This blog and (some of) its readers

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

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

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

Further to my post below about the dangerous inanity of those who advocate ‘engaging with’ terrorists Bret Stephens observes, in a must-read in the Wall Street Journal, that the authorities in Iraq, Colombia and Sri Lanka are getting on top of terrorism not by talking to terrorists but through military offensives which destroy them. He writes:

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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Britain's Terrorism Derangement Syndrome

 
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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Britain's slide into dhimmocracy

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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