President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections -- which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.
He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest.
In foreign policy, Obama has started by trashing his own country through grossly misrepresenting its history and grovelling to America’s enemies such as Iran, which has flicked him aside with undiluted contempt. He has gratuitously upset America’s ally India by suggesting that America should muscle in and resolve the Kashmir question.
His right hand doesn’t seem to know what his left hand is doing. He reportedly asked retired Marine General Anthony Zinni to be US ambassador to Iraq, but then abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation after it had been confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And the precise role he is offering Dennis Ross – special envoy to Iran? Special adviser to Hillary? Special adviser to other special advisers? – remains mired in confusion.
I have argued before however that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be closely scrutinised.
And here’s a humdinger. Obama has picked a man called David Ogden to be deputy Attorney-General. Ogden has made his legal career from representing pornographers, trying to defeat child protection legislation and undermining family values. As FoxNews reported this week, he once represented a group of library directors arguing against the Children's Internet Protection Act, which ordered libraries and schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to obscene sites. And on behalf of several media groups, he successfully argued against a child pornography law that required publishers to verify and document the age of their models, which would have ensured these models were at least 18.
The Family Research Council has more examples of his contribution to upholding American and western values. In one such case, he expressed the view that abortion was less damaging to a woman than having children:
In sum, it is grossly misleading to tell a woman that abortion imposes possible detrimental psychological effects when the risks are negligible in most cases, when the evidence shows that she is more likely to experience feelings of relief and happiness, and when child-birth and child-rearing or adoption may pose concomitant (if not greater) risks or adverse psychological effects ...
In another, co-authored brief, he argued that it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified -- because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision:
There is no question that the right to secure an abortion is fundamental. By any objective standard, therefore, the decision to abort is one that a reasonable person, including a reasonable adolescent, could make. [E]mpirical studies have found few differences between minors aged 14-18 and adults in their understanding of information and their ability to think of options and consequences when asked to consider treatment-related decisions. These unvarying and highly significant findings indicate that with respect to the capacity to understand and reason logically, there is no qualitative or quantitative difference between minors in mid-adolescence, i.e., about 14-15 years of age, and adults.
And how did the 44th President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he was making? He threw his toys out of the pram -- or perhaps that should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds instead. As the Telegraphreported:
‘We were just tired of being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a book.
Tired of being President – after two weeks!
Tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism. America – what have you done?!
Yet another example of the ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said
What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope.
To those of us who have been following this scam for the past two decades, ‘interpolate carefully’ makes us suck our teeth. And so it has proved. Various scientists immediately spotted the flaw in Steig’s methodology of combining satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The flaw they identified was that, since Antarctica has so few weather stations, the computer Steig used was programmed to guess what data they would have produced had such stations existed. In other words, the findings that caused such excitement were based on data that had been made up.
‘This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,’ Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said in an e-mail. ‘It is hard to make data where none exist.’
Well, yes. But then the invention of data that does not exist and the obliteration of data that does exist has been precisely how the man-made global warming scam has been perpetrated right from the get-go. The most egregious example of this was the piece of ‘research’ that underpinned the entire IPCC/Kyoto shebang from 2001 when it was published -- the so-called ‘hockey stick’ curve, which purported to show a vertiginous and unprecedented rise in global temperature in the 20th century.
The problem with pegging such a rise to the evils of industrialisation had always been the Medieval Warm Period, during which global temperatures were warmer than in modern times. So the ‘hockey stick’ study dealt with that by simply managing to airbrush out the Medieval Warm Period and its subsequent corrective Little Ice Age altogether. Some seven centuries of global history were simply excised from the data -- because an algorithm had been built into the computer programme which would have created a ‘hockey stick’ curve whatever data were fed into it.
This shoddy research was subsequently torn apart so comprehensively that it has been called the most discredited study in the history of science (and has been quietly dropped by the IPCC, leaving man-made global warming theory with no more substance than the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Go here, here and here for a history of the titanic battle that ensued over its unmasking). The creator of this discredited ‘hockey stick’ curve was Michael Mann. And guess what? Michael Mann was a co-author of the Steig study of Antarctica.
‘Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,’ said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. ‘Now we can say: no, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend.’
