When I wrote about the Dilpazier Aslam affair at the Guardian (July 24 post) in which a news trainee was sacked after Scott Burgess revealed on the Daily Ablution that he was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir, I commented that the real scandal was that the paper had known about Aslam’s membership all the time but had only acted out of embarrassment once this was disclosed. This was because the paper’s ‘Background Briefing’ on the affair had written:

‘Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party, drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.’

My understanding now is that the situation was not so clear-cut. After he was hired, Aslam mentioned his membership of HuT to the executive who had hired him. Astonishing as this may seem, that executive had no idea what kind of organisation HuT was. The executive is now leaving the paper as a result.

As for Aslam having told ‘several colleagues and some senior editors’, my understanding is that – even more astonishingly -- the colleagues he told also didn’t have a clue about what HuT was, while the ones who did have a clue weren’t told. Some did raise some concerns, apparently, but the executive who had hired him assured them that had had checked it all out and there wasn’t a problem.

If this is true, then it puts the paper in a rather different light. On this account, it is not true that the paper as a whole was untroubled by Aslam’s affiliation until it was exposed. I understand that, on the contrary, many were utterly horrified when they found out. It also implies a level of chaotic disorganisation and general ignorance which some may find incredible. I do not. It happens.

None of this detracts from the central point of this affair. Whatever may or may not have been known about Aslam’s membership of HuT -- and several intriguing questions about this whole affair are still unanswered -- it remains the case that someone subscribing to its wholly unacceptable platform could find a berth at the Guardian which was perfectly comfortable about publishing his views. And that was because they fitted into its own general view of the world. The horror when it discovered that these views emanated from a HuT member was undoubtedly genuine, because they are genuinely horrified by HuT. And what that surely tells us is that the Guardian really doesn’t grasp that its view of the world is as extreme and unacceptable as it is.

Is this true?

'About a month before the July 7 bombings in London, British authorities balked at giving U.S. officials permission to apprehend a man now believed to have ties to the bombers, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

'Haroon Rashid Aswat, 30, of Indian heritage, is currently in custody in Zambia, U.S. and Zambian officials told CNN.U.S. authorities wanted to capture Aswat, who was then in South Africa, and question him about a 1999 plot to establish a "jihad training camp" in Bly, Oregon.

'According to the sources, U.S. officials had located Aswat in South Africa weeks before the July 7 attacks that killed 52 bus and subway travelers and the four bombers. U.S. authorities had asked South Africa if they could take Aswat into custody. South Africa relayed the request to Britain, but authorities there balked because he was a British citizen, the sources said. While the debate was ongoing, Aswat slipped away.'

An excellent article by Bruce Thornton on Victor Davis Hanson's site amplifies VDH's remarks (see post below). Echoing also the comments by Patrick Sookhdeo in the Spectator (see yesterday's post), he states that the jihadis are operating squarely within mainstream Islamic tradition:

'How else do we make sense of the continued widespread support for homicide bombings and Al Qaeda visible in poll after poll of Muslims worldwide? Even so-called “moderates” and Westernized Muslims can't help letting slip their true beliefs even as they try to spin the latest terrorist murder. Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a senior member of the Muslim Association of Britain and a Hamas member who is frequently featured on the BBC, has made clear his support for Palestinian Arab murder of Israelis, his belief that Islamic religious law (sharia) should not be compromised to coexist with liberal democracy, his admiration of the Taliban, and his desire to see Israel destroyed.

'Inayat Bunglawala, another “moderate” spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, has been all over CNN since the bombings in London. In a recent BBC4 interview, this is how he “condemned” homicide bombings: “Let me make clear then, once and for all, we condemn the killing of all innocent people wherever they are, human lives everywhere are of equal value, whether they are British, American, Iraqi, or Palestinian. Jewish lives are not worth more than Palestinian lives, all are worth equal, and it's been quite nauseating over the past week to see how Israel and its highly-placed supporters in the media have been trying to make political capital out of last week's atrocities against Londoners. It is shameful on them and shameful upon those who are trying to help Israel improving its PR image after the brutalities it commits against the Palestinian people.”

'Here is a classic example of so-called “moderate” double-talk. Notice how Jews are left out of the list of “human lives” that have “equal value.” Notice how the statement “Jewish lives are not worth more than Palestinian lives” is not followed by the logical corollary, “Palestinian lives are not worth more than Jewish lives.” And finally, notice the usual hysterical smokescreen of alleged Israeli “brutalities” to shift the focus away from Muslim murder of innocents by concentrating on its supposed causes.

'In fact, the obsession with the Palestinians is the smoking gun that reveals the jihadist sentiments of double-talking “moderates.” Consider how many British Muslims, supposedly opposed to homicide bombings, praised Hamas founder Sheikh Yassim, who engineered the murder of over 500 Israelis in furtherance of his organization's long-term goal to destroy Israel. After the Israeli Defense Forces killed him, a memorial service was held in London, an event attended by “moderates” like Muslim Council Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who call'ed Yassim a “renowned Islamic scholar,” an estimation shared by Inayat Bunglawala. Think about the implications: respected, Westernized “moderate” Muslims praise a terrorist murderer as an “Islamic scholar,” and we are supposed to believe that “fanatics” have “hijacked” and “distorted” Islam?

'Or consider Dr. Yusuf Karadawi, a British Muslim theologian the mayor of London has praised as a “moderate.” Of course, on cue he will recite the usual “condemnations” of terrorism, but always with his fingers crossed. Once more, Israel is the key to discerning the true beliefs of the “moderate.” Dr. Karadawi has stated that there are no civilians in Israel, that using children as homicide bombers is acceptable, and that the terrorists in Iraq murdering Americans, Brits, and Iraqis are “valiant.” The Muslim Council of Britain has described this apologist for murder as a “distinguished Muslim scholar, a voice of reason and understanding.”

'The “moderates'” praise of those who murder Jews and want to destroy Israel is not surprising once the proper context of jihad is restored. The return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland has always been the key to understanding the modern jihad and its favorite tactic, the terrorist murder of innocents, which began long before Israel even existed. No event more testified to the weakness of Islam than the creation of Israel, for unlike the other nations crafted by England and France after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, Israel is a nation of former dhimmi, a people once conquered by Islamic armies and forced in every aspect of their daily lives to show their humiliation and subordination to Islam and Muslims. And the Jews who created Israel were Western to boot, their nation one embodying Western political principles and ideals antithetical to Islamic religious law. Thus Israel stands as a double affront to the Islamic world-view: a once conquered, debased people throwing off the shackles of dhimmitude and outstripping by every indicator of success and well-being the Islamic nations surrounding them, not to mention three times defeating larger Arab armies in battle. If Israel survives, what then of the Islamic religious world-view that sees the House of Islam as the divinely sanctioned ruler of the world?

'Thus the modern jihad that seeks to reverse the contraction of the House of Islam and so fulfill the mandate of Allah must begin with Israel, and it is in that struggle between Jew and Arab that the battle-lines of jihad are most clear. And that's why the “moderate” spokesmen for Islam in the West cannot let go of the Palestinian obsession: not because fellow Muslims are suffering, for many more Muslims have been killed by fellow Muslims in Jordan, in Sudan, and in Syria than the Israelis have killed while trying to defend themselves. No, the smokescreen of “Palestinian national aspirations” conceals the true fight: the jihad against the West, the civilization that for centuries trembled in fear at Muslim armies, and the spiritually debased peoples whom Allah has destined for conquest and subordination to the House of Islam.'

Thornton makes another point, however, which appears to undermine the Bush/Sharansky doctrione that democracy is the key to peace. Comparisons with fascism or communism, he says, miss the point:

'Both of those ideologies were anti-Christian: fascism was a species of debased Romantic neo-paganism, and communism was blatantly atheist. As such, both ran counter to the powerful Judeo-Christian forces that shaped European and Russian civilization, and so could not satisfy for long the spiritual yearnings of the people, yearnings denied their traditional expressions. Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.

'The jihadist enemy, on the other hand, is operating on principles and values squarely in the tradition of Islam, and thus unlike fascism and communism is expressing a spiritual need and an orthodox religious mandate: to fulfill by force the will of Allah that all the world be subject to Islam and an Islamic state, the caliphate, ruled by sharia, Islamic religious law.'

Well, yes, this is true as far as it goes. But the democracy argument is based on the belief that the desire for human freedom is universal, transcending all creeds. On this basis, the desire of the average Muslim for freedom is no less because their religion happens to preach submission. Clearly, the tension between the innate desire for freedom on the one hand and the powerful attachment to the religion of submission on the other sets up enormous conflicts, which we are beginning to see being played out within the Muslim world. And we don't know whether an accommodation can ever be reached. But we must surely give those struggling to reconcile these particular spiritual needs with the desire for freedom every encouragement and support, because it is upon such an accommodation that the fate of the world may depend.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the much needed point that the attacks on the US, Spain and now London exposed the catastrophic mistake made by America and Europe in assuming that the war against Israel was sui generis, a localised conflict in which the Jews who they thought had created the problem could be left to stew in their own juice:

'Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their “unfair” foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy of some sort. Typical after the London bombing is the ubiquitous Muslim spokesman who when asked to condemn terrorism, starts out by deploring such killing, assuring that it has nothing to do with Islam, yet then ending by inserting the infamous “but” — as he closes with references about the West Bank, Israel, and all sorts of mitigating factors. Almost no secular Middle Easterners or religious officials write or state flatly, “Islamic terrorism is murder, pure and simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.”

'Second, thinking that the jihadists will target only Israel eventually leads to emboldened attacks on the United States. Assuming America is the only target assures terrorism against Europe. Civilizations will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together. It is that simple — and past time for Europe and the United States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating this plague of Islamic fascism. Third, Islamicists are selective in their attacks and hatred. So far global jihad avoids two billion Indians and Chinese, despite the fact that their countries are far tougher on Muslims than is the United States or Europe. In other words, the Islamicists target those whom they think they can intimidate and blackmail.

'Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies, alliances of convenience with dictatorships, triangulation with Middle Eastern patrons of terror, blaming the Jews — civilization has tried all that. It is time to relearn the lessons from the Cold War, when we saw millions of noble Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Czechs as enslaved under autocracy and a hateful ideology, and in need of democracy before they could confront the Communist terror in their midst. But until the Wall fell, we did not send billions in aid to their Eastern European dictatorships nor travel freely to Prague or Warsaw nor admit millions of Communist-ruled Bulgarians and Albanians onto our shores.'

Undoubtedly, jihadi terror has been fed by the feeble appeasement over the years by governments too craven to grasp what they were actually up against. And the most lethal example of all is the way in which they left Israel to swing in the wind, thus sending the clearest possible signal that the scope for manipulating and disarming the free world in the pursuit of jihadi objectives was infinite. Thus from the first plane hijackings in the sixties, the ratchet of terror was relentlessly turned in lock-step with the pusillanimous and morally compromised response to that terror by Britain, Europe and pre-9/11 America. Only when we recognise that Israel is in the front line of the attack on the free world, and that we must all pull together in resisting Israel's attackers in the same way that we resist the terror that targets London, Madrid, France, Germany or New York, will we start to be effective in the defence of the free world.

The unfortunate Mr Menezes, who was shot dead by police who mistook him for a human bomb, is being marketed as the latest martyr for the self-haters of the free world:

'JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES 7.1.78-22.7.05

Murdered by the police at Stockwell station
Friday 22 July 2005

The Menezes family call upon the people of London to join them
remembering Jean Charles.

Friday 29 July...Vigil at Parliament Square
Please bring Brazilian and Peace Flags

Followed byInter-faith memorial service...Westminster Cathedral

The service will include readings from friends and family of Jean and includes a live link to Jean Charles funeral in Brazil.

There will also be readings from Bianca Jagger and Tariq Ramadan.
Tube: Victoria/St James' Park. Buses 11, 24, 148, 507, 211.

ALL WELCOME

For more information please contact
Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign'

Tremendous, totally authoritative and hugely important article by Patrick Sookhdeo in the Spectator which simply eviscerates the claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Dr Sookhdeo, who is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, presents a set of historical and theological facts that demonstrate, on the contrary, that for the past 1400 years Islam has been a religion of war.

Acknowledging that, as with other religions, it is possible to pick out of Muslim holy texts both war-like bits and peace-loving bits, he makes the knock-out point that that wherever contradictions are found, the rules of the religion dictate that the later-dated text abrogates the earlier one. And the later text is the war-like text.

‘So the mantra “Islam is peace” is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace. From 622 onwards it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful co-existence, particularly in the colonial period, when the theology of war was not dominant. For today’s radical Muslims — just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical Islam — it would be truer to say “Islam is war”...

‘Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?...

‘What happens after this stage depends on which of the two main religious traditions among Pakistani-background British Muslims gains the ascendancy. The Barelwi majority believe in a slow evolution, gradually consolidating their Muslim societies, and finally achieving an Islamic state. The Deobandi minority argue for a quicker process using politics and violence to achieve the same result. Ultimately, both believe in the goal of an Islamic state in Britain where Muslims will govern their own affairs and, as the finishing touch, everyone else’s affairs as well. Islamism is now the dominant voice in contemporary Islam, and has become the seedbed of the radical movements.

‘Muslims must stop this self-deception. They must with honesty recognise the violence that has existed in their history in the same way that Christians have had to do, for Christianity has a very dark past. Some Muslims have, with great courage, begun to do this.’

Read it all.

Reverberations from my previous two posts continue. They have attracted passionate support and opposition from across the political spectrum. One reader who disagrees has set out some particularly cogent arguments, which I reproduce here:

‘As for your substantive arguments, particularly the ones you've advanced in this latest post, it's true that you've consistently argued over the years for Israel to leave the territories because it should not be in the position of ruling over another (hostile) people. However, you've just as consistently argued, especially since the start of the 2002 intifada, for the firmest possible opposition to terrorism, against rewarding, trusting and doing deals with terror-supporting political parties, and, most importantly, for democracy, and against legitimizing terrorist groups like Hamas through the ballot box. You've argued powerfully that if the Palestinian people vote for terror groups, than that makes them supporters of a terrorist entity, not of a potential legitimate state.

‘Yet now, you're saying that because you think the Palestinians and their Arab allies will never change their position, Israel should cut its losses in order to "regroup, consolidate and repair itself". In doing this, you ignore the issue of handing Hamas exactly the sort of victory that Israel handed Hezbollah by their rapid exit from South Lebanon, the action that probably more than any other fuelled the Palestinians in taking to the 2002 intifada. Hamas are at this time already organizing the victory parades they are going to hold in Gaza after the disengagement. Can you doubt the huge surge in their recruitment that will follow?

‘I think in saying that the Arab states will never accept Israel, you are resorting to exactly the same trope as when the left and other useful idiots say that the Arab states are never going to be democracies. While there appears to be little short term prospect of it, the moves in Iraq and especially Lebanon were the first tiny steps. By weakening and giving up on the project of bring democracy to the Middle East, you hand victories not just to Hamas and Syria, but to the paymasters of Hamas, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Come to that, if this is the argument driving you, you might as well say that radical Islamists established in London are never going to accept a
non-Islamic state, so we might as well back off into consolidating ourselves in the white suburbs and highlands, and cede Newham and Tower Hamlets to them right now.

‘Sharansky resigned from the Sharon government over precisely the issue of giving up Gaza in return for nothing. Abbas has manifestly failed to deliver on the road map, the absolutely crucial element of which was the move towards democracy by the disarming of terror gangs-- those of Fatah as well as those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That's not paving the path to peace. Without democracy, there will be no peace. Ceding any territory to the terrorists just makes it easy for them to recruit and sustain their murderers better. Oh, and by the way, the settlers in Gaza in fact settled no man's land. It wasn't anybody else's land.’

To which I would say this. Because of the dire existential threat Israel faces, and the campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation which has been going on in the west in order finally to turn that existential threat into reality, my views about disengagement have taken second place to the defence of Israel against prejudice, hatred and lies — including the lie that the occupation is illegal. Nevertheless, I have thought from the start that settling the territories was wrong, both morally and militarily, and have also supported disengagement from the start (see my Prospect article). And yes, I also happen to take the hardest of hard lines against appeasing terrorism. But I believe that there is no inconsistency in my position. Here’s why.

The argument that leaving Gaza is to appease Arab terror is a fundamental misunderstanding. This is because it rests on the premise that the Palestinians want the Israelis to leave Gaza and the West Bank because what they want is a state of their own in these territories.

To accept this is to accept the false premise behind Israeli peaceniks, muddled people of goodwill and the many enemies of Israel alike, that this conflict is all about a Palestinian state. If this were so then I probably would not support disengagement because one should never give terrorists what they want.

But it is not what they want. They want to destroy Israel. They do not want a state of Palestine to sit peacefully alongside Israel. We know this because they have been offered it many times, only to reject it. And they have said so, over and over again, that nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state will do. As far as their own national aspirations are concerned, the state upon which Palestinian terrorism originally had its eyes was Jordan — hardly surprising, since Jordan comprises most of what was originally known as Palestine at the time of the British Mandate. It was only after Jordan wiped the floor with the Palestinians in Black September that their demand shifted to the West Bank and Gaza. And why was that? Because they saw what Israel failed to see — that Israel had walked straight into a trap.

Israel believed — for both good and bad reasons — that it should settle those territories, gained in a war of self-defence and legitimately retained because that war never ended. The Palestinians understood that this gave them their greatest weapon. Since they could not win a conventional war against Israel, they would wage a different type of war through terrorism. Thus they would squeeze Israel in a pincer movement comprising not just terrorising its population but demoralising it by forcing it to take actions which they knew would tear the morally scrupulous Jews apart — and in the process posing as victims in order to delegitimise Israel in the eyes of the gullible and morally compromised west by painting it as a colonial oppressor. Israel was thus caught in a trap. Yes, the territories are no man’s land, and the occupation and the settlements are not illegal. But no man’s land still contains millions of Arabs. Yes, many of them are only there because the Arab states have kept them there as artificial ‘refugees’. But so what? To swallow them is to change and destroy Israel — demographically, morally and psychically. To drive them out is unthinkable.

