The spinning compass

5:13pm

Much is understandably being made of the political ramifications of the quite remarkable mess Gordon Brown is now in over first his decision to scrap the 10p tax rate and then double back on himself by cushioning the blow for assorted vulnerable groups. First he denies there are to be many losers – according to the Telegraph he

even assured Tony Blair last year that scrapping the 10p rate would hurt only a few thousand workers, not the 5.3 million even the Treasury now accepts will lose out

then he performs a U-turn but announces a rescue scheme of such arcane complexity no-one can understand it (but you can be sure the benefits of it will melt away under scrutiny). And the only reason he did this at all, as David Cameron observed in the Commons exchanges today, was...

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The open society and its enemies

10:55pm

 

I am following with no little fascination the controversy over David Edgar’s article in the Guardian last Saturday, which has upset certain left-wing folk by suggesting that writers such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Andrew Antony, Martin Bright, David Mamet and Ed Husain are but the latest to have deserted the left and moved to the right. Oh -- and me.
This list is in itself absurd. As Andrew Anthony has pointed out, in renouncing seventh century Islamism, Ed Husain has moved (insofar as these terms still have any meaning) from right to left. As for several of the others, they have merely understood that one cannot be a true progressive and at the same time support the continuation of certain tyrannical regimes that enslave and murder their populations, even if they...

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The war against the Jews (17)

9:00pm

Has the Times gone soft in the head? It headlines a story today

Hamas leader accepts Israel's right to exist after Carter visit

even though the very first words of the story itself state

Hamas will not recognise Israel.

This is because the Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal has said it

will accept a Palestinian state on Palestine territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war

and so, concludes reporter Sheera Frenkel, this amounted to a

tacit acceptance of Israel’s right to exist alongside a Palestinian state, but without explicit recognition.

What nonsense! The profound Israel-hater Jimmy Carter (pictured above paying homage at the tomb of Yasser Arafat) may be spreading such mischief, but Mashaal’s remarks do nothing of the sort. Hamas has previously indicated graciously that it will accept a Palestinian state – all the better to...

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The war against the Jews (16)

8:08pm

 

Here we go again.
Last week the Palestinian Reuters’ cameraman, Fadel Shana, was said to have been killed by an Israeli tank in the raid in Gaza following the killing of three Israeli soldiers. However, it looks as if his death may have been yet another manipulated piece of propaganda. Initial reports claimed his car had been hit by an Israeli tank even though the car was clearly marked ‘TV’. Yet subsequently, Reuters claimed he had been killed by a weapon fired by the Israelis which upon exploding in mid-air scattered anti-personnel darts. So how could his car have been blown up by a shell that exploded mid-air? Further claims were made that a second shell was fired at the car two minutes later. But this story in the Sydney Morning...

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Intermission

5:33pm

Apologies for my absence over the past few days: Passover preparations and then a stomach bug  overtook me. I hope to resume posting very shortly.

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An Iraqi gets it

11:16pm

As three more Israeli soldiers were murdered today at the Nahal Or crossing into Gaza, and Israel once more tried to eradicate the source of the terror by a violent raid (and guess which of these two developments will get all the attention) one unlikely source understands what is actually going on. Unlike so many in the west, this London-based Iraqi author, Aref Alwan has a grasp of history and is honest enough to acknowledge the truth about the unmitigated evil that is dominating the Middle East and the world. In a remarkable article, he identifies the Arab refusal to recognise other people’s rights which has given rise to the ‘enormous lie’ that Palestine was stolen from the Arabs in the ‘nakba’ – ie, the creation of Israel in 1948. Refusing to recognise anyone else’s...

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