The real lesson of this history

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that Obama’s Middle East ‘peace’ initiative offers the best prospect for peace in the region since... Jimmy Carter at Camp David.

Jimmy Carter, eh? How instructive.

Carter, whose profound and disturbing animus against Israel has been revealed in all its ugly reality in recent years, was a disastrous President whose serial misjudgments paved the way for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the baleful consequences of which are now reaching crisis point. During his term of office he consistently acted against Israel’s interests and in favour of its Arab enemies.

What Miliband is referring to is the historic agreement over which Carter presided in 1978 at Camp David between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat . This was truly a monumental milestone and the one event which has been held to redeem Carter’s disastrous presidency in the eyes of the world. But as this Wall Street Journal article records, it was a milestone reached not because of Carter but despite him:

The truth is that Mr. Carter never wanted an Egyptian-Israeli agreement, fought hard against it, and only agreed to go along with the process when it became clear that the rest of his foreign policy was in a shambles and he desperately needed to log a success... Mr. Carter and his advisers all assumed that the key to peace in the region was to make Israel pull back to its pre-1967 borders and accept the principle of Palestinian self-determination in exchange for a guarantee of Israel's security.

Sound familiar?

After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sadat decided that Egypt needed to start from scratch in its relationship with Israel. Sadat found natural allies in Nixon and Mr. Kissinger after throwing out his Soviet patrons in 1972. With American support, he came to a disengagement agreement with Israel in 1973, and again in 1975. The culmination of this process was Sadat’s historic trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, where he discussed a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, and forestalled Mr. Carter's plan for a Geneva peace conference.

It was this trip -- not Camp David -- that marked the true seismic shift in Middle East relations since Israel’s founding. It came as an unwelcome surprise to the Carter foreign policy team, who still wanted their grandiose Geneva conference. In fact, for the better part of 1977, as Israel and Egypt negotiated, the White House persisted in acting as if nothing had happened. Even after Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Mr. Carter announced that ‘a separate peace agreement between Egypt and Israel is not desirable.’

But by the autumn of 1978, the rest of Mr. Carter's foreign policy had crumbled. He had pushed through an unpopular giveaway of the Panama Canal, allowed the Sandinistas to take power in Nicaragua as proxies of Cuba, and stood by while chaos grew in the Shah's Iran. Desperate for some kind of foreign policy success in order to bolster his chances for re-election in 1980, Mr. Carter finally decided to elbow his way into the game by setting up a meeting between Sadat and Begin at Camp David.

The rest of the story is now the stuff of legend: For 13 days Mr. Carter acted as the go-between for the two leaders. Yet for all their bluster and intransigence in public, Begin and Sadat were more than ready for a deal once they understood that the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to stop the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, such as the PLO, from derailing a peace. An agreement was hammered out for an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, coupled with vague language about Palestinian ‘autonomy.’ The item Mr. Carter had really wanted on the agenda -- a Palestinian state -- was kept at arm's length.

In other words, this historic peace treaty occurred only because 1) Carter was sidelined and 2) the issue of a Palestinian state was kept out of it because it was irrelevant to peace between Israel and the Egyptians. And that’s the point – the absolutely key, all-important point -- that Miliband, the British Foreign Office and the Obama administration cannot and will not grasp. As the Times reported:

[Miliband] said the most significant aspect of Mr Obama’s initiative was that he was the first US president to accept it was in America’s national interest to back Palestinian statehood. ‘Palestinian statelessness is the biggest recruiting sergeant for Islamic extremism around the world,’ said Mr Miliband.

Ah yes – Palestinian statelessness was obviously uppermost in the minds of the Islamists who blew up Mumbai; it was obviously the reason they bombed Spain to help along the restoration of the caliphate and tried to do the same to France, that legendary ally of Israel; it’s obviously the driving passion of the Chechen Islamist separatists; it’s obviously the rallying cry of the Islamists in Indonesia who intend to Islamise southern Asia; it’s obviously the reason Islamists are persecuting, murdering and driving out Christians across the Third World from Sudan and Nigeria to Bethlehem and Gaza.

