Power and amnesia at the White House

During the US Presidential election campaign I reported that Samantha Power, a very close friend and adviser of Obama's whom he nevertheless fired for calling Hillary a ‘monster’, said she still expected to be in Obama’s administration. Power has advocated the ending of all aid to Israel and redirecting it to the Palestinians. She has also spoken about the need to land a ‘mammoth force’ of US troops in Israel to protect the Palestinians from Israeli attempts at genocide (sic) -- and has complained that criticism of Barack Obama all too often came down to what was ‘good for the Jews’.

If such a person were to be given a place in the administration this would be a pretty good indicator of just where Obama actually stands in the fight to defend civilisation.

Officials familiar with the decision say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and potential travel with Clinton, who is now secretary of state. NSC staffers often accompany the secretary of state on foreign trips.

the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.

In these most recent 20 years — the alleged winter of our disrespect of the Islamic world — America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them. It engaged in five military campaigns, every one of which involved — and resulted in — the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The two Balkan interventions — as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims (43 Americans were killed) — were humanitarian exercises of the highest order, there being no significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. In these 20 years, this nation has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim, anywhere on Earth. Why are we apologizing?

And what of that happy U.S.- Muslim relationship that Obama imagines existed 'as recently as 20 or 30 years ago' that he has now come to restore? Thirty years ago, 1979, saw the greatest U.S.- Muslim rupture in our 233-year history: Iran's radical Islamic revolution, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, the 14 months of America held hostage. Which came just a few years after the Arab oil embargo that sent the United States into a long and punishing recession. Which, in turn, was preceded by the kidnapping and cold-blooded execution by Arab terrorists of the U.S. ambassador in Sudan and his chargé d'affaires. This is to say nothing of the Marine barracks massacre of 1983, and the innumerable attacks on U.S. embassies and installations around the world during what Obama now characterizes as the halcyon days of U.S.Islamic relations.

No wonder the Iranians are jubilant.

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The Iranians look very frightened

As was entirely predictable, the Iranian government has reacted with utter contempt to the exciting new approach of US President Obama towards resolving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme:

US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of ‘domination’ has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday. ‘This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,’ Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency. ‘Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,’ he added.

No! Surely not!! There must be some mistake!!! Not after the Guardian told us so authoritatively:

The ferocity of Ahmadinejad's response does make one thing clear: the Tehran hardliners are more terrified of a moderate and charismatic new voice from Washington than all the sabres rattled by the Bush administration.

Yes, yes, -- that must surely be it. The fact that not just Ahmadinejad but the official spokesman of the entire Iranian government is saying that Obama’s offer of talks -- showing that America has no intention of stopping its nuclear programme and instead is grovelling to Tehran -- is laughing fit to bust at this display of chronic weakness reveals of course that Iran is shivering its shoes at the thought.

Phew – the Iranians had me worried there for a moment.

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The western front of the jihad against the Jews

The common front between the Jew-haters of the Arab and Muslim world and the Jew-haters of the west is now gathering momentum. On 26 January the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (sorry no link) put out this statement:

In a letter to Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, reported on ‘a most alarming situation yesterday in Malmö, as witnessed by one of our Centre's Swedish members.’ Samuels noted that ‘apparently, a small number of Swedish Jews had received the necessary permit for a silent demonstration for peace, to be held in the centre of Malmö’. He continued: ‘Following the first speech, electric wires to the microphone were cut as a large crowd of Arab counter-demonstrators surrounded your Jewish citizens, screaming antisemitic abuse and brandishing swastika posters’, adding that the official demonstration organizers requested the police officers present, to keep the peace and prevent a riot. The law enforcement response was that “The Jews should leave!” Jewish children and elderly were forced to run from the gathering as young Arabs pursued them, threatening physical violence. The Centre pointed out that ‘Malmö has become a Gaza nest in Scandinavia, with an increasingly Jihadist presence, especially galvanized by the European Social Forum calls from Malmö for assaults upon Israel, last September, BEFORE the Gaza operation.’

