Another axis of evil

Yesterday, there were suggestions that Hezbollah forces were being brought into Iran to help put down the revolt against the regime. Today, as reports seep out of the brutality being meted out to the protesters – the anonymous post here at 6.03 pm is particularly affecting – which suggest that the casualty toll is far higher than has so far been claimed, the Jerusalem Post reports that Palestinian Hamas thugs have been imported into Iran to crush the uprising:

On Tuesday two protesters told The Jerusalem Post that Palestinian Hamas members are helping the Iranian authorities crush street protests in support of Mousavi... ‘The most important thing that I believe people outside of Iran should be aware of,’ the young man went on, ‘is the participation of Palestinian forces in these riots.’

Another protester, who spoke as he

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Oh dear, how inconvenient for the White House

Britain’s embarrassing foreign Secretary David Miliband was on the Today programme earlier absurdly implying that President Obama’s famous ‘hand of friendship’ which he extended to the Iranian regime has somehow been responsible for the extraordinary popular uprising in Iran that we have seen over the past few days. On the contrary – the hand of friendship has been met with the regime’s clenched fist being brought down on the Iranian people. With the election apparently having been rigged – at least, that’s what the people think – suddenly popular fury has boiled over. Obama now looks worse than ridiculous.

It has been clear for a considerable time that a ferment has been building in Iran, especially among the young who long for their freedom from the regime. It is true, as Miliband said, that the opposition leader Mir Hossein...

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Now he tells us

Not since Chris Woodhead was Chief Inspector of Schools has anyone at the heart of the ruling education establishment told the truth about the collapse of the British education system under the onslaught by egalitarian Jacobins determined to reset Britain’s cultural calendar to year zero. Today, a man who sat at the top of the bureaucracy implementing this system has blurted it out, albeit in muted form considering the disaster on his watch.

The Telegraph reports that Ralph Tabberer, the former Director-General of Schools at the Department for Children, Schools and Families who now works in the independent education sector, has condemned the comprehensive system and said academic standards have suffered because of an obsession with ‘fairness’. Not enough emphasis had been put on ‘scholarship, genuinely high quality study and its importance’, and even teaching children ‘character’ and the...

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A statement from first principles

The essence of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech a few hours ago, which you can read in full here, was simply this:

Israel wants peace with the Palestinians. The cause of the conflict remains, as it ever was, the Arabs’ refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland of Israel, which (contrary to Obama’s claim) predated the Nazi Holocaust by several thousand years. Those (like Obama) who think the cause is the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza are confusing cause and effect. The fundamental prerequisite for ending the conflict is therefore a public, binding and unequivocal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Far from Israel occupying Palestinian land in  Judea and Samaria, it is the...

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The Law Lords make Britain unsafe yet again

The English judiciary has now pretty well completed its attempt to destroy altogether Britain’s ability to defend itself against terrorism.

First, it used ‘human rights’ law to prevent Britain from deporting foreign terrorist suspects on the grounds that just about everywhere on the planet would treat them badly.

To protect the public while such suspects were in legal limbo, the government tried to lock them up. The courts then ruled that this went against their human rights too, since it treated foreign suspects differently from British ones and was therefore ‘discriminatory’. The fact that of course British suspects wouldn’t be treated like this because British suspects would not potentially be deported, and that it could hardly be discriminatory to say that British citizens had different rights in Britain from foreign nationals, was deemed to be irrelevant. Universal human rights were universal...

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If this is a leadership contender, I'm a banana

My jaw is still in the floor after this morning’s performance on the Today programme (0810) by the Foreign Secretary David Miliband. First of all he gabbled away with statements he had clearly come on to make and which turned the interview largely into a campaigning platform (for what end? And against whom?) yet protested that he would ‘battle through the rest of this interview’ to make his points. Eh? He barely allowed interviewer Jim Naughtie a word in edgways.

And then there was what he actually said. Babbling incontinently about having ‘vision’ and being ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ and how ‘my generation will not throw away the privilege of government’ in order to bring about this radical and progressive change for Britain – a fruity way, surely, of trying to justify his patent cowardice in not resigning to help...

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