A true scientist in government? Quel scandale!

Mon dieu! Are the French about to lead Europe into a second Enlightenment and a new age of reason? Climate Depot reports:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy appears ready to appoint renowned geophysicist and former socialist party leader Dr. Claude Allegre – France’s most outspoken global warming sceptic – to head the new super-ministry of industry and innovation.

... Allegre, a former French Socialist Party leader and a member of both the French and U.S. Academies of Science, was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, but he now says the cause of climate change is ‘unknown.’ Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books, and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States.

... Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992, letter titled ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ in which the scientists warned that global warming’s ‘potential risks are very great.’ But Allegre now believes the global warming hysteria is motivated by money. ‘The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!’ he explained. (LINK)

... Allegre ridiculed what he termed the ‘prophets of doom of global warming’ in a September 2006 article. (LINK) Allegre has mocked ‘the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.’

Doubtless the warmist inquisition is already working out how to boil Allegre in Big Oil.

Ecrasez l’infâme, Nicolas!

• The picture shows the Marquise du Châtelet as the muse of Voltaire, reflecting Isaac Newton’s heavenly insights down to Voltaire, in the frontispiece to their book, Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton.

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The fruits of appeasement

So now we can see once again the fruits of appeasement. North Korea has tested a second set of nuclear bombs and the west throws up its hands in horror. What did it expect? Once the Bush administration cravenly decided to give up on North Korea (following the similarly short-sighted approach taken by Bill Clinton), Kim Jong-il duly took the opportunity to press full steam ahead with his nuclear programme. Now the same ‘new realists’ who came to power at the tail-end of the Bush presidency and decided to ‘live with’ a North Korean bomb – just as they have apparently decided the US could ‘live with’ an Iranian bomb – are serving in the Obama administration, which of course has taken such imbecility to unprecedented depths. Obama has been abasing himself to every despot on the planet, proclaiming America’s weakness through his ‘hand of friendship’ and infantile belief that talking to tyrants is the route to peace.

The result of such epic cringing is two fingers from North Korea, with yet further threats today. Iran in particular will now be watching intently to see whether America will once again display weakness and impotence; if the US won’t even act to stop North Korea from going nuclear, Iran will be reinforced in its belief that it can develop its own nuclear weapons with impunity. So far, Obama has ‘rushed out a special statement’ in which he said ‘I strongly condemn [North Korea’s] reckless action’ and promised to ‘redouble’ America’s efforts to stop Pyongyang from acquiring nuclear weapons. Well, that will have them quaking in their boots, for sure. Redoubling weakness simply results in twice as much weakness.

As John Bolton commented a week ago -- correctly predicting the second North Korean test – following remarks by Stephen Bosworth, the US special envoy to the region:

Despite Pyongyang’s aggression, Mr. Bosworth has reiterated that the U.S. is ‘committed to dialogue’ and is ‘obviously interested in returning to a negotiating table as soon as we can.’ This is precisely what the North wants: America in a conciliatory mode, eager to bargain, just as Mr. Bush was after the 2006 test. If the next nuclear explosion doesn't derail the six-party talks, Kim will rightly conclude that he faces no real danger of ever having to dismantle his weapons program. North Korea is a mysterious place, but there is no mystery about its foreign-policy tactics: They work.

Not only is America now paying the price of its past defeatism over North Korea, but Obama is now ensuring that the US is weakened even more actively and catastrophically. The insanity of his overall strategy is set out here by James Lewis, who rightly suggests that Obama is simply the very worst person to be sitting in the White House right now.  And as John Bolton again wrote in the New York Times:

... the Obama administration is seriously weakening both our strategic offensive and defensive capacity. The Defense Department budget proposes major cuts in missile defense programs, returning to an emphasis both in operational and diplomatic terms on ‘theater’ missile defense (mainly for defending deployed military forces), rather than ‘national’ missile defense (for shielding America’s population from missile attack).

... The Pentagon also proposes ending financing for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a key to substituting safe, dependable warheads for the ones now aging... The administration is also putting new emphasis on negotiating conventions against the ‘arms race’ in outer space, which would undercut America's current substantial advantage above the earth...

Unhappily, the administration is pushing Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a ‘non-nuclear-weapons state,’ meaning Israel would have to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. Iran and others will welcome this, given their repeated demands for the same result. Today’s real proliferation threat, however, is not Israel, but states like Iran and North Korea that become parties to the alphabet soup of arms control treaties and then violate them with abandon. Without robust American reactions to these violations--not apparent in administration thinking--more will follow.