Disengagement is Israel’s first step towards breaking out of this trap. It is not appeasement because it is not giving the Palestinians what they want. On the contrary, it is giving them what they do not want. They do not want freedom from ‘occupation’ to rule themselves in the territories, not least because that would destroy the platform from which they have recruited terrorists and bamboozled the world with their wholly artificial cause. So what they don’t want they must have. Whatever celebrations the Arabs plan in Gaza when the Israelis leave, however much they dress it up as a retreat under fire — and they are already doing their damnedest in that direction, and no doubt there will be more — they will then have to get on with running themselves in Gaza. No more excuses.

But opponents say the Arabs will be rejoicing at Israel’s exit from Gaza because then they will be able to realise their aim of using this territory to redouble their attacks. Disengagement will create 'Hamastan', with even more rocket attacks on Israel. This is certainly a fearsome possibility. But this would probably have happened anyway. The truth about the ‘occupation’ is that Gaza has been allowed to spiral out of control for years. If, however, after disengagement it does attack Israel, then Israel will fight it — but this time without having the constraint of Israeli civilians playing the role of hostages, and this time from the moral high ground of being attacked without any provocative ‘occupation’.

There is also the intriguing issue of Egypt. As we know, Egypt’s peace with Israel has been ambiguous, to say the least. Nevertheless, the one thing it surely does not want is Hamastan or al Qaeda on its doorstep. It may well be therefore that it is finally forced to cooperate with Israel in stopping the supply of arms — particularly since Israel will be removing the fig-leaf of its presence inside the territory.

It is said that disengagement will send the same disastrous signals of flight and weakness as Israel’s retreat from Lebanon, which was a major cause of the ensuing terror. Well, maybe that was so — although I rather think the perceived weakness that fuelled the terror emanated from the appeasement of that terror under Oslo. But in any event, as we can see from jihadi terror across the world, anything and everything is used to recruit for the death cult, including any actions the free world takes to defend itself. Thus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the liberation of East Timor, every single thing Israel does to protect itself such as the security barrier, the road blocks or the strikes against terrorist leaders, all are said to be recruiting sergeants for terror. Does that mean all these actions are wrong? Of course not. They may well be right and necessary but nevertheless in the short term exacerbate the security problem because they are used to ramp up the murderous grievances still further. That is precisely the fiendish calculation of terror, to force victims into a choice between doing what is necessary, which hardens the grievance that recruits more to the terrorist cause, or not doing what is necessary, which in the longer term means defeat.

Hamas has gained popularity not because of the disengagement but because of the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. This is why Sharansky’s basic argument, that the key is to force the PA to construct the institutions of a free society, is fundamentally sound. The problem is when he applies that argument to oppose disengagement. In his book The Case for Democracy, he writes:

‘I was opposed to Sharon’s disengagement plan because I did not accept the premise that there was no Palestinian partner and no hope for peace’.

But there is no Palestinian partner for peace for the forseeable future, and will not be until and unless there is pressure on them from the international community, particularly the US and the EU which along with Israel continue to subsidise the Palestinian police state. To this end, Sharansky is right to say that aid and recognition should be made conditional on Palestinian democratic reform. But he wants that process to happen before there is any question of withdrawal from the territories. Yet even in the unlikely event that the free world adopted the Sharansky strategy, democratisation — if it were to happen at all — would take a very long time. If it is right to get out of Gaza, it is right to do so on Israel's own terms and not dangle it as a carrot to encourage the Palestinians to institute free elections, a free press and the rule of law.

What Sharon is saying instead to the Arabs is this. You want a state? Fine. So do we want this for you. We’ve tried to negotiate its boundaries with you and got only war in return. You’ve had innumerable chances over the past 50 years, and now enough is enough. You won’t negotiate its boundaries? We’ll make them for you. You insist on murdering us? Very well, if you make it impossible for us to live together than we must separate ourselves from you. If ever you change your minds and decide to live with us rather than try to exterminate us, you’ll find us ready to extend a hand of friendship. Until then, we will remove our people from harm’s way, build our security barrier and turn our backs on you. And if you then hit us, we will hit you as hard as we would hit any other people who wage war upon us — but this time we will not be labouring under our current constraints.

In other words, disengagement is the very opposite of appeasement. It is an end to the manipulation, to the pretence that has fooled the world that the Arabs of the territories are now or for the forseeable future capable of acting in good faith as interlocutors for a just and peaceful settlement. It is a pulling up of the drawbridge — no less terrible and perilous for Israel for that, but a necessary move in dire circumstances in which every option is a rotten one.

Given this strategy of separation and the iron logic that has driven Likud — Likud! — to take such a step, the incendiary charge that this is akin to the Nazi/Arab policy of making the land Judenfrei is not only obscene but stupid. The charge that this is akin to giving in to the demands of Islamic fundamentalists in Britain doesn’t hold water either, because their agenda is totally non-negotiable. Between Israel and the Palestinians there is something to negotiate about, as there has been since the Peel Commission first recommended partition of the land in 1937 — ie, a two-state solution. The fact that the Palestinians refuse to do so but make war instead does not alter that fact. With the Islamists, it is not that there is no-one yet to negotiate with but that there will never be anything to negotiate.

There is a similarity between what is going on in Israel and our appeasement society, but it is a very different one. Those who have turned Jerusalem orange to stop disengagement are performing the same function for Israel at a time of great national danger as those in Britain and the US who have turned on their governments over the war in Iraq.

The point about disengagement is that it is not being done for the benefit of the Arabs. It is being done for the benefit of the Jews. Between the rock and the hard place, it is the rock. The orange protesters should get real.

A number of people have reacted in dismay to my post below. They make some very fair points, and so I will amplify my previous remarks. I agree with them when they say that the vast majority of settlers are not messianic zealots, as Gershon Baskin implies, but are ordinary Israelis who have lived in Gaza for a number of more mundane reasons. I agree with them when they say that this vast majority are not bent on civil war. I agree with them when they say that the main reason for the feeling in Israel against disengagement is not 'messianism' but the conviction that to leave Gaza without getting anything in return is an act of recklessness. And I agree with them when they say that the issue is not that the Israelis don't want to live in peace with their neighbours but the Arabs don't want to live in peace with Israel.

I agree with all of this. In so far as Baskin implied the opposite, I disagree. But the point of his passionate despair seemed to me to be that Israel had to leave Gaza and most of the disputed territories because it is wrong for the Jews to rule another people -- even though that was not their intention, and even though the only reason Israel is in those territories at all is because their inhabitants remain in a state of war against it.

And that is what I agree with. Whatever the original arguments for settling the territories -- some, on grounds of security, were more reasonable than others -- that is what this exercise has meant in practice. I am under no illusions that disengagement will bring peace. But I want Israel to be better able to defend itself, and a war of attrition in territory which is not even part of Israel seems to me instead to be the way eventually to destroy it from within.

As for leaving without getting anything in return, I'd say wake up and smell the coffee -- there isn't going to be anything in return for the foreseeable future. There is no peaceful Arab interlocutor who wants to live side by side with Israel. So Israel would wait forever for The Moment. And so it would be ruling an unwilling people forever. And I think that because this is wrong in itself, it would eventually tear Israel apart.

That is why I think Israel is right to leave Gaza now, and should go further and leave more of the territories too, in order to regroup, consolidate and repair itself morally and militarily. I fully accept that this is an agonising decision. I fully accept that it is fraught with the greatest of dangers. But Israel is, as it has always been, between the very hardest or rocks and hard places. And the bottom line is that this desperately dangerous act of disengagement is made very much more dangerous if Israel's population is not strong and united but is in a state of uproar against it. That is why I think that Baskin -- for all the caveats about some of his attitudes -- is fundamentally right.

Gershon Baskin says it all:

'Zionism is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.

'The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.

'The future appears ominous. Over the past months I have watched the streets of Israel and, in particular Jerusalem, turn orange. As the streets, the trees and the fashion has adopted this new symbol I have found myself confronted with the very strong visual image of a people I do not recognize.

'How could these people – with their messianic vision and value system that justifies treating the "other" as less equal than Jews – and I be part of the same nation? We have the same roots, we share a common heritage, we come from the same places, yet there has been a split; for some time they and their kind have been very different from me and my kind.'

The disengagement appears to have brought the moral crisis that has engulfed Israel out into the open. The terrible danger, of course, is that this weakens Israel still further at a time when the Arab enemies who wish to annihilate it are seizing their moment and redoubling their attacks. The orangistas are thus handing Hamas victory on a plate. This hysteria is suicidal. The country should pull itself together to back the disengagement, and put an end to the disgusting, Holocaust-denying equation being made between the resettlement of Jews from places where settlement was always a moral and strategic error -- a disengagement fraught with extreme danger which is being undertaken in order to safeguard the Jewish state -- and the pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews by those who wished them dead.

A country can survive a threat from without -- but not if it is simultaneously tearing itself apart.

Rollicking fisking by Scott Burgess of Hizb ut Guardian's apologia for jihadigate and its denunciation of him for exposing the scandal. Here's a taste, which starts by quoting from the Guardian background article on the affair which mysteriously was penned by an anonymous 'staff reporter':

' "Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian for its stance on the environment, its columnists such as Polly Toynbee, and its recent intervention in the US presidential election campaign."

'I wonder how they know when I moved to London - I don't think I've ever mentioned it here. The intent of painting me as a recent arrival to these shores seems to be to emphasise my American-ness, with all of its negative (to Guardianistas) connotations. In fact, I moved here over 6 years ago. To call my presence "recent" is akin to referring to the "recent" opening of the Millennium Dome; i.e., ridiculous.

'"Spends his time indoors"? Can someone explain to me what this is supposed to mean? As for the balance of the paragraph, I plead guilty with pride and without reservation - although I might append the phrase "as well as its blatant misstatements of fact". "He pitched into Mr Aslam, who as it happened, beat him to the traineeship on the Guardian."

'This is where the fun really begins. "As it happened," I did indeed "apply" for the traineeship - as a means of providing ironic entertainment to my readership (thanks very much Jackie D. of Samizdata, for your spirited and welcome defence). My "application" succeeded very well in its goal, becoming a running Ablution joke. Honestly. Given that I "spend my time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian" (as I was doing long before my spurious "application") how can anonymous really expect people to think that I was serious?

'Actually, I should thank the Guardian for being so impressed with my investigative skills. In their view, I went from never having heard of Mr. Aslam to my discovery, two days later, of exactly which trainee position he was occupying. Perhaps the Guardian has room for a reporter of such ability - I understand they have a slot open. [NB - the last sentence is intended ironically.]'

Glorious. Read it all.

You read it here first (March 17 post) -- Condi Rice is a wrong'un. She has just visited Israel ostensibly to calm a deteriorating situation caused by the Islamic Jihad suicide bombing outside a Netanya shopping mall on July 12, which killed five Israelis, and relentless bombardments of Gaza and western Negev communities by Hamas which killed 22-year-old Dana Galkovitch in Netiv Ha'asara inside the green line. Instead, she praised the people who the US says it expects to put a stop to such terror but have refused to do so. The Jerusalem Post is rightly aghast:

'Though PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's foreign minister has candidly reneged on the PA's road map commitments to confiscate weapons and explosives in the hands of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and those elements within his own Fatah movement aligned with the rejectionists, Rice nevertheless complimented the Palestinian leadership for taking "important steps" against terrorism. Such praise strikes the wrong tone.

'What "steps" she was referring to was left to the imagination: Perhaps Abbas's goal of incorporating terrorists under the rubric of the PA's security forces; perhaps it was the belated, uneven, largely ineffective, and now apparently suspended efforts by PA Interior Minister Nasser Youssef to end Palestinian lawlessness – not for Israel's sake, but for the Palestinians themselves.

'Whatever the "steps" and with just 21 days to disengagement remaining, Abbas's aversion to taking on the rejectionists helped make Saturday night's murder of husband and wife Dov and Rachel Kol, who had gone to Gush Katif to visit family in Ganei Tal, possible. The attack also left the area's intrepid civilian security coordinator, Ami Shaked, and a young couple, also visiting for Shabbat, wounded. It took many hours for Abbas to even bother to condemn the attack – not as immoral but as counterproductive.

'Further catastrophe was averted – no thanks to the Palestinian Authority – on Friday night, when the IDF caught a would-be suicide bomber from Abbas's own Fatah movement on his way to blow up a crowded Tel Aviv nightspot. The terrorist, wearing a five-kilogram explosives belt packed with nails, infiltrated from Gaza's perimeter fence near Kibbutz Nir-Am. Another infiltrator – married to a woman from Jaffa and thus enjoying unimpeded access inside Israel – was tasked with delivering the bomber to his target.

'All told, 92 infiltration attempts into Israel from Gaza have been thwarted by security forces since the beginning of 2005. Friday night's effort was the first successful penetration from inside Gaza in seven months. In this context, Rice's admiration for the "steps" Abbas has taken to curb Palestinian terrorism rings hollow. And yet Rice went on to compound her stance with an even more incongruous avowal: "When the Israelis withdraw from Gaza, it cannot be sealed or isolated, with the Palestinian people holed in ... We are committed to the connectivity of Gaza and the West Bank."

'This sort of statement is grating for two reasons. First, because it implies that Israel is, presumably out of spite or indifference, arbitrarily impeding Palestinian movements when all such movements have immediate security implications. Second, because at just the moment when Israel is simultaneously under terrorist attack and tearing itself apart over dismantling settlements, Washington still seems to feel a need to search for some Palestinian demand it can endorse while publicly berating Israel. This is called "evenhandedness," something that Rice's predecessor early in the Bush administration vowed would not continue under President George W. Bush, and yet remains a recurring touchstone of American policy.'

So much for the Bush doctrine.

Michael Ledeen has explored the reasons why Tony Blair may have omitted Iraq and Israel from his list of countries that have suffered from terrorism. He puts it down in part to the related Britsh phenomena of multiculturalism, a history of Arab appeasement and the astonishing indifference to the recent creation of ‘Londonistan’. But there’s something else:

‘The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.

'This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington. Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.

'All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.’

Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post makes a strong if bitter point:

‘Had Israeli police shot dead an innocent foreigner on one of its buses or trains, confirming the kill with a barrage of bullets at close range in a mistaken effort to thwart a bombing, the UN would probably have been sitting in emergency session by late afternoon to unanimously denounce the Jewish state. By evening, 12 hours had passed since the shooting, but the BBC still hadn't interviewed a grieving family, no one had called for British universities to be boycotted, Chelsea and Arsenal soccer clubs hadn't been ordered to play their matches in Cyprus, and The Guardian hadn't yet called British policy against its Pakistani population "genocide."

‘As for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who is in overall control of transport in the city, including the train where the man was shot, and who strongly defended the shoot-to-kill policy as a legitimate way to prevent suicide bombings, he was not yet facing war crimes charges – as Livingstone himself has demanded Israeli political leaders should be. Instead on Friday, Polly Toynbee, leading commentator for The Guardian, wrote that the terrorists were "deranged," "savage" and "demented" "killers" who "murder in the name of God." This is a far cry from the habitual manner in which The Guardian and others describe the suicide killers of Israelis as "fighters" and "activists."'

Gross also makes the striking point that the Israelis do not shoot their suicide bombers – they disarm them, as happened in fact last Friday when, at the very time British police were committing their fatal error at Stockwell station, the IDF caught and disarmed a terrorist from Fatah already inside Israel en route to carrying out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Gross is right to say that the Israelis receive no credit for this. But I doubt whether he is right to say that the reports in the British press that the Israelis had advised the British police to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the brain were a lie. It all depends on where the suspected bomber is at the time. As an article in the New York Times reports, the crucial point is that the Israelis are able to disarm their human bombs because they have prior intelligence:

‘Among the differences in the situations faced by the two countries, perhaps the most significant is intelligence. Israel occupies the West Bank and its army and officials of the Shin Bet counterterrorism agency patrol it constantly. They have mapped every building and built a network of informants and collaborators. Many Israeli officers speak Arabic, and they often receive a warning before a bomber tries to attack.

‘Boaz Ganor, a counterterrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, an Israeli policy research center, said, "The key is intelligence, to know when they're coming." The last option is offense, he said, because when confronted with a suicide bomber in a crowded area, "you have to act" before the bomber can detonate the explosive. The risk of "false positives," however, is enormous, he said, as in the British case.’

They key to the debacle at Stockwell, as I said in my Daily Mail article today, is the catastrophic dearth of British intelligence on the British Islamic terror networks. Once a suspected human bomb gets into a crowded area of likely targets, there is no option but to kill him. But the aim should be to intercept him before he ever gets to that position. That can only be done by extensive and accurate intelligence – the one thing Israel has and Britain, as we are now painfully being made all too aware, does not.

An insightful piece of reportage in Christian Science Monitor goes some way towards answering the question ‘why do they do it?’:

‘Abu Osama's faith deepened early. Watching his Pakistani immigrant father struggle to support his family of seven, he sought strength in Islam. "I began praying and studying when I was 16, and since then I've been like this," he says, pointing to his long, curling beard. Abu Osama first spoke publicly eight years ago; he has since won ardent followers.

‘Last fall, addressing a meeting of scores of British radicals, he sighed: "At the moment in Britain there is no jihad." Faces fell around the hall. "Yet!" he exclaimed suddenly, to approving murmurs. The jihad would soon come, Abu Osama predicted, and he urged his listeners to embrace its arrival. On 7/7, the jihad came. The suicide bombers were aged 18 to 30 - the same age as Abu Osama's cohorts. By portraying militancy as the ultimate expression of piety, Abu Osama and preachers like him are leading young Muslims down the path toward violence.

‘"Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you'll want to convert," says Dublin-born convert Khalid Kelly, who soaks up Abu Osama's sidewalk sermon. "But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle." Armed struggle was the last thing on Mr. Kelly's mind until his conversion several years ago. "I was your average Irish drunkard, partying and so on," he says. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a nurse, for brewing his own alcohol, Kelly found Islam in prison - an increasingly common arena for Muslim conversion and radicalization.