And now as Andrew Bolt has noted Steve McIntyre, who with Ross McKitrick uncovered the ‘hockey-stick’ nonsense in the first place, has delivered the coup de grace to the Steig/Mann Antarctica claim. Steig used data from a weather station called Harry. Bolt observes:
Harry in fact is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:
Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in ‘New Harry’ arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.
With their reputations thus disappearing faster than the snows of Kilimanjaro, the zealots have become hysterical. Mann attacks a prominent sceptic, Lawrence Solomon, for citing the scientists’ criticisms of the Antarctica study, and is in turn answered by Solomon -- an exchange reproduced in Canada’s Financial Post, for which Solomon writes, here and here. Mann repeatedly accuses Solomon of lying. In doing so, he has left himself dramatically exposed. Claiming that Solomon
repeatedly lies about my work
he cites as evidence of this that his ‘hockey stick’ study was
vindicated in a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
and seeks to back up this assertion by citing the way the media reported this study as
‘Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate’ (New York Times), ‘Backing for Hockey Stick Graph’ (BBC), and so on.
This is, to put it mildly, disingenuous. While it is certainly true that the media reported it in this sheep-like way -- thanks in part to the manner in which the NAS chose circumspectly to spin its own conclusions -- it is nevertheless the case that in every important particular the NAS actually agreed with the McIntyre/McKitrick criticisms. Far from vindicating the ‘hockey stick’ graph, the NAS said that although it found some of Mann’s work ‘plausible’, there were so many scientific uncertainties attached to it that it did not have great confidence in it. Thus it said that
Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions
and that they had downplayed the
uncertainties of the published reconstructions...Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that ‘the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.’
What Mann also does not say in his diatribe is that a subsequent House Energy and Commerce Committee report chaired by Edward Wegman totally destroyed the credibility of the ‘hockey stick’ study and devastatingly ripped apart Mann’s methodology as ‘bad mathematics’. Furthermore, when Gerald North, the chairman of the NAS panel -- which Mann claims ‘vindicated him’ – and panel member Peter Bloomfield were asked at the House Committee hearings whether or not they agreed with Wegman’s harsh criticisms, they said they did:
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman’s report?
DR. NORTH. No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.
DR. BLOOMFIELD. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his co-workers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.
WALLACE: ‘the two reports were complementary, and to the extent that they overlapped, the conclusions were quite consistent.’ (Am Stat Assoc.)
As Mark Twain might have put it, there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies and global warming science.
Still worried that the planet is about to fry and drown as a result of man-made global warming? Tsk. Take a look at this to realise just why you should not believe a word the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ever says.
I am hearing ever more alarming accounts of the deepening attrition against British Jews in the wake of the incitement against Israel provoked by the war in Gaza. In addition to the record number of attacks upon Jewish individuals and institutions and murderous incitement displayed on the anti-Israel demonstrations and riots as reported by the Community Security Trust, Jewish parents report that their children – some as young as eight – are now running a gauntlet of attack from their Muslim classmates at school who accuse them of ‘killing Palestinian children’. Comments by adults about ‘Jews controlling all the money/the media/the BBC’ (yes, really! All because it allowed Israel’s spokesman to put the case for Israel from time to time) are now commonplace in both private and public discourse. Today’s Jewish Chronicle reports that a 12 year-old Birmingham schoolgirl was terrorised by a mob of 20 youths chanting ‘Kill all Jews’ and ‘Death to Jews’ on her way home from school last week:
She said: ‘One of my friends said an Asian girl from the year above asked her why she was talking to me because I am Jewish. I asked the girl in a friendly manner if she had a problem with me being Jewish. She said “yeah, I do”. I managed to punch her before she hit me but then she grabbed me by the hair and swung me around shouting “f****** Jews, I hate Jews”. But then another Asian girl rounded up a whole gang. They were all in school uniform and they came running towards me shouting “death to Jews” and “kill all Jews.”’
A reader has sent me the following account of what happened to him when, travelling on the Tube in London, he started to read a copy of The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz:
After a time, I became aware that a man sitting diagonally in front of me near the doors at the end of the carriage was looking a bit agitated and had a disgruntled expression on his face. However, he didn't meet my eye, so I thought nothing more of it and continued reading as before...When the train reached St Paul's, the man I had noticed stood up to get off. But instead of leaving by the end doors, he made to pass me. In the process of doing so, he deliberately shoved into me and made to crush me against the side of the carriage and the passengers sitting behind me. Despite already knowing exactly what had actuated this behaviour, I asked the question anyway - and received the following response: ‘You shouldn't be reading that, you f***ing [indecipherable].’...The whole confrontation had taken place in the time it took for the tube doors to wheeze open and shut.
