Israel

Thursday

David Blackburn

Israel’s public relations problem

The front page of today’s Washington Post shows a picture of the BBC’s Jihad Masharawi holding his dead 11-month-old son, an innocent victim of Israeli action against Hamas’ paramilitary targets following months of indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians in southern Israel*. The Post’s front page reinforces the fact that Israel has a public relations problem when it retaliates in Gaza; a fact that friends of Israel ought to accept. My colleague Douglas Murray is right to assert that the western media often applies a double standard when reporting Israeli and Palestinian casualties: the suffering of Israeli citizens is not given the coverage it deserves. This bias skews the tragic human story of Israel and

Douglas Murray

Israel vs Hamas: Who started it?

The papers and media are full of the news that Israel has killed a Hamas leader in the Gaza. Why did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it not yet another example of the blood-thirsty Zionists doing their worst? If you read most of the British media that may well be what you think. After all there has been barely any previous mention in the British papers of the massive escalation in rocket fire into Israel in the last month or the even swifter escalation this week. Certainly no British paper or broadcaster has come close to giving these attacks the front-page publicity they grant to Israel’s response

Friday

Douglas Murray

The UK pays salaries to terrorists

Why are UK taxpayers paying salaries to terrorists? The answer, as I explain in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, is Alan Duncan. The International Development Minister has been told repeatedly that money provided by the UK taxpayer to the Palestinian Authority’s and its ‘general budget’ is being used to pay salaries to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. As I explain in the piece, Alan Duncan appears to have remained smugly unbothered about these payments of up to £2,000 a month to the worst murderers. That is more than the average income across most of Britain. Duncan’s claims that this was not happening have now been thoroughly refuted. Andrew Mitchell resigned

Monday

Douglas Murray

Party conferences: a vapid kind of hell

As I may have intimated last week, political conference season is a particular kind of hell. Most of us just are not diverted by faked class warfare or efforts by Ed Balls to be more ‘butch’ than David Cameron. Anyhow – whilst the few remaining members of political parties come together to remind the rest of us why we want nothing to do with them, here are some things that are actually happening. 1). In a video posted on Sunday, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood preacher  Wagdy Ghoneim declared that liberals, modernists and secularists are all ‘infidels’ who must be tried and killed for abandoning Islam: ‘If they do not repent,

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Mitt Romney’s ‘gaffe’ is nothing of the sort

The papers today are full of the latest alleged ‘gaffe’ by Mitt Romney. It has become a staple of US election coverage that any Democrat’s foreign policy fumble is a ‘mis-speak’ while any Republican saying something even mildly contentious – as opposed to wrong – is a world-class clanger which shows them to be unfit for office. Today’s Romney ‘gaffe’ relates to his reported comments on the Middle East. This is not exactly a region in which the Obama administration has covered itself in glory.  But even as Obama’s policy failings are being felt, it is Romney who is being lambasted for, among other things, his claim that ‘the Palestinians

Friday

Martin Bright

Israel is losing the battle in Britain

The simplest way to react to the madder pronouncements of the trade union movement is to dismiss it as so much infantile ‘group think’. Solidarity can be very selective and Israeli trade unionists are apparently discounted simply for being Israeli. The latest decision of the TUC to send a delegation to Gaza under the auspices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is not the daftest. But the idea that it would give delegates anything approaching balance is absurd. My Bright on Politics column for the Jewish Chronicle this week was addressed to the Jewish community but the Israel/Palestine conflict has a wider resonance: ‘Supporters of Israel are losing the battle of

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Iran: Jews make Gays

An article in an Iranian state-controlled newspaper has claimed that the Jews are spreading gays. According to Mashregh News the ‘Zionist regime’ (with the help of the US and UK) is deliberately spreading homosexuality to pursue Zionism’s real goal of world domination. Quite how you can dominate the world through gays, I don’t know. It’s true that the very hard to spell Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became the world’s first openly lesbian head of state in Iceland a few years ago. And only last year Elio Di Rupo became the first gay Prime Minister of Belgium. But if Israel is in fact the force behind this then it seems to me one

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Iran keeps saying it’s nuking up – despite what its Western apologists say

The same problem keeps occurring for the megaphones of Iranian propaganda in the West: they keep being let down by their own side.  Every time another op-ed appears in the Guardian or Nation arguing that Iran isn’t seeking a nuclear device (and even if was it would never use it, and even though it doesn’t want a nuke and wouldn’t use it if it did, it does still at least have the ‘right’ to one) another Iranian official or one of their proxies lets slip the truth. The latest person to let the side down is the Hezbollah MP Walid Sakariya.  The MP for the Iranian Revolutionary government’s party in

Monday

Martin Bright

Anti-Semitism: no longer big news

My fellow Spectator blogger Douglas Murray wrote a powerful post yesterday. Like him, I was disturbed by the way the Bulgarian bus-bombing and the Manchester terror trial were treated in the media. You won’t hear me say this very often, but I don’t think Douglas has gone far enough. For once, I think even he has pulled his punches. ‘What links these two events across a continent?’ he asks. ‘The answer is ideology. It is an ideology which deliberately targets Jews as Jews.’ I know what Douglas means: that there is a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism at the heart of the politics of extremist Islamism which strips its victims of humanity.

