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The Islamists are winning

David Selbourne

Wednesday, 19th July 2006

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century

Truth is generally the first casualty in war. On the battlefields of the Middle East, especially when Israel is involved, Reason also has a hard time of it. For neither Israel nor the Jews are seen — whether by themselves, by their friends, or by their foes — as a nation and a people like others.

One form of irrationality, shared by (some) evangelical Christians and (some) Jews, has it that Israel is the ‘Zion’ of prophecy, part of God’s plan, with its borders fixed for eternity by the Almighty. A contrary irrationality denies Israel’s right to exist, or regards Israel as not a nation at all. In the words of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in April 2000, it is merely a ‘cancerous body in the region’. Or, according to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’, speaking last Sunday — and breaking new medical ground — Israel is an ‘infectious tumour for the entire Islamic world’.

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The secret letters of the Jonestown death cult

Barry Isaacson

Thirty years after the mass suicides and murders in Guyana, Barry Isaacson unveils a cache of letters he found in his LA home, mapping the pain of one of the families

C’mon Cherie: even Goering stuck up a bit for Hitler

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says it is no surprise that Gordon Brown has ended up as surly and suspicious as he has: the memoirs of John Prescott, Lord Levy and Cherie Blair are appalling acts of treachery and avarice

I never want to be as insecure as Olivier

Tim Walker

Tim Walker talks to Greta Scacchi about her new role in The Deep Blue Sea, the gaucheness of Bill Murray — and being offered the lead in Basic Instinct

Meet James Purnell: the best hope Labour has of avoiding disaster

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson says that the 38-year-old Work and Pensions Secretary is the best candidate to succeed Gordon Brown. Already surging ahead at his department, he has the gift of sounding like an ordinary human being — and he understands the Cameron Conservative party

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Joan Collins

Joan Collins lives an actor's life

Happy 60th birthday, Israel: well done for surviving

Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips says that the prosperity and growing cultural confidence of Israel is a fitting riposte to the Western intelligentsia, American meddling and the daily propaganda assault that ignores the Islamisation of the Palestinians

My dream for Turkey, by Boris’s great-grandfather

Norman Stone

Norman Stone on the dramatic life and death of Ali Kemal, one-time interior minister of Turkey and our mayoral candidate’s forebear

We live in a state of emergency: and we are getting angrier

David Selbourne

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, says David Selbourne. The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

Milburn: What’s it all about, Gordon?

Fraser Nelson

Alan Milburn gives his first interview since Brown became PM, and tells Fraser Nelson that Gordon has converted to Blairism too late. Something new is needed now

I know why the government wants to send homosexuals back to Iran to be hanged

Rod Liddle

Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country