Other than in the Jewish press, such incidents are barely being reported. Last week, for example, there was virtually no coverage of the violent demonstration organised by the Stop the War coalition which prevented the deputy commander of Israel’s Gaza operation from speaking at London’s Jewish student centre, Hillel House, when a crowd of about 60-80 students attempted to storm the building.
One of the most troubling developments is the way in which the universities have become an extension of the Middle East conflict, with a simulacrum of the aggression, intimidation and violence from which Israel is under attack by the Arabs being directed at Jewish students on British campuses, who now routinely run a gauntlet of intimidation and abuse from Arab and Muslim students. But even more worryingly, some universities are spinelessly choosing to give in to such bullying.
Throughout last week, after the cease-fire was declared in Gaza, there was a series of anti-Israel sit-ins and demonstrations organised by the STWC at some 17 universities: in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics, Queen Mary College and King’s College, as well as at Bradford, Sheffield Hallam, Warwick, Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex, Essex, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan and Strathclyde. Some of these protests led to criminal damage and forced the universities to pay thousands of pounds to deal with the disruption, rearrange lectures, hire extra security guards and repair the damage.
The demonstrators took control of lecture halls and made a series of demands: that the universities should issue a statement condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza; offer scholarships to Palestinian students; send surplus educational materials to help rebuild Gaza (presumably its Islamic University, said by Israel to be a fount of terror); dedicate some of their time to fund-raising for Gaza; and take no action against the demonstrators.
Some of these universities responded robustly to such disorder and intimidation. Manchester Metropolitan, Birmingham, Nottingham and, after some delay, Leeds and Cambridge reportedly refused to accept any of these demands. At Nottingham and Sheffield Hallam, the demonstrators were forcibly evicted.
But the LSE, King’s College London, SOAS, Bradford, Strathclyde and Oxford reportedly gave in to some or all of these demands. According to the JC, the LSE agreed to waive application fees for Gaza and West Bank students ‘directly affected by the conflict’, while Bradford
agreed to investigate the ‘ethical background’ of food and drink served on campus, and promised to ‘explore the feasibility of a twinning link with the Islamic University of Gaza’.
Strathclyde agreed among other things to cancel a contract with an Israeli water-cooler company. Oxford – which fined each demonstrator the princely sum of £20 – nevertheless started negotiations with them with indecent haste, and a mere few hours later had agreed to pretty well everything. In a craven letter to colleagues the Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, having stated that
unlawful action of this kind cannot be condoned
proceeded to reward it by giving the perpetrators what they had demanded.
The Oxford demonstrators also demanded that the title of the series of lectures on ‘world peace’ at Balliol, recently inaugurated by Israeli President Shimon Peres and named in his honour, be changed; the Senior Proctor, Professor Donald Fraser -- who oversees disciplinary matters and who recommended ‘a relatively lenient course of action against the demonstrators ‘-- duly wrote to Balliol drawing its attention to the students’ concerns.
Thus the trahison des clercs as they crumble in the face of criminality, violence and intimidation.
And so now at British universities --which should be the most protected of all environments for free discourse and inquiry -- British Jews no longer feel safe. At Nottingham, one such student said:
The sit-in has created an atmosphere where we do not feel comfortable going into shared buildings on campus.
At King’s, another Jewish student said:
Someone from my course wrote ‘kill the Jews’ on my Facebook profile. Later he said he didn’t know I was Jewish. In public someone said to me, ‘I think all the Israelis are crazy and so are the f***ing Jews’.
One University Reader reportedly told a meeting that ‘within five years, Oxford will be a Jew-free zone’
and a student wrote to Professor Fraser warning that
for Jewish students, the university and the city have developed a toxic atmosphere in which I and many others feel increasingly alienated and unwelcome.
Meanwhile, of course, as Sky’s Tim Marshall pointed out the other day on his blog, the government of Sri Lanka is also attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military campaign in which, according to the UN, ‘many civilians are being killed’, thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as food shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists. Yet there are no sit-ins on campus against the Sri Lankans, no violent riots outside its High Commission, no calls to boycott Orange Pekoe tea. As Marshall observed:
And yet somehow the lives of the 1,300 Palestinians killed by the Israelis causes far more outrage, in certain quarters, than the 2 million dead in Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Sunni and Shia terrorists, or the growing number of Sri Lankan dead to add to the 70,000 killed over the past 25 years (far more than the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the same period).