But does Obama care about any of that? As Con Coughlin wrote in the Telegraph:

The naivety of the West’s approach to North Korea was best summed up by Stephen Bosworth, Mr Obama’s special envoy to the region, who declared he was ‘relatively relaxed’ that the American-led six-nation talks aimed at bringing Pyongyang to heel have achieved virtually nothing... If the Obama administration is relaxed about this failure, then I suppose it will take an equally sanguine view of North Korea’s attempts to export its bomb-making expertise to other rogue states, such as Iran and Syria.

Indeed, after Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear facility there was evidence of North Korean involvement in that forbidden programme. North Korea is also selling nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan as well as Iran. Yet Obama appears ‘relaxed’ about everyone’s nukes except Israel's– the one country that will never use them except to prevent itself from being annihilated by the countries Obama is appeasing.

Naivety – or the profound idiocy of malice?

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Fine words butter no voters, David

I found much to agree with in David Cameron’s call for a new politics in the wake of the Great Parliamentary Meltdown -- not surprising, since I have been writing much the same thing over the past three weeks – which he set out in a speech today. He was right to say that the real problem is the general powerlessness felt by the public caused by far more than MPs’ corrupt expenses claims. He was right to point to

the collapse in personal responsibility that inevitably follows the leeching of power and control away from the individual and the community into the hands of the elite

and so therefore

We should start by pushing political power down as far as possible, wherever possible. To do this, politicians will have to change their attitude - big time.

He was right to say

Almost half of all the regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU. And since the advent of the Human Rights Act, judges are increasingly making our laws. The EU and the judges - neither of them accountable to British citizens - have taken too much power over issues that are contested aspects of public policy...and which should therefore be settled in the realm of democratic politics

and so therefore

a progressive reform agenda demands that we redistribute power from the EU to Britain and from judges to the people.

Amen to all that. And so what fresh policies can we expect from the Tories to put this radical blueprint into practice? Um...well, freeing up new schools and greater parental choice, a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and, er, a new Bill of Rights.

Only problem – these are pre-moat-and-duck-house policies. They’re not necessarily bad – some of them are rather good – but they will not in themselves give the British people back the power and responsibility they have lost. They merely tinker with the existing taxpayer-funded model of public services – and giving more power to local government runs the risk of merely moving centralised controls down from Whitehall to town hall -- while a new Bill of Rights will not undo the damage done by the human rights culture but will merely add another layer of confusion, and a referendum on the EU constitution will not address the loss of self-government to Brussels that has already taken place.

Maybe we’ll see different and more robust policies in due course. Let’s hope so. Cameron’s words were good – but he must know that if the public perceive that the policies on offer don’t match up to the fine rhetoric, then far from remedying public alienation from the political class he will merely deepen it still further.

If such a thing is possible.

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The maple leaf of decency

Western leaders who understand -- and are prepared publicly to acknowledge -- the signature deformity of our age are a rare breed indeed. So it was quite a shock to see that Jason Kenney, Canada’s minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, had publicly identified the ‘new antisemitism’ emanating from an alliance of Western leftists and Islamic extremists as even more dangerous than the ‘old European’ form of Jew-hatred.

Kenney said many anti-Israel attacks come from adherents of a form of anti-Semitism that who appear to view a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. ‘Israel is not perfect, obviously,’ Kenney said. ‘Israelis should be the first to admit that. But we acknowledge that so much of the criticism Israel faces is motivated by a dangerous form of anti-Semitism that tries to hide behind anti-Zionism and is represented by a coalition of the far left in the West with extreme currents of jihadi Islam that seek the destruction of the Jewish nation. They seem to believe that the Jewish people are the only people in the world that don't have a right to a homeland.’

Can you imagine Obama saying that? Or British Foreign Secretary Miliband?

Minister Kenney’s courage and decency should be applauded. Canada's government also distinguished itself by being the first country alongside Israel to boycott the 'Durban 2' conference which upheld the Durban 2001declaration demonising Israel.

Canada gets it. It is in highly select company.

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The sexualisation of heresy

The Equality Bill currently going through Parliament is the latest and potentially most oppressive attempt to impose politically acceptable attitudes and drive out any that fall foul of these criteria. Since the attitudes being imposed constitute an ideological agenda to destroy Britain’s foundational ethical principles and replace them by a nihilistic values and lifestyle free-for-all, they represent a direct onslaught on the Judeo-Christian morality underpinning British society.

