delegation may have walked out of Ahmadinejad’s rant, but it has still not withdrawn from the conference itself which goes on until Thursday. It is thus still underpinning the unconscionable. So are all those others who are still attending a conference they say has descended into ‘a circus’. But if it is indeed now just a ‘circus’, why are they still there? Why is the conference continuing at all?

The really terrible thing is that, for all the pious expressions of shock and horror at Ahmadinejad’s speech, many of his odious and even deranged claims are now common currency amongst the western intelligentsia. The oppressive ‘power grab’ of European colonialism; the creation of Israel ‘in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe’; the ‘aggression, brutalities and the bombardment of civilians in Gaza’; the ‘military action against Iraq planned by the Zionists and their allies in the then US administration in complicity with the arms manufacturing countries and the possessors of wealth’; America’s responsibility for the global financial meltdown after it introduced ‘laws and regulations in defiance of all moral values only to protect the interests of the possessors of wealth and power... And today, they are injecting hundreds of billions of dollars of cash from the pockets of their own people and other nations into the failing banks, companies and financial institutions making the situation more and more complicated for their economy and their people’; the identification of Zionism with racism and the need therefore to ‘eradicate’ it; all these monstrous and genocidal myths that featured in Ahmadinejad’s speech are now the commonplaces of western political and intellectual discourse.

After all, did not even Jeremy Paxman, the grand inquisitor of BBC TV’s Newsnight, ask on the programme last night in the course of an otherwise vigorous dissection of the UK government’s hypocrisy in walking out:

What is the difference between Zionism and racism?

The real sting of the Geneva circus is that the Islamist agenda of delegitimising Israel, Jewish peoplehood and thus Judaism itself is actually being endorsed within the west. Which is why so many countries decided to turn up – and which is why Ahmadinejad may actually have done the cause of human rights a back-handed favour, in leaving those who would otherwise have had barely a qualm in endorsing Durban II nowhere now to hide.

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Short shrift for Israel's human rights in Londonistan

So in the end, at the eleventh hour and fifty ninth minute on the eve of the ‘Durban 2’  anti-anti-racism, anti-Israel hatefest that starts in Geneva tomorrow, the US finally decided not to attend – but appallingly, Britain has decided to turn up. Despite the harm it had done in participating for a week in the preparatory meeting for this disgusting farce and then ambiguously withdrawing, the Obama administration finally did the only decent thing – while perfidious Albion has lived up to its name once again.

The US finally decided to boycott the meeting because, as it said,despite improvements to the text of the draft declaration it still crossed the red lines the US had set down:

‘The text still contains language that reaffirms in toto the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action [DDPA] from 2001, which the United States has long said it is unable to support,’ it said in a statement. ‘Its inclusion in the review conference document has the same effect as inserting that original text into the current document and re-adopting it. The DDPA singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. The United States also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding “incitement”, that run counter to the US commitment to unfettered free speech.’

But the British government apparently has no such concerns. Despite having originally set out similar ‘red lines’, it has unceremoniously junked them. We must therefore assume that either it doesn’t care that the declaration singles out Israel alone for defamation and falsehoods -- along with threatening free speech -- or it actively supports such sentiments. We can also see that it has no problem with attending a ’human rights’ meeting which is to be addressed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the butcher of Iranian human rights and promoter of genocide against the Jews.

What does that tell us about Britain’s concern for human rights and the defeat of Jew-hatred? Australia, Germany and the Netherlands have now joined the US, Canada, Italy and Israel in the boycott -- but Britain is still in there. What a statement about the post-Blair UK government’s changed attitude to Israel – or to be more precise, reversion to historic Arabist type. In Londonistan, there is to be short shrift indeed for Israel.

In a sanctiminious piece of humbug, Britain tried to justify its decision by saying it wasn’t sending a minister, only a delegation headed by the UK ambassador to the UN – big deal! – and also said that it was attending to try to

actively lobby the conference participants to include language in the final draft statement condemning anti-semitism as well as promoting the remembrance of the Holocaust.

