Just whose side is he on?

6:41pm

Chas W Freeman has now been confirmed as Obama’s pick for the chairmanship of America’s National Intelligence Council. This appointment, to a post which oversees production of America’s National Intelligence Estimates and shapes America’s understanding of the threat posed by the world’s rogue regimes and terror organisations, has caused even Obama supporters to choke into their cappuccinos. For Freeman is not simply, as I wrote here, in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, with ties to the bin Laden family after 9/11. Seven months after 9/11, he told the Washington Institute: 

I accept that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden almost certainly perpetrated the September 11 attacks.

He is not simply a vicious enemy of Israel, pushing for a one-state solution ie the destruction of Israel.

He is not simply a supporter of the Walt/Mearsheimer anti-Jew canard that ‘the Jewish lobby’ manipulates American foreign policy in the interests of Israel. He bragged about the fact that the Saudi-funded body of which he is president, the Middle East Policy Council, not only published the Walt/Mearsheimer paper but interviewed Dr Azzam Tamimi of Hamas on the subject of Hamas in power.

Worse yet, he is also an intimate of the Iranian and Chinese regimes. According to Sultan Knish, he is co-chair of the US China Policy Foundation and the American Iranian Council, with offices in Iran and holder of the Order of Abd Al-Aziz, 1st Class. He called Hezbollah -- Iran's proxy terrorist organisation --  a legitimate outgrowth of Lebanese nationalism and denied that it was an Iranian puppet.

He is also on the international advisory board of the China National Offshore Oil Co. CNOOC is controlled by the Chinese government and has designs on American oil companies.  He sided with the Chinese government over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the Chinese regime turned its tanks upon demonstrating dissidents. In 2006 he wrote of that event:

The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud... I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be.

Given this man’s closeness to the enemies of America, doesn’t his appointment to the heart of American intelligence compromise the security of that intelligence – and at a time of maximum danger from the regimes with which he is involved, threaten all of us in the free world as a result?

In recent years, America has understandably looked askance at the threat to its security posed by radical Islamists in Britain. But now, Britain and the other nations of the west must really start asking themselves whether America is still on their side.

 

 

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Another ruling in the US vaccine court

5:26pm

Seven days ago, the US vaccine court awarded damages to a ten year-old child, Bailey Banks, who it said had developed acute brain damage involving autistic spectrum disorder as a result of his MMR vaccination.

This followed a judgment by the same court a few days previously in the ‘Cedillo’ case which threw out three test claims involving MMR on the grounds that that there was no proven link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The judges in that case said parents had been misled by doctors who were guilty of ‘gross medical misjudgment’ and had peddled ‘speculative and unpersuasive’ theories.

That judgment in turn followed another case in which the vaccine court said nine year-old Hanna Poling had developed autism as a result of a cocktail of nine vaccines administered simultaneously, including MMR, which had

significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.

In the Bailey Banks case, the ruling was unequivocal. It concluded from the evidence provided by a full neurological examination of the child 16 days after his MMR vaccination that the jab had caused Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM) which in turn had led to Pervasive Developmental Delay, a disorder on the autistic spectrum.

Special Master Richard Abell wrote:

The Court found, supra, that Bailey’s ADEM was both caused-in-fact and proximately caused by his vaccination. It is well-understood that the vaccination at issue can cause ADEM, and the Court found, based upon a full reading and hearing of the pertinent facts in this case, that it did actually cause the ADEM. Furthermore, Bailey’s ADEM was severe enough to cause lasting, residual damage, and retarded his developmental progress, which fits under the generalized heading of Pervasive Developmental Delay, or PDD. The Court found that Bailey would not have suffered this delay but for the administration of the MMR vaccine, and that this chain of causation was not too remote, but was rather a proximate sequence of cause and effect leading inexorably from vaccination to Pervasive Developmental Delay.

Therefore it had been successfully demonstrated that

the MMR vaccine at issue actually caused the condition(s) from which Bailey suffered and continues to suffer.

It also turns out from this ruling that the vaccine court had heard two previous cases where the Special Master had found that the MMR vaccine had caused Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.