For various reasons, however, this idiotic but deeply ideological analysis is now accepted by many non-ideological folk as axiomatic. They are all fixated by the delusion that a Palestine state is the key to peace between Israel and the Arabs. It is not. The briefest knowledge of history tells us that it is not – for the simple reason that it has been on offer repeatedly for seven (some would say nine) decades, with the Jews in agreement – indeed, with the Israelis in recent years offering the Palestinians more than 90 per cent of the disputed territories -- and yet the only response from the Arabs has been war.

The requirement by the Arab side is not for a Palestine state. It is for the end of the Jewish state. It is not just Hamas that declares this over and over again. It is also the supposedly ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, who say repeatedly that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these facts are simply ignored as if they don’t exist.

Now, King Abdullah of Jordan claims to be offering Israel the ‘prize’ of recognition by the Arab and Muslim world. Oh please. We’ve all been here before so many times. ‘Recognition’ is a weasel word which the Arabs use to mean simply recognising the literal fact of Israel’s existence rather than accepting its right to exist -- a very different matter. If the Arab rejectionist states were to say that they accepted Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and to live in peace alongside them – and show they mean it --  there would be peace tomorrow. But King Abdullah is talking about the deeply manipulative Saudi peace initiative -- appeasement for dummies -- which, through its giveaway demand for unlimited immigration of Arabs into Israel, would mean the end of the Jewish state.

Despite the the Times’s kid-glove treatment of King Abdullah, as its own headline made clear he was in effect threatening Israel: ‘surrender now, or war later’. Commit national suicide – or face Iran alone. That’s some choice. And that’s the choice Obama too is giving Israel – and who can be surprised that Miliband is so enthusiastic, since as we also learn from King Abdullah,

Britain is playing a very vital pro-active role

in the Obama Middle East initiative.

What is even more remarkable is that these twin icons of progressive politics, Obama and Miliband, are actually pushing the cause of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing. For the proposed Palestine state is to have not one Jew living inside its borders. So Obama and Miliband say the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East can only be served by the creation of a racist, exclusionary state -- while beating up on Israel, which actually gives full civil rights to its Arab and Muslim citizens.

The key to the ending of the war between the Arabs and Israel is that the Arabs and the wider Muslim world have to grasp that it is in their interests to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, legitimised as such under international law, and to abandon for ever their attempt to remove it from the map. That is the real message of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

But instead, the message the Arab and Muslim world is currently getting from America and Britain – with their overtures to Iran and creeping recognition of Hamas -- is that its violence and aggression have paid off and that the great prizes, not merely of Israel’s destruction but also the defeat of the free world, are now within reach. Having accepted the Arab and Muslim narrative on Israel/Palestine, and having decided that appeasement is the only way forward, Obama and Miliband are making the strongest effort since Carter to pressurise Israel to become the propitiatory sacrifice to the enemies of civilisation. And from the White House to King Abdullah via the Foreign Office and the BBC, Israel is to be blamed if it refuses to play the role.

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Yet more of the same old, same old

Yet again, the Anglican establishment has singled out Israel for scapegoating, defamation and demonisation. A Resolution on the Middle East passed three days ago by the Anglican Consultative Committee parrots, as usual, Arab and Muslim propaganda against Israel – now the default position of Anglicanism as it genuflects to the force that is intent upon destroying it. Not all Anglicans by any means support this resolution which has been passed in their name: Anglican Friends of Israel has protested:

Once again, Anglican representatives have singled out Israel for criticism without placing her actions in context or directly addressing the Palestinian contribution to the conflict.  Thus the Resolution calls on Israel to lay down all measures which protect her citizens from Arab terrorism whilst failing to demand that Palestinian leaders meet any of the obligations placed on them by UN resolutions, such as the requirement to dismantle their terrorist networks.  Israel is falsely accused of imposing an 'apartheid' system on Palestinians whilst the education of Palestinian children to hate Jews and give their lives in cause of Israel's destruction is ignored.

Just so. Among other hateful assertions, the resolution

laments the fact that current Israeli policies in relation to the West Bank, in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions, have created severe hardship for many Palestinians and have been experienced as a physical form of apartheid.