‘After his return to Britain in 2002, Kelly quickly became a disciple of Bakri, a radical Syrian-born cleric based in Britain, who is most widely known for celebrating 9/11, and more recently, blaming 7/7 on British foreign policy. Through Bakri's circle, which is now largely underground, Kelly met Abu Osama. Now, they gravitate toward obscure mosques that nurture homegrown extremists.

‘"The imam here" - Kelly nods at the mosque - "said, 'Pray for the victory of the mujahideen in all the world.' He's talking about Osama bin Laden, but he can't say that." Hard-line mosques are an intoxicating arena for disillusioned young Muslims, Britain's fastest-growing, poorest, and worst-educated minority. "The pull to Islam in general is not bad," says Malik. "It gives [young people] a sense of identity and spirituality that is important to their lives." However, the perceived persecution of Muslims worldwide can imbue their faith with a politics of resentment; they see the world divided into two opposing groups: Muslims and others. "The world begins to appear black and white," Malik says.’

Irwin Stelzer tears into Britain’s useless attitude to the war being waged against the west:

‘British culture now dictates a confused response to terrorists. Start with the unwillingness of the majority of the British people to recognize that they are indeed in a war. The flak-jacketed, heavily armed men and women lining my road to Heathrow last week were cops, not troops. America is at war, Britain is playing cops and criminals… The entire panoply of legal procedures that prevent detention, deportation, and arrest of Muslim clerics calling for the blood of Britain's infidels is available to the as-many-as 3,000 terrorists whom the authorities estimate live in Britain, many trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or with actual battle experience in Iraq. Whatever rights U.K. law doesn't confer are available to the fledgling jihadists as a result of Blair's decision to sign on to Europe's Human Rights Act. Britain makes available to terrorists and preachers of mayhem, often at government expense, an entire industry of human rights lawyers and support groups... So British policy remains: easy entry for potential terrorists; benefits for them while they are in the country; and relative safety from deportation and detention as enemy combatants. Little wonder that Britain's security services say another strike, more lethal than the one last Thursday, is a virtual certainty.’

As Stelzer says Tony Blair — for whom he has previously held a pretty steady candle — goes along with all this, plus the deadly poison of multiculturalism, to this very day. So much so, in fact, that even after the London bombings the response is to avoid a backlash that may upset the Muslims even more. Thus Britain is paralysed, the bungling will continue and its people will remain unprotected.

The Guardian has now fired its trainee journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, after news reports picked up the disclosure by Daily Ablution blogger Scott Burgess that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir whose website — according to the BBC — ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’. The firing is the first (albeit small) British mainstream media scalp taken by the blogosphere, whose vital role in policing and holding to account unaccountable mainstream media has now at last begun to have an effect in Britain and well as in the US.

This has provoked screams of fury from within al Guardian, where some members of staff at least are still clearly in the Aslam camp. An anonymous ‘staff reporter’ writes:

‘Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the 'blogosphere' can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.’

Ah yes, ‘rightwing’ – the knee-jerk Guardian insult, which it employs as a synonym for ‘evil’, and which it automatically applies to anyone who upholds fundamental notions of truth and the difference between right and wrong. Thus the paper masks the uncomfortable fact that it saw nothing wrong in the views expressed by this member of a party which ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’ and thought they sat perfectly comfortably on its pages.

Yesterday, the Guardian ran a story about its firing of Aslam, as well as an entry in its Corrections and Clarifications column. But these items obscure the real scandal of this affair. Corrections and Clarifications tells us:

‘At the end of an article headed We rock the boat, page 21 (Comment), July 13, we identified the author Dilpazier Aslam as a Guardian trainee journalist but did not say that he was a member of the political party Hizb ut Tahrir. The Guardian accepts that Mr Aslam’s membership of the party should have been explicitly mentioned...’

What this coy rubric implies but does not spell out is that the Guardian knew that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir before the blogosphere got hold of the story. This is confirmed in a brief paragraph buried on yet another Guardian web article on the affair, this time in a ‘background briefing’ published yesterday. After a lot of sanctimonious guff about promoting diversity, this admits that although Aslam did not mention his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir on his application form:

‘Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party, drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.’

And yet

‘On July 12 - the day it was announced that the July 7 London bombs had been placed by young British Muslims from west Yorkshire - Aslam was asked to write a piece for the comment page.’

So Aslam was not fired because the Guardian thought -- as it said in its statement -- that his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir was ‘incompatible with his continued employment by the company’. It had been perfectly happy, it seems, for its trainee to be a member of this organisation – as long as no-one else knew about it. It was only when this fact became known that he was fired – presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

So who were the ‘several colleagues and some senior editors’ who did know and yet chose to do nothing about it? What price the Guardian's anti-fascist credentials, when it is happy to be in bed with an anti-Jewish organisation that promotes religious fascism -- at least until this relationship is exposed? And what does this tell us about the Guardian and the role it is playing at a time of national emergency?

The Times reports:

‘An Indian man was jailed in Bombay yesterday for plotting to fly passenger jets into the House of Commons and Tower Bridge in London on September 11, 2001. ‘Mohammed Afroze was sentenced to seven years after he admitted that he had a role in an al-Qaeda plot to attack London, the Rialto Towers building in Melbourne and the Indian Parliament. His lawyer has claimed, however, that the confession was “forcefully taken” and that Afroze was tortured by Indian police.

‘Afroze admitted that he and seven al-Qaeda operatives planned to hijack aircraft at Heathrow and fly them into the two London landmarks. The suicide squad included men from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afroze said. They booked seats on two Manchester-bound flights, but fled just before they were due to board.’

I did a double-take when I read this. One of the central claims by the appeasenik crowd is that Britain would never have been an al Qaeda target had it not joined the US in its war on terror, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. It was always obvious to anyone with eyes to see that Britain was always a target along with the rest of the free world. But the only reference to an actual plot against Britain on 9/11, as far as I am aware, was made in Rohan Gunaratna’s book Inside al Qaeda. Now, in a small story on page 12 of the Times, we are told that a man has been convicted of an al Qaeda conspiracy to hit Britain on 9/11. Shouldn’t this be a major story?

*Update: a reader has pointed out to me that the Daily Mail ran a story on Afroze's arrest for this plot on December 7 2001.

A poll carried out for the Daily Telegraph has underscored the fact that a terrifying number of Muslims in Britain support terrorist attacks. The vast majority of British Muslims oppose them, but six per cent say they were ‘fully justified’. As the political analyst Professor Anthony King observes:

‘Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do. Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent. A substantial majority, 56 per cent, say that, whether or not they sympathise with the bombers, they can at least understand why some people might want to behave in this way.’

The survey also found that nearly one British Muslim in five feels little loyalty towards this country or none at all:

‘If these findings are accurate, and they probably are, well over 100,000 British Muslims feel no loyalty whatsoever towards this country… YouGov asked respondents how they feel about Western society and how, if at all, they feel Muslims should adapt to it. A majority, 56 per cent, believe "Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end".

'However, nearly a third of British Muslims, 32 per cent, are far more censorious, believing that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". Among those who hold this view, almost all go on to say that Muslims should only seek to bring about change by non-violent means but one per cent, about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence.’

These findings are deeply alarming. Such numbers supporting terrorism and expressing hatred for this country and a desire to destroy it are simply insupportable. Britain has a major social and security crisis on its hands which it has yet to properly acknowledge, let alone confront.

According to representatives of the Muslim community in Britain, there is one way to end the suicide bombing threat. Surrender. As the Evening Standard reported:

‘Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq... 7/7, 21/7, and God knows what will happen afterwards, our lives are in real danger and it would seem, so long as we are in Iraq and so long as we are contributing to injustices around the world, we will continue to be in real danger. Tony Blair has to come out of his state of denial and listen to what the experts have been saying, that our involvement in Iraq is stupid." His comments were echoed by the marketing manager for The Muslim Weekly newspaper.

‘Shahid Butt said he believed the threat to Britain would reduce if it pulled its troops out of Iraq. He said: "At the end of the day, these things [violent incidents] are going to happen if current British foreign policy continues. There's a lot of rage, there's a lot of anger in the Muslim community. We have got to get out of Iraq, it is the crux of the matter. I believe if Tony Blair and George Bush left Iraq and stopped propping up dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world, the threat rate to Britain would come down to nearly zero."

‘Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, also called on the Government to take responsibility for creating the "political environment" in which these attacks have happened. He said: "Now we know this wasn't a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it's urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life."'

I’d say this was a clear threat to Britain from these people, that unless we come out of Iraq there will be more attacks. Bombs on the tubes and buses, threats from community leaders -- Britain is currently under sustained attack by word as well as deed, in a pincer movement designed to break our resolve.

Meanwhile, at least 83 people died in an al Qaeda attack on Egypt when bombs ripped apart three hotels at Sharm el Sheikh, the popular Egyptian tourist resort — thus helping prove, if those who believe Iraq was a cause of the London attacks are paying any attention, that we are dealing with a fascistic agenda which changes its grievance of choice with every country that it targets, precisely to sow confusion and division among gullible populations. The fact is that Islamofascists have declared war on everyone who stands in the way of the revival of the global Islamic Caliphate, and everyone who defends themselves against this holy war of conquest — whether they are in Australia, Indonesia, Chechnya, Israel, Iraq, the US or Britain — is presented therefore as an aggressor and used to recruit still more into this cult of murderous lunacy. The only alternative for those under such attack, however, is surrender. That is why those in Britain who endorse the morally twisted and cynically selective logic of the Iraq connection — such as the wretched BBC — are behaving like traitors to their country in a time of war.

The gay pressure group Outrage has claimed that its leaders have received death threats from Islamic extremists:

‘Peter Tatchell, the leader of OutRage; Brett Lock its campaign co-ordinator; and Aaron Saeed, the organization's spokesperson on Muslim affairs, have been warned they will be murdered, Tatchell said Monday. In a statement Tatchell said that they have been told they are on a "hit list" and are going to be "beheaded" and "chopped up", in accordance with "Islamic law". ‘The threats apparently began soon after OutRage stepped up its campaign in defense of LGBT Muslims, including gay Muslims fleeing attempted "honor killings" in Algeria, Iran Palestine and in the UK. Tatchell said that since early April, Islamic fundamentalists have made various attempts to track his movements - posing as journalists, police officers and representatives of the Muslim Council of Britain.’

Tatchell is prone to making somewhat wild statements, but in the circumstances this should not be ignored. Although I have my differences with the gay rights lobby, such a threat to gay people is all too real. All of us who are targeted by this terror must now stand shoulder to shoulder in the great fight to defend our society against it.

Amir Taheri relates the horrendous toll in France sustained by that country’s historic appeasement of Islamic terror, and issues a timely warning to Britain:

‘As Britain tries to absorb the shock of 7/7, some voices are urging what would amount to the appeasement of the terrorists. Experience, however, shows that the appeaser becomes a more attractive target for the terrorists. The appeased terrorist concludes that, having won a battle, he should press for victory in his war against a weakened adversary. Appeasing terrorists was tried by French president Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s, and made France the most-targeted Western country for a decade...

‘France is not alone in having tried appeasement and failed. Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Saudi Arabia and more recently Spain have had similar experiences. The British should know that any appeasement of terrorists could put them in an even greater danger.’

Taheri is worried about Britain’s resolve. He’s right to be so.

The following transcript of remarks by the impressive Austalian Prime Minister John Howard in London today provides a devastating riposte to the 'Iraq is the cause of London terrorism' brigade:

PRIME MIN. HOWARD: 'Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

'Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

'And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

'Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

'When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

'When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

'Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.'

PRIME MIN. BLAIR: 'And I agree 100 percent with that'. (Laughter.)

Since the London bombings, the Guardian has paraded on its comment pages a sickening number of apologists for terror, taking that paper into a new dimension altogether of treachery in time of war. Today it publishes an article by Professor Norman Geras denouncing such reactions. In a shortened version of a post on his eponymous Normblog, Geras writes:

‘The "We told you so" crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London. How do they know this, these clever people? For what they need to know is not just that Iraq was one of a number of influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary, motivating cause for the London bombings. If it was only an influencing motivational cause among others, and if, more particularly, another such motivational cause was supplied by the military intervention in Afghanistan, then it's not the case that the London bombings wouldn't have happened but for the Iraq war.

‘Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.

‘There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share. Because we believe in and value these, we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with is precisely it. We have to challenge their excuses without let-up.’

In his full piece on Normblog, Geras further amplifies the extreme political selectivity of the root-causers:

‘These are people for whom the crime of 9/11 did not constitute an act of war meriting a military response, people whose preferred course of action was to leave the Taliban in situ ruling that country and al-Qaida with the freedom to continue organizing there. This rather does help to establish what is one of the main objects of the present post, namely that the root-causers are very selective about the root causes they're willing to recognize as relevant; and, attached as they are to an ethico-political outlook that has lately been (let us just say) indulgent towards anti-democratic forces, they particularly favour root causes originating in the vicinity of Washington DC.

‘To shift part of the blame for the London killings and maimings on to Blair and Bush - and also Parliament and Congress, and everyone who supported the war in all the coalition-of-the-willing countries - you not only have to guess at the Iraq war having been operative and decisive in the motivations of the actual bombers, you not only have to overlook anything that might have been right about that war, like seeing off one of the most brutal and murderous dictators of the last few decades, you further have to reckon that what was wrong about the war not merely caused the anger of those bombers but made their response, in some sort, morally appropriate rather than (what it in fact was) criminally excessive.’

No doubt tomorrow it will be business as usual at al Guardian.

In the Times, Dr Theodore Dalrymple articulates the profound unease I have felt at the decision by the General Medical Council to strike off the medical register Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the paediatrician whose apparent statistical error which formed part of his expert evidence in court was said to have helped convict a number of women of killing their babies, convictions which were later overturned. Dalrymple writes:

‘Professor Meadow did not wrongly convict anyone — only the courts could have done that. And if his statistical reasoning was so obviously and disgracefully wrong, why was he able for so long, according to the GMC, to persist in his errors, uninterrupted by defence experts and lawyers? (I leave aside the question of what part his statistical evidence actually played in the original convictions.) An error that is obvious once it has been pointed out may not be so very obvious before it is pointed out... Evidential value is not proof, however, and anyone who thought it were would be failing to understand the nature of proof in a criminal trial. The expert does not speak, and the jury convict or acquit accordingly; or if it does, the fault lies not with the expert, but with the court.

‘A society that is intolerant of error will soon become intolerant of truth, for truth rarely emerges except by the testing of error. In this connection, it is probably not irrelevant to note that Professor Meadow was a disseminator of an unwelcome and disturbing truth: that parents may sometimes maltreat their own children in bizarre ways, and those children, therefore, need to be protected from them. Although I am not a paediatrician, I can testify from personal clinical experience that parents are capable of doing things to their own children that, had I not had incontrovertible evidence, I should scarcely have credited as being possible. And all paediatricians in this country are familiar with the kind of cases that Professor Meadow described.’

Meadow has been made a scapegoat for a system which was at fault but which has got off scot-free. It was up to the defence to cross-examine Meadow and expose any flaws in his evidence. It failed to do so – and yet Meadow has now been struck off the medical register. Why? He committed no medical error or misconduct against his patients. At worst, he stumbled into an arena - statistics – on which he was not a specialist, and as a result made an error. The whole point of a trial, however, is that evidence should be tested to destruction. It wasn’t. So why has the medical profession treated this as a hanging offence for one of its own?

The most likely answer, as Dalrymple also suggests, is that the GMC was anxious to fall into line with the witch-hunt which developed after the convictions of these mothers were overturned. A sacrifice was demanded, and the GMC duly obliged. As a result, doctors will be far less willing to give evidence as expert witnesses, and in general there will be less chance that in cases of suspected child maltreatment, justice will be done.

Last night, I got a chance to interrogate Dr Azzam Tamimi, the Hamas supporter and advocate of human bomb terror in Israel (see earlier posts), on BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze. You can listen to it here.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been all over the airwaves in the past 24 hours. He says he does not support suicide bombers; but then he provides a detailed justification of this terrorism on the grounds that the terrorists are ‘oppressed’ by the people they murder. He blames the west for ‘double standards’ around the world which drive young Muslim men to turn themselves into human bombs.

Three guesses which particular country is in his sights. At a press conference yesterday, he said:

'Given that the Palestinians don't have jet fighters, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In that unfair balance, that's what people use. When talking about the imbalance of forces, I will gladly welcome leading members of the Israeli government if they come here even though they have done horrendous things which border on crimes against humanity in a way they have indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades’.

He repeatedly draws a moral equivalence between genocidal Arab terrorism against Israel with its attempts to defend itself against it. He wept over the London bombings but implies that the Jews in Israel are fair game for slaughter. He also compared Likud to Hamas, saying:

'I think the Israeli hardliners around Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same coin, they need each other to drum up support.'

Hamas terrorists are regularly killing and attempting to kill Israelis. This is what the Hamas Covenant says:

'Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.' (Preamble) 'The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.' (Article 6)

'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out:' O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him'. (Article 7)

'The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.' (Article 11)

'Palestine is an Islamic land...Since this is the case, the
Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem
wherever he may be.' (Article 13)

'The enemies have been scheming for a long time...and have
accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money,
they took control of the world media...With their money they stirred
revolutions in various parts of the globe...They stood behind the
French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the
revolutions we hear about...With their money they formed secret organizations - such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions - which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies
and carry out Zionist interests... They stood behind World War I ... and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the
world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains...There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it.' (Article 22)

‘Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.’ (Article 13)

Given that these are the genocidal aims of Hamas, to say that the Israeli Likud party needs Hamas is a sick and bigoted travesty which is almost beyond belief.

Even more disgustingly, Livingstone claimed it was wrong to question the bona fides of young Muslim men when ‘Jewish boys’ who enlisted in the Israeli army were welcomed back into Britain:

'If a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate," he said. "But for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think: I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist. And I think it is this that has infected the attitude about how we deal with these problems.'