In response to the Bailey Banks case, Dr. Bryan Jepson, an autism specialist at Thoughtful House where Andrew Wakefield now conducts research, said:

The contradictory rulings from the Vaccine Court regarding vaccines and autism demonstrate that we still don't have a definitive answer. We need to realize that the question of MMR’s potential contribution to autism remains under scientific debate. Ultimately, the correct answer will come through honest, transparent and rigorous scientific study, not from a court bench.

 

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A less than engaging strategy

12:58am

A couple of weeks ago, there were claims on Panorama and in the Guardian that the government was about to make a drastic change to its strategy for tackling Muslim extremism in Britain. According to these claims, it realised it had made a  catastrophic error in identifying extremism with violence, thus ignoring the conveyor-belt of extreme Islamist ideas which is radicalising ever rising numbers of young British Muslims -- and, worse still, engaging people with those extremist ideas as government advisers on combating Islamist violence. At the time, I expressed scepticism about such an outbreak of realism and suggested it was more likely that an argument was going on in Whitehall between these two factions.

On Wednesday evening, the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears delivered a major speech on the subject which, far from presaging a change in strategy, was a defence of the status quo. But it was so incoherent and nodded simultaneously at so many competing arguments that it seems even more likely that, just a few weeks before the government is set to announce the second phase of its counter-extremism strategy, the argument behind the scenes about the direction it should take is indeed still raging.

The essence of the muddle in this speech was her blurring of the distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims, and between tackling only violent extremism (as at present) and tackling extremist ideas. At one point early on in the speech she seemed to well understand the key point that until now the security world has denied – that it is not enough to tackle terrorism, because extremist ideas by people who are not themselves violent nevertheless act as a continuum of prejudice, hatred, sedition and violence:

But the question is the extent to which politically-extreme groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir contribute to an environment which makes violence more acceptable or justifiable, makes individuals more susceptible to committing acts of violence, and whether there is a symbiotic relationship between groups whose hate is expressed in words, or whose support for terrorism or suicide bombing is confined to the Middle East but not Britain, and those whose hate is expressed in violent actions. For example the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organisation, but it supports terrorist organisations such as Hamas in Gaza.

Indeed. And so did that mean that the government would now treat the Muslim Brotherhood as beyond the pale and stop throwing money at them and employing them as government advisers in the wholly misguided belief that they were the antidote to terror? Well no. Because although the common threads in this ‘network of violence and hatred’ were

a belief in the supremacy of the Muslim people, in a divine duty to bring the world under the control of hegemonic Islam, in the establishment of a theocratic Caliphate, and in the undemocratic imposition of theocratic law on whole societies: these are the defining and common characteristics of the disparate strands of this ideology here and around the world,

nevertheless this was all a

twisted reading of Islam

which was not shared by the vast majority of British Muslims who

oppose the single narrative promulgated by Al-Qaeda, and certainly oppose violence.

But she had just gone to some lengths to explain that the problem was not just al Qaeda but also people who did not support violence but the ‘political Islamisms’ whose extremist ideas helped promote that violence. So what was she going to do about them – the ‘political Islamists’ -- was what we now needed to know.

But she didn’t tell us. Instead, she retreated to the old comfort zone of the ‘moderate majority’ and the need to engage with and encourage the mainstream Muslim community so that violence would not take further root there. And then her speech started skidding all over the road:

You can see the potential dangers inherent in this approach. Every minister is well aware of them. It involves engaging with organisations and individuals with whose views we disagree vehemently, who, for example, have unacceptable attitudes towards women, Jews, or gay and lesbian people. As a Government anchored in the European social democratic tradition, we place great store in equality, women's rights, anti-racism, and so on.

So there is a need for moral clarity, for a clear dividing line between what we consider acceptable, and what we consider beyond the pale.

We are clear that engagement is not the same as endorsement. I know our political opponents will seek to make hay with this: they will say that somehow engaging with groups with extremist views shows a lack of proper understanding of them, that we're being hoodwinked, used, or exploited by extremists, or that we don't care enough about anti-Semitism, sexism or homophobia. This is at the core of the argument of, for example, Melanie Phillips.

But if we leave the field clear to extremists, without any engagement at all, we embolden them and undermine our own objectives. And if we genuinely want to change minds, then we will never make progress merely by talking to people who already agree with us. We must be prepared to challenge, and be challenged in return.