The most neuralgic of these issues is gay rights. This is because the tolerance of homosexuality that a liberal society should properly show has long been hijacked by an agenda which aims at destroying the very idea of normative sexuality altogether – and does so by smearing it as prejudice. The true liberal position, that it is right and just to tolerate behaviour that deviates from the norm as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, is deemed to be rank prejudice on the grounds that homosexuality is not ‘deviancy’ but normal. ‘Normality’ is thus rendered incoherent and absurd and accordingly destroyed altogether.  The agenda is therefore not liberal tolerance but illiberal coercion against mainstream moral values, on the basis that the very idea of having normative moral principles at all is an expression of bigotry. So anyone who speaks out against gay rights is immediately vilified as a ‘homophobe’ and treated as a social and professional pariah.

Most people have been intimidated into silence under this onslaught. ‘Society has changed – get over it’ is the uncompromising message which few now dare gainsay. It is certainly the motto of the Tory Cameroons. But the people who find themselves in acute difficulty with this are religious groups whose faith prevents them from accepting these new sexual and moral anti-norms.

There has been growing concern that Christians in particular are being unfairly targeted by discrimination laws, following a number of high-profile cases of Christians finding themselves in difficulties – members of adoption panels having to step down because they oppose gay adoption, for example, or the nurse who was suspended (although subsequently reinstated, after protests) for offering to pray for a patient -- by standing up for their faith.

Until now, however, they have managed – in the teeth of considerable opposition within government – to secure conscientious exemptions from certain ‘equality’ laws so that they are not forced to go against their religious principles. Under existing ‘equalities’ legislation, any roles deemed to be necessary ‘for the purposes of an organised religion’ have an exemption. But now the deputy Equalities Minister, Maria Eagle, has said that under the new Equality Bill religious groups will be banned from turning down gay job applicants on the grounds of their sexuality. So churches, mosques and synagogues will therefore be forced to employ, for example, gay youth workers. The only exception will be the employment of priests or other ministers of religion where gay applicants can be turned down – and even that concession looks somewhat shaky. As the Telegraph reported:

Religious leaders had hoped to lobby for exemptions to the Equality Bill but Maria Eagle, the deputy equalities minister, has now indicated that it will cover almost all church employees. ‘The circumstances in which religious institutions can practice anything less than full equality are few and far between,’ she told delegates at the Faith, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Human Rights conference in London.

‘While the state would not intervene in narrowly ritual or doctrinal matters within faith groups, these communities cannot claim that everything they run is outside the scope of anti-discrimination law. Members of faith groups have a role in making the argument in their own communities for greater LGBT acceptance, but in the meantime the state has a duty to protect people from unfair treatment.’

But what about the unfair treatment of traditional Christians and other faith groups? The doctrine of equality means they have no right at all to uphold their belief that certain types of sexual behaviour are wrong. This is simply trumped by gay rights, which allows them no space at all to uphold their religious beliefs. This is not progressive. It is totalitarian. This was effectively acknowledged by none other than the high priest of judicial liberalism, Professor Ronald Dworkin. In a piece for Prospect in 2007, he observed in respect of the specific issue of gay adoption:

A liberal society faces a difficult decision when some of its members claim that their religious conviction will not allow them to obey a law that the majority deems necessary to prevent injustice. In such cases there is an apparent conflict between the demands of justice and respect for the freedom of citizens to follow their own convictions on matters of faith, and care is needed to discover the best way to reconcile the two liberal principles at stake. Liberal societies have exempted conscientious pacifists from frontline fighting in war, for example, in spite of the important principle that danger ought to be shared equally among citizens able to fight.

... It means respect for convictions that are matters of central concern across religious traditions because they touch the meaning of human life, generation and death. Bigotry is not among those issues, but war, sexuality and procreation are. That is why it is wrong for the state to forbid early abortion, and also wrong for it not to permit and sanction gay marriage. Government that limits freedom in those ways takes sides on religious issues. Of course the state cannot allow people full licence even in matters of religious dimension: it must regulate marriage and adoption out of concern for those who would otherwise be harmed. But it should try to accommodate strongly held and genuine religious conviction when accommodation would not significantly impair important government policy or significantly damage anyone. [My emphasis]

One of the key tenets – possibly the key tenet – of a liberal society is that it grants religious groups the freedom to practise their religious faith and live by its precepts. Preventing them from doing so is profoundly illiberal and oppressive – and it is not made any less so by the fact that ‘progressive’ voices inside the church themselves deem such precepts to be ‘homophobic’. This is merely the sexualisation of heresy. And what follows from heresy, whether religious or secular, is persecution.

