The game is up -- but they're all still playing

Thirteen days to go, and the draft declaration for ‘Durban 2’ – the vicious anti-Israel hate-fest being held under the auspices of the satirically named UN Human Rights Council on April 20, which I wrote about here, here, here, here, and here – still ‘reaffirms’ the 2001 Durban Declaration which singles out Israel alone for libellous vilification as a racist state – thus attacking it for the very crime of which it is not only wholly innocent but is actually the victim. This was one of the supposed sticking points which the EU, America and other so-called civilised nations said would be enough to stop them participating in Durban 2. But it’s still there and guess what – the EU, according to Anne Bayefsky,isn’t objecting and the US still hasn’t decided whether or not it will go to Geneva after all.

The very fact that any decent country or organisation has had anything to do with this wholly disreputable meeting is itself disgraceful. Supposedly going along with it in order to sanitise the language ‘otherwise we will withdraw’, all they have achieved is some minor cosmetic adjustments – and yet they haven’t walked out. Here’s the disgusting game that’s being played:

The OIC countries are locked in a struggle with EU states over the ability to stifle free speech (such as ‘defaming’ Islam) in the name of protecting religion. The Russian move helps the OIC nations by letting them use the antisemitism clause as a bargaining chip, to be played in exchange for the EU’s allowing free-speech restrictions. In a related issue, the Danish are unhappy with the mention of something the U.N. invented called ‘anti-Arabism.’ That phrase has been inserted in the paragraph about discrimination in the form of Islamophobia, Christianophobia and anti-semitism. But the rest of the EU has told the Danes to get lost, on the grounds that if the EU proposes deleting anti-Arabism, the OIC will insist on deleting antisemitism. As EU officials explain to observers, ‘We want to show restraint.’

Otherwise known as agreeing to an equivalence between truth and lies, the post-moral EU’s stock -in-trade. But the draft declaration remains what it was always going to be – a means of reactivating the Durban Declaration, and with it the smearing and delegitimisation of Israel: the Jew of the world which is being lined up for slaughter, with the west acting as mute accomplice.

Update: Here'sa further report from Anne Bayefsky about the amendments to the draft declaration being suggested by Iran for improving human rights. Surreal.

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The first test

Both Professor Eytan Gilboa and John Bolton, here and here have observed that the crisis over North Korea has a significance beyond itself. It is the first major test of Obama – and how he reacts will tell the world how he intends to deal with Iran.

So far he could hardly have performed more stupidly. Here’s Bolton:

Incredibly, U.S. Special Envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth revealed -- just a few days before the launch -- that he was ready to visit Pyongyang and resume the six-party talks once the "dust from the missiles settles." It is no wonder the North fired away. Once the missile shot was complete, the administration's answer was hand-wringing, more rhetoric and, oh yes, the obligatory trip to the U.N. Security Council so that it could scold the defiant DPRK. Beyond whatever happens in the Security Council, Mr. Obama seems to have no plan whatever.

...Iran has carefully scrutinized the Obama administration's every action, and Tehran's only conclusion can be: It is past time to torque up the pressure on this new crowd in Washington. Not only is Iran's back now covered by its friends Russia, China and others on the U.N. Security Council, but it sees an American president so ready to bend his knee for public favor in Europe that the mullahs' wish list for U.S. concessions will grow by the minute.

Obama believes that offering a hand of friendship to the enemies of civilisation turns swords into ploughshares. If he is not persuaded otherwise, he will test that craven theory to destruction. Our destruction.

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Delivering Israel to the Arabs

As was entirely predictable, Obama has gone to his good friends the Saudis to help him throw Israel under the bus. Having bowed deeply to the Saudi King Abdullah when they were in London last week (an image which tells you everything you need to know -- and so has been conspicuous by its absence from the msm; the Queen, by contrast, merited only a protocol-busting hand on the back) Obama, according to his Middle East envoy George Mitchell, is adopting the Saudi Israel destruction 'peace' plan as his solution to the Middle East impasse. Ha'aretz reports:

The Arab peace initiative will be part of the Obama administration's policy toward the Middle East, the United States special envoy to the region said. The 2002 initiative offers to normalize relations between the entire Arab region and Israel, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories including East Jerusalem, the establishment of a Palestinian State and a ‘just settlement’ for Palestinian refugees.

That ‘just settlement’ in the Saudi destruction plan means the unlimited immigration into Israel of the Arabs of the territories, which would mean the end of Israel. It would certainly result in two states – both of them Arab. Has there ever been a dispute whose proposed solution is the establishment of a state for people clamouring for one of their own plus their right to live in someone else’s country? How can this possibly be said to be a fair settlement? Contrary to the propaganda, those Arabs have no legal or moral claim on Israel any more than the descendants of any other population displaced through war – even less so in this case because they were displaced through their own illegal aggression in a war which they continue to wage to this day.

