In the ‘peace camp’ in Parliament Square last week, a man sat with a placard which said ‘NORWAY Jew Mafia Job’.
In the ‘peace camp’ in Parliament Square last week, a man sat with a placard which said ‘NORWAY Jew Mafia Job’. I wonder if police would have tolerated it if it had replaced the word ‘Jew’ with ‘black’, ‘gay’ or ‘Muslim’. But it would not surprise me if a large number of people have been persuaded that Jewish power somehow armed Anders Breivik and induced him to murder scores of Norwegian teenagers. True, there is nothing as old-fashioned as actual evidence of this, but so what? Just as Breivik seems to have picked up dreadful ideas from the internet, so anti-Semites find endless material to feed their obsession. The difference, perhaps, is that Breivik’s views are not state-subsidised. I have recently been studying reports, one by the TaxPayers’ Alliance and one by Impact-SE, on the teaching materials used by the Palestinian Authority in its schools. Whatever the subject — environment, geography, history, language, religion, even mathematics — the lesson is the same. The Jews, children are taught, have stolen, starved, killed, pillaged. Maps of the region erase the existence of Israel. A picture of a Mandate-era stamp removes the Hebrew on it. ‘Miserliness and avarice are among the Jews’ prominent traits’, says a religious textbook. All this is assisted by money from the British Department for International Development. Last month, it announced its plans for further funding of the Authority, including primary education for over 35,000 children. The relevant minister, Alan Duncan, posted a video of himself visiting the security wall. He denies that the wall is for security and describes it as part of ‘a land grab’ by Israel. ‘Israel can build and it is not their country,’ he cries. No doubt Mr Duncan would refuse the ‘NORWAY Jew Mafia Job’ train of thought, put like that. But the ‘education’ he supports, with our money, comes to much the same thing.
It is good news, I suppose, that Lady Buscombe is leaving the chairmanship of the Press Complaints Commission. Perhaps her successor might actually stand up to the main press groups. This will be difficult to achieve, however, unless the method of appointment is radically different from what it used to be. In 2002, when I was editor of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Wakeham left the chairmanship after we had complained that he was not handling complaints impartially but brokering deals between newspapers and the embattled subjects of their intrusions. A weird agreement conjured up by the PCC between Buckingham Palace and (surprise, surprise) the News of the World over Prince Harry’s drug-taking was the last straw. Fleet Street papers paid the lion’s share of the chairman’s excessive salary of £150,000 for a three-day week. I was approached for my view of who should succeed Wakeham. I suggested Sir David Ramsbotham, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, who had already proved his unbending independence. I quickly discovered, however, that there was no chance. Agreement had already been reached between the two great powers — Les Hinton at News International (who last month resigned over the phone-hacking scandal), and Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail. They wanted Sir Christopher Meyer, who was just retiring as British ambassador to Washington. He was duly appointed in 2003. I noticed that Sir Christopher soon became a major contributor to the Daily Mail on diplomatic subjects. In 2005, the paper serialised his controversial book about the Iraq war, Tony Blair’s trousers, his own wife’s legs, etc. Sir Christopher did not challenge his paymasters. Will history repeat itself?
A new book about Trinity College, Cambridge (Trinity, A Portrait, Third Millennium) celebrates the college’s great minds. Although it is put together by Trinity men (Edward Stourton and John Lonsdale), it rightly does not gloss over the less wonderful Trinity minds — Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt – who became Soviet double agents. But Lord Hunt of Chesterton (emeritus professor in climate modelling, former leader of the Labour group on Cambridge City Council) contributes a curious essay which tries to defend the spies — in particular, Blunt. When Blunt, a leading art historian, was exposed in 1979, Trinity wondered whether to strip him of his honorary fellowship. The dons were divided. Blunt offered his resignation and the Master accepted it. Lord Hunt attacks this, implying that some Fellows had briefed against Blunt to the press: ‘Trinity appeared to have learned nothing from its decision to sack the philosopher Bertrand Russell… after his conviction for the crime of pacifism,’ he says. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Russell case, the analogy is false. Russell engaged in no deception. Blunt, Burgess, Philby and co lied for decades, in the interests of a foreign power which committed mass murder. They actually worked for that power, including when (Lord Hunt does not mention this) it was allied to the Nazis and later, when it was our enemy in the Cold War. Hunt says academic duty ‘does not require unconditional loyalty to the state’. Indeed not, and one must accept that some intelligent people in the 1930s became Nazis or communists because of their clever-silly convictions about how to change the world. But Blunt and his friends did believe that loyalty to the Soviet state should be unconditional, and that every deception, including ones which led to the deaths of colleagues, could be justified by this. They were traitors not only to their country, but to the intellectual honesty upon which university life depends. So Blunt was a jolly bad Fellow.
My daughter and I went for an evening walk this week, and saw two roe-deer across the field, quite rare round us where the deer are mostly fallow. We stalked them (unarmed) with our dog. They were silly teenagers: when they saw us, they ran off, but dithered, turned round, and started grazing again. Then they did something which I have never before seen deer do — they approached us to work out what we were. They came within ten yards, looking pretty, shy but inquisitive. I felt that the boot was on the other foot (or rather, slot), and that it was we who were being stalked.
Comments