But now she appeared to be saying that the mainstream Muslim communities with whom the government was having all this dialogue actually had ‘extremist’ views. So while earlier she had been talking about the importance of engaging with moderates, now she seemed to be talking about the importance of engaging with extremists. And as she said, I do indeed think that such ‘engagement’ is ‘endorsement’;  more importantly, truly moderate Muslims think so too and have repeatedly begged the government not to engage with extremists in the community because it emboldens them and undermines true moderates .

Blears went on:

What is needed is a framework for engagement, based on clear principles.

Indeed: and those principles should surely be that it is not just support for violence in Britain that should be beyond the pale but advocacy of a caliphate, a desire to overturn British society and impose sharia law, or support the enemies of this country or terrorism abroad. But no, the minister declared merely that she would not sit down with advocates of terrorism because:

You cannot win political arguments with groups who tell lies as part of their strategy, who change the goal-posts, who spread misinformation and seek to undermine the very process of debate. Agreeing to meet and engage in discussion with such groups would lend a veneer of legitimacy that they have done nothing to warrant.

But it is not just terror groups who fit this description but political Islamists such as the Muslim Brothers. Yet with groups which display

an equivocal attitude on core values such as democracy, freedom of speech or respect towards women,

there would be ‘ limited engagement’. Did that include the Muslim Brothers, or Hizb ut Tahrir, or other groups who want to Islamise Britain? Because ‘engagement’ with such people is the current strategy, and the result is that radicalisation of Britain’s Muslims is going through the roof while the government is seen to cave into the threat of violence and dance to their tune. Witness, for example, the banning of the Dutch anti-Islamist politician Geert Wilders, who threatens no-one, while according to the Centre for Social Cohesion the Hezbollah spokesman Dr Ibrahim el-Moussaoui is to be allowed into the country to teach a course on political Islam at the School of Oriental and African studies – a course apparently aimed at educating Government officials and the police.

So let’s get this straight – ‘engagement’ with extremists means having a spokesman for an Iranian terrorist organisation responsible for numerous attacks upon western interests ‘teach’ British officials and police officers about the inspiration for that terror.

It defies belief. No wonder there's an argument going on in Whitehall.

 

 

 

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Liberal fascism

6:18pm

On Harry’s Place, Dave Rich makes some good points about the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others. Its import, as he says, lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.

But Rich points out a further consequence of demonising Israel in this way:

If Israel is a Nazi state, then anybody who does not oppose Israel is morally no better than a Nazi. There is only one place this train of thought can end: with the demonisation and social isolation of the vast majority of ordinary British Jews.

It means that when mainstream Jewish community leadership bodies organise a rally with the slogan, “Stop Hamas Terror: Peace for the people of Israel and Gaza”, and launch a Jewish community fundraising campaign for hospitals in both Gaza and Israel during the fighting, Richard Seymour accuses them of “cheerleading the massacre” and concludes that anybody who goes on the rally “ought to be shunned, and treated as the moral and political degenerates that they are.” It means that a research paper published by the School of Oriental and African Studies to investigate “legal aspects of economic and trade issues arising from Israel’s occupation of the OPTs” lists the names, addresses and contact details of kosher food shops in London and Manchester.

Once the central argument of anti-Israel campaigning in this country is that Israel is Nazi Germany, then this is no longer an anti-Zionist movement: it is an antisemitic one, with an antisemitic politics as its driving force.

Precisely so. And that is why so many British Jews now feel under siege in a country that to their horror and astonishment has now turned against them -- which they feel every time they switch on the BBC or read the newspapers or go to the office or stand around over drinks with people they once thought were friends but who now force them to make a choice: renounce Israel and be accepted, or support Israel and be a pariah.

I would also make a further point that Rich does not make. Calling Israel a Nazi state retrospectively sanitises the Holocaust and lets complicit Europe off the hook – Britain too. After all, Britain was partly responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews to whom it refused entry to Palestine -- in order to appease the Arabs of Palestine who were in league with the Nazis – and who perished in the Holocaust as a result. If the Jews have become Nazis, then their victimisation at the hands of the Nazis stops being the crime of crimes.