Persecution needs an enforcer. And such a tool of oppression has been duly created in the form of the Orwellian-styled Equality & Human Rights Commission, whose role is to stamp out all such heresy. Accordingly Stonewall, the gay rights pressure group whose de-normalising agenda has been enacted virtually in its entirety by this Labour government, has not one but two commissioners on the E&HRC. And yet despite this blatant loading of the regulatory dice, gay activists have kicked up a stink over the appointment of one token evangelical Christian on the Commission, Joel Edwards -- even though by all accounts he is meek and conformist in his approach – so much so that at the same Faith, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Human Rights conference addressed by Maria Eagle the Commission’s head, Trevor Phillips, actually expressed contrition over Edwards’s appointment:

Trevor Phillips, Chair of the Equality & Human Rights Commission, spoke candidly about his position in the face of the controversies over the appointment of the Rev Joel Edwards, former General Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, to a Commissioner role for faith issues. Responding to tough questioning, he told the conference that had he known at the time of the appointment what he knew now, how deeply people had been hurt and alienated over this, maybe there would have been a different outcome.

Truly, as the joke goes, what was once prohibited has now become compulsory. Once, homosexual practice was outlawed. Now, it appears that Christian practice is to be afforded the same fate. This is a matter of fundamental civil rights. So where are the upholders of progressive values on this? Where are the human rights lawyers? Where is the voice of Liberty, Britain’s powerful human rights NGO? And where are the supposed defenders of core British and western values? Where (don’t laugh) is the Conservative Party?

Marching in the ranks of the secular inquisition, every one of them.

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The danger of the wrong kind of revolution

In the Telegraph, Philip Johnston rightly expresses alarm that various people are attempting to use the current crisis over the corruption of Parliament to bring about the constitutional revolution for which they have long been agitating – written constitution, more plebiscites, PR, elected House of Lords, control of Parliament by the public, that kind of thing. Constitutional reformers are – to use the words of Rahm Emanuel across the pond – determined not to let a good crisis go to waste, and are hoping to seize their opportunity.

As Johnston says, however, none of these proposed measures is necessary or called for and would make matters far worse – not least because the constitutional reformers have already done enough damage to the governance of Britain. One of the principal causes of this crisis, after all, is the weakness of Parliament, caused by the progressive loss of its powers to the executive, regional parliaments and assemblies, the judiciary and above all to the European Union. This has caused a loss of role and purpose amongst MPs, causing a profound de-moralisation (in every sense) which has in turn created the breeding ground for corruption.

The last thing that should happen is for Parliament to be made even weaker. Yet MPs are apparently themselves doing just that by agreeing to have their financial arrangements removed from Parliamentary control and given to an outside body. But this undermines a key principle of our Parliamentary democracy, that Parliament is sovereign and no-one tells it what to do.

Yes, of course this crisis has arisen precisely because MPs have shown themselves unfit to police their own activities. But that’s because it’s the MPs who are rotten, not the institution. It’s the MPs who’ve got to go, not the independence of Parliament. That’s why more plebiscites or giving the public greater powers of recall over MPs are really bad ideas too. All these things would make MPs even weaker, and hand yet more power to whichever interest groups can shout and fight loudest and dirtiest. Which is precisely what the constitutional Jacobins want. With Parliament wounded and bleeding, they see their chance to go in for the kill and replace rule by the people through elected representatives by rule by unelected groups.

So we must be careful not to throw out the democratic baby with the dirty Parliamentary bathwater. What we are witnessing is a moral breakdown, not a systems breakdown. It’s MPs themselves who have to be reformed so that they can play the role in our unique and historic British constitution -- the ancient guardian of our liberties -- that we want and expect them to play.

First and most important, we have to hold them to account by slinging the present incumbents out – which is why we need a general election now. The few MPs who are falling on their swords are merely some of the most egregious offenders. There is no more salutary or democratic antidote to corruption than the sack and, where appropriate, condign punishment through the exercise of the criminal law.  

Next, MPs must be strengthened against the executive. Johnston makes some good suggestions in this regard. To me, an absolutely key requirement is to minimise the power of the whips, to break the power not just of the executive but also of party-imposed conformity. That’s partly why paying MPs higher salaries is also not the answer, since that would merely exacerbate the already damaging trend for young people to treat politics as their one and only career, thus making themselves utterly dependent on party patronage for their career advancement.