Not only does this travesty (and thus effective denial) of actual apartheid ignore the fact that the sole reason for the undoubted hardships experienced by the Palestinians is their persistent attempts to murder as many Israelis as possible, but it totally ignores the truly vindictive war against Palestinian Christians being waged by Palestinian Muslims. As Khaled abu Toameh writes for the Hudson Institute:

Many Christians in Bethlehem and the nearby [Christian] towns of Bet Sahour and Bet Jalla have repeatedly complained that Muslims have been seizing their lands either by force or through forged documents. In recent years, not only has the number of Christians continued to dwindle, but Bethlehem and its surroundings also became hotbeds for Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters and members. Moreover, several Christian women living in these areas have complained about verbal and sexual assaults by Muslim men. Over the past few years, a number of Christian businessmen told me that they were forced to shut down their businesses because they could no longer afford to pay ‘protection’ money to local Muslim gangs.

... As a Muslim journalist, I am always disgusted and ashamed when I hear from Christians living in the West Bank and Jerusalem about the challenges, threats and assaults that many of them have long been facing. The reason why I feel like this is because those behind the assaults and threats are almost always Muslims.

...When they go on the record, these [Palestinian Christian] leaders always insist that Israel and the occupation are the only reason behind the plight of their constituents. They stubbornly refuse to admit that many Christians are being targeted by Muslims. By not talking openly about the problem, the Christian leaders are encouraging the perpetrators to continue their harassment and assaults against Christian families.

It’s not just the Palestinian Christians who refuse to acknowledge this reality, but the leaders of Anglicanism worldwide  -- including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the hierarchy of the Church of England. Not only do they refuse to speak about it but they actually blame Israel for it instead – Israel, the only country in the Middle East where Christians and their holy sites are fully protected and Christian numbers are increasing.

The historical echoes of this particular scapegoating are as unmistakeable as they are horrifying.

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Learning nothing from history

Leaving aside for the moment the malice towards Israel that is involved, the attitude of the Obama administration towards the Middle East is well-nigh incomprehensible in its suicidal stupidity. It is trying to make Israel play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Britain under Neville Chamberlain told it that if it didn’t submit to the Nazis it would stand alone – with the result that the following year, Hitler invaded Poland. Determined to prove that history repeats itself the second time as tragedy, America is trying to force Israel to destroy its security by accepting the creation of a terrorist Iranistan on its doorstep, under the threat that otherwise the US will not help protect its security by defanging Iran (and how, precisely would it do that?). But in doing so, the Obama administration is jeopardising the security of America itself and the free world, not to mention the Arab states which have good reason to fear Iranian regional hegemony.  This paper by Efraim Inbar spells out the multiple idiocies of an administration that believes that making nice with genocidal fanatics will turn them into apostles of peaceful co-existence :

Recently, we also learned that the White House is trying to make kosher the transfer of funds to a Palestinian government that includes the radical Islamist Hamas. This is another sign of strategic folly. Hamas, a recognized terrorist organization, is an Iranian proxy, with a clear Jihadist agenda. Hamas has strong ties to the Islamic opposition in Egypt that wants to replace the pro-Western Mubarak regime. Arab moderate states are alarmed by the resilience of Hamas' rule in Gaza and the last thing they want is to aid this radical organization. The struggle against Hamas, just as the quest to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, serves American interests and those of its allies in the Middle East. It is only marginally related to Israel. Unfortunately, Obama’s Washington does not get it yet.

... In the Middle East, misguided American policies, particularly regarding Iran, may have disastrous consequences such as the fall of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey into Islamist hands. Under such a scenario, Israel would remain the only country where an American airplane could land safely in the Middle East; this is not a thought that Jerusalem relishes.

Nor, obviously, should any of us. The question ever more insistently poses itself, not just about the political neophyte Obama but all those hatchet-faced apparatchiks in senior foreign policy, defence and security posts within his administration: how can so many people in such a position be so staggeringly stupid?

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A crisis bigger than individuals

