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Thursday 21 August 2008

 

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Tuesday, 3rd June 2008

Britain's Terrorism Derangement Syndrome

11:02am

 
Mr Clarke, what kept you so long?

Today’s article in the Telegraph by Peter Clarke, the former Metropolitan Police officer who was until recently national co-ordinator of terrorist investigations, is a straightforward and sensible endorsement of the government’s embattled proposal to extend the detention period for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days. The opposition to this measure, when it is not merely playing mischievous politics, borders on the hysterical. Opponents shriek that it is internment by another name, and that if it is passed Britain will have destroyed its ancient liberties and handed victory to the terrorists. They also declare triumphantly that, since no-one can identify a case that has already occurred where 42 days was necessary and its absence caused terrorists to be released, this clinches the argument that it is totally unnecessary.

What utter drivel. Pointing...

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Monday, 2nd June 2008

Britain's slide into dhimmocracy

6:11pm

There can hardly be a more graphic illustration of Britain’s helter-skelter slide into dhimmitude that this story:

Two Christian preachers were stopped from handing out Bible extracts by police because they were in a Muslim area, it was claimed yesterday. They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime.

The community officer is also said to have told the two men: 'You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.' A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

The noteworthy point about this incident is that...

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Terror and appeasement

1:59pm

The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde (who most certainly should know better) said a few days ago that Britain could only stop al Qaeda by negotiation. A little while back there was a clamour for talking to the Taleban. This is all part of a huge establishment push for talking to terrorists (on both sides of the Atlantic – indeed, this is already becoming a major issue in the US presidential election) including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The argument is a perfect distillation of the hubristic ignorance and solipsism of the west which views everything through the prism of its own cultural assumption that the entire world operates according to the rules of rational self-interest and that all conflict can be solved by dialogue. Indeed, the dominant belief is that conflict can only be...

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Thursday, 29th May 2008

The strange death of political Britain

11:23pm

 

Gordon Brown continues to stagger punch drunk round the ring, blows still raining down. Today’s round brought a Guardian story that only five weeks are left before Brown and other Labour apparatchiki are personally bankrupted by the party’s unpaid loans. House prices are continuing to crash through the floor, exceeded in velocity only by Brown’s continuing plunge in the opinion polls -- the latest from You/Gov appears to show the Tories on course for a majority of several trillion seats; newspapers bring breathless dispatches every day from the Commons tea-room about which of Brown’s loyal ministers is now selflessly preparing to step up to the plate should a desperate nation beg him or her to stand, before concluding that none of these pygmies is up to it and then starting the...

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Wednesday, 28th May 2008

The universities' witch-hunt against the Jews

11:23am

Today, the Universities and Colleges Union is discussing whether universities should single out Israeli and Jewish scholars for active discrimination.

Yes, you read that correctly. The UCU is debating a motion which not only raises the spectre yet again of an academic boycott of Israel but demands of Jewish and Israeli academics that they explain their politics as a pre-condition to normal academic contact. The motion asks colleagues

to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating... the testimonies will be used to promote a wide discussion by colleagues of the appropriateness of continued educational links with Israeli academic institutions... Ariel College, an explicitly colonising institution in the West Bank, be investigated under the formal Greylisting Procedure.

The implication...

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Dangerous naivety

12:50am


The New Republic has published an article by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank which claims that al Qaeda is unravelling because former supporters are turning against it, and that as a result Muslim moderates are on the march against the jihadis. While there is undoubtedly some truth in their argument, in that – as we can see in Iraq – the mass killings of Muslims by al Qaeda are clearly turning increasing numbers of Muslims against it, the authors’ apparent naivety and ignorance have nevertheless led them to some dangerously wrong conclusions, particularly in their analysis of what is happening in Britain.

They have fallen into the trap of believing that the only extremists are al Qaeda and others who support terrorism in Britain. They thus extol as moderates those who oppose al Qaeda and terrorism in Britain. But...

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Search this blog

 

Melanie's Published Articles

Has Bush forgotten his own doctrine?

The ‘Me’ in media

A very Blairite plot

Britain’s dangerous political vacuum

Swooning over Princess Obama

Mr Balls fails the test

The club of tyranny

Sleepwalking into Islamisation

Can we afford to lose this expertise?

The silence of complicity

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here

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