The select committees were supposed to be a brake on the power of the executive, but this has been all but negated by the fact that the committees themselves are whipped. If Parliament is to regain its power, it is vital that MPs regain the independence they have lost. That means breaking the power of the political party. That’s why I think the development of Sir Paul Judge’s ‘Jury Team’, the umbrella group putting forward independent parliamentary candidates, is exciting and important. Party politics – more precisely, the ideologies that are enforced through party discipline to produce conformist MPs who answer to their party whip rather than their electors – has been the single greatest reason why representative politics has parted so catastrophically from the lives of the people it is supposed to serve. To ensure that the right kind of revolution emerges from this crisis, we need to see lots of independents ousting party hacks at the election. That would concentrate minds wonderfully.

Of course that’s not the end of it either. There’s the little matter of our membership of the EU, for example, and the way that has destroyed the significance of the British Parliament, part of the wider phenomenon of Britain losing its own national identity and purpose.

There’s the destruction of the independence of the civil service -- which started under Mrs Thatcher, let us not forget, whose determination to ensure that public servants were ‘one of us’ was so greatly amplified by Tony Blair, whose Mussolini-like identification of party with national interest completed Whitehall’s mutation from the Civil Service into the Cipher Service.

There’s the collapse of Britain’s education system, which means that an increasing number of the said civil/cipher servants along with MPs can no longer think, let alone actually know anything about anything.

And there’s the wider cultural and moral breakdown of Britain under the onslaught from nihilism and cultural Marxism, which has created our general free-for-all of incontinent personal gratification enforced by a secular inquisition which treats any brake on the appetite as heresy – a culture of which our MPs are demonstrably such triumphant exemplars. 

Rescuing representative democracy in Britain from the pit into which it has fallen sure won’t be easy. Parliament is in trouble because it reflects a country that's in trouble.

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The Edinburgh Bigotry Festival

We know there are left-wing bigots who hate Israel and tell defamatory lies about its behaviour. What is much more troubling is the way in which others go along with this, to the extent of trampling down fundamental liberties.

The film-maker Ken Loach is well known for his extreme hostility to Israel. Tali Shalom Ezer, a graduate of Tel Aviv University, was due to go to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for a screening of her film, Surrogate. Her film has nothing to do with politics. It is a romance set in a sex-therapy clinic. Yet simply because she was Israeli, and had received a grant of £300 from the Israel embassy to enable her to travel to Scotland, Loach said the Festival should be boycotted on account of ‘the massacres and state terrorism in Gaza’.

This was clearly appalling on several counts. First, there were no massacres or state terrorism by Israel in Gaza. There was a war against terrorism. The terrorism is being perpetrated by Gaza against Israel. Loach does not seek to boycott those who deliberately try to murder Israeli innocents; he supports them and tries to punish their victims instead. Second this film director, whose business should surely be to promote free artistic and cultural expression, was trying to stifle and censor a film. Third, he was attempting to penalise someone who had no responsibility whatever for Israeli policy, simply because she was an Israeli citizen. Lies, suppression and injustice – that’s what Ken Loach has now shown he stands for.

But what was much more shocking was that the festival organisers meekly capitulated to this pressure. The Times reported:

In a statement the festival said it accepted that Loach spoke ‘on behalf of the film community, therefore we will be returning the funding issued by the Israeli Embassy’.

Who says Ken Loach speaks for anyone other than Ken Loach? And even if he did speak for the ‘film community’, why should that make this action any more acceptable?  What’s more, this capitulation was also an abrupt volte-face. For the festival organisers had been under sustained pressure to return Ezer’s travel grant to the Israel Embassy from the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign .

And just look at that correspondence, published on the SPSC website, to see the deranged ravings with which members of the SPSC bombarded the festival organisers:

[The Palestinians in Gaza] are being systematically starved, abused, degraded, and slaughtered by the State of Israel... the barbarism of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and infanticide. The screams of the Palestinian children, 400 of them, that were slaughtered by Israeli bombs and bullets back in January transcend the importance of any film festival or appeal to culture behind which you have chosen to justify this monstrous decision....

...I am a 68 year retired Professional Engineer and have no axes to grind and no connections with Arab, Jew or Israeli. I am ethnic English, whatever that is, and was a child when Ben Gurion started what turned out to be a holocaust. I see as quite bizarre the similarities between what happens in Israel now and what happened in Nazi Germany to the Jews.