It also allows people safely to hate the Jews once again. As I was told to my face by a prominent man of impeccable liberal views, the enormity of the Holocaust had meant that it was no longer possible to disdain or loathe the Jews as before, at least not in public. But with Israel painted as a Nazi state, it can be open season on the Jews once again.

As the thinker Paul Berman points out in an interview on Z Word, the problem of Jew-hatred today lies principally with people just like this. The idea that it is reserved for knuckle-dragging right-wingers is simply wrong. Throughout history, it has been people pursuing the mostly high-minded visions who have wanted the Jews out of humanity’s hair once and for all. As Berman notes:

The unstated assumption is always the same. To wit: the universal system for man's happiness has already arrived (namely, Christianity, or else Enlightenment anti-Christianity; the Westphalian state system, or else the post-modern system of international institutions; racial theory, or else the anti-racist doctrine in a certain interpretation). And the universal system for man's happiness would right now have achieved perfection - were it not for the Jews. The Jews are always standing in the way. The higher one's opinion of oneself, the more one detests the Jews.

... But the disdain takes another shape, too, which is cruder, though it follows more or less from the first version. In the cruder version, the Jews are not just regrettable for being retrograde. Much worse: the Jews have done something really terrible. By forming their state and standing by it, they have set out actively to oppose the principle of universal justice and happiness - the principle that decrees that a people like the Jews should not have a state. So, yes, the comparisons to apartheid - or, more radically and these days more typically, to the Nazis.

... Israel's struggle puts it at odds with the entire principle of universal justice and happiness, as people imagine it - no matter how they choose to define the principle. Other countries commit relative crimes, which can be measured and compared. But Israel commits an absolute crime. In the end, it is the grand accusation against the Jews, in ever newer versions: the Jews as cosmic enemy of the universal good.  

Having stated these truths, Berman then flinches from the contemporary political application, refusing to agree that the human rights movement is intrinsically a vehicle for Jew-hatred. But it is. It is very noticeable that hatred of Israel and the Jews today goes hand in hand with higher social class and education, and high-minded progressive ideals such as human rights, the replacement of war by law, post-nation universal values and the forcible eradication of any views that challenge this agenda. It is, in short – as the title of Jonah Goldberg’s excellent book proclaims -- liberal fascism.

 

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Proxy-Activist Stress Syndrome?

6:00pm

There is a big row going on between the British Medical Journal and Honest Reporting over the BMJ’s claims – detailed in no fewer than five pieces in the current issue – that Honest Reporting sponsored a mass lobbying campaign of hostile and often abusive emails in response to the Journal’s criticisms of Israeli policy.

Without getting into the substance of this argument (except to note, en passant, that co-ordinated and abusive emails are hardly confined to the pro-Israel side of this debate) I merely ask one question: what have the Arab/Israel impasse and Israel’s military strategy towards the Palestinians got to do with the practice of medicine?

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Condolences

10:20am

How very sad that David Cameron's six year-old disabled son Ivan has died. Like so many, I was  touched and moved by the devoted way in which the Camerons cared for Ivan. Now that poignant and short life has ended, and we must feel for them all at this difficult time.

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Israel's choice

11:54pm

As Iran sprints towards the nuclear finishing line, the lethal and wicked isolation of Israel in the west is accelerating.

Yesterday, Amnesty called for an arms embargo against Israel based on a travesty of a report which accused Israel falsely of crimes it did not commit in Gaza – deliberately targeting civilians – while omitting the crimes Hamas did commit – using civilians as human shields. An arms embargo (of the type apparently favoured by Obama’s foreign policy guru Samantha Power) – would of course remove Israel’s ability to defend itself against an Arab and Muslim world bending every sinew for its destruction. It is therefore tantamount to calling for the destruction of Israel.

Amnesty proposes no total arms embargo on Iran, nor on any of the 22 states of the Arab league. Only on Israel, their designated victim. Oh, and on Hamas whose sole crime it says was to have fired rockets at Israel which hardly killed anyone anyway. Thus in its absurd attempt to appear even-handed Amnesty equates the victims of terror with those who would murder them. Israel alone of all the countries of the world is not to be allowed to defend itself against annihilation.