When the expenses scandal finally hit the Tory party yesterday, I sucked my teeth a bit to read that Michael Gove MP had reportedly ‘flipped’ the designation of his main and second homes, the cynical practice we now know has been used by so many MPs to claim living expenses way beyond the spirit of ‘the rules’ they are claiming so disingenuously to have been following. I got to know Michael Gove as a fellow-panellist on the Moral Maze on BBC Radio Four; and although he sadly jeopardised his claim to be a human being when he went over to the dark side by leaving journalism and becoming a Tory MP, he always struck me as upright and I did not think he was it was remotely plausible that he would have ripped off the taxpayer in this way. Now he has put out a statement to explain that his house designation really did change; having lived with his family in his constituency, he decided for various reasons to move his family back into London. So his London house really did become his main residence and his constituency house really did become his second home.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to correct such an impression once the claim has been made, and in such a high-profile way. Doubtless there are other MPs who, like Michael Gove, have been falsely and unfairly accused. In the current mood, however, such protestations will probably be given short shrift; they are likely to be swept away by the great tide of popular revulsion and disgust at the entire political class. Today’s fresh revelations, implicating a slew of Tory grandees who it seems have been using public money to pay for swimming pools, moats and orchards raise the affair onto a more baroque level still. As I said in my Daily Mail piece yesterday, this is a crisis not just for the political parties themselves but for Parliament as a whole, the authority of which has now totally imploded with the likelihood of a catastrophic public alienation from the democratic process itself. For mixed with the astonishment at the eye-popping nature and extent of these scams is a kind of grim satisfaction amongst a public which has long been convinced that ‘they’re all the same as each other ‘ and that all political snouts are equally deep in the trough. In that sense, this great scandal is a kind of public catharsis, an explosion of the fury and despair that has been building up for years at a political system which no longer seems to connect with reality at all. This is more than a scandal – it is a crisis for British democracy.

 
Update: Among the Tory MPs who are paying back money they claimed on expenses, Michael Gove has repaid £7000; and Andrew Lansley, who also said he had genuinely changed his main and secondary homes and so like Gove denied that particular scam, has paid back £2600 for other expenses claims.

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Another rancid dropping from the British camel corps

I’m delighted to see that the truly excellent Robin Shepherd, a rare British voice of reasoned authority and moral decency on international affairs, has started a blog here. Today, he writes about a typically disgusting rant by Sir Max Hastings about Israel, against which Hastings routinely displays an obsessive animus. As Shepherd observes:

His writing is an almost parodical one-stop shop for every misconception, misreading of history and civilisational pathology in the mindset of Britain’s upper class, Arabist, right.

I look forward to Shepherd’s book, due out in the autumn, in which he analyses the dysfunctional inability of establishment people like this in Britain and Europe to view Israel rationally.

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The global psychosis

Typically brilliant piece in Commentary by Mark Steyn on the ‘mass psychosis’ of global Zionophobia:

The Muslim world has spent decades peddling the notion that the reason a vast oil-rich region stretching thousands of miles is politically deformed and mired in grim psychoses is all because of a tiny strip of turf barely wider than my New Hampshire township. It will make an ever more convenient scapegoat for the problems of a far vaster territory from the mountains of Morne to the Urals. There was a fair bit of this in the days after 9/11. As Richard Ingrams wrote on the following weekend in the London Observer: ‘Who will dare to damn Israel?’

Well, take a number and get in line... So it will go. British, European, and even American troops will withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a bomb will go off in Madrid or Hamburg or Manchester, and there will be nothing left to blame except Israeli “disproportion.” For the remnants of European Jewry, the already discernible migration of French Jews to Quebec, Florida, and elsewhere will accelerate. There are about 150,000 Jews in London today—it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category. By 2025, there will be Jews in Israel, and Jews in America, but not in many other places. Even as the legitimacy of a Jewish state is rejected, the Jewish diaspora—the Jewish presence in the wider world—will shrivel.

And then, to modify Richard Ingrams, who will dare not to damn Israel?

Read it all.

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The Grand Bargain?

The Confidential Reporter blog has suggested an even more baroque interpretation of Obama’s grovelling to Iran: that the Grand Bargain -- denied by Defence Secretary Robert Gates -- involves America seeking Iran’s assistance in an American invasion of Pakistan to prevent a more radical Islamist administration there from giving nuclear weapons to al Qaeda. This, says CR, is based on the totally mistaken belief that Ahmadinejad is a Stalin figure, a devil with whom it is possible to do deals – whereas in fact the correct analogy for Ahmadinejad is not Stalin but Hitler:

Unlike the monster Stalin, who, in the years leading up to World War II, consistently put the Soviet Union's national interest, as he saw it, ahead of the country’s Communist ideology, to the point of betraying overseas Communists (his ‘useful idiots’) and the cause of world revolution--from China to Germany--Ahmadinejad intends to overthrow the balance of power, globally as well as regionally, by destroying Israel, driving America (the ‘Great Satan’) out of the Middle East, and dominating the region for decades to come--for starters. He dreams of a ‘world without America and Israel’ and he intends to make his dreams come true.