... In January this year, the Israel Occupation Forces murdered 1400 defenseless Palestinians, trapped under a genocidal siege in what has become the biggest open air prison in the world.

Under this onslaught, the festival organisers told the SPSC firmly that

not accepting support from one particular country ‘would set a dangerous precedent by politicising what is a wholly cultural and artistic mission. We are firm believers in free cultural exchange, and do not feel that ghettoising filmmakers or restricting their ability to communicate artistically on the basis that they come from a troubled territory is of any benefit. Nor do we see that filmmakers are voices of their government. It is particularly important in situations of strife and conflict that artists be supported in having their voices heard.’

Fine principles: but when the SPSC enlisted the help of Ken Loach, the festival organisers promptly crumbled and decided to stifle one of those voices instead.

Now a number of people, led by the former head of Channel Four Sir Jeremy Isaacs who has worked closely with Loach in the past, have denounced the Festival’s spinelessness and its denial of the principle of free expression it is supposed to defend. People are rightly very shocked. But one wonders whether they might be shocked not just by the censorship but also by the gross defamation of Israel that is involved – or whether they too believe those lies. Freedom of expression is a key principle that should be defended. But truth and justice -- not to mention rationality -- are also key principles but which, when it comes to Israel, are simply being written out of Britain's cultural script .

Update: The EIFF have now issued an apology and said that it will ensure that Ezer is able to attend the festival. That does not, of course, address the deeper point at issue than her freedom of expression -- the capitulation to those who demonise Israel through a campaign of lies.

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A wary encounter

In remarks made after his meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama said:

I suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure. That means that all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations that they have previously agreed to. Those obligations were outlined in the road map...

But the first obligation in the Road Map was laid upon the Palestinians -- to dismantle their infrastructure of terror. It was their failure to meet that first obligation, without which the rest of the Road Map could not be implemented, which led to its collapse as a strategy. Yet Obama appears to think that the only obligations which must be met are those which apply to Israel, with the Palestinians apparently getting a free pass.

This is of course all of a piece with his belief that Israel is the cause of the Middle East impasse which would be solved by the creation of a state of Palestine. The fact that even now Fatah states explicitly that it won’t accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, let alone Hamas repeatedly restating its intention to destroy Israel and kill every Jew, is not, in Obama’s mind, the real obstacle to a solution. Not only does Obama not see the creation of ‘Hamastan’ in the West Bank as an obstacle --  he sees instead the refusal to treat Hamas as part of the solution as an obstacle. Accordingly, he presents as the obstacle not the people continuing to wage war but the country that is the victim of that war – which he blames for not agreeing to destroy its own security.

The irrationality and injustice of this is manifest on every level. But what cannot be stressed enough is the way both Obama and the ‘progressive’ legions behind him have made as their rallying cry support for a proposed racist and religiously exclusionary state that denies civil rights for all. Those screaming ‘apartheid’ at Israel are demanding the establishment of a putative Palestine state which would allow no Jews to live there, let alone enjoy the equal civil and human rights afforded to Arab citizens of Israel. As the former CIA Director James Woolsey is reported to have observed earlier this month:

...the world has a tendency to ‘define deviancy down for non-Jews.’ As a result, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, never even mention the possibility that Jews should be able to enjoy the same rights and privileges in any future Palestinian polity that Israeli Arabs exercise today in the Jewish state.

So, instead of what amounts to a Hitlerian program of Judenrein in any prospective Palestinian state - meaning, as a practical matter, if not a de jure one, that no Jews can reside or work there, there could be approximately twice the number of Israeli Jews as currently reside in so-called ‘settlements’ on the West Bank. They should be free to build synagogues and Jewish schools. And newspapers that serve the Jewish population in any future state of ‘Palestine’ should be permitted to flourish there.

Jews should also have a chance to elect representatives to a future Palestinian legislature. They should be able to expect to have representation as well in other governing institutions, like the executive and judicial branches. In order for the foregoing to operate, Jews in the Palestinian state must be able to live without fearing every day for their lives. In Mr. Woolsey`s view, ‘Once Palestinians are behaving that way, they deserve a state.’

