Whoops, what a giveaway

4:45pm

The charge that he is a bigot has clearly got under Johann Hari’s skin. In today’s Independent he writes a riposte to the torrent of criticism apparently provoked by his article last month — including my blog entry here — a rejoinder which he clearly believes boosts his case. On the contrary: he merely digs himself even further into the hole he has created.

He uses the tired device of screaming McCarthyism at anyone who says disobliging things about his views, wholly oblivious to the obvious and absurd paradox.
He cites as authorities for his views those paradigms of reason and decency Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter. Finkelstein calls Holocaust survivors ‘frauds and hucksters’, says American Jews are ‘parasites’ and supports Hezbollah. You can gain some insight into Finkelstein’s fraudulent scholarship and...

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A great victory -- but at what terrible price?

6:43pm

It was eminently predictable, but it is still a great victory. Today the Court of Appeal unanimously and emphatically declared that the ban under the Terrorism Act of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahideen of Iran (PMOI), was illegal. Since the judges also refused to allow the Home Secretary even the possibility of an appeal, the government must now de-proscribe the PMOI as ordered by the court.

This not only brings to an end a shameful chapter in Britain’s long appeasement of the tyrannical Iranian regime but also offers a sliver of hope that that regime might now be toppled. One might have thought that this was an outcome devoutly to be wished for by the governments of the west. Far better, after all, that the ayatollahs should be deposed by popular will of the...

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Who could know?

3:54pm

 

The UN has long effectively behaved as a club of terror, excusing, ignoring or condoning acts of terrorism and tyranny while repeatedly singling out their principal state victim, Israel, for grotesque condemnation. The role of its relief agency UNWRA in supervising ‘refugee camps’ which are factories of terrorism has long been deeply compromised. Israel has repeatedly claimed that terrorists operate under the cover of UNWRA vehicles and facilities. The UN however has always strenuously denied any involvement whatsoever in such activities. Now however Reuters tells us that the headmaster of a UN school in Gaza, Awad al-Qiq who was killed last week in an Israeli air strike on a 'mechanic's workshop', taught by day and made rockets for Islamic Jihad by night. Wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag, he was buried as a...

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Full marks, Boris

11:02am

Boris’s first move as Mayor of London is a seriously good one. He has appointed Ray Lewis as a deputy mayor with responsibility for tackling youth violence. The Telegraph describes Lewis as ‘inspirational’; I can certainly endorse that. I wrote here in 2005 about his Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which takes gifted young black boys who are already well on track for a life of crime, drugs and mayhem and turns them into high-achieving solid citizens. He does so by giving these boys a combination of military-style discipline and profound belief in their potential, and by holding their (overwhelmingly single) mothers to account for their own inadequate parenting. He is tough, loving, uncompromising, charismatic and achieves astounding success in turning round some of the most difficult boys around. But because he identifies the slop and sentimentality...

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Why is Condi Rice breaking international law?

3:35pm

For all those (including Haaretz afficionados) who are either ignorant of or deny the true history of the Jewish claim to what was once called Palestine, and who believe the West Bank (and until 2005 Gaza) is territory that is ‘illegally occupied’ by Israel, this admirable and well-informed resume should be required reading (along with this article by Efraim Karsh in Commentary). Look first at the two maps at the beginning, and certain facts immediately leap out. The first is that in 1920 Mandatory Palestine, which was established in order to set up within it the restored Jewish national home, comprised present day Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. The second is that by 1922, this territory had shrunk with the creation of Transjordan, after Churchill unilaterally gave three quarters of Palestine to the Hashemite dynasty as...

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The war against the Jews (20)

3:17pm

 

I have often referred to the baleful influence of Haaretz on Israel’s reputation through the writings of a number of its correspondents who promulgate the most vicious distortions about their country. Yet even I am left open mouthed by this account of the lies it published recently in a story by Gideon Levy about Palestinian children being deprived of swimming pools, to the extent that allegedly none of them could swim without life preservers. As you will see from the CAMERA article, a multitude of pictures in themselves (similar to the one above of a swimming pool in Jenin) tell a very different story, as did a previous piece in Haaretz itself:

As Levy's own colleague at Ha'aretz, Avi Issacharoff wrote on Aug. 8, 2007:

Nowadays, every city in the West Bank has a

...

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