Thus also the truth of the devastating insight of Natan Sharansky who, writing of his experience – straight after last week’s London conference on antisemitism -- at the hands of the BBC which purred over an Arab interviewee blaming Israel for the rise in global Jew-hatred, observes that, as on previous occasions, the Jews of Israel are being faced with this obscene choice:

Either live and be hated, or die and be loved.

Scarcely had the new items on Amnesty’s report faded away yesterday than BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week featured Alastair Crooke, the former MI6 agent who now promotes the cause of genocidal Islamists as ‘resistance’ and who was plugging his new book: Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution.

I have written repeatedly about the way Crooke promotes the cause of Hamas and Hezbollah and the way he has acted as a conduit between the EU and these terror organisations. His book, of which he has kindly sent me a copy, is a farrago of distortion, omission, recycled conspiracy theory and anti-western loathing, drawing upon such staples of revisionist and anti-western pseudo-scholarship as Karen Armstrong and Edward Said.

Thus for example, the Crusades were an attempt by the Church to ‘force a change on history through mass human action’ – no mention of the fact that they were a reaction to the Islamic conquest and colonisation of Jerusalem. Thus the American neo-cons deliberately created a fear of Islamism in order to restructure western society by eradicating liberalism and multiculturalism (I kid you not). And thus there is no mention whatever of the demented loathing of the Jews -- not just of Israel – which permeates the charter of Hamas and everything they say and do, but instead this:

Resistance for Hamas therefore is both an expression of deep-seated human emotions and Islamist principles of justice...

Some of this book makes no sense by any standard of logic:

Islamist resistance is also about refusal...to allow the complexity of the past to be reassembled by archaeologists who seek to privilege one particular layer of history above others.

But isn’t that precisely what Hamas stands for, privileging Muslim history over that of the Jews (which so inconveniently is validated by archaeology?)

Or this demonstrable rubbish from Hamas leader Khaled Mesha’al, who told Crooke

...that there is no problem with Jews either as individuals or collectively as a society. ‘This is not the dispute: the conflict stems from behaviour – from aggressive Zionist behaviour. It is this behaviour that is unacceptable. The question of behaviour however is a political issue between us; it is not theological.

Dear oh dear. The Hamas charter describes Jews as a cosmic evil who were the hidden hand behind every rotten aspect of modernity; it accuses them in terms of being responsible for the French Revolution, capitalism, communism, sociology, psychology, the League of Nations, Freemasonry, on and on. And quoting the curse from the Koran, it states that Jews must be killed wherever they may be found.

The other remarkable thing about this book is that Crooke understands very well indeed the enormous influence upon the foundational Islamist thinkers of such Marxist and nihilist western radicals as Frantz Fanon or Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. These thinkers themselves have played a major role in undermining the west and all its values. But Crooke actually recommends that western radicals should learn from and apply the way in which the Islamists were inspired by these totalitarian thinkers. He is thus not merely promoting the Islamists’ cause in the Middle East; he is urging a totalitarian alliance between western radicals and Islamists, to bring about a revolution in the west and the overturning of its civilisational precepts.

None of this, needless to say, was raised on Start the Week. Instead, host Andrew Marr gave Crooke the most gentle and respectful of hearings for his promotion of genocidal, anti-western jihadi terror outfits on the treasonous basis that the west had lost its way and we’d all better start listening to the superior insights of the Muslim world instead. The nearest Marr came to challenging this thesis was to suggest that the Islamists also had a ‘history of violence’ and that they were not very keen on certain liberal freedoms such as the rights of women or homosexuals.

There was not one mention of their murderous hatred of the Jews. Not one.

Instead, another guest on the show, writer Miri Rubin, cooed over this ‘rich book’ and spoke about the Islamists’ ‘trauma in Gaza’. Also taking part in this discussion was the noted Israeli author Amos Oz. And what did Israel’s premier man of letters have to say to this propagandist for those who would murder him and all his fellow Israelis? He was ‘greatly inspired’ by what Crooke was saying; indeed, he suggested that the American neo-cons were the same as the Islamists in that they too wanted to ‘save souls by force’.

Why are so many noted intellectuals always so drawn towards suicidal idiocy and totalitarian ideas?