On all these essential preconditions for a solution that pass the basic test of civilised values, Obama is silent. Quite apart from the injustice of his approach to the Middle East impasse and the irrationality of linking it with the Iran crisis, his policy of ‘engagement’ with Iran is hardly making him popular in the Arab world. He agreed with Netanyahu that there was a new and more promising mood in the Arab world. But he seems unable to grasp that what’s behind that new mood is terror of Iran getting the bomb – and despair at the way the US is resorting to the policy of appeasement. Accordingly, Obama is actually squandering the opportunity to enlist those Arab states in the fight against a common enemy of Iran. As John Hannah writes in the Washington Post:

Notably, the administration’s approach is increasingly at odds with that of U.S. allies in the Middle East that seek to maximize pressure on Tehran. For the past month, Egypt has mounted a courageous public effort to rally America’s Arab friends in opposition to an Iranian campaign of subversion that stretches from Iraq to Morocco. Instead of rushing to the defense of distressed allies, Obama has largely remained silent, instead opting to reiterate his interest in reaching some sort of accommodation with Tehran, the source of the region’s problems.

This was amplified by this telling exchange at the press conference after his talks with Netanyahu:

Q :  Thank you, Mr. President.  Aren’t you concerned that your outstretched hand has been interpreted by extremists, especially Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshal, as weakness?  And since my colleague already asked about the deadline, if engagement fails, what then, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Well, it’s not clear to me why my outstretched hand would be interpreted as weakness.

Q:    Qatar, an example.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  I’m sorry?

Q:    The example of Qatar.  They would have preferred to be on your side and then moved to the extremists, to Iran.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Oh, I think -- yes, I’m not sure about that interpretation. 

On the face of it, the evidence that has emerged from this meeting between Obama and Netanyahu could not be more stark -- as David Horowitz observes -- that the Obama administration is set upon a strategy that would effectively throw Israel to the Islamist wolves. The worst fears of Israel’s government and friends appear to have been amply confirmed.

And yet and yet; notwithstanding all this, sanity might eventually still prevail. A small hope indeed – but it may just happen.

Consider. The fact that Obama is making this lethally false linkage between creating a state of Palestine and tackling the problem of Iran should not blind us to the fact that the overriding issue is indeed not Palestine but Iran. That is the issue which will define Obama’s presidency. The great question is whether Obama has concluded that, when push comes to shove, America will have no option but to ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran. My understanding is that, while there are those in his administration for whom the answer is ‘yes’, there are others for whom the answer is ‘no’. In his post-meeting remarks, Obama himself acknowledged the danger a nuclear Iran poses not just to Israel but to America and the whole of the Middle East. Certainly, he thinks ‘engagement’ can defuse that danger. But what will he do when it becomes apparent that it will not?

Obama has already demonstrated that, when brought up sharply against the suicidal consequences of his naivety, he can shift his position. We saw this in recent days by his twin retreats from publishing more pictures of ‘enhanced interrogation’ in Iraq and from his previous opposition to military tribunals for al Qaeda suspects. He has stated that if Iran hasn’t unclenched its fist by – variously – the autumn/end of the year he will introduce ‘tough sanctions’. This is not altogether reassuring, both in the vagueness of the timetable, the weakness of any sanctions regime and the fact that he is still giving Iran the greatest gift of all – time -- to progress towards its nuclear goal. But it may just be that he really does think in his liberal hubris that making nice with Iran will draw the poison – and when he realises it has not done so, he may not be too keen on becoming the President that allowed Iran to go nuclear on his watch.

A further point about Obama is this. He is a man of the left. The left is not merely Manichean, but insulates itself from any possibility of heresy by surrounding itself only by those with whom it agrees. It is therefore rarely forced to follow through its reasoning and thus see its patent falsehoods and idiocies exposed. From his history and past associations, it’s a fair bet that Obama has thus never had his assumptions properly challenged by exposure to rationality and evidence. In recent years, Israel has been led by politicians who were either incapable, for various reasons, of properly articulating that rationality or themselves subscribed to many of the false premises of post-modern, post-moral, ahistorical thinking that characterises ‘progressive’ opinion in the west. Netanyahu breaks that mould. By simply talking to him, Obama may have heard for the first time an argument that is intellectually capable of puncturing at least one or two of his illusions.

We have no way of knowing whether any of that took place; or, if it did, whether it had any significant effect at all. No-one should take too much notice of the public show of relaxation and relative harmony with which this meeting was subsequently spun. Nor should we believe the counter-spin that Netanyahu returned to Israel a grimmer and wiser man. He knew the score about Obama well before he set out on this trip; and he would indeed be a fool if he were not therefore playing a carefully thought-through diplomatic and strategic game. Let’s hope he is; because if ideologue Obama does indeed turn out to stifle pragmatic Obama over the issue of Iran, Israel really will be on its own.