If this theory is correct – big if – the explanation for forcing Israel to sacrifice its security on the grounds that a Palestine state is necessary to get the Arab states on side in the fight to contain Iran clearly doesn’t hold up. In which case, Obama would be throwing Israel under the bus just because he wants it gone altogether -- as analysed here in terrifyingly plausible detail.

Either way, however, Iran doesn’t seem terribly impressed:

In further comments on U.S.-Iran relations, Khatami said: "Praise to the Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Revolution in Iran] who said, 'If America was a human being, we would talk with it' – but you are not human beings, and this is the same nation it was 30 years ago... and [therefore] say: 'Death to America!'"

So much for the American hand of friendship. And as Amir Taheri points out, the only result of Obama’s overtures to Iran has been -- to strengthen Iran:

Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises.

...Arab states are especially concerned because Tehran has succeeded in transcending sectarian and ideological divides to create a coalition that includes Sunni movements such as Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, sections of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Marxist-Leninist and other leftist outfits that share Iran’s anti-Americanism.

Indeed, Shiite Iran has already made numerous Molotov/Ribbentrop-style pacts with Sunni jihadists. Doubtless that’s another little detail that the Obama administration finds just too inconvenient to note.

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Obama prepares to throw Israel under the bus

As predicted here repeatedly – Obama is attempting to throw Israel under the Islamist bus, and he’s getting American Jews to do his dirty work for him. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly told the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Sunday that efforts to stop Iran hinged on peace talks with the Palestinians. General James Jones, National Security Adviser to Obama, reportedly told a European foreign minister a week ago that unlike the Bush administration, Obama will be ‘forceful’ with Israel. Ha’aretz reports:

Jones is quoted in the telegram as saying that the United States, European Union and moderate Arab states must redefine ‘a satisfactory endgame solution.’ The U.S. national security adviser did not mention Israel as party to these consultations.

Of course not. If you are going to throw a country under the bus, you don’t invite it to discuss the manner of its destruction with the assassins who are co-ordinating the crime. As I said here months ago, the appointment of Jones and the elevation of his post of National Security Adviser at the expense of the Secretary of State was all part of the strategy to centralise power in the hands of those who want to do Israel harm.

Yesterday Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry turned the thumbscrews tighter, telling Israel to stop building more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow Palestinians freedom of movement.

This is all not only evil but exceptionally stupid. The idea that a Palestine state will help build a coalition against Iran is demonstrably absurd. The Arab states are beside themselves with anxiety about Iran. They want it to be attacked and its nuclear programme stopped. They are desperately fearful that the Obama administration might have decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran.

The idea that if a Palestine state comes into being it will be easier to handle Iran is the opposite of the case: a Palestine state will be Iran, in the sense that it will be run by Hamas as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. The idea that a Palestine state will not compromise Israel’s security is ludicrous.

It is of course, by any sane standard, quite fantastic that America is behaving as if it is Israel which is holding up a peace settlement when Israel has made concession after concession – giving up Sinai, giving up Gaza, offering all the territories to the Arabs in return for peace in 1967, offering more than 90 per cent of them ditto in 2000, ditto again to Mahmoud Abbas in the past year -- only to be attacked in return by a Palestinian terrorist entity, backed in its continued aggression, let us not forget, by the countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has made no concessions at all and is not being pressured to do so.

It is not the aggressor here but the victim of aggression that America is now choosing to beat up. In any sane world, one might think the Americans would be piling the pressure on the Palestinians to renounce their genocidal ambitions against Israel, to stop teaching and training their children to hate and kill Jews, to adhere to the primary requirement in the Road Map that they must dismantle their infrastructure of violence as the first step in the peace process; one might think, indeed, that they would view Mahmoud Abbas’s repeated statements that the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state to be the main impediment to peace.

But no. The repeated professions that America will never jeopardise Israel’s security are stomach churning when Obama is actually blaming Israel for measures it has taken to safeguard its security – the settlements were always first and foremost a security measure, and the travel restrictions are there solely to prevent more Israelis being murdered – and trying to force it to abandon them. Today comes further news that Obama will also try to force Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would force it to dismantle its nuclear arsenal – which it only has as a last ditch insurance against the attempt to annihilate it to which more than a billion Arabs and Muslims remain pledged.