But Britain knows perfectly well that since those things were taken out of or watered down in the draft declaration as a result of the process of ‘improving’ it, there is no chance they will now be put back; and even if they were, such words would be worse than meaningless since the crucial point -- and the reason why any participation in this process was so odious -- is that regardless of the text of the 'Durban 2' declaration, the whole point of the thing is to reaffirm the 2001 Durban Declaration, a piece of anti-Jewish spite which singles out Israel for libellous vilification. That is what the British government finds no difficulty, apparently, in swallowing, regardless of what it said to the contrary until now.

That core purpose of 'Durban 2' to ratify Durban 2001 was something the leadership of British Jews in the guise of the Jewish Human Rights Coalition -- who obdurately insisted on taking part in the negotiations ‘to improve the text’ -- resolutely refused to grasp. But having finally run out of rope with which to hang themselves, they are apparently amazed and aghast that the UK government is actually going to attend. In a statement released today, they inform the world that two days ago they

took the opportunity to underline the full extent of communal concern around the conference

to the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on no fewer than three separate occasions that day -- fancy! -- and urged him to consider

serious concerns about the conduct and atmosphere of the event itself

which threatened to be a ‘travesty’. But since it wasn’t until Friday that the leadership of British Jews decided that this event was indeed a travesty and that there were ‘serious concerns’ that could not be overcome; and since their participation up to that point had been sanitising and legitimising what was always going to be a travesty even before Ahmadinejad decided to come and rub everyone’s noses in it, it is hardly surprising that the British Foreign Secretary was deaf to their sudden and belated horror. Indeed, even in their statement today they make no mention of the core issue of the defamation of Israel – their only stated anxieties are the failure to include unambiguous references to the Holocaust, and

serious concerns about the conduct and atmosphere of the event itself.

They have in short made utter fools of themselves, and have proved once again to be worse than useless defenders of Israel.

The British government systematically betrayed the Jews of pre-Israel Palestine in the 1930s -- during which period the leadership of British Jews generally followed suit in their indifference, ambivalence or outright hostility to the putative restored Jewish homeland and refuge from persecution. History is today repeating itself in more ways than one.

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The facade cracks

The BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee has censured its Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen for breaching the BBC’s rules on impartiality and accuracy in his coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The ruling was in response to a formal complaint filed by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and a similar complaint filed independently by a member of the UK’s Zionist Federation about two specific reports.

The first point to note is that, using the narrowest possible criteria to judge the items in question, the Trust found only relatively minor failings – conclusions which managed with singular obtuseness to ignore the real sting of what Bowen had said. For example, in his report to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Six-Day War, ‘How 1967 Defined The Middle East’, the committee concluded about Bowen’s reference to ‘Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier’

that this statement had been unqualified and, as a result it had not been clear and precise and that there had been a breach of the guideline on accuracy in this respect.

‘Unqualified’ seems to be a reference to differing views about the ‘innateness’ of Zionism – including the absurd justification by Bowen that, since the first Zionists had started with one kibbutz, the frontiers had clearly been pushed out to found the state itself! But since the history of Zionism has demonstrably involved not a pushing out of the frontier but a successive pulling back of the frontier – with the British first shrinking the putative Jewish homeland in Palestine by some 75 per cent, and then proposing to cut it in half, and with Israel subsequently giving up Sinai and Gaza and having offered to give up most of the West Bank in 1967 and in 2000 -- to criticise this statement for being merely ‘unqualified’ and not ‘clear and precise’ seems, to put it mildly, understated to the point of obduracy.

On Bowen’s statement that Israel showed a ‘defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own’, the Trust found that

‘everyone’ was a loose use of language. It would have been perfectly possible to have qualified this as ‘nearly everyone’ or ‘the vast majority’, and that would have been acceptable.

This was a nod towards the fact that noted experts in international law, such as former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Eugene Rostow who was instrumental in drawing up the seminal UN Resolution 242, have said not only that the settlements are legal but have drawn attention to the fact that under still-binding Mandatory law Jews have been legally entitled to settle throughout the West Bank and Gaza for the past six decades.