On the same day that this letter was sent, the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, Egyptian cleric Amin al Ansari appeared on an Egyptian TV channel to announce that Europe had had no choice but to exterminate the Jews in the Holocaust because of their innate evil. You can see the footage and read the transcript here. 

Starting off by examining ‘the civil strife the Jews have caused throughout the world,’ Al-Ansari explained that because of the Jews’ deeds during and after World War I, ‘it got to the point that the rulers themselves had no solution but to annihilate them.’ Al-Ansari showed viewers how ‘the holocausts of the Jews in Germany were because of their own deeds - they were killing Germans, kindling civil strife, inciting the people against their rulers, and corrupting the peoples,’ underlining his points with World War II footage of the bombing of Berlin, which he compared to present-day Gaza. Then, saying, ‘Let’s watch what Germany did to Israel - or rather, to the Jews,’ he screened footage of torture and killing of Jews in Dachau, Mauthausen, and Belsen, providing running commentary, and stating, ‘This is what we hope will happen, but, Allah willing, at the hand of the Muslims.’ He adds that the Jews ‘have even turned [the Holocaust] it into a holiday, which will be marked in a few days. They call it the Holocaust Holiday, in which they rekindle what happened to them, for the whole world to see, so that people will feel sorry for them... so that they can continue to extort people politically and financially forever. They like money.’

Egypt, you may recall, is the country which the west is expecting to ensure that no more weapons to annihilate Israel are smuggled through the tunnels under its border into Gaza. Small chance of this support for the genocide of the Jews being viewed with abhorrence in Norway, where Trine Lilleng, that country’s First Secretary at its embassy in Riyadh, recently sent out an email on her office account (excoriated here by David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish committee) in which she declared:

The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany.

Accompanying the text were photos, with an emphasis on children, seeking to juxtapose the Holocaust with the recent Israeli military operation in Gaza.

Amin al Ansari would doubtless approve.

Having been incited by such obscene remarks to believe that the Israelis are indeed Nazis – with all the Holocaust-denial that such a monstrously inverted view necessarily entails)  the Norwegians clearly think it’s time for a pogrom against their supporters. The Jerusalem Post reports that Siv Jensen, chairwoman of the main opposition Progress Party, has been receiving death threats after she spoke at a pro-Israel rally and is now under 24-hour security guard.

‘I have never experienced this kind of hatred in Norway,’ said Toje, who was present at the demonstration. ‘There were people throwing stones at and spitting on rally-goers. Afterward, people carrying Israeli flags were randomly attacked in the streets.’ Along with expressions of support for Israel, speakers at the rally, including Jensen, called for aid to be distributed in Gaza and for a cease-fire agreement to be signed. ‘It was a peaceful rally,’ said Toje. ‘Jensen was calling for the same things as Barack Obama. The difference is that she was doing it in Norway. The environment here is different.’ The Socialist Left Party (Sosialistisk Venstreparti), which is part of the current coalition, has proposed a number of boycotts against Israel since the government was formed in 2005. ‘The first was a general boycott,’ said Toje. ‘Next came an academic boycott and then a boycott on arms.’ The boycotts, though not implemented, have exacerbated an already hostile atmosphere.

As they do everywhere. And now as Ha’aretz reports American academics are also leaping on the pogrom bandwagon. The surreal nature of this twisted and unique hatred was encapsulated in this exchange with one of the boycotters, David Lloyd, a professor of English at the University of Southern California:

Lloyd wrote that to the best of his knowledge, all supporters of the anti-Israel boycott were also opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Asked if logic wouldn't dictate that he and his colleagues boycott themselves, he responded, ‘Self-boycott is a difficult concept to realize. But speaking for myself, I would have supported and honored such a boycott had it been proposed by my colleagues overseas.’

Lloyd and his colleagues are not of course similarly exercised to boycott Iran, openly committed to genocide and sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Jerusalem Postreports:

Israeli intelligence agencies recently succeeded in thwarting a major Hizbullah terror attack against an Israeli target in Europe, Channel 2 reported Wednesday, citing security officials. The attack was reportedly thwarted by Israel in conjunction with a European intelligence agency. Hizbullah planned the attack to avenge the February 2008 assassination of arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the report said.