But help is at hand for the Islamic 'resistance' from the White House. Obama is giving Gaza $900 million which is to be handed to UNRWA to ensure it does not end up in the hands of Hamas. This will ensure that it ends up in the hands of Hamas, due to the fact that nothing moves in Gaza outside Hamas’s control: UNRWA is riddled with Hamas members amongst its workforce, its ambulances and other vehicles are used to transport Hamas weaponry and terrorists, and the camps it administers are Hamas bomb factories. So Hamas will get a $900 million pay-off from America, in order to smuggle yet more weapons with which to kill yet more Israelis.

Meanwhile the Islamists’ western European front – aka Britain’s human rights lawyers – are feverishly searching for ways of using international law to persecute Israelis for the crime of defending themselves. NGO Monitor explains how ‘lawfare’ is being vigorously promoted by Palestinian and other Arab ‘human rights’ activists – who for some unaccountable reason are not taking similar action against Hamas or any of the Arab states which have murdered so many of their own citizens and deprived them of their human rights over the years. Thus the Palestinian NGO al Haq, working through British lawyer Phil Shiner, launched legal proceedings today against three British Cabinet ministers to stop all British aid or assistance to Israel on the false grounds that Israel is gratuitously attacking Palestinian civilians. According to NGO Monitor:

Al-Haq's General Director Shawan Jabarin has been denied exit visas by Israel and Jordan on account of his alleged ties to the terrorist group Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  On July 7, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the visa denial because it examined reliable evidence that Jabarin is ‘among the senior activists of the Popular Front terrorist organization.’

Amongst al Haq’s funders are the governments of Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway and the UK charity Christian Aid.

Such legal actions may have little chance of succeeding in court but their purpose is to propagandise, terrorise and demoralise, in which they have significant success. Thus Israel becomes progressively more isolated by the day, in a process of global delegitimisation  -- whose diabolical purpose is nothing less than to soften up the western world for genocide.

 

 

 

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An American addition to the Islamists' armoury?

10:19pm

After I wrote the assessment below of the threat already posed by Obama’s policy towards Israel and the Islamist war against the west, news emerged of a further possible appointment to his administration which exceeds in sheer brazenness the malice even of the others. Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who is tipped to become chairman of the National Intelligence Council, is a piece of work.

In 2008, he told the Middle East Policy Council: 

Hamas’ ascendancy as an elected government in Gaza has been accompanied by new extremes in suffering for the Palestinian people... How can there be two states when one of them is limited to less than 11 percent of the original territory of the Palestine mandate? How can there be two states when one state has the sovereignty that we accord to Indian tribes, rather than the sort of sovereignty that is generally recognized internationally as pertinent to a state?

In September 2005, he told the National Council on US-Arab Relations: 

As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected. Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent. ...And as long as such Israeli violence against Palestinians continues, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that Palestinians will stand down from violent resistance and retaliation against Israelis...

And that in turn paled by comparison with these remarks by Freeman in 2006, reported on the Saudi/US Relations Information Service: 

There will be no acceptance of Israel, by the Arabs or by the Muslims - including the Iranians, and the Indonesians, and others, if Israel does not find a way of coexisting peacefully with the other inhabitants of the land in which it has established itself... Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace... For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

...Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess. 

He even blamed Israel for 9/11 and the Islamist war upon the west:

We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam, with more said by our government's neoconservative mentors to be in prospect.

So close is Freeman to Saudi Arabia that Ed Lasky previously remarked he should more properly be described as Saudi’s ambassador to America:

As head of the Middle East Policy Council, he has promoted the interest of Saudi Arabia. He shares Board membership with executives from major multinationals with major markets in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world, Frank Carlucci-head of the Carlyle Group, George McGovern, and...a representative of the giant Saudi Binladin Group.

If he is appointed to this new intelligence role, Freeman will shape the intelligence assessments that will tell America, among other things, what threats are posed to America and the free world by the Iranian regime. We already saw, with the misleading and manipulatively spun NIE two years ago which facilitated the demonstrably false conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the bomb – a conclusion almost immediately disproved by further intelligence but which was used to head off action against Iran – how such politicised intel can be used to thwart attempts to stop the Iranian bomb.