What the committee chose completely to ignore was the innate (to coin a phrase) bias involved in focusing upon Israel’s alleged illegal actions while ignoring altogether the sustained illegality of the Arab states and the Arabs of the territories in maintaining their belligerency against Israel’s existence – in conspicuous defiance of international law since 1948; indeed, one might say since the 1920s – not to mention perpetrating acts of terrorism and promoting genocide. If the BBC’s Middle East Editor is fulminating against breaches of international law in the Middle East, doesn’t the most conservative interpretation of the word ‘impartiality’ in the BBC’s handbook necessarily mean that the Arabs’ egregious breaches of such law – the actual cause of the Middle East conflict -- should be acknowledged in such a report?

On Bowen’s statement that

the Israeli generals, hugely self-confident, mainly sabras (native-born Israeli Jews) in their late 30s and early 40s had been training to finish the unfinished business of Israel’s independence war of 1948 for most of their careers

the Trust found

that the phrase ‘hugely self-confident’ was used in this context to characterise the different attitudes to war between the native-born generals and the older, largely immigrant, politicians;

that this was a generalisation and that it would hold even if some of the generals had episodes of doubt or fear; and

that there had been no breach of the guideline on accuracy.

ii) On ‘unfinished business’

that, although the Middle East Editor stated that he had meant it to be understood that he was referring to the capture of East Jerusalem, it would have been impossible for a reader of the article to know which ‘unfinished business’ had been meant; and that there had been a breach of the guideline on accuracy with regard to the use of ‘clear, precise language’ in this respect.

To say that this language wasn’t ‘clear ‘or ‘precise’ enough is a judgment of quite perverse marginality. To accuse the Israelis in 1967 -- fighting a defensive war which they certainly had not sought; indeed, they were petrified of losing it and thought their end had come -- of trying to ‘finish the business’ of the previous war of self-defence they had fought in 1948 implies that both these events were wars of Israeli aggression rather than, as they actually were, defensive wars against annihilation. It’s as if Britain’s generals, after war was declared against Nazi Germany in 1939, stood accused of having been ‘training to finish the unfinished business of the fight against German aggression in 1914-18 for most of their careers’. As CAMERA observed at the time of Bowen’s report:

It is nothing short of shocking to read this last quote on the Web site of a mainstream media organization, as it absolutely turns reality on its head. It was not Israel, but rather the Arab world which by its own admission had sought to take care of the ‘unfinished business’ it had failed to achieve in 1948 — the destruction of Israel. This view was epitomized by Iraqi president Abdel Rahman Aref, who shortly before the war declared: ‘The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948.’

What was so outrageous about Bowen’s article was that it rewrote history and inverted victim and belligerent to suggest Israel was the aggressor in 1967, was stronger than the Arabs and had a lust for war. As Sir Martin Gilbert pointed out to the committee, this was simply historically wrong:

The Arabs were not ready for combat …but they were in a stronger position overall so it’s not an accurate reflection… To say ‘the Jewish Goliath had never been stronger…’ was not true – it was well armed to DEFEND itself against attack. I would disagree with that quite strongly.

But the reason the committee's criticisms of Bowen were so muted was that time and again it disregarded the opinion of Sir Martin Gilbert in favour of revisionist historian Avi Shlaim – Israel’s equivalent of Jon Pilger with a chip on his shoulder the size of Iraq against the Ashkenazi world.

The second point to note, however, is that although the complaints against Bowen were only partially upheld the wave of reaction from the Israel-bashers to this limited censure of such obscenity has been enormous. This is because, regardless of the details, any finding of bias or inaccuracy by the BBC Trust against its most senior Middle East journalist is of the greatest significance. It is the first time the BBC has acknowledged specific bias in its Middle East reporting -- thus itself puncturing the assiduously created myth that any claims of such bias are merely a reflection of the absence of objectivity amongst those Jews who claim this to be so. The reputation of BBC News as a global kitemark of objectivity is accordingly badly tarnished – all the more so because, to fend off precisely such accusations of bias towards Israel (which led to the commissioning of a report on the BBC’s Middle East coverage by Malcolm Balen, publication of which the BBC has actually gone to court to prevent and which remains secret to this day) Bowen was appointed Middle East editor in order to remove any accusations of bias.

