10:19am
In the New Statesman, Martin Bright asks the big question: why do liberals hate Israel so much?
The Israel issue has become a terrible fault line on the British left…The internet has flushed out a whole subculture of left-wing hostility to Israel that should make even Marqusee uncomfortable. This has a regular and willing outlet on the Guardian's Comment is Free website and the New Statesman also suffers from it whenever we publish articles on Israel. Postings on our blog casually link Zionism to fascism or South African apartheid. The language is so unpleasant that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that many of the comments are driven by anti-Semitism.
…For a long time Israel has been accused of crying wolf over surrounding countries that want to ‘drive it into the sea’. Now it has a neighbour whose
...
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3:35pm
The most important global event in the past week has been the attempted Hezbollah putsch in Lebanon. Accordingly it has received next to no coverage in Britain, where as the citizenry so insightfully informed the world in 2006: ‘We are all Hezbollah now’. Those who rant obsessively about Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the disputed territories are completely silent about Hezbollah’s invasion of Lebanon, its creeping state-within-a-state and its near-annihilation of Lebanon’s government which tried to stop the putsch and failed — despite that government being backed, as Walid Phares points out here, by an overwhelming sector of the public including most of the Sunnis, Christians and Druze plus a minority among the Shia, two thirds of the Lebanese Army, and a majority in Parliament.
What coverage there has been has presented this development as yet another round in the schismatic internal politics of...
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11:08am
Anthony Browne has an excellent piece in this week’s Spectator saying that what Britain needs is US-style think-tanks whose size enables them to do what the far more modest British think-tanks cannot do and for which there is a crying need — to challenge the intellectual stranglehold of the universities. Indeed, we need to go much further than that. At the heart of Britain’s spiral of intellectual, moral, social and political disintegration (yes, I am indeed understating the case) lies the intellectual hegemony of the left, enforced through bullying, intimidation, character assassination and the whole bag of tricks used to stifle an open society.
The result is a public discourse from which truth, evidence and rationality have been exiled, a society where normative values have been replaced by the transgressive or alien, and a national culture which is losing the will...
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5:29pm
The public apology and libel damages awarded to Channel Four’s Dispatches programme over Undercover Mosque, its investigation showing Islamic preachers in UK mosques preaching jihad and calling for the murder of non-believers, amount to much more than merely a victory for the programme and a complete vindication of its integrity. For the people who are having to pay the six-figure damages and costs are the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. This was a programme which uncovered disturbing evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques. But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the WM police and the CPS turned on the Dispatches producers, accusing them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion. The police then referred the programme to...
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5:13pm
The Guardian’s hatred of Israel and the Jews truly is a fathomless — and unfathomable — well. The last few days around Israel’s 60th anniversary have seen a further escalation of its obsessive verbal pogrom. Today it published a piece by
Samir el Youssef which turned the Arab attempt to exterminate Israel in 1948 into an attempt by Israel to exterminate Palestinian society (which did not then exist, as many Arabs have attested) but for which he magnanimously suggests Israel should be forgiven.
This follows a previous modest proposal by
Ahmad Samih Khalidi of the need to choose between never-ending conflict and a new form of power sharing beyond the two state solution (ie the end of Israel); a series on Gaza’s heartbreaking human tragedies (Israel’s fault) plus a series...
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4:54pm
The Australian prints a
story that you won’t see in the British media. It reports:
Children with a step-parent or no biological parent are significantly more at risk than those with a single parent or both biological parents…Dr Tooley's study found that children with a step-parent were at least 17 times more likely to die from intentional violence or accident. A limited version of the study found that the rate could be as high as 77 times. It found the risk was higher if there were no biological parents, such children being at least 22 times more prone. Most at risk were children under five.
Very similar findings were reported in Britain some two decades ago. The evidence that shattered or reconstituted families pose vastly greater risks to children than traditional two-parent families has always been...
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