But now look: in Europe the madness created by ‘human rights’ has now reached such a point that European jurists think killing terrorists is a war crime. Forget the attempt to hunt down and kill bin Laden; forget the al Qaeda terrorists killed by the western alliance; forget the thousands of Taleban the west has killed in Afghanistan. When Israel kills a man responsible for planning and implementing mass atrocities against both its own citizens and those in the west, this alone is a war crime. And thanks to the globalisation ofwww.jpost.com/servlet/Satellitethrough international ‘human rights’ law, Israel is now being persecuted through legal action for defending its own citizens against mass murder. Thus in Spain a judge agreed yesterday to an investigation of seven former top Israeli security officials for alleged war crimes in the 2002 bombing in Gaza that killed top Hamas terrorist Salah Shehadeh and 14 other people. As the then defence minister Binyamin ben Eliezer said: 

‘The decision of the Spanish court is delusional, ridiculous, and more than that, outrageous,’ Ben-Eliezer told Channel 2. ‘They are using the courts of the free world to fight those who fight terror. I am not sorry about the decision that I made when I was defense minister to assassinate him. Shehadeh was an arch-murderer. If we hadn't done this, hundreds of others would have died,’ he said.

This jihad of the law being mounted against Israel is now, as this analysis by theIntelligence and Terrorism Information Centre sets out, a psy-ops strategy by Hamas to win the propaganda war against Israel:

1. As soon as Operation Cast Lead ended, Ismail Haniya, prime minister of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, called for international teams to investigate the so-called ‘war crimes’ carried out by Israel . He also demanded that the Israeli leadership (what he calls ‘the occupation leadership’) be tried in an international court (Al-Jazeera TV, January 18, 2009 ). These tactics are used to strengthen Hamas's defamatory allegations that Israel acted solely against civilians and to represent the IDF operation as a ‘holocaust’ for the Gazans. ¹ 2. As part of Hamas's propaganda campaign, Ismail Haniya appointed an ad hoc committee to document the IDF operation in the Gaza Strip to provide a foundation for attempts to prosecute Israel for ‘Zionist war crimes.’ The committee's ‘source of authority’ will be Hamas activist Faraj al-Ghoul (chairman of the Hamas faction in the Palestinian Legislative Council). It will be headed by Dhiaa al-Din Madhoun , also known as a Hamas activist. The committee chairman announced that teams including ‘jurists and investigators’ had been set up with 160 members spread, out through the Gaza Strip to ‘document Israel 's crimes,’ and would begin work on January 24 (PalMedia website, Gaza , January 26, 2009 ). 3. The objective of Hamas's ‘documentation activity’ is to attack and defame Israel and represent it as harming civilians, ignoring and even hiding the military infrastructure it established in densely-populated civilian centers. Since the documentation will not have an objective, truthful foundation, it will be nothing more than blatant propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion to defame Israel . In addition, Ismail Haniya, Hamas activists and the countries supporting them make no mention of the indiscriminate rocket fire used to attack Israeli population centers and the use made by Hamas of the civilian population as human shields for its military-terrorist operatives, both of which are consideredwar crimes . Thus the perpetrators of war crimes themselves and their supporters are currently engaged in gathering evidence against Israel , the victim of continuous rocket and mortar shell fire, to charge it with ‘war crimes’… 4. Hamas’s activity is liable to be supported by Arab countries and the anti-Israeli elements in the Middle East and abroad which are always eager to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon.

And also by anti-Israel elements in Spain, and in Britain where for years now Israeli military top brass have been unable to set foot without the threat of just such a law suit. As the lies and libels about Israel continue to circulate in the west western ‘progressives’ helping incite this gathering pogrom – and who appear to be wholly impervious to facts, truth or reason -- are in an obscene alliance with those bent upon genocide to delegitimise Israel, neutralise its capacity to defend its own people against slaughter and prepare the ground for its eventual destruction.