Apart from the disgusting equation of the systematic mass murder of Israelis with their attempt to defend themselves against annihilation, he suggested that ‘Jewish boys’ from Britain were helping to oppress the Palestinians. Leave aside the small fact that ‘Jewish boys’ from anywhere only serve in the Israel Defence Force if they are Israeli, and the resulting slur about divided loyalty that this remark implied, this association makes ‘Jewish boys’ in Britain fair game for Muslim boys who will doubtless be further enraged by these lies and libels.

There was yet more. On Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0749), Livingstone said by way of explaining why Palestinian Arabs turned themselves into human bombs against Israelis that they did not have the vote. The implication was that Israel has prevented them from having the vote, and is therefore an apartheid state. But of course, the Arabs of the territories do not have a vote in Israel because the territories are not part of Israel; Livingstone would be the first to scream if Israel claimed them as such. If it’s the lack of a Palestinian state that he’s referring to, well, they have been offered that repeatedly and responded instead by murdering Jews. And in any event, they do have a vote – they used it to elect Mahmoud Abbas as their Prime Minister.

Livingstone, whose whole presentation was off the wall, was given the softest of treatments by the Today presenter who lobbed a couple of feeble counter-arguments at him but never challenged the gross distortions.

This man is no longer some far-left maverick. He is the Labour Mayor of London, brought back into the Labour fold by Tony Blair himself. His words, like countless articles and broadcasts by people who have treacherously sided with or made excuses for the enemies of this country and the west have without doubt, through the lies and libels they have perpetrated, helped foment the demented hysteria which sends Muslim boys into the arms of the cynical terror-puppeteers who turn them into human bombs. If the Prime Minister seriously wants to root out the causes of terror, he should expel Livingstone once more from the Labour party – and the Attorney-General should consider whether there is a case against him for incitement.

Meanwhile, alas, the torrent of poison about Israel has done its lethal work among the British mainstream. As Michael Gove reports in the Times:

‘Listening to Any Questions the other day, I was intrigued to hear one of the panelists refer to a fascinating website run by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organisation that translates news reports and speeches from the Arab world. MEMRI has provided a valuable insight into developments in Arab politics and religion, including illuminating translations of sermons, whose reliability no one has seriously contested. But on Friday night's show George Galloway kept interrupting his fellow-panelist to point out that people working for MEMRI were Israelis. A section of the audience laughed and applauded, as though this exposed MEMRI's work as unworthy of further attention.’

Israel, a nation that by and large tells the truth, has become a synonym for lies — as a result of the Big Lies about Israel that now circulate in the British bloodstream. To repeat: the demonisation of Israel and the Jews lie at the rotten core of the war against the west. It will not — cannot — be won until this is acknowledged, discussed and dealt with.

One desperately wants to give credit where credit is due. The British Muslim Forum has issued a fatwa against fanaticism and terrorism. That is a good start; it is the second such fatwa by British Muslims in the past few days, and thus a significant advance on the silence that came before.

But...

The text of this fatwa is slippery. It unequivocally condemns suicide bombings in London but does not unequivocally condemn them elsewhere, for example in Iraq or Israel:

‘Islam strictly, strongly and severely condemns the use of violence and the destruction of innocent lives. There is neither place nor justification in Islam for extremism, fanaticism or terrorism. Suicide bombings, which killed and injured innocent people in London, are HARAAM - vehemently prohibited in Islam, and those who committed these barbaric acts in London are criminals not martyrs. Such acts, as perpetrated in London, are crimes against all of humanity and contrary to the teachings of Islam.’

This leaves wide open the question of whether suicide bombings elsewhere are permitted. And if the religion does permit them elsewhere, then obviously it is not true that ‘There is neither place nor justification in Islam for extremism, fanaticism or terrorism. ‘

It condemns the ’destruction of innocent lives’ everywhere, but that begs the question of the meaning of ‘innocent’. This suspicion deepens when it adds:

‘The Holy Quran declares: “Whoever kills a human being… then it is as though he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a human life, it is as though he had saved all mankind.“ (Quran, Surah al-Maidah (5), verse 32) Islam’s position is clear and unequivocal: Murder of one soul is the murder of the whole of humanity; he who shows no respect for human life is an enemy of humanity.”’

But it is not unequivocal at all, because the verse that is quoted here contains another, absolutely crucial phrase which has been left out in this fatwa but which changes the meaning altogether:

‘That was why we laid it down for the Israelites that whoever killed a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, (my emphasis) shall be regarded as having killed all mankind; and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind.

‘Our apostles brought them veritable proofs; yet many among them, even after that, did prodigious evil in the land. Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.’ (Sura 5:31)

In other words, where there is ‘villainy’ killing is expressly permitted; and since villainy can mean anything, and since Islamist extremists regard western or democratic influence as villainous, it follows that the slaughter of western or reformnist Muslim innocents is expressly permitted – because they are not regarded as innocent in the first place.

This sinister thinking is presumably why, as the Times reports today, a Muslim teacher in Dewsbury – which is where one of the London bombers came from -- who signed a fatwa against suicide bombings nevertheless advocates armed jihad and hatred and suspicion of the west and the country in which his pupils live:

‘While Tony Blair and leaders of Britain’s Muslims were condemning extremism at their Downing Street summit, Mufti Zubair Dudha explained why British foreign policy led directly to the 7/7 atrocities. Mr Dudha, 29, teaches primary school children, teenagers and young adults at his Islamic Tarbiyah academy in Dewsbury.

‘He condemned the London atrocities and signed the Sunni Muslim fatwa against suicide bombings, but he is also an advocate of jihad. In his foreword to a 1996 translation of a pamphlet by one of his mentors, entitled Jihaad, Mr Dudha wrote: “Today many of us are misled into believing that in our times jihad of the sword is not warranted. Most definitely physical jihad is, and will be needed to a large extent.”

‘Later he added: “Besides the jihad of the pen and tongue, the Muslim ummah [nation] cannot be exempted from physical jihad. No learned person and no true Muslim can deny the benefits, fruits and blessings of physical jihad for the course of Allah.” One chapter title in the book is: “Preparing for Jihad and obtaining warfare equipment is also compulsory...

‘In Dewsbury, students at Mr Dudha’s Islamic Tarbiyah Academy are taught that “the enemies of Allah” have schemed “to poison the thinking and minds of [Muslim] youth and to plant the spirit of unsteadiness and moral depravity in their lives”. Parents are told that they betray their children if they allow them to associate with non-Muslims.’

Does the government realise that these declarations seem not to be worth the paper they are written on?

Riveting piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht contends that the Islamic terrorism that has emerged in Europe is not a foreign import from Arab and Muslim lands but has become a home-grown European phenomenon:

'What was once unquestionably an import has gone native, mutated, and grown. Some of what the Europeans are now confronting -- and for the United States this is very bad news -- is probably a locally generated Islamic militancy that is as retrograde and virulent as anything encountered in the Middle East. "European Islam" appears to be an increasingly radicalizing force intellectually and in practice. The much-anticipated Muslim moderates of Europe--the folks French scholar Gilles Kepel believes will produce "extraordinary progress in civilization," a new "Andalusia" (the classical Arabic word for Moorish Spain) that will save us from Osama bin Laden's jihad--have so far not developed with the same gusto as the Muslim activists who have dominated too many mosques in "Londonistan" and elsewhere in Europe. Moderates surely represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Europe, but like their post-Christian European counterparts, they usually express their moderation in detachment from religious affairs.

'Though Europeans often fail to see it, the secularization of the Muslims living in their midst has been, by and large, a great success. It explains why Muslim activists gain so much attention, be they arch-conservatives, like the devotees of the Tabligh movement in Britain and on the continent who espouse segregation in Europe, or "progressives," like the Switzerland-based intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who refuses forthrightly to declare the Muslim Holy Law null and void as a political testament for Muslims in a European democracy. The moderates have abandoned the field. They have become European. The militants, who perhaps should be seen as deviants from a largely successful process of secularization, are the only ones left ardently praying.

'For organizations like al Qaeda, this may mean that the future will be decisively European. From its earliest days, al Qaeda viewed Europe as an important launching platform for attacks against the United States and its interests. Now, Western counterterrorist forces, which have traditionally tried to track Middle Eastern missionaries in Europe, would be well advised to start searching for radical European Muslim missionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere. Some Europeans--and they are mostly French--have seen the future. Always ahead of his time, the French scholar Olivier Roy has written:

"When we consider the [Islamic] movements that embrace violence, we can see that they are not expressions of an outburst in the West of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict in the Middle East. Most of the young Muslims radicalize in the West: They are "born-again Muslims." It's here that they are Islamicized. Almost all separate from their families and many have marriages with non-Muslims. Their dispute with the world isn't imported from the Middle East: It is truly modern, aimed against American imperialism, capitalism, etc. In other words, they occupy the same space that the proletarian left had thirty years ago, that Action Directe had twenty years ago. . . . They exist in a militant reality abandoned by the extreme left, where the young live only to destroy the system. . . . [This radicalization] isn't at all the consequence of a "clash of civilizations," that is to say, the importation of intellectual frameworks coming from the Middle East. This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West."

'Roy may overstate the autonomy of Islamic radicalism in Europe from the militancy in the Middle East; he surely diminishes too much the religious ingredient in the emerging radical Muslim European identity. But my own visits to numerous radical mosques in Western Europe since 9/11 suggest that he is more right than wrong about the Europeanization of Islamic militancy. The Saudis may pay for the mosques and the visiting Saudi and Jordanian imams, but the believers are often having very European conversations in European languages. In France, Belgium, or Holland, sitting with young male believers can feel like a time-warp, a return to the European left of the 1970s and early 1980s.'

This is of course part and parcel of the axis that has developed between the left and Islamofascism, which has filled the totalitarian gap left by the defeat first of Nazism and then of Communism. It is surely no accident that the word 'struggle', which is used in Marxist thinking to sanctify the attempts by the workers or the self-designated 'oppressed' to destroy western civilisation, was also found in the defining creed of Nazism --'Mein Kampf'-- and is the meaning of the word 'jihad'. Nazism and Communism required the submission of free peoples to their ideology -- and 'submission' is of course the meaning of the word 'Islam'.

I wouldn't go as far as Gerecht or Roy in downplaying the influence of the Arab and Muslim world on the Muslims of Europe; nor would I downplay the role of the grievance culture -- based on the lies and libels about the west and the Jews that are disseminated by that world -- in acting as a recruiting sergeant for terror among European Muslims. But I do think that there is a symbiotic relationship between Islamic fascism and the European left, which has, alas, created a particular and distinctive European nightmare.

I wondered who would be the first person in Britain to openly blame the Jews for the London bombings. Step forward for the garland of hatred Professor Sir Bernard Crick, the government’s former adviser on citizenship. On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0852) this morning, he said:

‘It’s not easily refuted that these kinds of protests…have been going on since the failure of Israel to follow the UN resolutions after the 1967 war.’

Sir Bernard, whose speciality is politics and who is a biographer of George Orwell, has a selective grasp of historical facts. Contrary to popular myth, the UN’s most important resolutions concerning Israel (which ones he was referring to he did not specify) do not place unconditional obligations on Israel to give up the territories it occupied after the Six-Day War. They require it instead to give up ‘territories’ — the absence of the definite article was deliberate — but not necessarily all of them, and then only if the Arab states that declared war on Israel and thus caused it to take the territories as an act of self-defence abandon that war. That has never happened. To repeat for the umpteenth time — Israel’s occupation of those territories was not an act of aggression but an act of self-defence, and its continued presence there while war continues to be waged against it by Arabs pledged to its destruction is sanctioned under international law as a legitimate defensive measure.

There is no doubt that ‘Palestine’ is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic death cult by propagating the big lie of Israeli aggression and oppression and thus inciting hatred and murderous hysteria towards the Jews among Muslims across the globe. To blame the Jews, who are the victims of this terrifying evil and are in the front line of fighting it, rather than those who are perpetrating the lies and racial libels which are fuelling it, is disgraceful.

Sir Bernard Crick is not some marginal figure. He is at the heart of the Labour and British establishment. Moreover, the view he ariculates is shared by a very significant proportion of that establishment. He is therefore a symptom of the moral sickness that has gripped Britain and which poses such terrible dangers to the defence of the west. The hatred of Israel lies at the very epicentre of the war that now rages. Until and unless this fact is grasped, along with the profound moral inversion that it has caused throughout the west, we will not win this fight for civilisation.

A reader has sent me this impression of ‘multiculturalism’ in the British classroom:

‘As a Christian primary school teacher, I believe the moral values, religious beliefs and ethical codes (or lack thereof) are the foundation of society, our dialogue and interactions with people of various faiths. Many Brits are unsure of their own beliefs (due to watered-down Christianity which lacks any vitality or relevance) and definitely ignorant of the beliefs and religious teachings of the main faiths represented in Britain (Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism). Hence the confusion, as you mentioned, over the term 'jihad' and cultish Muslim doctrine.

’I believe that this 'moral inversion' starts in schools. A lot has been said of the responsibility of mosques and Muslim Society leaders, but the schools these children attend play a large part in their 'moral upbringing' albeit passively. The majority of Muslim children attend state schools, Catholic and Church of England Primary Schools. Twelve years ago when I was at C of E Sixth Form, I remember the religious tension and the political correctness creeping in.

‘On many occasions I have attended conferences with other colleagues in education from the north of England. According to my colleagues in these multicultural areas, their schools consist of at least 75%-100% Muslim children. White British children are in the minority and often feel intimidated. The daily grief their staff endure is unbelievable.

‘White, British female teachers are often insulted by their own pupils, suffer sexual harassment from young Muslim males and are intimidated by Muslim fathers (in their own classrooms) who have no respect for women. Parents aggressively handle their own children, undermining school codes and ethos in front of the children. One colleague said she was told by a father, if his daughter did not achieve academically, she (the teacher) should tell her that she is stupid, lazy and useless and let him know so that she can be beaten at home! This is a regular occurrence in schools - especially C of E schools, and teachers have their hands tied as opposition would be branded as religious hatred and racism.

‘Heads and governors are frightened to step a foot wrong in their own schools, lest they offend the community by upholding Christian values and denying the right for Muslim children to pray during the day. There is so much fear that paralyses and I believe actually prevents clear religious dialogue because Christianity is seen as inferior and submissive to the wishes of Islam. When you think that thousands of these Muslim children also attend Koran school (sometimes everyday) you can see they way they are indoctrinated by Muslim logic from the very start.

‘I work in a predominantly white school. I am the only ethnic minority teacher on staff, and there are only a handful of children from ethnic minority groups. Even in this predominantly Christian school, there is fear of being associated with Islamophobia and racism. Many people are afraid to talk about religion these days. Religious discussions as seen as taboo, as they may cause offence.

‘We actually held a themed 'Multicultural Week' this year and the person who co-ordinated it decided not to cover any RE during the week as it could upset some people. So we looked at the nations of China, India, Pakistan without even a mention of their religious beliefs and festivals! As our area is not very multicultural at all, there weren't even any minority groups who could visit and share their culture. Needless to say, the children were left with a very narrow and unrealistic view of the places and the cultures they were studying.

’I know that this is only a brief mention or a snapshot, but when I think of all the multicultural schools across Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and London, there must be thousands of children (British Christians and British Muslims) who are seeing Christianity undermined while Islam forces its way in. These children, shaped by our example and actions now, will be Britain tomorrow.’

Michael J Totten’s website links to an ABC News item in 1999 which reported evidence of substantial links between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Much of this has been reported by Stephen Hayes in his various books and articles (see previous posts), but it is helpful to hear audio proof that this connection was acknowledged back in the days of the Clinton administration.

If you ignore the over-excitable commentary which irritatingly punctuates this clip, you will hear the ABC reporter in 1999 reveal that Osama bin Laden was trying to obtain nukes for al Qaeda and went to Saddam Hussein, one of the few sources who was in a position to help, on the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’; that the relationship had started in the Sudan; that Sudanese officials acting on behalf of bin Laden asked representatives of Saddam Hussein for asylum and were told that bin Laden would be welcome in Baghdad; and that bin Laden observed that there were people who were prepared to commit terror in his name whom he did not control.

When is the British mainstream media going to start reporting any of this voluminous evidence of the connection (see earlier posts)? How long are they going to collude in the myth that there were no links between Saddam and al Qaeda?

An editorial in The Business makes some excellent points about the state of denial in Britain and the true nature of what we face:

‘In today's Britain you will find proof positive that those the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. The fact is that Britain is pockmarked by all manner of communities which feel alienated, marginalised and discriminated against, from East Glasgow to South London, but none become suicide bombers, bar those contaminated by a perversion of Islam. Nor were the London bombers particularly poor: some were university educated, most lived normal lower-middle class lives; the Egyptian biochemist suspected of being the bombmaster (and this weekend being interrogated in Cairo) had been granted £30,000 by the British taxpayer to continue his studies at Leeds University. So much for marginalisation or discrimination.

‘Then there is Iraq. In the most stupid intervention so far by a major British politician, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy tried to link the country's vulnerability to terrorism to Britain's intervention in Iraq. Our memory might sometimes fail us but we seem to remember that the jihadists who inspired the London atrocity were bombing New York's Twin Towers and Paris subway stations a full decade before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, the brutal reality of today's Iraq is not that it is a crucible for terrorists out to bomb London but that it is under attack from the very same sort of terrorists who have bombed London. Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadist, is currently slaughtering thousands of innocent Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad on a much grander scale than Londoners were slaughtered on 7/7 -- all because he would rather have civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims rather than peace and democracy.

‘Last week he had the head of the Egyptian ambassador to Iraq hacked off because he believes that all earthly governments are an affront to Allah. At the same time his bombers were killing and maiming scores of Iraqi children. Anybody who thinks that the beheading and the bombing (in London or Baghdad) will stop - and that video copies of the beheading will no longer be passed around outside London mosques, as they were this week - only when the last British soldier leaves Basra is an idiot. We will know Britain's Muslim leaders have come of age when they stop bellyaching about the invasion of Iraq, start realising that the people of London and Baghdad face a common jihadist enemy, condemn unreservedly killers like Mr Zarqawi and urge their young people to turn against him and his kind.’