Hence the foaming fury amongst the Israel-bashers, whose edifice of lies is maintained by casting critics who dare to call this by its proper name as a supremely manipulative lobby merely peddling their own paranoid propaganda -- and whose nefarious power is supposedly proved in turn by their very protests. Indeed, calls by Jews for this committee’s findings to lead to further action -- along with criticism of the BBC's own attempt to paper over the crack that has now opened up in its own facade -- are being seized upon by the Israel-bashers as further confirmation of the World Jewish Conspiracy, just as criticisms by Jews of the committee’s findings as weak are being seized upon as further confirmation of the World Jewish Conspiracy.

In the Independent, Robert Fisk appeared to be at risk of an aneurysm as a result of the committee’s report. The ‘cruelly named’ Trust was

pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest... pitiful... preposterous... nauseous (sic)

all because it offered highly circumscribed criticisms of a perspective that to Fisk cannot be gainsaid in any way, shape or form because the Original Sin of Israel is the Revealed and Perfect Truth. Just think what would have happened to poor Fisk’s health had the BBC Trust upheld the complaints in full!

Indeed, so completely and utterly unbelievable is it that the Bowen /Fisk axis of propaganda can be faulted on anything at all that seemingly there can be only one explanation for what has happened. The BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee members are apparently incapable of having reversed the axis of the earth like this all by themselves. To Fisk, they have been manipulated into doing so by the evil of evils, the Israel lobby, which clearly has truly demonic power to take hapless BBC committee members, shut down their brain function and turn them into zombie-like pawns of the Zionazi conspiracy. It is the Protocols of the Elders of Portland Place.

Truly, Fisk is a national treasure. If there was ever any doubt that Israel and the Jewish people were up against a truly malevolent and irrational force, Robert Fisk repeatedly lays it to rest.

Bowen and Fisk -- the Mutt and Jeff of the Israel-bashing media world.

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Intermission

Posting will be taking a pause now for a few days. A happy Easter and peaceful Passover to all.

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The hand of appeasement

An aghast Amil Imani, an Iranian who always tells it how it is, registers his profound shock at Obama’s appeasement of the Iranian regime:

Mr. President, the Iranian people do not recognize the Islamic Republic as a country, but call these terrorists occupiers who must leave Iran or to be crushed decisively by hook or by crook. President Obama, what is it that you do not understand? Why is it so difficult for you to comprehend that the Islamic regime is a terrorist entity and the Iranian nation is fed up with them? Nothing less than an overthrow of this bloodthirsty regime is acceptable to millions of Iranians.

...We simply ask you stop appeasing the Islamists all over the world and given them legitimacy... Mr. President, ‘Change, Yes We Can’ was not about changing America to Socialism, Communism or Marxism and appeasement or softening your tone about the Taliban or Muslim extremists. It was not about emptying out our treasury department and writing hot checks as though it belongs to you. Only a person who has no allegiance to the United States constitution would terrorize Americans with anti-American agendas, one after another, and create fear in the hearts of the American people.

Alas, it was only too plain from the moment Obama burst upon the scene that all of this was precisely his agenda. Imani continues:

President Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as president, declared Monday ‘The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.’

Mr. President, first and foremost, you made a fool out of yourself again. Your ill-advised coziness with the Muslim nations will bring down our nation faster than any foreign enemy. America has never been at war with Islam. On the contrary, it is Islam that has waged a war with the infidels and wants to conquer the world.

And with Obama in the White House, it has its best chance yet of doing so.

It is indeed beyond amazing that a President of the United States can behave with such an embarrassing ignorance of history (the latest such absurdity was that he thinks Islam has helped shape America; as Robert Spencer writes, this is an utter delusion), adolescent naivety (how North Korea and Iran must be splitting their sides at a Commander-in-Chief who thinks if America Bans its own Bomb, they and every other rogue state will follows suit), disloyalty towards his own country (for which he never stops apologising); and suicidal idiocy in grovelling to its enemies.

But then it is beyond amazing that such a man could ever have been elected President in the first place.

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