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A lethal double standard

Two points arise from the apparent victory by the Sri Lankans against the Tamil Tigers. The first is that this has been achieved by flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that terrorism can never be defeated by military means but only by negotiation, ‘peace processes’ and compromise. The Sri Lankans tried that some years ago, with the result that the Tigers were enormously strengthened and merely ratcheted up their terrorist attacks.

As a result of that experience, the Sri Lankans decided that the only way to defeat the Tigers was to destroy them militarily. Consequently, they have waged a war against them as notable for its ruthlessness as for its strategic and tactical skill. In particular, they ensured that the media was excluded from the theatre of war so that what they were doing was not fully exposed to scrutiny.

The lesson to learn from all this would therefore seem to be that terrorist insurgencies can only be defeated by military means  -- which in turn can only work if such measures are not undermined by the queasy neo-pacifism and defeatism of the west expressed through the surrender monkeys of human rights lawyers, NGOs and the media. In the Times, however, Michael Clarke, Rector of the Royal United Services Institute, warns that it may be premature to arrive at such a conclusion since the refusal of the Sri Lankans to try to win hearts and minds may yet mean that Tamil terrorism returns at a future date. Well, we shall see whether that turns out to be true or not.

But what is undeniable is that that war against the Tamil Tigers has exposed the rank hypocrisy and double standards of a western world that demonises and delegitimises Israel, on the basis of a false accusation that it has disproportionately targeted civilians in a theatre of war, while remaining relatively muted in the face of evidence which has emerged – despite the media restrictions – that the suffering of civilians under Sri Lankan bombardment (whether or not the Sri Lankans tried hard enough to minimise their suffering) has vastly exceeded that of the Palestinians. Hospitals have been repeatedly shelled. Thousands of civilians have been trapped and unknown numbers have died. The BBC says more than 70,000 people have been killed in this conflict, while the United Nations says it thinks 265,000 people have been displaced. As even Jonathan Steele writes in today’s Guardian:

There has to be relief that the worst suffering of the quarter of a million Tamils who were trapped on the island’s northern beaches is over. Cowering under government artillery fire, and shot by Tamil Tiger troops if they tried to flee, they have lived for four months in infinitely worse conditions than the people of Gaza during Israel's invasion in December. Palestinians were at least in their own homes, with supplies of food and water, however inadequate. The shelterless masses huddled along the lagoons and sand banks of Sri Lanka's Mullaitivu coastline had nothing except panic, grief and the sight and sound of the dying. The prolonged hell they have been through far outweighs the sudden horror of the tsunami which swept over this same coast four years ago.

Sure, there are some protests. But  where are the calls by academics or trade unions to boycott Sri Lanka? Where are the denunciations of Sri Lankan ‘atrocities’ by the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England? Where are the passionate and emotive TV documentaries about the plight of the Tamils, the one-sided grillings of the Sri Lankans on the Today programme, the front page splashes and multi-part newspaper features on the Sri Lankans’ supposed breaches of international law, the NGOs’ appeals for humanitarian aid for the beseiged Tamils, the attempts by human rights lawyers to prosecute Sri Lanka’s military for ‘war crimes’? No, all these things are reserved instead for Israel, which has demonstrably gone out of its way to avoid civilian casualties as far as humanly possible and yet upon whose imagined crimes against humanity the western intelligentsia – which has barely bestrirred itself over the Tamils -- obsessively dwells.

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The final solution

From the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki, a member of Fatah which, as we all know, unlike Hamas is the ‘moderate’ party which will deliver a two-state solution and peace with Israel:

Therefore, it is high time that we found a final, comprehensive solution...With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

... The use of weapons alone will not bring results, and the use of politics without weapons will not bring results. We act on the basis of our extensive experience. We analyze our situation carefully. We know what climate leads to victory and what climate leads to suicide. We talk politics, but our principles are clear. It was our pioneering leader, Yasser Arafat, who persevered with this revolution, when empires collapsed. Our armed struggle has been going on for 43 years, and the political struggle, on all levels, has been going on for 50 years. We harvest U.N. resolutions, and we shame the world so that it doesn't gang up on us, because the world is led by people who have given their brains a vacation – the American administration and the neocons.

The P.L.O. is the sole legitimate representative [of the Palestinian people], and it has not changed its platform even one iota. In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the P.L.O. proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine.

This is what the American, British and EU governments are attempting to force Israel to accept. As the man says, it’s not a two-state solution -- it's a final solution.

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