Tony Blair’s speech last Saturday on the threat that we face was excellent and seminal, a step-change in his rhetoric on Islamic terror, and should be read in full. He spelled out more clearly than he had ever done before why the argument that the London bombings were carried out in response to Iraq or indeed to any other conflict is exceptionally stupid and ignorant:

‘This ideology and the violence that is inherent in it did not start a few years ago in response to a particular policy. Over the past 12 years, Al-Qaeda and its associates have attacked 26 countries, killed thousands of people, many of them Muslims… They demand the elimination of Israel; the withdrawal of all Westerners from Muslim countries, irrespective of the wishes of people and government; the establishment of effectively Taleban states and Sharia law in the Arab world en route to one caliphate of all Muslim nations...

‘From the mid 1990s onwards, statements from Al-Qaeda, gave very clear expression to this ideology: "Every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hatred towards the Americans, Jews and Christians. This is part of our ideology. The creation of Israel is a crime and it has to be erased. You should know that targeting Americans and Jews and killing them anywhere you find them on the earth is one of the greatest duties and one of the best acts of piety you can offer to God Almighty." Just as great is their hatred for so-called apostate governments in Muslim countries. This is why mainstream Muslims are also regarded as legitimate targets.

‘Their cause is not founded on an injustice. It is founded on a belief, one whose fanaticism is such it can't be moderated. It can't be remedied. It has to be stood up to.’

Quite. But will he do so?

Last week there was an Islamic Jihad suicide bombing outside a Netanya mall that killed five and wounded 90 Israelis, and hundreds of Hamas rocket attacks over the Gaza border into Israel that killed a woman who was sitting on her porch. This followed five months of the so-called ‘truce’ declared by Hamas and Islamic jihad which in fact has seen dozens of mostly thwarted terror attacks on Israelis. Finally, Israel responded by resuming attacks on the Hamas leadership. Yet parts of the media described this as Israel breaking the truce. As HonestReporting.com reports, the Washington Post said:

‘The Israeli military killed seven members of Hamas on Friday in rocket strikes that renewed Israel's policy of assassinating militant Palestinian leaders and effectively marked the end of a five-month truce’

while Associated Press claimed:

‘The Israeli military launched an airstrike Friday on a van carrying Hamas militants and a cache of homemade rockets in a Gaza City street, killing four people in what may be the most serious blow to a 5-month-old truce.’

Question: why do these media outlets regard the sustained terrorism by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as not breaking the truce but when Israel finally tried to defend its citizens this is breaking the truce? Answer: because Jewish casualties of Arab terror are invisible since the media ‘know’ that the Jews don’t do self-defence, only aggression — even when they are under rocket attack.

The authority on anti-Jewish hatred Professor Robert Wistrich, writing in the Jerusalem Post about Britain’s fanatics, makes the crucial point that anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred lie at the very core of the jihad against the west:

‘Perhaps most worrisome, stridently anti-Israel sentiments have long ceased to be limited to Muslims. Earlier this year, the city's mayor, Ken Livingstone published a piece in The Guardian claiming that Ariel Sharon "is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office," adding that "Israel's own expansion has included ethnic cleansing." ‘Since the election late this spring, things have only gotten worse. On May 21, a massive rally held in Trafalgar Square featured a crowd waving anti-Israel banners. In addition to Palestinian representatives and local Muslim leaders, several prominent non-Muslim public figures also spoke. Tony Benn, for instance, a former Labor MP and veteran Leftist, called George Bush and Sharon the "two most dangerous men in the world," while Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War coalition demanded the dismantling of the Jewish state. "The South African apartheid state never inflicted the sort of repression that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians," he said to cries of allahu akbar! from the audience. "When there is real democracy, there will be no more Israel."

‘The demonization of Israel has had a profoundly debilitating effect on British public opinion. It has helped to blind Britain to the true nature of the Holy War currently being waged against Western civilization. In reality, the motivations of the bombers have little to do with Palestine, with poverty or despair - the usual suspects evoked after every murderous terrorist assault in Europe or elsewhere. It has everything to do with religious fanaticism. Slowly yet surely, the jihadist challenge is effecting a profound erosion of Britain's proud history of tolerance, moderation and multiculturalism. Unfortunately, until Britain acknowledges this growing cancer of terrorism, jihad and anti-Semitism in its midst - and acts to stamp it out - we can expect that Thursday's tragedy will not be the last London sees.’

Judea Pearl, father of the journalist Daniel Pearl who was murdered by al Qaeda, wrote in the Sunday Times yesterday that condemnations of the London bombings by the Muslim community, however sincere they may be, are ineffective when dealing with fanatics capable of such irrational and cruel crimes:

‘It is only through the formal instruments of the Islamic religion — declaring such acts as suicide bombing to be apostasy, fasad (corrupting the principles of Islam) and kufr (falsifying the roots of Islam) — that the Muslim majority can hope to penetrate the shroud of self-righteousness that licenses killings in the name of God. And it is only through religious excommunication that Muslim communities can disassociate themselves from those who have defiled their religion. These considerations were keenly recognised by the spiritual leaders of the Spanish Muslim community. On March 11, commemorating the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings, 75% of all clerics associated with the Spanish Muslim Council issued a fatwa against Osama Bin Laden, calling him an apostate and urging others of their faith to denounce the Al-Qaeda leader.

‘This brave and unprecedented move — most welcome to families like mine whose children have been murdered by Islamic extremists — generated only a meagre response from leaders of the great mosques in the Middle East, but sent an important symbolic message worldwide. It demonstrated that western Muslim clerics do have the Islamic credentials and jurisprudent justification to issue such fatwas. Further, it has accentuated the disingenuous stance of some clerics in the Middle East who refuse to denounce, in religious vocabulary, acts that they have proclaimed to be contrary to the teachings of Islam. The horrific events in London offer a unique opportunity for British Muslim clerics to join their Spanish brethren and issue a fatwa (ruling) against Bin Laden — the arch symbol of the ideology that led to the bombings.’

That very day, Associated Press reported that Britain's largest Sunni Muslim group on Sunday had issued a binding religious edict, a fatwa, condemning the July 7 suicide bombings as the work of a ‘perverted ideology’:

‘The Sunni Council denounced the bombings as anti-Islamic and said the Quran, the Muslim holy book, forbade suicide attacks. "Who has given anyone the right to kill others? It is a sin. Anyone who commits suicide will be sent to Hell," said Mufti Muhammad Gul Rehman Qadri, the council chairman. "What happened in London can be seen as a sacrilege. It is a sin to take your life or the life of others."

‘The council said Muslims should not use "atrocities being committed in Palestine and Iraq" to justify attacks such as those in London that killed 55 when suicide bombers struck in three Underground trains and a double-decker bus, the fatwa declared. "We equally condemn those who may have been behind the masterminding of these acts, those who incited these youths in order to further their own perverted ideology," Qadri said. More than 2,000 Sunni clerics, scholars and community leaders attended Sunday's meeting, which was scheduled before the bombings.’

It’s a start, and one for which the Sunni Council should be given credit. But it is only a start. What particularly needs to happen is for Muslim religious leaders to declare named individuals who promote or support terrorism as apostates and to issue a fatwa against them. For if supporting terrorism is truly against the precepts of the religion, then a fatwa should be issued against such supremely influential terrorism promoters as Sheikh Qaradawi.

When such a development occurs, then we’ll know that the Muslim community is serious about reclaiming its religion from the evil that has consumed it.

The Muslim Labour MP for Dewsbury, Shahid Malik, has been addressing the implications for British Muslims of the London bombings far more outspokenly than Muslim leaders or much of the chattering classes. In the Financial Times, he does not mince his words:

‘We have reached a dangerous crossroads, and the direction we choose will prove to be a defining moment in our history. The knowledge that the bombers were British Muslims, living what were, to all appearances, respectable and unremarkable lives, has sent us a signal we can no longer ignore, that there is indeed an “enemy within”. The battle for the soul of the community has begun.

‘The stakes are high and the choice is stark: either we confront the voices of evil, or we sit back and allow wider British society to regard us as a community that condones such evil. We must accept that the poisonous preachers of violence and hatred in the name of Islam, few in number though they may be, have to be halted in their actions. This means ending their access to, and their manipulation of, impressionable and vulnerable young men.’

Such directness is refreshing. Yet Malik still sidesteps the main issue. Referring to the political anger at what young Muslim men see as the

‘double standards of the west in relation to international Muslim areas of conflict, whether that be Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya’

he fails to point that this perception of double standards is not only wrong – at least as far as Afghanistan, Iraq and ‘Palestine’ are concerned, and maybe Kasmir and Chechnya too -- but that this false perspective means not only that Muslims fail to acknowledge the role of Islamists in these conflicts in instigating unprovoked aggression, but also that young Muslim men are incited to acts of mass murder on the utterly twisted belief that acts of self-defence against such acts of mass murder are not self-defence but unprovoked aggression.

Among the home truths that people like Malik have to begin to deliver to their own community is that Afghanistan was the training ground for Islamists who were waging holy war on the west; that Saddam Hussein was the godfather of Arab and Muslim terror; and – most difficult and most urgent of all – that Muslims have for decades been told systematic lies about the Jews and about the history and present circumstances of Israel and the Arabs of the disputed territories, and that far from seeking to oppress those Arabs the Jews of Israel have been defending themselves for half a century against the unprovoked aggression of Arab states determined to ethnically cleanse the Jews from their ancient homeland.

When Muslim MPs or other community leaders start saying this, then and only then will we know that they are seriously and honestly facing what they need to face, for all our sakes.

We have heard much from Muslim leaders about how Islam is a religion of peace, that it specifically rules against the taking of innocent life, that the word ‘jihad’ is a media invention, that imams preach only sweetness and light and that the terrorists who bombed London last week were acting so much against the tenets of the faith that they weren’t really Muslims at all. Well, here’s the text of a sermon
delivered in March last year at the Grand Mosque in Leeds, the area from where three of those bombers came:

‘We learnt, from last Friday’s speech, how the rulings of Islam are based on great considerations and objectives, and we mentioned that they are represented in the preservation of the deen (religion), preservation of life, preservation of intellect, preservation of lineage, and preservation of wealth. The speech last week was about preserving the deen and preserving life, and we learnt how Islam commands its followers to fulfil their obligations towards preserving their deen, adhering to it, and establishing its rites, by performing the acts of worship, fulfilling the obligations, leaving what is prohibited, calling people altogether to the great shade of this deen with its wide space, its abundant justice and its great tolerance. If the forces of evil stop and intervene between the people and them entering this deen as Allah, exalted is He, loves for them, it is legislated for those who call, when they face these oppressive forces, to fight Jihad in the path of Allah, and it is legislated for them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of this deen and for the sake of making the da'wah of Islam reach every heart.

(my emphasis)

‘The preservation of the deen comes before the preservation of life because if the deen goes and imaan is absent, obedience is abandoned and tawhid of the All-Merciful is not found, and the worshippers of the Shaytan appear, great corruption spreads in the earth, which Allah made a resting place for His servants who He created to worship Him alone and it is upon them to care for it, cultivate it, and bring forth its bounties. You learnt, O beloved brothers and sisters, how Islam forbids the killing of the self, and destroying it and damaging it without right, for whoever kills for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth

(my emphasis)

it is as if he has killed all of mankind, and whoever gives a self life it is as if he has given life to all of mankind. And you learnt how Islam forbids transgression and prohibits the killing of the weak, from the women and children, and non-combatants, in the battlefields.’

Now, my reading of this is that the preacher was saying that it was expressly permitted for Muslims to kill in order to prevent ‘corruption in the earth’, which itself includes any (unspecified) obstacle to Islam.

He then went on to link this to the Israeli killing of the Hamas ‘spiritual’ leader Sheikh Yassin, and used this to justify the killing of Israelis -- employing the most vile and hysterical libels against Israel and the Jews:

‘Does not the land which has been illegally seized from its people since 1948, and its people forced to flee, kicked out of their houses in order for it to be inhabited and occupied aggressively by people coming from various parts of the world, does it not deserve that which is similar? Is this not a just and clear cause with no ambiguity in it? Does not international law legislate for everybody who has had their land occupied and right seized the right to defend their land? ‘Therefore know that this defence is an honour and an aspiration, a jihad and a sacrifice, striving for it, the like of Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, and as you say: Israel has the right to defend itself, likewise, sound logic and wise intellect and the people of truth say that we too have the right to defend our possessions, our land, our rights and our honour, so who has the right to give the Zionist state the right and withhold it from those who own the land?

‘...Indeed, Palestine is a Muslim land, occupied, its right seized, and the rights of its people seized. Palestine is the first Qiblah, and it is where the Prophet sallalahu alahi wa sallam ascended from to the Heavens. Palestine, O rulers of the Muslims, is your responsibility in front of Allah. So wake up from your intoxication and wake up from your heedlessness and fulfil your obligation towards the cause of the Islamic Ummah, the cause of Palestine. Crying and lamenting and other passing emotions are not sufficient. It is upon you to stand as one row, hand in hand, beside your brothers in Palestine.

‘The assassination of Shaykh Ahmad Yasin reminds you of the treachery of the Jews; their plotting and their scheming. Who tried to kill your Prophet by throwing a rock from the top of the house which the Prophet sallalahu ‘alaihi wa sallam was sitting in, and who is the one who put poison into the lambs meat which was given to the Prophet sallalahu ‘alaihi wa sallam? Who whispered to Abu Lu’luah al-Majoosi, who betrayed and killed Amir-ul-Mu’mineen, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, and he was leading the Muslims in Fajr prayer? Who was the one who spread tribulation and dissention and planned the assassination of the Khalifah of the Muslims ‘Uthman bin ‘Affan, who was killed while reading the book of Allah? And who was the one who killed Imam ‘Ali RA while he was on the way to Fajr prayer? And who are the ones today who have killed a leader, a Mujahid, after he performed the Fajr prayer? The planning and the actions are the same; it is only the hands and the names that differ… Take up positions in the Jihad, don’t give in to sleep, and don’t give in to failure and disgrace. Be firm on the truth which you believe in and defend that which is sacred to you and your honour and your country.’

This sermon is on the Mosque’s website. Do our police or security services actually read open websites? Why isn’t anyone raising this now, after three local men committed their unspeakable acts in pursuit of the very objectives laid out in this sermon? How many other imams are saying similar things or worse? When will the mainstream media wake up from their ‘Islamophobic’ trance and start investigating what is happening here?

The BBC is doing a lot of things wrong at present. But here are a couple of things it has done to redress the balance in the past couple of days. First, BBC OnLine published this article of sympathetic interviews with Israelis about what it’s like to live with suicide bombings.

Second, Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday morning (0733: transcript here) broadcast an item in which the Panorama journalist John Ware was given time to make the point that the ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain, which has denounced the terrorism in London, has not been prepared to denounce the terrorism against Israel. When two British suicide bombers blew up Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv killing three people, the MCB General Secretary Sir Iqbal Sacranie said the loss of civilian life — and he mentioned both Palestinians and Israelis — couldn’t be condoned. The attack was later claimed by Hamas, whose founder Sheikh Yassin was later killed by the Israelis. As Ware said,
a year or so later several Muslim organisations here in London held a memorial service for Sheikh Yassin at the Central Mosque in Regent’s Park.Sir Iqbal chose to attend this service, and he also described Sheikh Yassin as a renowned Islamic scholar, even though he was

‘the chief ideologist of an organisation that’s charter seeks the destruction of Israel. And Hamas has conducted a fair number of the 60 or so suicide bombing attacks since the second Intefada, which have killed in total over 500 people, again women and civilians just as in London.’

Ware also pointed out that the MCB had described Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi in flattering terms as

‘a distinguished Muslim scholar, a voice of reason and understanding’

even though Qaradawi had supported the use of child human bombs against Israel and supported attacks in Iraq against American and British soldiers. Ware then pointed out that Dr Azzam Tamimi, (see earlier post) a senior member of an MCB affiliate, the Muslim Association of Britain, has also supported suicide bombings in Israel.

The ‘moderate’ MCB thus stood accused of being anything but moderate in its endorsement of those who commit mass murder against Israelis, or who themselves endorse it. Today then put this charge to the MCB’s press officer, Inayat Bunglawala -- who, having been shown a very deep hole proceeded to jump in it. Invited to unequivocally condemn terrorism against Israel, he repeatedly declined, taking refuge in bland assertions that

‘we always condemned the taking of innocent life anywhere’

before ranting about Israel’s ‘very brutal occupation’ and coming as close as he dared to justifying the murder of Israelis while denying that this was what he was doing:

Presenter:

‘But that still can’t be justification for suicide bombings…’

Inayat Bunglawala:

‘No, no it cannot, but many of our own columnists, even members of parliament, have said that if they were Palestinians, if they were living under those conditions, if they were seeing their children humiliated in the way that Israelis humiliate their children, if they saw their children being blown to pieces, they would consider doing what the Palestinians do. That is, our own Parliamentarians have said that. So if they can say that, of course Muslims will feel a greater affinity for the Palestinians.’

He also repeated the MCB’s endorsement of Sheikh Yassin:

Presenter:

‘OK, two other very brief points. Sheikh Yassin, the support that Sir Iqbal Sacranie has mentioned for him, as John Ware was saying, was that misguided?’

Inayat Bunglawala:

‘No it was not, Sheikh Yassin is an Islamic scholar, was an Islamic scholar, was renowned throughout the Muslim world as an Islamic scholar, and the Israelis assassinated him, let’s remember that, the Israelis broke international law, he was a quadriplegic man, a disabled man, he was coming out of the morning prayers, and the Israelis sent F16 fighter planes and they blew him up.’

Presenter:

‘He was the chief ideas man behind an organisation whose charter seeks the destruction of Israel?’

Inayat Bunglawala:

‘Well that’s right. If Israel claims to be a democracy, which it does at every opportunity, then it should bring people to justice by courts of law, not blow them up by missiles.’

and also supported Azam Tamimi:

‘Dr Azam himself is a Palestinian, and I can understand why he feels such pain for the Palestinians, and I can understand why others are driven to what they are doing. Dr Azam Tamimi again is respected, if our own Parliamentarians can say they can understand why Palestinians are doing this, of course other Palestinians themselves will express their feelings...’

