5:24pm
The excellent Joshua Rozenberg*, who is a pearl without price at the Telegraph, has spotted a curious inconsistency in police statements in the Damian Green imbroglio:
Last Thursday's statement by Scotland Yard implied that they had been granted four search warrants. After saying that a 52-year-old man had been arrested in connection with alleged offences of misconduct in public office, the statement continued: ‘Search warrants have been executed at a residential address in Kent; a residential address in west London; a business premises in Kent; a business premises in central London’. Those ‘business premises in central London’ can only have been the Houses of Parliament. Today, though, Scotland Yard's Acting Commissioner at made it clear at City Hall that only three warrants had been issued.
There was no warrant for the search of Green’s Parliamentary office....
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11:52am
Obviously I don’t know what the Speaker will say later today about the Damian Green affair. But the unease I have felt from the start about the reaction to the police raid on Green’s home and Parliamentary office finally boiled over when the Tories released the video of the police searching his office. From the start, this drama has been presented as the biggest threat to Parliament since Charles I confronted Speaker Lenthall. But the implication that Green’s assistant, who was shown being politely asked to end the use of the camera, was some kind of dissident resisting the secret police as he was dragged off to the gulag is just pathetic. Releasing the video was the kind of response you would expect from members of a student union, not a professed party of government. And all the...
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4:15pm
In the
Wall Street Journal,Tom Gross rightly draws attention to a troubling gap in the BBC's coverage of the Mumbai atrocities:
For some time, many have argued that an element of antisemitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that antisemitism may even be at work in the way the BBC covers foreign news in general. For much of the Mumbai siege, the BBC went out of its way to avoid reporting that the Jewish community center was one of the seven targets. At one point viewers were told that ‘an office building’ had been targeted (referring to the Jewish center as such). Then on Friday morning, TV pictures of Indian commandos storming the besieged Jewish center were broadcast by networks around the
...
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3:55pm
Two writers today make observations about Obama’s security team that underpin the point I made here: that those who think these appointments represent a lurch to the centre never grasped that President Bush’s own foreign policy lurched in this direction some time ago. In the Times, Bronwen Maddox notes of the so-called ‘hawks’:
What they seem to represent is a continuation of the last year or so, in which President Bush adopted policies that were more conciliatory, less combative and actively sought the help of other countries...A difference in tone, then. But in policies, not a million miles from the chastened and cautious Bush Administration of the past year.
And in the New York Times, David Brooks similarly observes that one of these supposed hawks, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, has already been implementing Obama’s...
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3:44pm
The following letter has been received from Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of Oxford University. I reproduce it here in its entirety.
From: The Rt Hon Lord Patten of Barnes C.H. Dear Sir,
Your article, “Carpe diem -- or can we all relax now?” by Melanie Phillips (26 November 2008), repeats a number of patently false assertions about Robert Malley that are currently blighting the more dubious corners of the internet and do not belong in a respected publication.
Mr Malley did not work for the Obama campaign, nor is he working for the transition team. He did not travel anywhere for Obama, neither before nor after the election. His work on the Middle East in recent years has been in his role as the Middle East and North Africa Programme Director of the International Crisis Group, where I am currently co-chairman.
Ms Phillips uses a quote...
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12:13pm
On the
JihadWatch site Raphael Israeli, professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Chinese history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of 25 books, including
Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology and his latest,
Arabs in Israel: Friends or Foes? (excellent, as ever), cites another al Qaeda theorist (see my
Mail piece today) to explain the Mumbai atrocities in their wider and terrifying context:
Qurashi, who has obviously studied the most recent Western research in matters of the future battlefields and war doctrines, has come up with conclusions that are alarming: first, that the era of massive wars has ended, because the three war models of previous generations have been eroded; second, the fourth-generation wars of the 21st century will consist of asymmetrical confrontations between well-armed and well-equipped armies, who have a turf, a way of
...
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