Friday

Shiraz Maher

An arms race in the Middle East is a real possibility

The war with Iran has already been raging for many months. So far, Western powers have largely confined themselves to covert operations designed to thwart Tehran’s nuclear aspirations. However, the bombing of a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday marks a dramatic escalation in hostilities. In the past, western intelligence agencies have assassinated and kidnapped Iranian nuclear scientists, at one stage picking off a different target every few months. Not only did this hinder Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, but it was also deeply embarrassing to the regime because of the sophistication with which attacks were being conducted right under its nose. Further embarrassment occurred in late 2010

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The Gazan double standard

The journalist Tom Gross notes a story that you may have missed.  One hundred and twenty families in Gaza have lost their homes. ‘Ma’an and other Palestinian news agencies report that the Hamas government in Gaza has renewed its policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinian families in order to seize land for government use. 120 families are to lose their homes in the latest round of demolitions – a far greater number than the number of illegally built Palestinian homes Israel has demolished in recent years – and unlike Israeli authorities, Hamas doesn’t even claim these homes were built illegally or with dangerous structures. Yet western media and human

Monday

Martin Bright

First, call the lawyers

I have just started a new column, Bright on Politics, for the Jewish Chronicle. My first piece last week discussed Ed Balls and Israel. And this week I discussed why politicians turn to judges when they have lost their moral compass. Here’s the piece. I’m sure you’ll let me know what you think. Blind faith of Brothers and others in law When the political class loses faith in its ability to make moral judgments, what does it do? It calls in the lawyers. The present fashion for judge-led inquiries in the UK has given us the Leveson inquiry into the ethics of the press, and may yet lead to a

Saturday

Shiraz Maher

Plus ça change in Cairo

Don’t expect Cairo to become Kabul now that the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohammed Mursi, has been sworn into power earlier today. There are real fears, of course, about the future of Egypt under an Islamist president and it’s foolish to whitewash Mursi as either moderate or benign. The Muslim Brotherhood is a deeply reactionary and dangerous group, but Mursi will find it extremely difficult to implement the more radical aspects of his agenda.   Officially, the Brotherhood has said it will respect all existing treaties – a subtle attempt to placate fears about Egypt’s future relations with Israel. Yet, when Mursi’s candidature was announced one of the clerics invited

Friday

Martin Bright

Have Israel and Britain given up on each other?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement to authorise more than 800 new housing units in West Bank settlements, and the condemnation which followed from British Foreign Secretary William Hague, has marked a new high-water mark in the mutual frustration felt by the two governments. The move, which followed close on the heels of the Israeli Prime Minister’s decision to block legislation to regularise unauthorised settlement building, was criticised in a strongly-worded statement from Mr Hague last Thursday: ‘While we appreciate the Israeli Government’s efforts to avoid damaging legislation in the Israeli Knesset by voting against a bill to legalise West Bank outposts, the decision to move settlers from an illegal outpost by creating

Monday

Nick Cohen

Gunter Grass: the tin drum and the tin ear

This morning’s editorial in Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper noted a double standard that was also a bad joke. Israel’s Interior Minister’s had declared, ‘If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he’ll find an appreciative audience.’ The minister could not detect the irony in his words, the paper said. It is precisely his decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of a poem he wrote that ‘is characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea’. You can read Grass’s poem here. I find it a false and vainglorious work because of its strong

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How do you solve a problem like Baroness Ashton?

Baroness Ashton has managed a return to diplomatic form by comparing the murder yesterday of three children and a Rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse with ‘what is happening in Gaza.’ Plenty of people have already deplored her comments. But they present an opportunity to address one of the underlying and too infrequently asked questions of our time: if you do not think Ashton is a very good politician, what can you do about it? Ordinarily if a politician says or does something you do not like we, the electorate, are at some point given the opportunity to vote them out. There used to be considerable pride in this

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Will Israel strike?

While we’re on the subject of conflict in the Middle East, it’s worth pointing out the cover story to this week’s edition of the magazine. It’s by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and it deals with the dangerous war of words currently being waged over Iran. Will it tip over into real war? In the eye-catching conclusion to his article, Goldberg suggests so: ‘I thought, before the Netanyahu-Obama summit, that the meeting would delay premature action by Israel against Iran. I believe now that I was mistaken. My sense is that Netanyahu feels the press of history and may well strike at Iran in the coming months. The clues are increasingly

Thursday

Alex Massie

Iran Hawks Circling

At National Review, Mario Loyola offers a pretty succinct summary of the conservative (that is, American conservative) case for attacking Iran: [I]n an editorial, the Wall Street Journal makes the same points that I made on the Corner over the weekend, here and here. The only way to convince Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons is to convince it that the risks of pressing on are prohibitive. Almost certainly the only way to do that is to convince them that military strikes are coming if they don’t pull back. If the goal is to deter from getting the bomb in the first place, then we should be giving Iran the

Tuesday

Alex Massie

10% of Voters Will Agree With Anything (Except for the Canadian Question)

Almost no belief is so barmy it can’t win the approval of at least one in ten voters. The problem for politicians is that the nutty tenth is not fixed. Indeed, perhaps a majority of the population is, on occasion, likely to be a member of the loopy group. The latest evidence that a tenth of the population is utterly unsound on even the simplest questions comes from a Gallup survey of American attitudes to other countries: Perhaps some of those pleased with North Korea thought they were being asked their views on South Korea. Whatever. That one in ten Americans professes to have a positive view of Iran is,

Saturday

Jonathan Jones

Hague’s ‘Cold War’ warning

William Hague has gazed into his Middle Eastern crystal ball and doesn’t like what he sees. In an interview in today’s Telegraph, he says of Iran: ‘It is a crisis coming down the tracks, because they are clearly continuing their nuclear weapons programme… If they obtain nuclear weapons capability, then I think other nations across the Middle East will want to develop nuclear weapons. And so, the most serious round of nuclear proliferation since nuclear weapons were invented would have begun with all the destabilising effects in the Middle East. And the threat of a new cold war in the Middle East without necessarily all the safety mechanisms… That would