Of course – because the protests in Britain have nothing to do with humanitarian concerns for the innocent. They are part of the jihad against the Jews – and those in the universities and other parts of the establishment who are capitulating to or even endorsing this are accomplices to a great evil that is now consuming British public life.
Even by their usual standards, the excuse that ‘human rights’ groups have now come up with to explain the fact that, while they devote obsessive attention to alleged human rights abuses by Israel they all but ignore those unambiguously committed by Hamas, is pretty jaw-dropping. It’s because the war crimes by Hamas are too obvious. The Jerusalem Post reports Sarit Micha’eli of the Israeli NGO B’tselem as saying that it was clear that Hamas was in violation of the requirement of the distinction between civilian and military targets:
‘It makes it quite easy regarding Hamas. It is quite clear that they are attacking and targeting civilians. When someone straps a bomb on themselves or fire missiles at civilians, the details are less important. It is clearly a war crime without even looking at the details,’ she said. ‘Even if they fired a Kassam missile as a military target, the fact that it is an inaccurate weapon, it would still count as an indiscriminate attack.’
‘With Israel things are more complicated because Israel states it does not deliberately target civilians and that it safeguards them. With Israel, you have to investigate each specific incident because even if a civilian is killed in an attack, it doesn't mean it's necessarily a war crime. Targeting civilians is a war crime, but the damage to civilians in a given situation isn't indicative of a war crime."’
‘The Israeli authorities deny everything, so one has to prove what happened in a way that you don't need to do with the Palestinian rockets,’ said Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International.
So because Hamas clearly targets civilians, this can be ignored because it is indisputably a war crime; but because Israel does not target civilians and actually safeguards them -- and thus does not commit a war crime -- it has to be investigated and defamed on the basis that it has done so.
And that’s why, according to NGO Monitor, NGOs issued over 300 statements in condemning Israel’s policy in Gaza in 2008 alone, but only a handful of statements condemning over 6,500 rockets fired on Israel from Gaza since disengagement in 2005.
That’s the trouble with genocidal violence. It’s just too damned obvious to bother with. So much more rewarding to vilify the victims instead.
After the British courts ruled on ‘human rights’ grounds that foreign terrorist suspects could neither be thrown out of the country nor locked up pending their potentially being thrown out of the country – measures which were said to represent ‘a defeat for our own values’ -- the government in desperation settled upon the idea of ‘control orders’, under which such suspects would be detained in their own homes under varying degrees of restriction. These orders were in turn challenged and watered down under pressure from the ‘human rights’ lobby. In response to the anxiety that control orders were not adequate to maintain public security against terror suspects, the government insisted that they constituted a robust protection and that there was no cause for alarm.
Now, however, the government’s anti-terrorism adviser, Lord Carlile of Berriew, QC, hasrevealed that a few of these controlees (there are currently 15 of them) are plotting a return to terrorist activity with extremist associates despite being held under virtual house arrest:
Lord Carlile said that despite the restrictions, ‘a few of the suspects had been able to keep in contact with associates in terrorism’. His review said: ‘The material I have seen justifies the conclusion there are a few controlees who, despite the restrictions placed upon them, manage to maintain some contact with terrorist associates and/or groups, and a determination to become operational in the future.’
He added that control orders would not be suitable for any former Guantánamo Bay detainees returned or accepted into the UK. It is understood that the suspects have contacted associates by telephone and through personal contacts. They were discovered in surveillance by the police and security agencies.
Well, waddya know. Could it be that the ‘human rights’ lobby has made ‘a defeat for our values’ more likely by aiding those who remain intent upon destroying them? Surely not – just as we all know that closing Guantanamo will mean a victory for our values over... er, the Bush administration that had been bringing about their defeat.
Uh huh.
Last month, the Pentagon said that 61 former Guantanamo Bay detainees appeared to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody:
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as ‘returning to the fight’ and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And how did the ‘human rights’ lobby -- which has screamed from the get-go that Guantanamo represented the quintessential defeat of western values -- react to this news that 61 detainees had returned to their murderous attempt to destroy western values? By denying it, of course!