In similar vein, giving up east Jerusalem, to which Israel has an overwhelming claim according to both international law and historical attachment and presence, would expose Jerusalem’s Jewish inhabitants to an annihilatory genocidal regime – most probably standing proxy for Iran – literally in the neighbouring streets. (It would also mean the desecration not only of Jewish holy places, as happened before 1967when under illegal Jordanian occupation synagogues and cemeteries were destroyed and Jews were forbidden to pray at the Western Wall, but of Christian ones too – remember the destruction by the Taleban of the Buddhas of Banyam.) This would therefore be the most unjust settlement of any dispute in the world.

The adoption of this plan by the Obama administration means that all its protestations about safeguarding Israel’s security are totally worthless. It has now thrown its weight behind the destruction of Israel.

What is that eerie sound? It is the continuing silence of America’s Jews.

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The nerve! Doesn't this man realise that black is white?

Here is a standard boilerplate Israeli reaction to Avigdor Lieberman’s speech, which I remarked upon here. Writer Eitan Haber comments that the foreign Minister needs some tutoring before he says such foolish things as the fact that Israel failed to achieve anything from the concessions it made as part of the Oslo peace process, since that process apparently led to the approval of Israel by the world, a doubling of the education budget, the building of new roads and Ben Gurion airport and the eradication of cancer (ok, I made that last bit up).

What Haber fails to acknowledge is a) the world approved of Israel during Oslo because it thought that now Israel would never again use military force to defend itself, which of course Jews are forbidden by the world to do, and b) that it was during the Oslo years that admiration for ‘plucky little Israel’ somehow got translated to ‘Israel is a Nazi state’ in 2000 when the suicide bombers of the Second Intifada were unleashed upon its buses and pizza parlours and Israel took measures to stop the carnage. 

This was not a coincidence.

However, since it appears that in the theatre of the absurd that in Israel passes for a political system the Foreign Minister may soon get carted off to jail for corruption, the excitement over the rare wisdom he has enunciated may be distinctly premature.

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Israel gets up off its knees

Well, well. Two days into the new Netanyahu government, and Israel gets up off its knees. First off, Netanyahu tells Obama ‘Stop Iran or we will’. Then Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his maiden speech restores the all-but forgotten notion that people must actually adhere to their agreements. You want two states, he says? Fine. Israel will work towards that – but there is already an agreement on the table, called the Road Map, which sets out the steps that must be followed, one by one, to achieve that end:

Israel will adhere to every step; so must the Palestinians: We will adhere to it to the letter, exactly as written. Clauses one, two, three, four – dismantling terrorist organizations, establishing an effective government, making a profound constitutional change in the Palestinian authority. We will proceed exactly according to our clauses. We are also obligated to implement what is required of us in each clause, but so is the other side.

The brilliance of this proposition is that it calls the bluff of those who blame Israel for the failure to proceed to a two-state settlement – ignoring completely the fact that the Road Map process broke down because the Palestinians failed to implement a single one of their requirements. In other words, Lieberman has recalled people sharply to reality.

He also put the Middle East impasse in its correct perspective in a very sharp rebuke to a world which has lost the plot:

The claim that what is threatening the world today is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a way of evading reality. The reality is that the problems are coming from the direction of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq... We have proven our desire for  peace more than any other country in the world. No country has made concessions the way Israel has. Since 1977, we have given up areas of land three times the size of the State of Israel. So we have proven the point.

... When was Israel at its strongest in terms of public opinion around the world? After the victory of the Six Day War, not after all the concessions in Oslo Accords I, II, III and IV. Anyone who wants to maintain his status in public opinion must understand that if he wants respect, he must first respect himself.

Lieberman is a controversial politician who has been called a fascist. Such a speech will undoubtedly attract yet more name-calling. But the fact is that it’s been a very long time since an Israeli politician has stood up to the world’s amoral bullying in this way by the novel expedient of actually telling truth to power instead of scrabbling in disarray before it. Israel has now thrown down a gauntlet. It will be interesting to see how America responds.

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The answer to Obama's hand of friendship

As we all know, stupid politics involves defending ourselves militarily against those waging war upon us. Smart politics is reaching out a hand of friendship to our enemies instead, inviting them to unclench their fist. They know it makes sense. Who would not want the goodies that would flow from such a gesture, after all?

This is Ahmadinejad’s response to Obama’s  sustained charm offensive towards Iran:

Thanks to the steadfastness of the Iranian nation, which stands behind the dear leader [Khamenei], this nation continues in its glorious path and is known to the world as a nation that cannot be defeated. Today, thanks to great achievements, the threat to Iran has been lifted, and no power in the world entertains the notion of taking action against the Iranian nation. Even if someone were to entertain this notion and want to undertake any act of aggression against the nation… he should know that the Iranian nation is ready, and any hand outstretched in order to attack will be cut off.

And this is the Taleban’s response to Obama’s wish to reach out to the moderate elements of the Taleban:

According to a report in a Pashtu-language newspaper, the Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan has declared that the Taliban do not have hardliners and moderates in their party, and that they will not talk to the Afghan government and the U.S. unless the foreign troops leave Afghanistan.

