Why on earth not?

2:15pm

 

In line with my own comments here about the need to support, promote, encourage and generally put rocket fuel behind the Iranian resistance in order to topple the terrorist regime in Tehran, Michael Ledeen makes the following observation about the Bush presidency:

This administration has said many things critical of Iran, but it has never said it wants, and will support, peaceful democratic change.

Astounding.

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Witchfinder Balls

11:10pm

The victimisation of faith schools by the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls is a real shocker, even by the standards of this administration. Balls has repeatedly claimed that dozens of faith schools have broken the admission rules. One in six state schools is guilty of selecting pupils by the back door, he says, and claims in particular that such schools even made places conditional on parents agreeing to pay for various services. Even though Balls subsequently admitted he hadn’t checked his facts when he first made this claim, he continues to make it and indeed has even stepped up the rhetoric.

In fact, only seven primary schools fit this claim and they are all in the London borough of Barnet. But there isn’t a shred of evidence that voluntary payments made by parents influenced admissions at any of these schools....

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Why is the UK appeasing Iran?

10:56am

Yesterday evening I joined members of the Iranian resistance and their parliamentary supporters at a House of Commons reception to celebrate the Iranian new year. These dissidents are anxiously awaiting the imminent decision by the Court of Appeal on whether the Home Secretary can appeal against the ruling by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) that the proscription of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) — a ban it described as ‘perverse’ — must be lifted.

Meeting and listening to these warm, attractive, and above all courageous people — our natural allies within a Muslim world from which they have been exiled by the true terror which has taken over their country since the Iranian revolution of 1979 — I was struck even more strongly than ever before by the absurdity and indeed obscenity of the situation. Iran...

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The war against the Jews (15)

9:52am

The New York Times has published a piece by its former Jerusalem bureau chief, Steve Erlanger, detailing the incitement against the Jews routinely promoted by Hamas. Most disgusting — and most ominous — is the way in which Palestinian children are taught from the cradle to hate and to murder Jews:

Another children’s program, ‘Tomorrow’s Pioneers,’ has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. ‘We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,’ Assud said recently. ‘We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,’ cities now in Israel proper. ‘We will liberate the whole homeland.’

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the

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The war against the Jews (14)

8:30pm

A reader, Kevin O'Sullivan, has sent me the following message, which I reproduce here with his permission:

Having just read your very interesting article in the Spectator about anti-Israeli bias in the media, especially the BBC, I thought you might like to see my recent complaint to the BBC, with reference to yet another highly anti-Semitic broadcast.

Alas, I have now become quite blasé about the constant anti-West, pro-Muslim propaganda broadcast by the BBC, but even I just had to respond to the most recent example, transmitted on the Radio 4 program, From Our Own Correspondent. If I stood on any street corner in London, holding anti-Semitic placards vilifying Jewish people, and encouraging hatred towards the most persecuted race in the history of man, I would rightly be arrested and hopefully prosecuted under

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A Britain without honour or shame

7:48pm

At a Civitas lunchtime seminar today Nazir Afzal, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service for West London, spoke forcefully about the appalling persecution of Muslim women in Britain through forced marriages and honour-based violence. Such violence is based on a cultural assumption that women are of low worth and their lives must be controlled, and that if they break free of that control they may bring shame upon the family honour for which they are punished by violence and murder. He said:

The greatest fear of Muslim women [in Britain] is not of Islamophobia or being arrested by the police — it is of being attacked in their own homes.

The meeting heard an impassioned intervention by a Muslim woman, Gina Khan, who was born and bred in Birmingham. Delighted as she was, she said, that this...

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