‘Until enough information is provided to allow the press and the public to verify these claims, they need to be viewed with a healthy degree of skepticism,’ said Jennifer Daskal, a Washington-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch. Rights advocates contend that many Guantanamo detainees have never taken up arms against the United States and say the Defense Department in the past has described former detainees as rejoining ‘the fight’ because they spoke out against the U.S. government.
Maybe it’s the ‘human rights’ lobby which should be regarded with a ‘healthy degree of scepticism’ after reading this:
As reported by the SITE web site, two men released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a Jihadi site. The most notorious of the two, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been ‘elevated to the senior ranks of al-Qaeda in Yemen,’ a US counter-terrorism official told AFP. The other man on the video is Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an al-Qaeda commander...
But more troubling is the fact that al-Shihri was a contact person between al-Qaeda and Iran. As reported by AP, he was ‘an alleged travel coordinator for al-Qaida who was accused of meeting extremists in Mashad, Iran, and briefing them on how to enter Afghanistan.’ Such a person operating in the most strategic area of Jihadism, the most dangerous bridge of (potential) cooperation between al-Qaeda and the Khomeinist regime, was released from Guantanamo on the basis that he said ‘bin Laden had no business representing Islam, denied any links to terrorism and expressed interest in rejoining his family in Saudi Arabia.’ When asked about his Iranian trips, he allegedly answered that he was ‘buying carpets for his store in Riyadh.’
The NEFA Foundation has released English-subtitled excerpts from the final video-recorded will of Kuwaiti national Abdullah al-Ajmi (a.k.a. Abu Juhaiman al-Kuwaiti). Al-Ajmi was a former detainee at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba who was freed from American custody and, undeterred, subsequently joined Al-Qaida's ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI). In April 2008, al-Ajmi allegedly executed a suicide truck bombing on behalf of al-Qaida targeting local Iraqi security forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Footage of al-Ajmi reading his will and carrying out his suicide mission were later distributed by the official media wing of Al-Qaida in Iraq. The Kuwaiti is shown addressing the camera and declaring, ‘I thank Allah… who freed me from Guantanamo Bay prison and, after we were tortured, connected me with the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). And it is the gift of Allah to follow the path of this country, the Islamic State of Iraq... You may not see us again after this meeting because we are headed for Allah, and Allah-willing, we will enter the dens and the neighborhoods of those who have abandoned Islam.’
I have argued throughout that both the Guantanamo and control orders fiascos in the US and Britain arose because the west is facing an entirely new phenomenon: asymmetric warfare which conforms neither to our conventional definition of war (between states) nor of terrorism (discrete and limited goals). Accordingly, our existing structures of detention and trial, either criminal or military, are unable to deal with it. We need to devise new ones which are appropriate for this new phenomenon -- and which do accord with our most fundamental principles, such as the rule of law and the duty to protect our society, rather than cherry-picking those principles to use some to undermine others in furtherance of the anti-western agenda of the doctrine of human wrongs.
First of all Boris fails to display true grit in bringing about what Hitler had failed to achieve by taking all of London’s buses off the road:
London Mayor Boris Johnson insisted that the authorities had coped ‘pretty well’ with the blizzards that brought the capital to a virtual standstill. He defended the decision to shut down London’s buses, saying that while extensive efforts had been made to clear the roads around the depots, they had been overwhelmed by the volume of snow.
Boris Johnson has been asked to explain why he retracted evidence he gave to MPs about the Damian Green affair earlier today. Keith Vaz, the chairman of the home affairs select committee, has demanded that Johnson clarify which version of events was correct after the mayor of London admitted an error in his evidence shortly after his grilling session by the committee was concluded. Asked whether he had discussed the arrest of Green, the shadow immigration minister, with David Cameron on the day of the arrest, Johnson failed to mention a telephone conversation with the Tory party leader conducted at noon that day. Vaz said that changing his evidence in such a way was a ‘serious matter’.
Whoops! As Boris himself put it in his Telegraph column today (on a subject unrelated to mayoral preoccupations such as snow or Green), he is running the risk that
a skid will turn into a prang from which it could take a long time to recover.
I have been travelling during the past few days and so have built up a bit of a backlog of events upon which I have not yet commented. One of these is the apparently gross abuse of Parliament by Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, which remarkably has not been covered at all in the mainstream British media. Another member of the House of Lords invited the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is currently facing prosecution in the Netherlands for his outspoken analysis of the Islamist war on civilisation, to screen his controversial film ‘Fitna’ in the Lords on January 29 and discuss his views.