 

 

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An incendiary error

Remember the UNRWA school in Gaza which was reputedly shelled by the Israelis during the war in Gaza with the reported deaths of 30-40 civilians who had taken refuge inside it? This was presented by Hamas and the UNRWA high command as a major atrocity. In response, the Israelis maintained that they had been returning fire from the school. After an investigation, they amended this to say the firing had come from a compound adjacent to the school; they had returned fire with three shells, one of which had hit the school by mistake.

While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.

...The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant:  ‘Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead. Three of my students were killed,’ he said. ‘But they were all outside.’ Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front. ‘There were only three,’ he said. ‘They were all out here on the road.’

The claim that Israel had shelled refugees huddling for shelter on the school’s property was therefore totally untrue.

But now look at what John Ging, UNRWA’s operations director in Gaza (pictured outside the subsequently shelled UN aid store) has been saying. In an interview this week, he acknowledged  that all three Israeli mortar shells landed outside the school and that ‘no one was killed in the school.’

‘I told the Israelis that none of the shells landed in the school,’ he said. Why would he do that? ‘Because they had told everyone they had returned fire from gunmen in the school. That wasn't true.’

But that was only at the very beginning, when all was confusion. The Israelis quickly corrected themselves to say they had returned fire which was coming from the vicinity of the school; and then amplified after further investigation that the firing had come from a compound next to the school.

Yet look at whom Ging is pointing the finger of blame for the error!

Mr. Ging blames the Israelis for the confusion over where the victims were killed. ‘They even came out with a video that purported to show gunmen in the schoolyard. But we had seen it before,’ he said, ‘in 2007.’

It's true that at the beginning the Israelis believed the Hamas missile had come from the school grounds. But contrary to Ging's claim, the IDF never claimed to have a video showing gunmen in the schoolyard during this particular incident. It said this footage showed another UNRWA school being used to fire rockets the previous year; and it said that this footage showed the school in the January 6 incident being used for mortar fire in October 2007. The story goes on:

The Israelis are the ones, [Ging] said, who got everyone thinking the deaths occurred inside the school. ‘Look at my statements,’ he said. ‘I never said anyone was killed in the school. Our officials never made any such allegation.’

But as the Globe and Mail observes:

Speaking from Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as the bodies were being brought in that night, an emotional Mr. Ging did say: ‘Those in the school were all families seeking refuge. ... There's nowhere safe in Gaza.’

...The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs got the location right, for a short while. Its daily bulletin cited ‘early reports’ that ‘three artillery shells landed outside the UNRWA Jabalia Prep. C Girls School ...’ However, its more comprehensive weekly report, published three days later, stated that ‘Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools ...’ including the one at issue. Such official wording helps explain the widespread news reports of the deaths in the school, but not why the UN agencies allowed the misconception to linger. ‘I know no one was killed in the school,’ Mr. Ging said. ‘But 41 innocent people were killed in the street outside the school. Many of those people had taken refuge in the school and wandered out onto the street.’

This is highly disingenuous.  As I recall, no-one ever said the school building was hit by the Israeli shells. What was claimed from the start was that people in the compound in front of the school -- ie outside the school building but in its grounds -- had been killed. And from the start Ging displayed a high degree of outrage that refugees had been shelled as they sheltered on UNRWA school property. The UN reported after a press conference that day:

Decrying mounting civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip since Israel launched its military offensive there some 11 days ago, the head of United Nations relief operations in the enclave today demanded an independent investigation into a spate of overnight and early-morning air strikes on several clearly marked schools... ‘It's quite a horrific scene here today,’ said John Ging...  In addition to the 30 people killed, 55 others had been injured by three Israeli artillery shells landing on the perimeter of a United Nations school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, where civilians had fled seeking refuge from the ongoing violence...Emphasizing that all United Nations schools in Gaza were clearly marked, he said they flew the Organization's flag and Israel had long been provided with the GPS coordinates of all its installations in the area.  ‘So the people in Gaza feel that nowhere is safe...’ [my emphasis]

Having made an incendiary false allegation which helped whip up an eruption of hatred and violence towards Israel and Jewish people around the world, Ging and UNRWA took until this week to correct this falsehood – and then blamed Israel for the damage that the error had done.