Of course Obama doesn’t care that Hamas would run any Palestinian state. Of course he doesn’t care that Israel would be unable to defend itself against such a terrorist state. Because he regards Israel as at best totally expendable, and at worst as a running sore on the world's body politic that has to be purged altogether (see this bleak assessment by Sultan Knish). His administration is proceeding on the entirely false analysis that a state of Palestine is the solution to the Middle East impasse and the route to peace in the region. What that state will look like or do is something to which at best the administration's collective mind is shut and at worst makes it a potential cynical accomplice to the unconscionable. So Israel is to be forced out of the West Bank. Far from building a coalition against Iran, Obama is thus doing Iran’s work for it.

None of this, however, should come as the slightest surprise to anyone who paid any attention to Obama’s background, associations and friendships before he became President and to the cabal of Israel-bashers, appeasers and Jew-haters he appointed to his administration, with a few useful idiots thrown in for plausible deniability.

Almost eighty per cent of American Jews voted for Obama despite the clear and present danger he posed to Israel. They did so because their liberal self-image was and is more important to them than the Jewish state whose existence and security cannot be allowed to jeopardise their standing with America’s elite.

But the ordinary American people are a different matter. They do value and support Israel. They do understand that if Israel is thrown under that bus, the west is next. And it is they to whom Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu must now appeal, over the heads of the politicians and the media and America’s Jews and everyone else. He must tell the American people the terrible truth, that America is now run by a man who is intent on sacrificing Israel for a reckless and amoral political strategy which will put America and the rest of the free world at risk.

This is shaping up to be the biggest crisis in relations between Israel and America since the foundation of Israel six decades ago. Those who hate Israel and the Jews will be gloating. This after all is precisely what they hoped Obama would do. To any decent person looking on aghast, this is where the moral sickness of the west reaches the critical care ward.

* An earlier version of this post linked to a story in the Jerusalem Post which said an AIPAC delegation to Congress was asking it to lobby for a two-state solution. This story appears to have been wrong. 

** Further update:It now appears from this story  and this that the AIPAC position may be more ambiguous still.

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The secular inquisition

The response to my post below on Intelligent Design has provided illuminating and revealing evidence of the ignorance, confusion, distortions, irrationality and malice that characterise this debate. For those who appear to assume I am part of some cosmic Christian conspiracy to destroy science and deny the laws of nature, let me first of all gently enlighten you: I am an agnostic if traditionally-minded Jew; not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a subscriber to any kind of -ology but a mere journalist who has always gone wherever the evidence has led and, trying not to make too many mistakes, has formed her conclusions and her opinions from that process.

I hold no particular brief for ID, but am intrigued by the ideas it raises and want it to be given a fair crack of the whip to see where the argument will lead. What I have also seen, however, is an attempt to shut down that argument by distorting and misrepresenting ID and defaming and intimidating its proponents.

One way of doing so is to conflate ID with Creationism. I wrote below that this is wrong, since ID comes out of science and creationism comes out of Biblical literalism. This provoked Charles Johnson on LGF to accuse me of being either duped or dishonest. Johnson – who has become unhealthily obsessed with ID and Creationism in recent months -- says I am wrong to say that ID is based on science rather than on religion, and wrong to say that it is different from Creationism.

The first thing to note is that the distinction I was drawing was not between ID and religion but between ID and creationism. Creationism holds that the universe was literally created in six days or -- through ’young earth’ Creationism -- that it was created in a few thousand years; either way, it flies in the face of the fact that the universe is billions of years old. Therefore Creationism is inimical to science. But few religious believers in the west subscribe to this literalism, as opposed to belief in a Creator which is common to all of them; Christianity and Judaism (even more so) promote the idea that Genesis is a poetic metaphor.  

Since ID holds that some vague kind of intelligent force must have been behind the creation of the universe, there’s surely very little difference (and considerable overlap) between ID proponents and the vast majority of mainstream religious believers – amongst whom are numbered many scientists who have no difficulty reconciling their scientific knowledge about the universe, and the evolution of life within that universe, with belief in an ultimate Creator who kick-started the whole process.

So what’s the big hullabaloo about?  ID proponents are said by the Charles Johnsons of this world to deny evolution. But this is not so. Creationists deny evolution. But ID proponents say over and over again they are not Creationists and accept many aspects of evolution, in particular that organisms develop and change over time.

