Paradise lost

5:00pm

 

In today’s Daily Telegraph Israel’s ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor writes about his shock, upon returning to a Britain he remembered for its fairness and decency from an earlier posting to London, to discover that it has become a bubbling cauldron of anti-Israel prejudice, demonisation and lies. One of his central points is that media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

is routinely tainted with bias and a surprising lack of context. Double standards are rife. Israel's military reaction to the attacks it faces is given in-depth, microscopic coverage. Yet the attacks to which Israel is responding are often ignored. Terror attacks, ambushes, suicide bombings, the constant barrage of rockets being fired on Israeli citizens are frequently disregarded.

Although he doesn’t name it, a principal offender in this regard is the BBC. But as the Continue reading...

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More madness in Londonistan

6:12pm

The Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has hitherto been thought of as one of the few government ministers who ‘gets it’ as far as the threat to Britain from domestic Islamism is concerned. Well, judging from remarks she is reported today to have made she still has a long way to go. Responding to the Church of England report which claims that the government is paying only ‘lip service’ to Christianity and marginalising the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches while focusing ‘intently’ on Islam, Ms Blears says brightly that yes, this is so and quite right too:

She said it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and home-grown terrorism. Ms Blears told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme: ‘That’s just common sense. If we’ve got an issue

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This blog and (some of) its readers

10:55pm

 

I have noticed a persistent complaint by some readers posting comments on my blog entries which I think requires some comment and clarification. Referring to my last entry on Barack Obama, they appear to find it objectionable that I singled out his attitude towards Israel for criticism. They seem to believe that it is wrong for me to write about Israel as often as I do, not least because they think that, since I am writing on the Spectator website, I have some kind of duty not to write about it so much. Some of these readers, as is painfully obvious from their comments, simply have a big problem with Jews – at least, Jews who identify with and defend the Jewish people. But others, whose instincts may be rather more decent, seem to be labouring under one or...

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Change we can all believe in

4:39am

So the new dawn of American politics has brought us, on day one, what exactly? First off, Obama makes a speech to the American Jews of AIPAC that is such a brazen piece of cynicism as to make one’s eyes water. The man whose support for Israel has hitherto been, let us say, equivocal, who thinks ‘no-one is suffering more than the Palestinian people’ who he therefore thinks are suffering more than the Israelis they routinely murder, whose every foreign affairs adviser is viscerally hostile towards Israel with one of them, Daniel Kurzer, saying last month that Israel should surrender part of Jerusalem to the Arabs, suddenly tells the Jewish lobby group AIPAC in his first major speech after clinching the Democratic nomination that he is Israel’s bestest friend in the whole wide world and insists that

Jerusalem must

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The enemy within British education

9:31am

In my book All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, in which I charted the disintegration of education and deconstruction of knowledge in Britain, I noted that this onslaught had resulted from the hijack of education by left-wing ideologues hell-bent on destroying British society. These people were entrenched in university departments of education. So when the government tried to address education decline by imposing a national curriculum and turned to the ‘experts’ to help them do so, the people who wrote that curriculum and sat on the curriculum boards and other education quangos were the very people who were doing the damage in the first place.

Twelve years on, Britain’s education system has disintegrated yet further and exactly the same kind of people are doing the same damage. Today’s Daily Mail reports that Professor John White, who specialises in...

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Beating terrorism

5:58pm

All this is good news in its own right. Better yet, it explodes the mindless shibboleth that there is ‘no military solution’ when it comes to dealing with insurgencies. On the contrary, it turns out that the best way to end an insurgency is, quite simply, to beat it.

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