The only good thing about all this is that people can now begin to get an inkling of the truth about UNRWA – that this supposedly impartial body supervising the tinderbox of Gaza is actually a major player in fuelling the murderous frenzy against Israel at the heart of the Middle East impasse.

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A cooling ardour

Since Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore produced his movie An Incomprehensible Untruth Inconvenient Truth predicting the imminent end of the world through frying and drowning caused by man-made global warming, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. The generally accepted prediction has been that as carbon dioxide levels continue to go through the roof (or should that be the stratosphere) the climate would continue to warm as a result, ice caps would continue to melt (with the North Pole becoming ice-free by 2008), polar bears would become extinct, glaciers would disappear and seas would continue to rise (by 20 feet in the near future, said Gore); and with an unchallengeable scientific consensus that life on earth would gradually succumb to the catastrophic consequences of greed, big oil and the cosmic and diabolical evil of western capitalism.

A whole new industry has grown up of ‘carbon trading’ to reduce those fatal emissions, which threatens to cripple the economies of the west. Global warming protection measures have brought California to the edge of bankruptcy. In Britain, where climate change is now a Cabinet portfolio, climate change policies already account for about 14% of the average domestic electricity bill and 21% of the average business electricity bill, with an expected rise to 55% of the average business electricity bill by 2020; now the aim is to cut carbon emissions by a crippling 80 per cent.

Two weeks ago the green guru James Hansen, who runs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and has done more than any other person on the planet to create the global warming frenzy with his dire climate warnings -- calling for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for ‘high crimes against humanity and nature’ by actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer -- warned the then President-elect Obama that he needed to take decisive action in his first administration as soaring carbon emissions threatened to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major weather disruption:

[Hanson] argues that most estimates of sea level rises are too low conservative - thanks to the accelerating ice melt, rises will be far greater than previously thought.

But now the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reports that James Hansen’s former supervisor, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Programme at NASA who was responsible for all weather and climate research in the agency from1982 to 1994, has said he thinks man-made global warming theory is anti-scientific bunk:

‘I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,’ Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. ‘I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation... Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress...

Theon declared ‘climate models are useless.’ ‘My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,’ Theon explained. ‘Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,’ he added.

Exactly as some of us have been saying since 1988.  Since then, the Great Global Warming Terror – with sceptics even compared to Holocaust deniers – has intimidated many scientists into silence and cost other braver souls their jobs. With the global financial crisis likely to bring the green fantasy of crippling the capitalist world to a crashing halt, it is possible that the greatest scientific scam in history will simply fade away without the charlatans who perpetrated it being brought to book. But their names are on record; and no-one should take seriously what they say about anything at all ever again.

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The Middle East appeasement process

The evidence mounts up that, as predicted, with the accession of Obama to the White House the forces of darkness are hugely buoyed by the new dawn of appeasement. Hamas, which broke its ‘cease-fire’ again yesterday by blowing up an Israeli patrol and killing a soldier, certainly thinks it’s winning. The Times reports:

‘I think there will be a change in these things [dialogue with Hamas] in the near future,’ said Ihab el-Ghusiem, a Hamas Interior Ministry spokesman in Gaza City. ‘In the last year there have been many backdoor meetings and dialogue with Europeans. I personally sat with them myself. They reached the conclusion that they must talk with Hamas because we are not going anywhere soon.’

Mr Mitchell, who compiled a report in 2001 into ways to tackle violence in the region, is not scheduled to talk to Hamas officials during his visit but Hamas hoped there would be progress in the truce talks.