With such viciously prejudiced views and such an intimate association with the principal force behind the Sunni division of the Islamic jihad, can anyone apart from the west’s gloating Jew-haters doubt that the appointment by America’s 44^th President of Chas W Freeman as chairman of the NIC would be a stunning coup as a weapon in the armoury of the enemies of the Jewish people and the free world?

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The fifth columnist in the White House

5:20pm

After merely one calendar month, Obama’s foreign policy has already been disastrous for the defenders of the free world. See Charles Krauthammer’s description of how he has turned America into a

grinning Goliath staggering about sporting a ‘kick me’ sign on his back

with Russia, Iran and Pakistan duly obliging in quick succession.

In the past four weeks, every single one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives has appeased and strengthened the enemies of both Israel and the west, whose fates are umbilically linked. The driving motif of Obama’s foreign policy has been ‘engagement’ with the Muslim world. Ostensibly offering the hand of friendship if that world unclenches its own fist, he is actually offering up not just the west’s hand but its entire body to be kicked into submission. And I use that last word advisedly.

Now Khaled abu Toameh reports that one result of this approach has been to boost Hamas. As the Independent reported yesterday,  European politicians  -- including two British MPs – are now openly talking to Hamas despite the fact that it is a banned organisation by the EU (the EU has in fact been talking covertly to Hamas for years). Abu Toameh reports that Egypt’s President Mubarak and Palestinian President Abbas are also now talking to Hamas, having previously refused to do so on the grounds that this would only strengthen it and weaken them. But now they are doing so principally because, according to Egyptian and Palestinian political analysts,

Mubarak and Abbas feel comfortable to talk to Hamas because they realize that President Barack Obama's new administration is contemplating a new, conciliatory approach toward Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, namely the Syrians, Hizbullah and Hamas...

Sure enough, only yesterday the US Middle East envoy George Mitchell supported the Egyptian call for a Palestinian unity government comprising the PA and Hamas. He dutifully parroted the formula that Hamas would still need to halt violence, recognise Israel and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. But Hamas has not done so and shows no sign that it will ever do so. What Egypt is proposing, and America has now endorsed, is a Palestinian government comprising people still bent upon a genocidal agenda.

According to the American Jewish leaders to whom Mitchell put in a conference call, he said that

until now divisions among the Palestinians have been a major obstacle to bringing peace to the region...

What an extraordinary thing to say. Until now, the major obstacle to peace in the region has been the Palestinians’ implacable goal of bringing about the end of the Jewish state. The divisions amongst them are merely about the best means of achieving this end. But this idiot went on to repeat the core delusion of those who have neither understood not learned the right lessons from recent history:

And he said that he had learned one lesson from his experience in Ireland that he believed was applicable now: the importance of having representation from all the different factions in the conflict. His remarks about the positive impact Egypt's efforts at bringing Palestinians together were made in this context.

For the umpteenth time: there is no analogy with Northern Ireland because a) the Irish Republicans did not want to conquer Britain for the Irish, subjugate the British under threat of death and turn the UK into a Catholic state, and b) the only reason the IRA abandoned terror and asked to become part of the democratic process was because the British Army had beaten it into at the very least a permanent stalemate. Peace became possible solely because terror had been defeated.

But Hamas has not been defeated: far from it. And now, far from helping to defeat this genocidal terror organisation, Obama is strengthening it by granting it legitimacy. By strengthening Hamas, Obama also strengthens its puppet-master Iran. So the enemies of America and the west are now stronger, while America and the west are now weaker.

The belief that this represents merely naivety on the part of Obama rather than malice towards Israel has taken moreover an enormous knock as a result of his decision to participate in ‘Durban 2’. This is the reprise of the 2001 Durban hate-fest against Israel, which is being held in Geneva in April under the auspices of the grotesquely misnamed UN Human Rights Council, chaired by Libya and with the vice-chairs occupied by Iran and Cuba. As Gregg Rickman, the US former special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, has noted:

...the council, like its predecessor, has become irrevocably tarred with anti-Semitism and bias against Israel. As the State Department’s March 2008 Report on Contemporary Global Antisemitism explained about these two organizations, ‘For many years before its abolition, the Commission on Human Rights had a separate agenda item focusing solely on alleged violations of Israel -- namely, Item 8, “Question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine.” This allowed multiple resolutions against Israel, while no other country could have more than one resolution run against it each year. No other country beside Israel had an agenda item exclusively scrutinizing it. This tradition has been continued by the new U.N. Human Rights Council.’