But various representatives of the British Muslim community protested; and Lord Ahmed issued a threat that he would personally mobilise 10,000 Muslims to prevent Wilders from entering the Upper House and would take the peer organising the event to court. In the face of such threats, the meeting was cancelled.
Lord Ahmed then boasted of his victory in the Pakistani media. The Associated Press of Pakistan reported him exulting in:
a victory for the Muslim community.
(Update: Lord Ahmed has been in touch to deny that he ever issued such a threat)
It was of course a major defeat for Parliament’s sovereign right and duty to protect free speech, the right to issue an invitation to a democratically elected member of a European parliament, and the right of British citizens to live without intimidation. It was an appalling development.
Khaled abu Toameh is the Jerusalem Post's splendid reporter on Palestinian affairs, the only journalist constantly to provide an honest, open-eyed account of what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza and explain what it means. Here is the transcript of a talk he recently gave to some American commentators in which characteristically provides a bracing if grim antidote to the fantasies of ‘peace in our time’ which grip so many in the west who think they know how to resolve the Middle East impasse. He recounts how his warnings about the corruption in the Palestinian Authority under Arafat went unheeded by the arrogant delusionists of America and Europe, whose money went to buy arms that were used not against Hamas or Islamic Jihad but against anyone who supported reform or democracy. Today he warns against the delusion of the ‘two-state solution’ that is the driving focus of the American and European approach to this problem, and delivers instead this brutally obvious message:
What we have in the West Bank is the secular, corrupt, powerless regime of the PLO. ... These people are in power only thanks to the presence of the IDF in the West Bank. If the Israeli army were to leave the West Bank tomorrow morning these PLO people would collapse in five minutes and Hamas would take over.
The question we should ask ourselves in the wake of this scenario is whether or not there is really a partner on the Palestinian side for any deal, let alone a peace agreement. Any kind of deal. Is there really a partner on the Palestinian side? And the answer is simple. No.
Hamas is not a partner for any peace agreement because Hamas is not going to change. All these people who believe that Hamas will one day change its ideology, that pragmatic leaders will emerge in Hamas, these people are living under illusions.
...Talking about a Palestinian state today is a joke. Where would that state be established? Israel controls nearly half of the West Bank. These PLO people can't deliver. If Israel gives up the West Bank, you will have to go to Cairo or Amman to take a flight back to America because snipers will be sitting on the hilltops above Ben-Gurion airport. If you keep up this policy of supporting one party against the other, Gaza will move to the West Bank and we will end up with more anarchy and lawlessness and God knows what else is going to happen.
His analysis is spot on because it is founded upon an unflinching connection with hard reality. And this is why you won’t read anything like these truths in the British or American media:
When I tried to alert my foreign colleagues in 1995, 1996, and 1997, to the fact that there was corruption in the Palestinian Authority, many of them asked me if I was on the payroll of the Jewish Lobby. I wanted to know where was this Jewish Lobby? If there was one maybe they would pay me.
I told them: ‘This is what I am hearing. The writing is on the wall. Come and listen to what Palestinians are saying.’ And they told me they weren't interested in that story. They told me they wanted anti-Israel stories because it made their lives so much easier. They told me they didn't want to write anything bad about Palestinians, that Arafat was a man of peace and should be given a chance. I heard this from major American journalists, by the way. Leading American journalists. I don't want to give you their names right now, but I was really frustrated. And angry.
Listen. For all these years we've been attacking the military occupation. So why is it that when I tell you something that Arafat is doing, suddenly you don't want to report it and think it’s Jewish propaganda? Most of these journalists did not even want to make any effort.
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a
panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over
God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.
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After the British courts ruled on ‘human rights’ grounds that foreign terrorist suspects could neither be thrown out of the country nor locked up pending their potentially being thrown out of the country – measures which were said to represent ‘a defeat for our own values’ -- the government in desperation settled upon the idea of ‘control orders’, under which such suspects would be detained in their own homes under varying degrees of restriction. These orders were in turn challenged and watered down under pressure from the ‘human rights’ lobby. In response to the anxiety that control orders were not adequate to maintain public security against terror suspects, the government insisted that they constituted a robust protection and that there was no cause for alarm.
Uh oh. 