President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is expected tomorrow to explore the chances of the Palestinian group Hamas being brought into a peace dialogue with Israel. Mitchell, on the first leg of a weeklong trip to the region, is scheduled to meet the President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo tomorrow. The Egyptians have been engaged in extensive talks with Hamas, which controls Gaza. Although Mitchell has no plans to visit Gaza or to talk directly with Hamas in the near future, the Egyptians offer an indirect route to the group, which is classified by America as a terrorist group.

‘Israel has a state, but its people live in unbearable anxiety, so security for the people is an overriding objective. The Palestinians don't have a state and they want one, an independent, economically viable and geographically integral state; that is their overriding objective,’ he said. ‘I believe that neither can attain its objective by denying to the other side its objectives. [My emphasis] Israelis are not likely to have sustainable security if the Palestinians don't have a state, and Palestinians will never achieve a state until the people of Israel have some security.’

President Obama said before dispatching his envoy: ‘The moment is ripe for both sides to realise that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. Instead it's time to return to the negotiating table.’

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Blood brothers

An illuminating and authoritative report by Dan Diker and Khaled abu Toameh, warning that counting upon Fatah to be a civilised replacement for Hamas in Gaza is a dangerous fallacy, contains the following arresting passage:

The enmity between Fatah and Hamas is far greater than Palestinian hatred of Israel. Nasser Juma'a, a Palestinian Legislative Council member from Nablus, described Hamas as "insects" in the final week of Israel's offensive in Gaza. Hamas legislator Salah Bardaweel countered that PA Chairman Abbas "played a major role" in the Israeli killing of Hamas Interior Minister Said Siam "through his men in the Gaza Strip, who have been pointing out the homes of Hamas members." However, what is remarkable and ignored in Western diplomatic circles is that Fayyad has continued to pay the monthly salaries of between 6,000 and 12,000 Hamas Executive Force operatives in Gaza, in line with the 2007 Mecca national unity agreement that brought Hamas under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority for budgetary purposes.

It is widely believed in Western diplomatic circles that the PA in Ramallah was only paying the salaries of civil service employees in Gaza to encourage them to stay at home to avoid working with Hamas, especially after Hamas' expulsion of Fatah in June 2007. This is incorrect. The PA, and indirectly the U.S., and international donor countries have continued to pay monthly salaries to Hamas security operatives (Read: terrorists) and their commanders from the PA's $120 million monthly budget allocation to the Gaza Strip. The height of irony in this regard may have been seen during the Gaza war when Hamas fighters received their salaries from the PA at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital which was immune from IDF fire.

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A selective approach to the facts

   The pressure group Arab Media Watch has put out a statement claiming that my observation in my Daily Mail column yesterday, that

Hamas has intercepted dozens of aid trucks and confiscated food and medical supplies bound for the UN stores in Gaza

AMW chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi spoke on the phone with John Ging, director of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, and its spokesman Chris Gunness. Ging described the claim as ‘completely untrue.’ Gunness described it as ‘utter nonsense,’ and said he would make a statement about this to the Mail. ‘It took me a few minutes to verify that this very serious claim is false,’ wrote Nashashibi in a letter to the newspaper. ‘Phillips could have, and should have, done the same.’

Hamas hijacked Jordanian aid trucks after they crossed into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing on Tuesday. The aid was to go to UNRWA. As the truck drivers started unloading the aid, Hamas gunmen opened fire on them and forced them to go to Hamas-run stores.

on Tuesday that Hamas gunmen had seized the trucks shortly after they entered the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom border crossing

that on Monday night alone, Hamas gunmen intercepted 12 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid that had been donated by the Jordanian government to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.  He said that the trucks were on their way to the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) when the gunmen belonging to the movement's armed wing, Izaddin al-Kassam, stopped them and confiscated their contents... Last week Fatah activists and eyewitnesses in the Gaza Strip claimed that Hamas had confiscated fuel and food that was en route to hospitals and schools housing thousands of Palestinian families.

Ging accused Israel of killing the Palestinian driver of an aid truck on Jan. 7, 2009, while Israeli officials – including the medic who brought the Palestinians to a hospital in Ashkelon – said the driver’s death [was] the consequence of Palestinian sniper fire...Ging acknowledged, however, that he could not be absolutely certain that the attacks came from IDF forces, telling a reporter who asked whether other combatants may have been responsible, ‘There is a conflict going on.’