Perhaps people could bear all this in mind the next time they hear the MCB pose as the moderate and responsible leaders of their community, and accuse anyone who dares to disagree of ‘Islamophobia’.

Is the BBC evil or just very, very stupid? In an item on BBC TV’s Newsnight last night dealing with what drove young Muslim men into terrorism, Dr Azam Tamimi was given several minutes of broadcasting time to make a film on this topic which he narrated, thus placing him in a quite different and much more authoritative position than a mere interviewee. This is a privilege television programmes give to very few people. He used it by not merely trotting out the usual morally bankrupt argument that a major factor was British foreign policy – complete with an implicit threat in his pay-off line that unless this policy was changed there would be more such attacks – but divested himself of such pieties as:

‘The Muslim community must combat extremism and the ideology of hate that equates innocence with guilt.’

This was simply astounding. For Dr Tamimi is no moderate. He is a leading light in the Muslim Association of Britain, which is the voice in the UK of the Muslim Brotherhood, the sect which is banned in Egypt on account of its extremism and which has been a major influence in promoting the murderous global jihad. What’s more Dr Tamimi, who has said he is a supporter of Hamas, has also said he supports suicide bombings against Israelis – the very slaughter of the innocents he so piously said he abhorred. Yet Newsnight gave him precious air time to take its viewers for a ride.

What’s more, it knew perfectly well what he was. For in the studio discussion afterwards, presenter Gavin Esler finally challenged him on his support for murdering Israelis and accused him of hypocrisy – thus giving him a further platform to demonise the country against which he supports terrorism. In addition, his fellow interviewees were a man from the extreme and venomous Muslim Public Affairs Committee who – surprise surprise -- said he ‘couldn’t agree more’ with Tamimi’s view that it was right and proper for Palestinians to murder Israelis, and a man from the UK Council of Mosques, who did not dissent.

Why are we paying a licence fee to be turned into accessories to a justification of mass murder?

I’m afraid the culture that produced ‘Londonistan’ is rather more sinister than the opportunism that the Director-General of Al-Arabiya TV offers as an explanation in the post below. Carol Gould wrote this prescient article last month:

‘The fundamental problem is that in the USA nobody, not even the most erudite and highly placed, understands that it is NOT just al Jazeera that is affecting world and Muslim opinion but the British and European news media, who powerfully influence the 15-odd million highly literate Muslims living in the UK and continental Europe. What, one may ask, does an irate columnist in a London tabloid have to say that could inspire an otherwise rational young man or woman to strap themselves with explosives or arm themselves with box cutters bent on bombing or hijacking Americans and Jews?

‘For the past five years in the UK AN Wilson; Brian Sewell; Polly Toynbee, the 'Daily Mirror' and its own John Pilger; 'The New Statesman' of 'Kosher Conspiracy' fame; Margaret Drabble; Richard Ingrams; Robert Fisk, Sir David Hare; Ahdaf Soueif; Faisal Bodi and many others including Kate Adie of BBC Radio 4 and Jon Snow of Channel Four have waged a biased and often vituperative campaign of journalistic vilification of the USA, Israel and the 'Zionist cabal' running America. Often their content is distorted and flawed; one fears the exaggerated claims of Zionist and American imperialism being promulgated across Britain and Europe by these journalists does indeed have a profound effect on impressionable young minds across the globe. I believe that a group of young Muslims -- we have already seen this in Brixton-based Richard Reid and Zaccarious Moussaoui -- being fed a daily dose of invective about Jews, Israelis and evil Americans will eventually commit acts to express their outrage.

‘The world wide web enables anyone to click onto a piece that suggests the United States is a rogue state (John Pilger in the July 4th 2002 edition of ‘The Daily Mirror’) and to an editorial by Faisal Bodi in ‘The Guardian’ (January 2001) that exhorts ‘Israel Simply Has no Right to Exist.‘ Virtually every day and evening, someone from an angry Muslim sect or pressure group is on TV or radio in the UK and Europe hosted by a grovelling anchor, ranting about American genocide and oppression and about the 'soiling' of Muslim lands when Americans set foot there. Very rarely do moderate Muslims, or those like Walid Shoebat, who admire the way Israel has risen form the ashes of Auschwitz to be a beacon of advancement and culture in the desert, have a voice in an increasingly anti-American and anti-Jewish Europe…

‘The head of Scotland Yard has expressed his despair that he believes 100 al Qaeda operatives are flourishing in Britain. I have met white, well-heeled citizens who have expressed enthusiasm for Hamas and who have said they wish more Jews and Americans would die in the next terror attacks. One somehow feels Tony Blair no longer possesses the power to deal with this situation, as an entire generation of young Muslims and indeed young Britons is being force-fed one viewpoint about the evil empire USA and its Zionist-apartheid supporters.'

In the Times today, Gerard Baker writes a terrific excoriation of the west’s enemy within:

‘Why do they hate us? But the “they” of my question are not the al-Qaeda slaughterers, the jihadis from Leeds and elsewhere and their sympathisers across Europe. I think we know by now why they hate us. The “they” of my question are the massed ranks of so many British opinion-formers. I don’t mean the perennially opportunist sort like the Galloways and the Kennedys. Nor do I mean the pure, certifiable lunatics who inhabit the ideological theme parks at the Socialist Worker and the editorial pages of The Guardian. I mean a sizeable chunk of serious, influential British opinion, from across the political spectrum, who act in a way that suggests they honestly think this country is the principal author of the bad things that happen to it.’

Baker then tears into the appalling cartoon by Peter Brookes published in the pages of the Times itself this week (the nearest the Times will get to apologising for this egregious editing error; see earlier post) which drew a moral equivalence between Islamic terrorism and US military action in Iraq. He then delivers this inspired piece of rhetoric:

‘Imagine this. Suppose we’d never invaded Iraq, and terrorists had blown up London in pursuit of their cause, what would the apologists have said about last week’s attacks? In fact we know exactly what they would have said because many of them did say it after al-Qaeda attacked the US on September 11 — long before any American or British soldier set foot in Afghanistan or Iraq.

‘They said it was because of our support for Israel and its “brutal occupation of Palestinian territory”, our complicity in the victimisation of Arabs from the Balfour Declaration to the ascent of the Jewish lobby in America. But what if there had never been an Israel and instead a Palestinian state existed peaceably in the heart of the Middle East, and the terrorists had still attacked us? What would the apologists have said then? They would have said, of course, that we were to blame for having abused the Arabs and Muslims generally for decades through our colonial ambitions and economic exploitation of Arabia and the broader Middle East.

‘And what if there had never been a British Empire and British occupation of Arab lands, and terrorists had still attacked us? Then it would have been the Crusades, and the long-standing ill-treatment of Muslims at the hands of deplorable Christian warriors. And what if there had never been a crusade, and they’d still attacked us? I’m stumped at this point to confect an answer, but I can guarantee that whatever it was that would have been said it would have been Britain’s fault.’

Gerard Baker (above) might well have been writing about Jonathan Steele, who in al Guardian employs that paper’s unique and award-winning formula of condescending and ineffably sanctimonious moral imbecility grounded in a vicious distortion of the facts to sanitise the genocidal killers of Hamas. Discussing the political situation with Salah al-Bardawil, chief columnist for al-Risala, the Hamas weekly, Steele writes:

‘The target of his anger stares him in the face daily. The high concrete walls of the Gush Katif settlement, with its gun towers and mine-strewn death strip, is less than 200 yards from his book-lined study. These are not random commuters at King's Cross but armed occupiers who had no hesitation in supporting their own government's use of violence against civilians, and only rebelled when Sharon chose to close the Gaza settlements. Hamas regularly hit the settlements with mortars and home-made rockets. When the Gaza withdrawal began to seem genuine early this year, Hamas declared a ceasefire, which included a halt to its suicide bombers going into Israel (this week's bombing in Netanya was carried out by another group, Islamic Jihad)...

‘It is not enough to clutch at the hope that, once in power, Hamas will be de-fanged. Hamas is starting a difficult internal debate over the terms on which it might negotiate with Israel. But to expect it to abandon its armed struggle before a peace agreement is foolish. Western governments that go on ostracising Hamas as a terrorist organisation and make vacuous calls on Abbas to "crack down on the militants" only disarm themselves. The "war on terror" rhetoric makes things harder, and the London attacks do not help to bring reason. But the need for even-handedness and cool western heads in the search for peace between Israel and the Palestinians has never been more urgent.’

Even more appallingly, Steele implies that while Londoners are not legitimate targets of terrorism, Israelis are because, far from being the innocent victims of genocidal murder, they are responsible for 'crimes' which deserve to be avenged:

'To respond by declaring a generalised "war on terror" or condemning "this assault on civilised values" obscures the problem and makes the search for solutions harder. Hamas - or the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine, to give its full name - denounced the London bombs within the first hours. They give both moral and pragmatic reasons. The victims were not legitimate targets - too remote to bear any responsibility for the crimes the bombers were avenging.'

At around the time readers were digesting Steele’s disgusting ‘even handedness’ over their hand-knitted muesli, his fledgling statesmen were venting their anger on a quite different target:

‘Palestinian Authority police and Hamas group militants clashed in fierce gun battles on Friday morning in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City. Two men believed to be passers-by were reportedly killed and some 25 were wounded. Earlier that morning PA police wounded six Hamas militants making their way to launch rockets at Israeli targets. Hundreds of civilians took to the streets to watch the fighting. Hamas militants set fire to a PA police station, as well as an armored vehicle and three jeeps of the police force. Mortar shelling and rocket fire continued throughout the morning.’

This gun battle followed a rocket attack by Hamas on a Jewish village inside Israel which killed a woman. Meanwhile, Hamas has reiterated what its armed struggle is intended to accomplish:

‘Hamas will not compromise on one inch of Greater Palestine, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar told an Italian newspaper earlier this week. Speaking to the Corriere Della Sera newspaper, al-Zahar said Hamas would "definitely not" be prepared for coexistence with Israel should the IDF retreat to its 1967 borders. “It can be a temporary solution, for a maximum of 5 to 10 years. But in the end Palestine must return to become Muslim, and in the long term Israel will disappear from the face of the earth.”’

No doubt the Guardian’s cool western heads would take that in their stride.

Diana West in the Washington Times identifies Britain’s mortal sickness:

‘Notice I didn't say "Islamists." Or "Islamofascists." Or "fundamentalist extremists." I've tried out such terms in the past, but I've come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so, because in their imprecision I think they allow us all to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islam — the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it "moderately" enables, or "extremistly" advances jihad — with the West. Am I right? Who's to say? The very topic of Islamization — for that is what is at hand, and very soon in Europe — is verboten...

‘In not discussing the roots of terror in Islam itself, in not learning about them, the multicultural clergy that shepherds our elites prevents us from having to do anything about them. This is key, because any serious action — stopping immigration from jihad-sponsoring nations, shutting down mosques that preach violence, expelling their imams, just for starters — means to renounce the multicultural creed. In the West, that's the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death — as it is for leaving Islam under Islamic law — the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs. Including extinction.

‘This is the lesson of the atrocities in London. It's unlikely the 21st-century will remember that this new Western crossroads for global jihad was once the home of Churchill, Piccadilly and Sherlock Holmes. Then again, who will notice? The BBC has retroactively purged its online bombing coverage of the word "terrorist;" the spokesman for the London police commissioner has declared that "Islam and terrorism simply don't go together," and within sight of a forensics team sifting through rubble, an Anglican priest urged his flock, as the Guardian reported, to "rejoice in the capital's rich diversity of cultures, traditions, ethnic groups and faiths." Just don't, he said, "name them as Muslims." Their faith renewed, Londoners soldier on.’

Dr Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, sounds a devastating warning about the desperate situation in Britain, where the left is doing everything it can to frustrate the sane and realistic approach which would enable the country finally to acknowledge the full dimensions of the threat that it faces. First he sets out the criminal indifference which led to the creation of ‘Londonistan’:

‘...largely unseen by the wider British public, a burgeoning militant Islamist subculture proliferated. London - "Londonistan" as the Islamists cheerfully began to term it - became a jihadist hub. The city played host to Islamist publishing houses, gatherings and newspapers: The Hamas monthly, Filastin al-Muslimah, was only one of many publications produced there. Individuals such as Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri and the Palestinian Abu Qutada preached support for the global jihad at regular gatherings in urban mosques. A recent British government report estimates between 10,000 and 15,000 supporters of radical Islamist groups resident in Britain by the end of the `90s.

'And from this fertile, unmarked ground, some of the best known names of the jihad have grown. The "shoe bomber" - Richard Reid, a convert to Islam radicalized by the fiery sermons preached at the Brixton Mosque in south London. Omar al-Sheikh, the killer of journalist Daniel Pearl, and the disaffected, brilliant son of Pakistani immigrants. Dhiren Barot, Nadeem Tarmohammed and Qaisar Shaffi - British citizens and Al-Qaida members currently on trial for plotting to attack major financial centers in United States cities. And, of course, Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British-born students of Omar Bakri Mohammed, who came to Tel Aviv via Gaza in 2003 and carried out the bombing of Mike's Place bar on the beachfront, killing three Israeli civilians.’

Yet the left/Islamist axis in Britain is intent on bamboozling the country into continuing this accommodation with terror:

'But the vital "paradigm shift" leading to wide-ranging action against radical Islamism has not taken place. Neither is it certain that it will happen now. The reason for this is because parallel to the actions of the radical Jihadists, a much broader, far-reaching effort at apologetics has taken place. This has created a strong lobby arguing for the retention of the ruinous policies of the `90s.

'The strange romance of parts of the European left with radical Islam is a much remarked-upon phenomenon of the current political scene. The response of the left/Islamist axis in Britain to the horrific events of last week is already becoming apparent. The Guardian newspaper is carrying a slew of op-eds from such luminaries as Tariq Ramadan, and also the UK-based Islamist Faisal Bodi, who seeks to blame the attack on British involvement in Iraq. Mayor Livingstone, who earlier this year hosted the Islamist Qatar-based, anti-Semitic Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in London, at the expense of London's taxpayers, is part of the problem.

'These elements, strongly represented in opinion-forming circles in the UK, will be doing their utmost in the weeks and months to come to cast the blame for the events of 7/7 everywhere except where it belongs. They will seek to portray all attempts to focus the discussion on the past folly of policies toward domestic and external radical Islam as "Islamophobic," and illegitimate. Consequently, the achievement of rational policy in the vital judicial, policing, intelligence and educational fields to ensure the defeat of this scourge is in the first instance a contest of political will. The prevention of a repeat of the terrible scenes witnessed last week in London may hinge on the outcome of this contest.’

Indeed, this is a defining moment not just for Britain but for the defence of the west.

In his statement to Parliament last Monday on the London bombings, Tony Blair referred to countries (or cities) which have been targeted in the past by what he called 'Islamic extremist terrorists'. He listed Madrid, Bali, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and New York. Yet he omitted Israel.
As Beyond Images points out:

‘Here are some facts about Islamic terrorism targeted against Israel:- • Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs, three of the five main Palestinian terrorist groups, are explicitly driven by Islamic principles (as they apply them) • Their “religious” worldview calls for the elimination of Israel as a nation-state (see Briefing 74, on Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin) • Together these three groups have carried out an intensive wave of suicide bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, car bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians since 2000 • In total, Israel has suffered over 21,000 acts of violence of all types since September 2000 • Over 1000 Israeli civilians have died in this onslaught (proportionately, that is the equivalent of over 9000 British citizens) • Between 1994 and 2004, Hamas alone carried out 42 suicide bombings, killing 446 Israeli men, women and children (See Beyond Images Briefing 78), and injuring and traumatising thousands more • Hamas means “Islamic resistance movement”'

Of course, Blair is well aware of the terrorism suffered by Israel. The problem is that he does not see this as intrinsic to the religious jihad against the west. He sees the war against Israel instead as a dispute over land. What he still does not grasp is that the dispute is indeed over land — not over creating a state of Palestine in the disputed territories, but a war of extermination waged since 1948 by an Arab world determined to ethnically cleanse the Jews from their own historic and reclaimed land so that it can be made Judenrein by its Arab and Muslim colonisers. This grievous error by Britain’s Prime Minister undermines his whole approach to the Middle East and has prompted such cardinal errors as suggesting that solving the Israel/Arab conflict would go a long way towards defusing Islamic terrorism, whereas the truth is that it is only be defeating Islamic terrorism that the Israel/Arab conflict will ever be solved.

An Arab journalist has expressed amazement — as might any sentient person — at the staggering phenomenon of ‘Londonistan’. Under the headline ‘Expel Extremism Today,’ Al-Arabiya TV Director-General Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed writes:

‘For over 10 years now, I myself and other Arab writers have warned against the dangers of the reckless handling of the extremism that is now spreading like a plague within the British community. It was never understood why British authorities gave refuge to suspicious characters previously involved in terrorist activities. Why would Britain grant asylum to Arabs who have been convicted of political crimes or religious extremism, or even sentenced to death? Not only were they admitted to this country, but they were also provided with accommodation, a monthly salary, and free legal advice for those who want to prosecute the British government.

‘The answer, I believe, is what... I call 'blind generosity.' This bizarre reasoning stuns individuals such as students who wish to establish careers abroad and whose [applications for British] citizenship are rejected. These people do not have criminal records like the others [to grant them entry]. Like many other diseases, extremism is a contagious one. A small dose of carriers can spread the infection like wildfire, establishing a community full of destructive thoughts and practices such as the horrific [bombing] in London.

‘The reason behind this [British] practice is the recklessness of internal British policies since the 1990s. This irresponsibility has been demonstrated by allowing extremists to enter the country – with the result being Thursday's attacks. [These attacks] were a crime that the majority of us anticipated, since leniency like this, and hatred like this, were bound to converge at some point. The British authority's leniency regarding fundamentalist fascism has allowed many, including Arab and Muslim intellectuals and journalists, to adopt ideologies that promote extremism and defend criminals such as bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi. The situation has escalated to the extent that Arab and Muslim intellects fear the repercussions of condemning extremists.

