Israel

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

We can’t just blame Benjamin Netanyahu for the lack of peace in the Middle East

The re-election of Benjamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu in Israel has not gone down well in the chancelleries of Europe, let alone the White House. During his terms of office, a majority of western politicians and commentators have become opposed to Netanyahu, viewing him as an obstacle to peace. BBC reporters claimed that his win was down to ‘scare tactics’. The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said he found Bibi’s success ‘depressing’. But the election results are a reminder that, although outside the country there is a vast industry focused on the unresolved Israel-Palestinian border dispute, inside Israel other issues dominate. Fifteen years after the failure of negotiations at Camp David, Israeli

Steerpike Steerpike

Andy Burnham burnishes his foreign policy credentials

If Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham’s future leadership aspirations were ever in doubt, then take a look at his reaction to the news of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election as Prime Minister of Israel last night: Burnishing his foreign policy expertise: tick. Cat-nipping the Labour left: tick. About as subtle as Burnham’s recent attempts in The Spectator to rebrand himself as ‘mainstream Labour’. The general election campaign has barely begun, and already potential Miliband successors are getting their ducks in a row.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Was Netanyahu’s message worth the diplomatic damage it caused?

For weeks before his plane set off for Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress was exhaustingly analysed here in DC. Did Speaker Boehner adequately notify the White House about the invitation? How angry was the President really about this fait accompli? Were the Republicans using the invite to try to show themselves to be more pro-Israel than their Democrat rivals? Or were certain Democrats talking of no-shows and walk-outs during the speech only in order to show themselves more critical of Israel than the Republicans? By the day of the speech it seemed both sides had need of the fight. Of course Netanyahu had not single-handedly created this

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

If ‘non-violent extremists’ can’t express their views at universities, where can they?

Last month, the government’s Counter-Terrorism & Security Bill became law. One provision is the legal obligation it places upon ‘specified authorities’ to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. ‘Specified authorities’ includes universities, whose vice-chancellors made several interventions as the legislation made its way through Parliament. The Education (No.2) Act of 1996 places a duty on universities and colleges to ‘ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and for visiting speakers’. University professors (myself included) pointed out very publicly that the Counter-Terrorism Bill, as originally drafted, seemed not to take account of this obligation. We were grateful that the House of

Thursday

Steerpike

Clash of the Titans: Rod Liddle calls Piers Morgan a halfwit

Piers Morgan’s claim in the Daily Mail that the Prime Minister of Israel’s reaction to the  terror attacks in Denmark ‘is a disgrace’ has caught the attention of Mr S’s colleague Rod Liddle. Liddle writes in defence of Benjamin Netanyahu in this week’s Spectator, arguing that Netanyahu’s offer of Israeli sanctuary to Jews should not be ridiculed. He also finds time to level a few insults at Morgan, whose face apparently ‘resembles a puckered anus’. ‘The bien-pensant attacks on Netanyahu were epitomised by the idiotic Piers Morgan, writing in the Daily Mail. I suppose one should not be surprised about what emanates from a man with a face which so closely resembles a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

It’s not Netanyahu’s fault that Jews in Europe are afraid

Have you seen the prices for houses in Israel? Astronomical, mate. You wouldn’t believe it. An arid and perpetually embattled country which everyone has recently decided to hate, and with a bloody great big wall topped with razor wire running through the middle of it — I’d have expected the cost of a nice four-bed would be comparable to what you’d pay in Rwanda, say, or Myanmar. Not a chance. Down south, in Eilat, it’s millions and millions and millions of quid, just to be oven-basted by the extremist sun and then eaten by a shark. It’s not much better in the nicer parts of Tel Aviv, either, such as

Monday

Geoffrey Alderman

Israel has become a life-insurance policy for many British Jews

Weekends are quality time in the Alderman household. On Saturday evenings, following the termination of the Sabbath, my wife and I are accustomed to sit together, review the week that has just ended, and map out the week ahead. But last Saturday the conversation took a very different turn. My wife and I considered the drama that had unfolded in Copenhagen, and asked ourselves, for the very first time in over forty-one years of marriage, whether we should not make plans to leave (flee?) England – this green and hitherto pleasant land in which we had both been born and educated– and seek shelter in some foreign field. We considered

Thursday

Tim Bouverie

Tony Judt: a man of paradox who made perfect sense

Tony Judt was not only a great historian, he was also a great essayist and commentator on international politics. Few in this country will be familiar with his journalism, however, since it was largely published in America by the the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. Thankfully, this situation can now be remedied through this collection of his writings, ranging from 1995 to his untimely death in 2010 from motor-neurone disease. As was often observed during his life, Judt was a man of apparent paradoxes. A secular Jew, who as a teenager had been a left-wing Zionist, he was castigated for criticising the actions of Israel. A

Friday

Douglas Murray

The siege in a kosher shop in Paris proves why Israel needs to exist

As I write a siege is ongoing in a Kosher shop in Paris.  In France, Belgium and across Europe in recent years, Jews have repeatedly been the targets of Islamist attack.  They always are.  Last year saw the largest upsurge of anti-Semitic hate crime on record even in the UK. But it is the continent that has seen the worst and growing litany of attacks.  In 2012 Mohamed Merah killed three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse.  In May last year three people were shot dead by an Islamist gunman at the Jewish museum in Brussels. During the twentieth century Judaism on the continent of Europe

Tuesday

Joseph Power

Australia finally feels the ripples of Islamist terrorism on its own shores

It was a scene that Australians are hitherto unfamiliar with. Terrified civilians forced at gunpoint to press a black flag, bearing the shahādah – the Islamic declaration of faith, most notably used as a battle banner by Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria – against the Lindt café window. The gunman, aside from a chat with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, requested a proper Islamic State flag, which, in fairness, would be hard to come by in Sydney these days. The perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, was well known to authorities. Facing more than 40 sexual and indecent assault charges, he had a conviction for sending offensive letters to families