He was ‘just not going to answer’ allegations that UNRWA had been infiltrated by Hamas.  No evidence had ever been provided by any authority, at any level.  Absolutely no official allegation had been made. 

UNRWA official Chris Guinness told the Jerusalem Post this week that the agency screens names of new employees against the relatively small U.N. database of Taliban and Al Qaeda figures. Extremist Palestinians, however, are far more likely to belong to organizations, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, that are not on that watch list.

In 2004, former UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen told the Canadian Broadcasting Company, ‘I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime.’ (My emphasis) He added, ‘We do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.’

...There have been several high-profile examples of terrorists being employed by UNRWA. Former top Islamic Jihad rocket maker Awad Al-Qiq, who was killed in an Israeli air strike last May, was the headmaster and science instructor at an UNRWA school in Rafah, Gaza. Said Siyam, Hamas' interior minister and head of the Executive Force, was a teacher for over two decades in UNRWA schools.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill say they are also concerned that terrorist propaganda is being taught in UNRWA schools. A notebook captured by Israeli officials at the UNRWA school in the Kalandia refugee camp several years ago glorified homicide bombers and other terrorists. Called ‘The Star Team,’ it profiled so-called ‘martyrs,’ Palestinians who had died either in homicide bombings or during armed struggle with Israel. On the book's back cover was printed the UNRWA emblem, as well as a photo of a masked gunman taking aim while on one knee.

There is evidence that students educated in UNRWA schools are much more likely to become homicide bombers, said Jonathan Halevi, a former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence officer who specializes in Palestinian terrorist organizations. Halevi has spent several years building an extensive database for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs of terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Islamic extremist groups.

Though he cautioned that estimates are tricky because the identity of an attacker is not always made public, Halevi estimated that over 60 percent of homicide bombers were educated in UNRWA schools. By comparison, roughly 25-30 percent of Palestinian students in the West Bank, the origin of almost all homicide bombers since the start of the intifada in 2000, attend UNRWA schools, according to the agency’s figures.

In this piece, Kushner writes of Hamas members controlling the unions representing UNRWA employees, of an UNRWA ambulance being used to transport weapons and explosives and to terrorists and of an UNRWA driver taking ‘advantage of the freedom of movement he enjoyed to transmit messages among Hamas activists in various Palestinian towns.’

Kushner also details the actions of Nahd Rashi Ahmad Atallah, a senior UNRWA official who admitted that during the months of June and July 2002, ‘he had used his car, an UNRWA car, for the transportation of armed members of the “Popular Resistance Committees” who were on their way to carry out sniper attacks against Israeli troops … and a missile attacks against Jewish settlements in the Northern part of the Gaza Strip.’

Also, in May 2008, the Global Research in International Affairs Center published an article detailing how UNRWA schools have ‘become hotbeds of anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic indoctrination, recruiting offices for terrorist groups.’ Included in this piece is a description of how Awad Al-Qiq, a science teacher at an UNRWA school served as the leading bomb maker for Islamic Jihad. According to the report’s authors ‘Islamic Jihad did not need to pay him a salary for his military and militant activities since the UN, and American taxpayers, were already doing so.’

At the same time, UNWRA has gradually adopted a distinctive political viewpoint that favors the Palestinian and Arab narrative of events in the Middle East. In particular, it seems to favor the strain of Palestinian political thought espoused by those who are intent on a “return” to the land that is now Israel. UNRWA’s adoption of any political viewpoint is undesirable, but the one it has chosen to emphasize is especially regrettable. In addition to clashing with the objectives of the United States, this view has detracted from UNRWA’s humanitarian assistance, encouraged Palestinians who favor refighting long-lost wars, discouraged those who favor moving toward peace, and contributed to the scourge of conflicts that have been visited upon Palestinian refugees for decades.