‘The battle we face is against the ideology, as opposed to against the terrorists themselves. The terrorist groups make the most of the concept of freedom of speech, as well as of the ability to promote such ideas to gain support. Such tolerance on behalf of the British government has allowed Arab and Muslim extremists to seek refuge in Britain, away from their own countries... Within a decade, they have established organizations, promoted their beliefs all over the world, and denounced others as infidels in mosques, schools, and the media, and have publicly called to enjoin battle. They have spread into the city of London, reaching communities that had no previous record or practice of extremism. The results were illustrated last Thursday.

‘So why has this happened? Until recently, London held the delusion that extremists would not target Britain, but only use it as a base, protecting their freedom as they worked against Arab and Islamic governments. For this reason, Britain was full of convicted [extremists] known for propagating their extremist ideologies. The time has come for British authorities to deal harshly with extremism, before complete chaos is unleashed onto British society. In the past, we talked about stopping them. Now, it is time to expel.’

The good news is that according to this Pew survey, support for suicide bombings, Islamist violence and Osama bin Laden appears to be falling across much of the Muslim and Arab world. The bad news is that it is still huge in terms of numbers.

‘The survey found that in Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia 15% or fewer said that suicide bombings and other acts of violence against civilian targets in defence of Islam could be justified; the figure in Morocco last year was 40%. In Pakistan, only one in four - 25% - took the view that suicide bombings could be justified, a sharp drop from 41% last year. In Lebanon, which has been the victim of several recent bombing attacks, 39% now regard acts of terrorism as often or sometimes justified compared to 73% in 2002.

‘The one notable exception to the trend was Jordan, where a majority - 57% - said suicide bombings and violence were justifiable in defence of Islam. Muslims in the surveyed countries were divided on suicide bombings in Iraq. Nearly half in Lebanon and Jordan, and 56% in Morocco, said suicide bombings against westerners in Iraq were justifiable, but substantial majorities in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia took the opposite view.’

The BBC excises the word 'terrorist' from its lexicon because this is a 'value judgment', but then publishes this:

'Sharon vows vengeance on bombers'

'Israeli leader Ariel Sharon has ordered his forces to shatter a Palestinian militant group, after a suicide bomb killed four Israelis..."I ordered the defence establishment to increase our activity and to do as much harm as possible to the leadership of the Islamic Jihad terror organisation," Mr Sharon said in a speech near Tel Aviv."We will not leave them alone until they stop these murderous acts." '

The purpose of this operation is therefore to destroy the source of this terror in order to prevent more Israelis from being murdered. What Sharon has ordered is therefore an operation to defend the lives of his citizens from further attack. Yet the BBC describes this as vengeance In BBC land, it seems, Jews aren't people like everyone else and entitled to defend themselves from being slaughtered like everyone else. Instead, they do vengeance, a stock jibe straight from the Jew-haters' manual.

Isn't it about time that someone prosecuted the BBC for incitement to racial hatred?

Harry's Place asks a fascinating question:

'Why is the Guardian employing an extremist Islamist?

The item refers to Dilpazier Aslam, a trainee journalist on the Guardian, who yesterday wrote a column entitled: 'We rock the boat; Today's Muslims aren't prepared to ignore injustice.' It was the usual repellent Guardian stuff about how the London bombings were caused by Britain's involvement in Iraq. So no surprises there. Except some sharp-eyed folk spotted something else. As Harry's Place says:

'I should have googled his name. Scott Burgess did, and discovered that before writing for the Guardian, he wrote for Khilifah.com, a Hizb'ut Tahrir supporting website, which calls for a world Caliphate. Dilpazier thinks that "we will have to run an Islamic state which must lead the world, economically, militarily and politically" and that "the establishment of Khilafah is our only solution, to fight fire with fire, the state of Israel versus the Khilafah State". A Caliphate, of course, would be a theocratic totalitarian state. Strangely, these were not views which he expressed in the Guardian piece. Perhaps Dilpazier didn't mention them in his job interview.'

The Guardian lost its way long ago. But now it has surely put itself beyond the pale.

Readers of this site will be familiar with the work done by Stephen Hayes in bringing to public attention the voluminous circumstantial evidence linking Saddam to al Qaeda, which has gone almost totally unreported in Britain. Now Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn have unearthed some startling new information about this incendiary connection:

‘There could hardly be a clearer case - of the ongoing revelations and the ongoing denial -- than in the 13 points below, reproduced verbatim from a "Summary of Evidence" prepared by the U.S. government in November 2004. This unclassified document was released by the Pentagon in late March 2005. It details the case for designating an Iraqi member of al Qaeda, currently detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an "enemy combatant."

‘1. From 1987 to 1989, the detainee served as an infantryman in the Iraqi Army and received training on the mortar and rocket propelled grenades.
2. A Taliban recruiter in Baghdad convinced the detainee to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in 1994.
3. The detainee admitted he was a member of the Taliban.
4. The detainee pledged allegiance to the supreme leader of the Taliban to help them take over all of Afghanistan.
5. The Taliban issued the detainee a Kalishnikov rifle in November 2000.
6. The detainee worked in a Taliban ammo and arms storage arsenal in Mazar-Es-Sharif organizing weapons and ammunition.
7. The detainee willingly associated with al Qaida members.
8. The detainee was a member of al Qaida.
9. An assistant to Usama Bin Ladin paid the detainee on three separate occasions between 1995 and 1997.
10. The detainee stayed at the al Farouq camp in Darwanta, Afghanistan, where he received 1,000 Rupees to continue his travels.
11. From 1997 to 1998, the detainee acted as a trusted agent for Usama Bin Ladin, executing three separate reconnaissance missions for the al Qaeda leader in Oman, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
12. In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars.
13. Detainee was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Khudzar, Pakistan, in July 2002.

‘Interesting. What's more interesting: The alleged plot was to have taken place in August 1998, the same month that al Qaeda attacked two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And more interesting still: It was to have taken place in the same month that the Clinton administration publicly accused Iraq of supplying al Qaeda with chemical weapons expertise and material.’

Once again, this latest disclosure has either been ignored by the US media or, where it has been reported, downplayed and all but dismissed. As Hayes says, it is possible that this account has been exaggerated or is plain wrong. But not to report it, in the circumstances, is an act of censorship to support an assertion – that Saddam had no connection with al Qaeda – that underpins the prevalent media and intellectual hostility towards the war in Iraq and George W Bush and Tony Blair. It is an assertion that has only been maintained by suppressing evidence which, although far from conclusive, all leads overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. And as Hayes goes on to say, much more in this vein has emerged since the fall of Saddam:

‘We know about this relationship not from Bush administration assertions but from internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) documents recovered in Iraq after the war--documents that have been authenticated by a U.S. intelligence community long hostile to the very idea that any such relationship exists.

‘We know from these IIS documents that beginning in 1992 the former Iraqi regime regarded bin Laden as an Iraqi Intelligence asset. We know from IIS documents that the former Iraqi regime provided safe haven and financial support to an Iraqi who has admitted to mixing the chemicals for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. We know from IIS documents that Saddam Hussein agreed to Osama bin Laden's request to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state-run television. We know from IIS documents that a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden stayed for more than two weeks at a posh Baghdad hotel as the guest of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

‘We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

‘All of this is new--information obtained since the fall of the Hussein regime. And yet critics of the Iraq war and many in the media refuse to see it.’

They are on the wrong side of history – and history will eventually judge them.

I print below an email message I have received from a Muslim. I do so because I believe this writer to be expressing views shared by many, if not most, mainstream Muslims in Britain, the kind who would be utterly horrified by terrorism and are therefore considered to be ‘moderate’.

'I am a Muslim and a regular reader of the Daily Mail. I much enjoy reading your columns. Today, on the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Serbia, I ponder to think what on Earth lead to such hatred against a minority group. What twisted mind could have incited it?

'Then I read your article ('No Surrender', Daily Mail, July 12, p 12) and found my answer. My theory is that a continual drip, drip of anti-Islamic propaganda fed to the Serbian population - much the same that I read in your article today - lead to the vicious pogroms against our community and the disaster that befell the Muslims of Srebrenica. This is the same propaganda which says that Islam is a violent religion, that Muslims are not integrated, that they condone violence and that they do not denounce it and take action and so on. The integration argument was employed particularly against the Jews of Poland who comprised nearly a third of all Poles and who were virtually wiped out overnight during the second World War.

'I find your stance on integration and denunciations particularly intriguing coming from someone who cannot make up her mind whether she is British or Israeli. After all, you spectacularly failed to answer a question on BBC TV, coming from a fellow Jew, as to who you would support if there was a conflict between Britain and Israel. You demand that British Muslims account for actions taken in the name of Islam. You should look nearer home. Israel was created (from stolen Arab land) in the name of all the Jews in the world. It is written into Israel's constitution. You should know. Every single atrocity carried out by the Jewish state against her Muslim neighbours since - the continual land theft, the massacres in refugee camps like Sabra and Shatila, the denial that Palestinians even exist - has, is and will be carried out in the name of Judaism and all the Jews in the world. Yet I have not heard any denunciations coming from yourself nor I have heard you call for British Jews to denounce these things.

'I do not think that British Jews, many of whom carry Israeli passports, should have to account for Israel any more than British Muslims have to account for Al-Qaeda. I do not think that Judaism is an inherently violent religion despite every evil committed in it's name by Israel. I do not think that Jews are any different to others even if the only Jewish state in the world is a military monster, a pariah which is becoming increasingly unpopular. I just find it ironic that you of all people demand that British Muslims - who have just a British passport and are truly British - apologise for being the victims of bombings in our own cities as a result of policies in Iraq which we stood against. People are rightly angry at what has happened in the city that I love and in which I live. But I wonder what they would think if London - like Baghdad - was bombed by a coalition which left over 100,000 people dead, or if Londoners were forced to live in refugee camps because some Jews proclaimed London as their holy land and that henceforth, no non-Jew would be allowed to live there. Is it inconceivable that people would be angry? Is it outrageous to think that some people would be driven by revenge to take action? Londoners are not stupid. If were indeed attacked by Al-Qaeda then we know exactly why it happened.

'When the IRA bombed London, there was no commentary about Christianity being a religion of the sword. We sat down with the IRA and we reached an agreement. If we sat down with Al-Qaeda I have no doubt that we would find that they too have similar concerns to the IRA. I think they would tell us that if We stopped meddling with their countries then they would stop meddling in ours (or rather, my country since I do not know your allegiance). I think however, that the main reason why you would be very uncomfortable with a dialogue with Al-Qaeda is because the British people would find out that - to adapt a phrase coined by Bill Clinton - it's Palestine, stupid. Iraq will eventually become a non-issue and we are now hearing leaked plans for a withdrawal of British troops, but the Palestine issue has been a festering sore ever since western powers gave that country away to create a Jewish state in 1948. Israel has created instability not only in the Middle East, but has managed to drag the rest of the world into the conflict. It called for war in Iraq and is now calling for action against Syria and Iran. It is a liability. This realisation by the British people is what you really fear.

'Furthermore, the excuse that young Muslims are somehow inflamed by radical preachers is a convenient excuse used by many to detract from the real causes of discontent. Would-be Al-Qaeda operatives are just as likely to regularly attend mosques as zionists are likely to regularly attend synagogues. Everyone knows that our mosques are finding it difficult to retain youngsters. Like many other religious establishments, our mosques are mainly staffed with conservative establishment figures who have little clue about contemporary culture. Instead, you will find young Muslims in our universities, hospitals, schools, civil service and every other place where Muslims have been a part of Britain for some time now. They don't need radical preachers to inflame them, as the policies of Bush and Blair are doing a nice enough job thank you very much. Commentary of the sort they read in the Daily Mail written by you today will already add to their grievances and sense of injustice. In this, you and Al-Qaeda share one aim, as the aim of Al-Qaeda is also to cause resentment against the Muslim community and divide them from other communities. It is fortunate therefore, that people will not fall for this trick and despite the best efforts of Al-Qaeda and yours truly, will remain united in the face of terror.’

To this reader, and to other Muslims reading this website who may think something similar or worse, I would just say this. It would be futile to try here to correct the distortions and inappropriate comparisons contained in these remarks, which I’m sure were written in the very sincere belief that they are all true and entirely valid. To try to do so would be to pit oneself against a whole culture which misrepresents both the past and the present and insists that falsehood is truth.

While mainstream Muslims persist in subscribing to such a morally warped victim culture constructed on untruth, error, denial of responsibility and, in particular, gross ignorance and prejudice on the subject of Israel and the Jews, they will alas continue to provide, however inadvertently and however much they may deny this in genuine horror, the sea in which terror swims. It cannot be stressed too much that the hatred that fuels Islamic terrorism does not derive solely from religious texts but is incited and inflamed by lies and distortions about the history and present actions of the west and above all about the Jews and about Israel — a world-view based on a wholesale denial and inversion of the truth which has poisoned the minds of millions.

Truth and lies are at the very heart of this terrible problem facing us all. The sense of grievance and injustice to which this reader refers is indeed very real. But it is the grievance of a people who turn their own misdeeds into their own victimology, thus making rational discourse all but impossible. The tragedy is that this reader and I undoubtedly have much in common — but what divides us is unbridgeable, unless the Muslim community starts to unpick the truth from the lies they have been told for so long.

A courageous and truthful Muslim, Mansoor Ijaz, has got the point about the London bombings:

‘This is why the London bombings represent a milestone for moderate Muslims. They can either stand up and fight Islam’s radical fringes from within or sit haplessly by while the west does it for them. Verbal condemnations and choreographed press releases against violent terrorist acts, as Britain’s Muslim leaders produced last Thursday, are no longer sufficient. Real action is needed – and fast...

‘First, forbid the use of mosques and other religious institutions to discharge bigotry and hatred. As France has done already, Britain should require each imam to pass minimum competency exams. Radical preaching must be replaced with knowledge of how the Koran relates to daily life within Britain’s secular traditions. Any imam failing to comply should be shown politely to the departure lounge at Heathrow airport. Those that pass must accept their citizenship responsibilities to become resources for authorities seeking data on criminal elements residing in Britain’s Muslim communities.

‘Second, open Britain’s Islamic charities to greater financial scrutiny to identify those that fund terrorism. Charities should be asked to limit foreign donations to 10 per cent of operating budgets and certify that the remainder of their donors are British citizens who give from taxable – and transparent – income sources. Stopping the flow of money is central to dismantling al-Qaeda’s franchise strategy, where one or two foreign “masterminds” oversee terrorist attacks with foreign money and logistical support.

‘Third, form community watch groups made up of Muslim citizens to reclaim Islam from the terrorists and committed to contributing useful information to the authorities. Britain’s tolerant political environment has transformed it into a haven for militant Islam. Communities joining together to compile and analyse data on Muslim fanatics for use by British authorities in official proceedings is the best way for moderate Muslims to prevent the state’s anti-terror apparatus from appearing biased or being used inappropriately. It would also be the surest sign that British Muslims take their citizenship as seriously as their religion.

‘It is hypocritical for Muslims living in western societies to demand civil rights enshrined by the state and then excuse their inaction against terrorists hiding among them on grounds of belonging to a borderless Islamic community. It is time to stand up and be counted as model citizens before the terror consumes us all.’

Daniel Pipes points out sharply that stalwart Britain is actually far more hapless in the fight against terror than is perfidious France:

‘U.K.-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain, and the United States. Many governments – Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Spanish, French, and American – have protested London’s refusal to shut down its Islamist terrorist infrastructure or extradite wanted operatives. In frustration, Egyptian president Husni Mubarak publicly denounced Britain for “protecting killers.” One American security group has called for Britain to be listed as a terrorism-sponsoring state.

‘Counterterrorism specialists disdain the British. Roger Cressey calls London “easily the most important jihadist hub in Western Europe.” Steven Simon dismisses the British capital as “the Star Wars bar scene” of Islamic radicals. More brutally, an intelligence official said of last week’s attacks: “The terrorists have come home. It is payback time for...an irresponsible policy.” While London hosts terrorists, Paris hosts a top-secret counterterrorism center, code-named Alliance Base, whose existence was just revealed by the Washington Post, where six major Western governments since 2002 share intelligence and run counterterrorism operations. (The latter makes it unique.)’

France has banned the hijab even though two French hostages were held with the demand that this ban be rescinded. By contrast, English judges ruled that schools must permit girls to wear the jilbab, which covers them from head to toe, against the strenuous opposition of the head teacher in the case who protested that this left her powerless to protect her pupils from intimidation by extremists. Pipes concludes:

‘What lies behind these contrary responses? The British have seemingly lost interest in their heritage while the French hold on to theirs; even as the British ban fox hunting, the French ban hijabs. The former embraced multiculturalism, the latter retain a pride in their historic culture. This contrast in matters of identity makes Great Britain the Western country most vulnerable to the ravages of radical Islam whereas France, for all its political failings, has retained a sense of self that may yet see it through.’

He’s right.

I was cheered up today by reading two articles which put truth into the public domain and shredded the morally and cerebrally challenged among us who are currently pumping out lies. The first was by David Aaronovitch, who wrote in the Times:

‘Yesterday I read the categorical “invading Iraq clearly made us a target” from someone who continued, “it diverted our attention and resources from the very people that we should have been fighting — al-Qaeda”, but who just after 9/11 argued that if the US starts bombing Afghanistan, young Muslims will almost certainly rally behind the Taleban and Osama bin Laden in a new jihad. In other words Iraq diverted our resources away from something they shouldn’t have been dedicated to in the first place, because that first thing would lead to a new jihad… n November 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, 54 people were killed in a series of bombings in Istanbul. We remember the death of the British consul-general, which was described yet again as payback for Iraq. We forget the attacks on the Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues a few days earlier. What exactly was that payback for? Attending bar mitzvahs, perhaps. ‘In fact a group called the Abu Hafz al-Masri Brigades in claiming responsibility made a series of demands on the Turkish Government, should it wish to avoid future attacks. “Listen to us, you criminal,” the statement began emolliently, “the cars of death will not stop until you concede to our demands . . .”, which included the freeing of unspecified prisoners from Guantanamo and everywhere else and stopping the war against Muslims. Demand No 3, however, was for the Turks to “purify all Islamic land from the filth of the Jews and Americans, including Jerusalem and Kashmir”. Jews out of Kashmir is quite a tall order, since you’d have to find them first. ‘A year earlier a whole lot of German and French tourists were blown up outside the synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia. A few months later a Spanish restaurant and a Jewish community centre were blown up in Morocco. The chap who did it had been trained by bin Laden in Afghanistan. The radicals have blown up Shia mosques in Pakistan, before, after and during Iraq. They have blown up Iraqi Shias for being apostates. Closer to home, in spring 2003, two boys, one from Derby and one from Hounslow, travelled all the way to Gaza and then to Israel so they could blow the arms off a French waitress in an English bar in Tel Aviv. What does all this tell us? First, that if they aren’t blowing us up, then they’ll be blowing up someone else. And you don’t get to choose who. Secondly, who or what they blow up is largely a matter of what’s available. Jews anywhere, Americans after that, Shia next and Brits probably a distant fourth. Africans for fun.’