Thursday

Julie Burchill

For some left-wing men, the misogyny of the Islamic State is part of the appeal

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview and in a way uniquely honest. Even a terror gang as vile as the IRA tried to keep a lid on the rapes and paedophilia going on within its rancid ranks. But when Amnesty International first claimed in September that Isis were enslaving and abusing ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of Yazidi women and children, it

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Baroness Warsi uses her retirement to provoke British Jews

If anyone ever wondered what the over-promoted, incapable and incompetent Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was planning to do in retirement, now we know: provoke British Jews on Twitter. Today, after four Jews, one a British citizen, were butchered while praying in Israel, Sayeeda Warsi used the opportunity to taunt British Jews. Not just the Zionist Federation but a former British Jewish communal leader as well. In Sayeeda Warsi’s world you see, Jews who protest that it is wrong only for Muslims to be allowed to pray at a site in Jerusalem holy to both Muslims and Jews are morally equivalent to Palestinian Muslims who use meat cleavers to butcher rabbis while they

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan. Consequently I have to short-change some of the highlights (note for next year’s diaries, folks — October is invariably the dance month of the year), including the liberation of ice-skating by the Canadians of Le Patin Libre, who made Alexandra Palace rink feel like a frozen field with their casual pyrotechnics (ice-o-technics?). And then there was the compellingly odd flamenco

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

What Julie Burchill’s ex-husband thinks of her new memoir

Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol — fell in love with the Jewish race. It’s an exhilarating and exasperating mix of the utterly brilliant and the totally bonkers. Poor Julie — she thought that her teenage dream of marrying a Jewish man had come true when she married me back in the 1980s. Yes, she got her Jew, but the -ish bit was missing. My family and I earn a chapter in her book called ‘Meet the Perverts’ and all I can say is: Oy vey! You think you’re a smart and funny man to be married

Monday

Kate Maltby

This opera is simplistic and dangerous. So is banning it

My father’s house was razed In 1948 When the Israelis passed over our street I’ve never forgotten the opening lines to John Adam’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Crisp, elegiac, this  ‘Chorus of Exiled Palestinians’ rises up to a moment of anguished dissonance as it spits out the word ‘Israelis’. It’s beautiful. It’s also the most egregious romanticisation of Palestinian terrorism outside the muralled bunkers of the Gaza Strip. In the Metropolitan Opera’s new production, a chorus of shrouded Palestinian women form a funeral procession as they intone their complaint, eventually parting to reveal a 5-year-old boy, cradled in the arms of his weeping, widowed mother. Marking the start of a libretto

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Why would jihadi terrorists attack Canada? Better to ask: why not?

The attacks in Canada probably seem non-sensical to some people. After all, much of the press and political class in the West has spent years trying to cover over the motivations of people like those who have spent this week targeting soldiers and politicians in Canada. ‘Why did they target Canada?’ headlines are asking today. And well they might. There has been a great push in recent years to put the causes of Islamic jihad not onto the perpetrators but onto the victims of this problem. So, for instance, when America has been attacked, it has regularly been suggested that ‘the United States had it coming’ (as Mary Beard so

Monday

Douglas Murray

Recognising a Palestinian ‘state’ in Parliament is not only pointless, it’s dangerous

Today in Parliament, MPs are voting on a backbench motion (supported by a one-line whip from the Labour party) proposing that Britain recognises Palestine as a state. The motion attempts push a new status quo on Israel-Palestine, without the agreement of the partners on the ground. This is not just an arrogant move, it is a pointless one – not least because the Cameron government has already said it will ignore the vote.  What is of concern, however, is that the whole move displays a startling degree of naivety in Westminster. At the same time as the West has declared war on Isis, it is odd for British MPs to be publicising

Thursday

Taki

What is to be done about a world where everything is for sale?

Next time you read about an auctioneer’s gavel coming down on a $150 million painting bought by some flunkey representing the ruling family of Qatar, don’t ooh or aah, but think of those monsters in Iraq and Syria who have their children pose on video while holding up the severed heads of innocents. And no, it’s not a stretch — without Qatar’s gold Islamic State would not exist, not even in the movies. Let me put it another way: had Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover given White House dinners for Al Capone, the outcry would have been heard all the way down to Patagonia. Yet, as reported in these here

Thursday

Rod Liddle

In Palestine, homosexuality is a capital offence. Does Peter Tatchell not realise this?

Peter Tatchell has been awarded an honorary fellowship from Goldsmiths University for ’47 years of LGBTI activism’ and campaigning. I’m not sure I agree with these baubles, but if anyone deserves one, it’s probably Tatchell. A good man, by and large. Tatchell has in turn passed on his honorary fellowship to Palestine, as a statement against the ‘occupation’ by Israel. Right on! Right on! Let’s just briefly compare the treatment of LGBTI people in those two territories, then – Free Democratic Palestine and the Vile Fascist Entity. The Palestinian National Authority awards the death penalty for homosexuals. In Israel homosexuality has been legal de facto since 1963 and de jure

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How can Jews oppose Muslim anti-Semitism without being ‘Islamophobic’?

On Sunday there was a rally in London demanding ‘zero tolerance’ of anti-Semitism. About 4,500 people gathered in front of the Royal Courts of Justice. Speakers who addressed the crowds included the Chief Rabbi, Maajid Nawaz and me. Among the things I told the crowd was to expect more and to demand more of their ‘communal leadership’. Long-term readers will know that I’ve never had much time for communal leadership of any kind. I don’t like the groups who claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims – groups which disproportionately represent a politicised and fundamentalist hard-line interpretation of their faith. And I don’t like groups that have claimed to