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The Jews of the gathering night

 One of the most agonising and tragic aspects of the current global wave of Jew-hatred is the prominent part played in this by Jews. This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout the centuries of Jewish persecution, from the medieval ‘conversos’ to Karl Marx and beyond, there have always been Jews who, for a variety of reasons, have been ready and willing to advance the agenda of the persecutors of the Jewish people. Today, the west is teeming with their successors – almost always on the left, very often but not always highly secularised and with a tangential or deeply conflicted relationship with their Jewish identity, they are in the forefront of the movement to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel. They do it to no other country; only the expression of self-determination of their own people inspires in them such frenzied and obsessive loathing.

The late Harold Pinter won a Nobel Prize, not for his over-rated plays, but for his anti-Israeli (and anti-American) posturing. Equally influential are fellow Jewish anti-Zionists like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Naomi Klein, Joel Kovel, Tony Judt, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Sara Roy, Henry Siegman, Avrum Burg, Jaqueline Rose and Richard Falk, to mention only a sparse handful, whose denunciation of Israel is so extreme and untextured as to be scarcely distinguishable from antisemitism.

Such apostates do not scruple to trade in apocrypha when indulging their animus against their own people, even when they can be readily exposed. In Fabricating Israeli History, Efraim Karsh has abundantly demonstrated how left-wing Israeli ‘New Historians’ have cooked the documents they work with. The lamentable Naomi Klein falsely accuses Israel of having cynically profited from ‘endless war’ and calls for academic and economic boycotts. Noam Chomsky’s gross fabrications have been outed by Peter Collier. The list goes on... Given the virulent anti-Zionist advocacy of so many prominent Jewish self-haters, one remains skeptical of ever achieving collective assent or reasonable consensus. Masking the syndrome of self-contempt as a quest for ‘justice,’ these Jewish turncoats seek redemption in a denial of both history and genealogy. Diagnostically speaking, it is not so much a mental illness or clinical aberration we are witnessing, but a sickness in the soul supple enough to contort itself into a spurious idealism, a simulacrum of ideological nobility.

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The ugly face of bigoted Britain

Tremendous piece by Andrew Roberts in the Times today, making the crucial point that the charities involved in the now-famous humanitarian appeal for Gaza (on which I have written today for the Mail) are not in fact motivated by humanitarian concerns as much as a visceral hatred for Israel:

In the months prior to the decision by Hamas to end the six-month ceasefire and resume rocket attacks, these charities issued a flood of one- sided denunciations aimed at Israel. Their campaign repeated tendentious and often highly inaccurate terms such as ‘collective punishment’ and ‘violation of international law’. On March 6, 2008, CARE International, Cafod, Christian Aid and Oxfam (among others) published a widely quoted report under the headline ‘The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion’. The authors did not bother to hide their political bias against Israel, repeating standard Palestinian political rhetoric and including claims that Israeli policy ‘constitutes a collective punishment against ordinary men, women and children’ and is ‘illegal under international humanitarian law’.

The report was wrong on many counts, including allegations over the availability of food and basic necessities, which were later contradicted by both the World Bank and World Health Organisation, neither of which are exactly Israeli stooges. The fact that Hamas chose to pursue war with Israel rather than the welfare of its people, was not covered in these reports. There was no sense that any of these claims might be disputed by the other side or by genuinely neutral observers... Violence against Israelis, including deaths, are virtually ignored by Oxfam officials, who have referred to ‘collective punishment illegal under international humanitarian law yet tolerated by the international community’. For those of us who reject such gross ideological bias, which absolves the Hamas leadership for a confrontation which they openly sought, such statements by charities are unacceptable and should not be rewarded by the BBC.

I'm afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally.

People don’t really think about the Israeli propaganda machine, which is swift and remorseless and well connected. They [the BBC] have done us a favour in that they’ve shown that at work.

Timid Mr Thompson and his jelly-legged executives have allowed it to be beaten up by vested interests. They have already lost the faith of their staff. Now growing numbers of licence fee-payers are wondering why they consistently bow to every hysterical headline from the usual suspects.

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