No free society should have anything to do with the sick farce of an ‘anti-racism’ conference held by such a body. This week America sent a delegation to Geneva, ostensibly ‘to try to change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading.’ I commented here and here on the damage this decision has already done.

But as Anne Bayefsky reports, when America got to Geneva this week it chose not to draw the poison from this process. On the contrary, it just sat on its hands. When Iran and Syria blocked an attempt to include a reference to the Holocaust, the Americans remained silent. Worse, they also remained silent when the Palestinian delegation proposed that the declaration should call for 

implementation of the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel's security fence], and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory.

But as Caroline Glick observes:

...the ICJ's advisory opinion on Israel's security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the US and Israel rejected the ICJ's authority to issue an opinion on the subject. On Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US effectively accept the ICJ's authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.

At what point will the Americans acknowledge that they cannot ‘change the direction in which the Review Conference is heading’?  Almost certainly, at no point. At every stage there will be doubtless overwhelming arguments for staying on in the pious hope of changing that direction – ignoring the fact that the direction of the Review conference has been set in stone, to ‘reaffirm’ and ‘foster the implementation’ of the Durban Declaration, which singled out Israel uniquely for censure and libelled it as a racist state.

Durban 2 is therefore central to the attempt by the Arab and Muslim world to legitimise the destruction of Israel. It also seeks to criminalise all criticism of Islam and suppress free speech under the guise of combating ‘Islamophobia’ as part of its jihadi strategy of progressively crippling all the west’s defences. This is the process Obama is now validating. If anything shows beyond a doubt that America is now set on a path of both doing the Jewish people maximum harm and surrendering to the intimidation by the Muslim world, its participation in the obscenity of Durban 2 is surely it.

As Gregg Rickman writes in aghast disbelief:

In encouraging this conference to reconvene and worse, leaving it in the hands of the likes of Iran, Libya and other terrorist states, the United Nations again dishonors itself by allowing these tyrants a platform to impose their racial and religious bigotry on the world. How can the United States possibly be a part of this insanity?

The answer lies in the man whom it has elected as its 44th President.

One might think alarm bells might now be ringing in the American Jewish community. On the contrary. These are the people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama (because he was a Democrat, because he was black and because he would liberalise abortion; the psychopathology of the majority of American Jews and their actual attitude towards Israel is an issue for another time). And they are the people he has now suborned. For on his delegation at Geneva, taking part in this process of delegitimising the Jewish state while pretending to put a brake on the process, is one Felice Gaer, a senior official of the American Jewish Committee.

Yes, that American Jewish Committee – you know, the so-called ‘Jewish lobby’ which (according to Mearsheimer/ Walt and every Jew-hater from the neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites to the pages of the Guardian and Independent) manipulates America to do the bidding of Israel. Uh-huh. So let’s get this straight. Having voted this man into power, the AJC now has its head up Obama’s backside while he lends legitimacy and strength to those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and the free world -- all the time pretending to themselves that they are helping to mitigate the damage.

Some lobby.

The fact is that Israel faces the nightmare scenario that it now stands alone -- and against America. Whether through naivety, ideology or rank malice, there is now a fifth columnist in the White House, delivering (however unwittingly) the agenda of the enemies of the west and undermining the cause of the free world. The vast majority of Americans who staunchly support Israel's struggle to exist in the face of genocidal attack, and understand only too well its role as the front line of defence for the free world, need to become aware of what is being done in their name.

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A requiem for British decency

8:59am

Simply magnificent piece in today’s Independent by Howard Jacobson about the ‘deranged and irreversible’ hatred of Israel that has engulfed Britain’s intelligentsia and poisoned the environment for so many British Jews. At the centre of his heartbroken and anguished requiem for dear old decent, rational Britain which is dying before our eyes out lies his identification of a new and vicious form of Holocaust denial and Jew-hatred– the equation of Israel with the Nazis and of Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto:

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those – it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.

Antisemitism? Absolutely not. It is ‘criticism’ of Israel, pure and simple.

Do read it all.

 

 

 

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