What they don’t accept is that random, blind-chance evolution accounts for the origin of all species and the origin of life, the universe and everything.  ID proponents say the idea that science can account for everything – the doctrine known variously as materialism or scientism – flies in the face of reason and evidence and seeks to commandeer the space previously reserved for the unknowable, or religion, which can sit very comfortably alongside science, as it does for so many.

Those who have imbibed evangelical atheistic materialism with their mothers’ milk, however, find it impossible to get their heads round this. Shouting from the rooftops that ID is not science but camouflaged religion, they react so viscerally precisely because ID does come out of science and talks its language. After all, if people are evil and bonkers for believing in an intelligent creator, why aren't religious believers in a Biblical intelligent Creator also evil and bonkers?

The answer is that it is the science that is seen to be evil and bonkers. While materialist fundamentalists can deal with religious believers by scoffing they are in a separate domain altogether from the real ie scientific world, the suggestion that science might itself arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to what it can understand is a heresy that directly threatens the materialist fundamentalist closed thought-system -- and therefore must be stamped out.

Refusing to accept that science and religion can be complementary -- and indeed feed each other --because religious faith is out to lunch, they cannot grasp that ID is a metaphysical idea that comes out of but stands separate from science, in that science leads here to an idea with which by definition it must abruptly part company. Instead they insist that the two must be fused – and when that proves impossible, they cry victory.

As Charles Johnson asks on LGF:

If ‘intelligent design’ is really based on science, why have their advocates failed to produce any scientific evidence for that claim, despite millions of dollars worth of funding and years in which to do it? Instead, ‘intelligent design’ proponents spend all their time on public relations. Where are the peer reviewed studies? Where are the experimental proofs that can be duplicated by other scientists? Answer: nonexistent.

Well of course they are non-existent -- because ID is not in itself a scientific discovery. It is rather an inference from scientific discoveries. Looking at the complexity of the created world, it says the evidence points inescapably to a guiding intelligence as the cause of that complexity. It is an idea, a conclusion to a chain of observation and thought. When people demand proof of this idea, what they are actually demanding is proof that an ‘intelligent designer’ exists. The fact that there are no peer-reviewed studies (!) demonstrating the existence of such a cosmic ‘designer’ provokes this yah-boo response. But it is obviously no more possible to prove the existence of an ‘intelligent designer’ than it is to prove the existence of the Biblical God.

ID is thus a paradox. The whole point is that it states that the ‘intelligent designer’ it posits as the only logical inference from scientifically verifiable complexity cannot be known through scientific means. This is because the essence of the ID idea is that there is a limit to science beyond which it cannot go, since science cannot prove nor disprove the existence of God nor any kind of ‘ultimate designer’ of the universe which thus stands outside that universe and its laws. That is where science stops and faith begins.

ID makes space -- as the result of science -- for belief in a creator, whether this is a deistic being (conveniently vague) or the Biblical God (uncomfortably moral). That certainly takes us into the realm of faith. Indeed, as already noted it takes us into pretty much the position occupied by many believers in Biblical religion – but it does so through the route of science. And that’s the incendiary point. For the idea that faith might actually be informed by science sends the materialist fundies totally and completely ape -- as Darwin might have said. (Atheists! Joke alert!!)

Charles Johnson quotes Phillip Johnson, whom he dubs the ‘father’ of the ID movement’, and another ID proponent, the mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, as saying variously that ID is really about religion and philosophy rather than science and can serve to clear the ground for Christianity. This, says Charles Johnson, proves that ID is based on religion. But of course it proves no such thing. ID certainly takes adherents into the territory of religion and philosophy -- but through the route of scientific reasoning. And the fact that certain evangelical Christians have spotted the potential of ID to restore Christianity to the public sphere, and have formulated a strategy to capitalise upon that potential, does not mean that ID is actually a religious movement. 

But the materialist fundies cannot accept this. Believing as they do with perfect faith that all dissent from their world view is heresy, they assume that ID can be nothing other than a conspiracy to smuggle religion back into the public sphere under the heavy disguise of science. And not just religion but Creationism, the Biblical, literalist, science-denying, dinosaurs-never-existed full monty.