... The Taliban fighters of the Mullah Dadullah Front in Afghanistan have rejected the offer of talks from U.S. President Barack Obama to moderate Taliban and have said they are not ready to hold negotiations with Obama, according to a March 9 report in a Pashtu-language newspaper in Pakistan. The report quoted a spokesman of Mulla Dadullah Front, Rahbarmal, as saying that the Taliban will continue jihad under the leadership of Mullah Omar...

Looks like Obama’s hand of friendship is causing fists to clench even more. Smart.

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Into the teapot in Londonistan

You might think this is an April 1 spoof but alas, it is in deadly earnest. An article on Guardian Comment is Free by Robert Lambert and Jonathan Gizens-Mather is an unabashed pitch for radical Islamism, a piece which stands truth, reason and morality on their heads in virtually every line and sides openly with those who wish to destroy the free world. Lamenting

an unnecessary schism

between the government and British Islamists, it cites as evidence first the

government failure to condemn Israel in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead [which] exposed a bias towards Israel and an ambivalence towards the value of Palestinian lives that angered British Islamists.

But the British government did not fail to condemn Israel. It condemned it virtually from the start as a ‘disproportionate’ operation that was ‘killing too many people’, and said this repeatedly thereafter. What this claim appears to be referring to was the government’s observation made from the other side of its mouth that Israel was entitled to protect its citizens against Hamas rocket attack. The idea that innocent Palestinians were targeted by Israel which thus deemed them to be worthless -- rather than what actually happened, which was that Hamas were targeted to prevent the further killing of Israeli innocents and it was Hamas, using innocent Palestinians as human shields and bonb fodder, who deemed their lives to be worthless --  is one of the lies promulgated by the Arab and Muslim world.

The second piece of evidence is Communities Minister Hazel Blears’s

ill-judged assault on Daud Abdullah and the Muslim Council of Britain. Taken together these incidents reinforce concerns that British Islamists are uniquely held out for political attack, and illustrate the power of key anti-Islamist lobbying groups. The result is a feeling that the government holds Islamists to a different political standard based on a Bush-ite principle of ‘either you are with us or against us’, where the ‘us’ is clearly not Muslim.

Let us remind ourselves why the minister insisted that the MCB disavow Daud Abdullah, the MCB’s deputy director-general, before the government would deal with it again. Daud Abdullah signed the Istanbul Declaration in which, inter alia, he called on all Muslims, including those in Britain, to take up arms against any forces, including British ones, should they ever seek to prevent arms from getting to Hamas to be used to murder more Israeli citizens. This is what the authors believe is holding Islamists

to a different political standard...

To which one might ask – different from what? It is the same standard required of all British Muslims – not just Islamists – along with every other minority and the indigenous majority, ie, all British citizens, that they do not take up arms against their own country, and that they do not support terrorism anywhere in the world. It is the authors who are requiring the government to hold Islamists who take this position to a different standard from everyone else.

Indeed, given that Islamism is the shorthand for politicised Islam, according to whose tenets there can be no secular government and so Britain and the world must be conquered by Islam by both violent and cultural means depending on circumstances, the authors -- using a sanitised definition of Islamism which fails to make this clear -- are promoting what used to be called sedition, and then arguing that it is outrageous to treat its adherents differently from anyone else. (The authors nevertheless make their one truthful -- if back-handedly revealing -- point in observing that Abdullah Quilliam, the British Muslim whose name has been taken by the Quilliam Foundation as a supposed example of how Islamic precepts can be reconciled with British values, was himself an outright Islamist who wanted Britain to become an Islamic state).

The authors strive to present Daud Abdullah and the MCB as ‘mainstream’ Islamists, as opposed to the ‘extremists’ of Hizb ut Tahrir and Islam For The UK. This is a totally specious distinction. All Islamists are extreme by definition, because they do not accept secular government and refuse to live by its tenets, devoting themselves instead to its overthrow and replacement by Islamic rule. The fact that they have different strategies for achieving that end -- some of which, as exemplified by the MCB, use the democratic system to undermine itself -- certainly does not obviate their common extremism and the threat they pose to British and western societies. The idea that some Islamists are Bad because they speak unambiguously about the threat they pose while other Islamists who veil that threat in more acceptable language are therefore Good and even a useful tool against the Bad Islamists is as ridiculous as it is lethal. Yet this is a continuum which the government -- the Daud Abdullah affair aside -- refuses to acknowledge, as the growing phalanx of Islamist 'counter-extremism' advisers within Whitehall continues so egregiously to advertise.

Which brings me to why this particular article -- whose proposterous bad faith is after all replicated time and again in other Guardian columns -- merits such attention. It is because Robert Lambert is a former Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism officer.

Amazing to report, as head of the Muslim Contact Unit within the Met’s Counter-Terror Command Lambert employed two Salafists (Islamists) as officers on the basis that – as he has stated -- terrorism cannot be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with the Salafists. Now we can see how his position has developed, from using Salafists to defeat other Salafists into becoming a Salafist apologist himself.

Lambert may no longer be a serving police officer; but the fact that the Met could employ such a man in such a post says all you need to know about counter-terrorism in Londonistan.

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