And so, spraying distortions and false assertions in every direction, they claim that Phillip Johnson is the begetter of ID, that the Discovery Institute is a Creationist front where the whole infernal movement was hatched, that its leaked ‘Wedge’ document revealed the deep conspiracy to foist Christianity upon an unsuspecting world, and that the school textbook Of Pandas and People at the centre of the seminal court case Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District had started life as a Creationist textbook and then been surreptitiously altered to pretend it was teaching ID instead – all proving that ID is in fact a conspiracy to smuggle Creationism into American schools, camouflaged as its scientific antithesis.

Like all conspiracy theories, this one is characterised by irrationality, distortion and hysteria. Assuming that there was indeed dirty work at the Creationist crossroads over Of Pandas and People – so what? One sneaky attempt to get round the constitutional bar on teaching religion in public schools doesn’t prove that the whole ID movement was a Giant Creationist Conspiracy.

If there was an intellectual begetter of this movement, it was surely the biochemist Professor Michael Behe, whose book Darwin's Black Box in 1996 expounded the theory of irreducible complexity. He is not a Creationist. Other exponents such as Phillip Johnson explicitly renounce Creationism. As he explained in his book Wedge of Truth in 2000, he wanted to make use of the scientific and philosophical idea of ID to split science from the materialist fundamentalism that had driven it to make hubristic claims to knowledge which it could not reasonably support. Far from denying science, he wanted to restore it to what he believed to be the realm of reason and observable evidence – and thus make space once again for religion.

To be sure, he and others at the Discovery Institute (which says it promotes religious pluralism rather than Creationism, and which refused to get involved in the Kitzmiller fight) were excited by what they thought were the prospects this would open up for a new stage in the culture wars. But while there is room for debate over that agenda, it is dishonest and really quite irrational to claim that this showed ID was invented as a pretext to wage such a war and smuggle back Christianity into the public sphere.

To repeat – I have no particular brief for ID. I am not in a position to judge whether its arguments about ‘irreducible complexity’ and the logic of intelligent design are soundly based or not. But I do know that the attempt to shut down this debate runs against every principle of rationality and scientific freedom; and that the claim that it is rooted not in science but in religious fundamentalism is a falsehood designed to smear and intimidate people into silence.

It’s the fact that it did come out of science that prompted the philosopher and celebrated former atheist Antony Flew to became a deist -- because, as he said in his book There is a God, the laws of nature presuppose an infinite intelligence; ‘...this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science’.

It’s why Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University and a self-described ‘secular humanist’, has argued  

that the way ID's practitioners approach the debate means they are actually engaged in a scientific enterprise. But he draws the line at Creationism because, he says, it has abandoned the scientific method: ‘Those guys are basically teaching the Bible as science.’ For Fuller, religion and science are compatible. He complains that evolutionary theory is being taught as dogma. It needs a ‘critical foil’ and ID satisfies that function as well as anything else.

Dogma is certainly what is on the other side of ID in this fight – a materialist dogma which, posing as the standard-bearer of reason against obscurantism, actually embodies irrationality and a kind of intellectual fascism. It is a secular inquisition – as the reaction to my post makes all too plain.

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Are these people serious?

Conservative Home reports:

A member of the shadow cabinet told me to look out for five things in the next few months that Team Cameron would be emphasing to show that ‘new Toryism’ is still alive and kicking - despite the ‘age of austerity’:

• Further promotion of women and ethnic minority Conservatives.
• Outreach to gay rights groups (yesterday we learnt this).
• More emphasis on environmental policies.  At Spring Forum in Cheltenham Greg Clark MP promised to make Britain the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewable energy.’
• Loud trumpeting of the fact that the NHS and international development are the top two Tory spending priorities.
• More initiatives on social justice with a greater role for Iain Duncan Smith.

So let’s get this right. We have Stalin’s nervous breakdown going on in Number 10, the British economy smashed to pieces, world war three about to erupt courtesy of Pakistan and Iran, the implosion of the taxpayer model of public service, and the institutionalised intimidation and bullying of citizens upholding the values of right and wrong as a result of the dominance of group rights and minority pseudo-‘victim’ culture – and the Tories propose to shimmy around on neo-Marxist and nihilistic rainbow coalition marches as they take us back to a pre-industrial peasant economy, with Iain Duncan Smith tacked on as camouflage for the final disintegration of normative values, common sense and national survival.

A conservative opposition? More like a Weimar cabaret act.

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