The second was by Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in the Mirror:

‘We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are. The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way...

‘It is a big mistake to believe this is an assault on "our" values or "our" way of life. It is, rather, an assault on all civilisation. I know perfectly well there are people thinking, and even saying, that Tony Blair brought this upon us by his alliance with George Bush. A word of advice to them: try and keep it down, will you? Or wait at least until the funerals are over. And beware of the non-sequitur: you can be as opposed to the Iraq operation as much as you like, but you can't get from that "grievance" to the detonating of explosives at rush hour on London buses and tubes. Don't even try to connect the two. By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?’

Alas — the wicked and stupid psychotic megaphone was blasting out on the very next page to Aaronovitch’s article in the shape of a truly shocking cartoon by Peter Brookes (cartoon gallery). On the left is a hooded Islamic terrorist with his hand resting on a bomb bearing the legend ‘indiscriminate killer aimed at urban centre’. On the right is a US general with his hand resting on a bomb bearing the legend ‘indiscriminate killer aimed at urban centre’. Above both is the rubric: ‘Spot the Difference’. So the perpetrators of the London massacre are morally equivalent to America’s defence of the free world! And in the Times, too, which actually supports the US in this great fight!

Meanwhile the BBC continues to do its considerable bit to aid and abet the war against the west. Not only has it decided that terrorism does not exist, but current affairs programme after programme seeks to minimise or excuse Islamic terrorism and blame the west instead. Apparently, BBC Radio's Any Questions this Friday is putting George Galloway on its panel. No doubt if Any Questions had been broadcasting during World War Two, it would have had Oswald Mosley on. And as Tom Gross pointed out in the Jerusalem Post, the BBC has reported the most outlandish Islamic propaganda:

‘In its round-up of world reactions, BBC online was also quick to highlight the views of conspiracy theorists. The very first article listed by the BBC started by quoting Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani saying Israel was behind the London attacks. It was followed by a commentary on Iranian state radio explicitly blaming the Mossad.’

Thus the BBC is helping incite Muslim grievances based on gross untruths by giving credibility and the oxygen of publicity to those untruths. We pay our licence fee for this treachery. What has happened to the BBC chairman and governors? Are they still alive – or are they perhaps in a persistent vegetative state?

The BBC's censorhip of the 't' word gets worse and worse. In his statement to the Commons today, the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to terrorism. BBC Online's account of this speech excised those references almost entirely, with only one reference in a quote to 'the moment of terror striking'. But whereas Mr Blair said:

'It seems probable that the attack was carried out by Islamist extremist terrorists, of the kind who over recent years have been responsible for so many innocent deaths in Madrid, Bali, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt and Morocco, of course in New York on September 11, but in many other countries too'

the BBC's version reads:

'Those responsible for killing 52 and injuring more than 700, probably Islamic extremists, would be hunted down.'

Mr Blair also said:

'Together, we will ensure that though terrorists can kill, they will never destroy the way of life we share and which we value, and which we will defend with the strength of belief and conviction so that it is to us and not to the terrorists, that victory will belong.'

But of course the BBC could not report these words because its Producer Guidelines forbid it from naming the particular threat that the Prime Minister has identified.

Many commented on the fact that, on the day of the London bombings, the BBC referred over and over again to these acts as terrorism and to the perpetrators as terrorists. This was in striking contrast to its refusal to use the term terrorist when reporting terrorism in Israel. When a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Bloomsbury, it seemed, the perpetrator was a terrorist but when a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Jerusalem the perpetrator was a ‘militant’ or even ‘fighter’.

Now, however, it seems that the BBC has had second thoughts and no longer considers what happened last Thursday to be unarguably an example of terrorism. Its news reports are either putting the dreaded ‘t’ word into inverted commas — making it someone else’s contested definition — or removing it completely. Thus the terrorists have been upgraded to militants here:

‘At least 49 people died in the London blasts, blamed on al-Qaeda militants.’

Harry’s Place produces evidence that in two separate reports the word terrorist was originally used but was then removed from later versions altogether. Meanwhile the Beeb’s World Affairs Editor John Simpson calls the perpetrators something quite different again:

‘Now that the bombs have exploded, and thousands of newspaper pages and entire days of air time have been devoted to the horror of it all, and to the poor, decent people who are dead and missing, and to the misguided criminals responsible, perhaps we can stand back from it all and catch our breath.’

So people who set out to murder as many innocent people as possible in the furtherance of the fanatical cause of religious domination were merely ‘misguided’, and their actions simply ‘criminal’! Clearly, in Simpson’s mind they would hardly even qualify for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Which makes the BBC’s Producer Guidelines all the more notable, since they sternly inform staff:

‘We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.’

But ‘misguided criminals’ is a quite staggering value judgment. In the warped moral universe of the BBC, it seems, a value judgment is not a value judgment when it downplays acts of depravity, only when it calls such an act by its proper name. For the refusal to use the word terrorism is not a display of editorial objectivity — quite the contrary. It is a conscious acceptance of the morally degraded nostrum that terrorism is a subjective term, because ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’. But this is not so. Terrorism is the deliberate killing or infliction of harm upon innocent people, in order to inflict terror upon wider populations to achieve through violence political ends which cannot be achieved by lawful means. The BBC’s refusal to use this word in any circumstances means only one thing — that it has decided that terrorism does not exist but is merely a matter of subjective opinion. This is a highly ideological position which denies the very existence of a particular activity — and in doing so not only downplays the nature and significance of an act of terror, but correspondingly implicitly inflates and distorts the nature of any act of self-defence against it which becomes in such a vacuum an act of aggression.

No wonder the BBC is institutionally hostile to the war against terror. It’s a war against a phenomenon which apparently does not exist.

The Guardian reports that the parish priest of the church which stands 30 yards away from where the number 30 bus was blown up in London last week said in his sermon yesterday, in which he urged the congregation to rejoice in the capital's rich diversity of cultures, traditions, ethnic groups and faiths:

‘There is one small practical thing that we can all do. We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.’

Would this priest have said of the IRA bombing campaign : There is one small practical thing that we can all do. We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Irish’?

No time to analyse or respond to most of the great tsunami of media coverage in the aftermath of last Thursday’s London bombings. A few mentions, though, of some of the more outstanding or egregious candidates for praise or shame.

In the former category, Nick Cohen in the Observer lays into the vicious and delusional myopia of those who said from the moment the Twin Towers were hit that America ‘had it coming’ to them and following last week’s London atrocities have merely added Britain as the other nation to blame for its own atrocity:

‘In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought. All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him...

‘The only plausible excuse for 11 September was that it was a protest against America's support for Israel. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden's statements revealed that he was obsessed with the American troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and had barely said a word about Palestine. After the Bali bombings, the conventional wisdom was that the Australians had been blown to pieces as a punishment for their government's support for Bush. No one thought for a moment about the Australian forces which stopped Indonesian militias rampaging through East Timor, a small country Indonesia had invaded in 1975 with the backing of the US. Yet when bin Laden spoke, he said it was Australia's anti-imperialist intervention to free a largely Catholic population from a largely Muslim occupying power which had bugged him.

‘East Timor was a great cause of the left until the Australians made it an embarrassment. So, too, was the suffering of the victims of Saddam, until the tyrant made the mistake of invading Kuwait and becoming America's enemy. In the past two years in Iraq, UN and Red Cross workers have been massacred, trade unionists assassinated, school children and aid workers kidnapped and decapitated and countless people who happened to be on the wrong bus or on the wrong street at the wrong time paid for their mistake with their lives.’

Cohen is excellent at savagely deconstructing the moral idiocy of his comrades on the left, whose position on the war on terror has made a total mockery of everything for which they purport to stand and which, in the fullness of time, will be seen to have wrecked what was left of their principles as surely as the blind support for Stalin exhibited by a previous generation.

Thank goodness some commentators get the point, even if they are on the other side of the world. A very sound analysis in The Weekly Australian on what this thing is really all about cuts to the chase:

‘This is a terrorist attack, but the conflict is not really a war against terrorism. Its sources lie in religious fundamentalism and an ideological perversion within Islam. The enemy is not a nation but a global movement embedded within religion and this explains its formidable and elusive nature. It is a civil war within Islam that runs from Morocco to Indonesia, with its epicentre in Saudi Arabia. It is not a clash of civilisations but a crisis within one great civilisation. The geopolitical aims of the jihadists are vast: the overthrow of moderate Muslim governments, the liquidation of Israel, the removal of US influence from the Gulf and the Middle East and the strategic eclipse of the West. Bin Laden declared after September11 that the world was divided "into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels". He says every Muslim has an obligation to take up arms. Like all political madmen, it is the purity of bin Laden's extremism that attracts fresh recruits and disarms Western opinion because it finds such extremism so incomprehensible.’

That last phrase might be a kind way of explaining the thinking processes of Sir Simon Jenkins, who proclaimed in the Sunday Times:

‘The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident...’

Not many take quite such a sanguine view of the world war that is raging. Victor Davis Hanson understands the shrewd calibration being made by the jihadists to strike an infernal balance between terrorising a population and motivating them to all-out war:

‘Train bombings in Madrid and bus explosions in London, like the carnage in Iraq, are preferable, since they are enough to terrify and demoralize the Westerner but not quite enough to knock sense into him that only military resistance and victory will save his civilization. So the attacks will never quite be of such a stature to convince Western voters that one more such explosion will destroy their societies. The trick is instead to wage war insidiously, incrementally, and stealthily to avoid an overwhelming response. A cooling-off period in between 9/11 and 7/7 in which Western apologists, pacifists, and Islamist sympathizers go to work is essential for the terror to continue.’

Thus a society is de-moralised, in every sense of the word, an essential precondition for weakening it to the point where it can finally be finished off. We can see much of that demoralisation around us, and it is a moot point whether it will triumph in Britain over the resolution displayed by a previous generation. It’s a hard thing to say, but the heroic Blitz spirit evoked by memories of World War Two – and which was unquestionable – came very late in the day, since the predominant mood in Britain during the 1930s and indeed even after war was declared was support for appeasement, a pervasive conservative isolationism that underestimated the threat posed by Hitler until it was almost too late.

The similarities with today’s mood in Britain are very striking. Yet now the stakes are as high and maybe even higher. Efraim Halevi, the former head of Mossad, warns in the Jerusalem Post of what we need to do to win this war for civilisation:

‘There will be supreme tests of leadership in this unique situation and people will have to trust the wisdom and good judgment of those chosen to govern them. The executives must be empowered to act resolutely and to take every measure necessary to protect the citizens of their country and to carry the combat into whatever territory the perpetrators and their temporal and spiritual leaders are inhabiting. The rules of combat must be rapidly adjusted to cater to the necessities of this new and unprecedented situation, and international law must be rewritten in such a way as to permit civilization to defend itself. Anything short of this invites disaster and must not be allowed to happen. The aim of the enemy is not to defeat western civilization but to destroy its sources of power and existence, and to render it a relic of the past. It does not seek a territorial victory or a regime change; it wants to turn western civilization into history and will stop at nothing less than that.’

The British government, however, has seemed remarkably happy to help this process along. The New York Times (even) ran a valuable and well-informed story on the astounding laxness and indifference to terror that have turned Britain’s capital into ‘Londonistan’:

‘For a decade, the city has been a crossroads for would-be terrorists who used it as a home base, where they could raise money, recruit members and draw inspiration from the militant messages… Among them were terrorists involved in attacks in Madrid, Casablanca, Saudi Arabia, Israel and in the Sept. 11 plot. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man charged in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, the convicted shoe-bomber, both prayed at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. The mosque's former leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached violence for years before the authorities arrested him in April 2004. Although Britain has passed a series of antiterrorist and immigration laws and made nearly 800 arrests since Sept. 11, 2001, critics have charged that its deep tradition of civil liberties and protection of political activists have made the country a haven for terrorists. The British government has drawn particular criticism from other countries over its refusal to extradite terrorism suspects.

'For years, there was a widely held belief that Britain's tolerance helped stave off any Islamic attacks at home. But the anger of London's militant clerics turned on Britain after it offered unwavering support for the American-led invasion of Iraq. On Thursday morning, an attack long foreseen by worried counterterrorism officials became a reality. "The terrorists have come home," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe, who works often with British officials. "It is payback time for a policy that was, in my opinion, an irresponsible policy of the British government to allow these networks to flourish inside Britain."'

Now, a courageous Muslim has spoken out against the British Muslim community’s state of denial as well as its tacit and not so tacit support of the terror in its midst:

‘Tariq Al-Humayd, editor-in-chief of London-based Al-Sharq Al Awsat (The Middle East), claimed that collections were frequently solicited in London's Arab neighborhoods for terrorist causes in the guise of charities. In a strongly worded editorial, he said that those enjoying the freedom of life in Britain had a "responsibility" to scrutinize such collections carefully, and if necessary prevent them from taking place. "In London, we have seen, and are seeing, the money being collected in the streets, and the conventions under various titles, and everyone is inciting jihad in our Arab countries and cursing the land of unbelief in which they live," he wrote. "When you express amazement [at this], they tell you that this is freedom. Has freedom no responsibility? No one answers." Mr. Al-Humayd added: "When you tell them, 'Stop being so tolerant of the incitement that comes from your own country, from your skies, and from your Internet' ... they turn away. And what happened? The terror struck London, indiscriminately. ... For the sake of freedom of all of us, stop the ones who are attacking our freedom."'

Mr. Al-Humayd might address similar sentiments to those brand leaders of the quisling tendency, Associated Press and the BBC. AP distinguished itself by putting out two gross falsehoods within a short time of each other. The first was a totally false story that Britain had given Israel advance notice of the London bombings before they happened. This turned out to be totally untrue, but not before it had sent a ‘world Jewish conspiracy’ story round the globe. Then it put out a report of Tony Blair’s remarks on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme where he made some observations about the root causes of terrorism, in which it invented a comment about Israel and the Palestinians which he did not make. This is what he actually said:

‘As well as dealing with the consequences of this - trying to protect ourselves as much as any civil society can - you have to try to pull it up by its roots… Ultimately what we now know, if we didn't before, is that where there is extremism, fanaticism or acute and appalling forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent.’

And this is what AP put out:

‘That meant boosting understanding between people of difference religions, helping people in the Middle East see a path to democracy and easing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, he said.’

But Blair hadn’t said a word about Israel and the Palestinians. Subsequently, AP issued a correction to this end – but not before the lie had reverberated around the world, having been incorporated into many staff-bylined press reports of Blair’s speech and drawn angry and bewildered responses from Israel to the implication that Blair was apparently blaming the London bomb on their own conflict. No doubt these two errors reflect the belief at AP that wherever terror occurs, the Jews are somehow behind it.

Meanwhile, on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week this morning, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner -- who was shot by Al-Qaeda terrorists last year -- delivered himself of the following apercus:

•that what the Wahabis found ‘offensive’ about the west were its policies in Muslim countries and its ‘harassment’ of suspected Islamists in Britain and Europe
• that it was extraordinary that they had panted a bomb in Edgware Road since this was a centre of Muslim population
• that if Islamists who supported terrorism in London had realised London was such a multicultural place they would no longer support it, because the real target was the government not the millions of British people who had opposed the Iraq war
• and that the bombings were ‘doubly tough for Britain’s Muslims…it’s more of a blow for them than for everyone else’ – to which another guest on the show, the Culture Secretary the Rt Hon Tessa Jowell, replied fervently: ‘That’s absolutely right; absolutely right’.

Presenter Andrew Marr saw no reason to point out, for example, that what the Wahabis found principally offensive about the west was that it existed; or that the bomb was not placed in Edgware Road but on a tube train deep below it; that just perhaps it might not be entirely appropriate either to murder government ministers or those British people who had supported the Iraq war; and that the people for whom these mass murders were ‘more of a blow than for everyone else’ might just have been the families of the murdered, rather than adherents of the religion in whose name this depravity was committed.

They just don’t get it, do they. How many more thousands will have to die before they do.

For those who still don't get the point, Amir Taheri in the Times provides a jihad primer which spells out exactly why the London atrocities were carried out:

'The ideological soil in which al Qaeda, and the many groups using its brand name, grow was described by one of its original masterminds, the Pakistani Abul-Ala al-Maudoodi more than 40 years ago. It goes something like this: when God created mankind He made all their bodily needs and movements subject to inescapable biological rules but decided to leave their spiritual, social and political needs and movements largely subject to their will. Soon, however, it became clear that Man cannot run his affairs the way God wants. So God started sending prophets to warn man and try to goad him on to the right path. A total of 128,000 prophets were sent, including Moses and Jesus. They all failed. Finally, God sent Muhammad as the last of His prophets and the bearer of His ultimate message, Islam. With the advent of Islam all previous religions were “abrogated” (mansukh), and their followers regarded as “infidel” (kuffar). The aim of all good Muslims, therefore, is to convert humanity to Islam, which regulates Man’s spiritual, economic, political and social moves to the last detail.

'But what if non-Muslims refuse to take the right path? Here answers diverge. Some believe that the answer is dialogue and argument until followers of the “abrogated faiths” recognise their error and agree to be saved by converting to Islam. This is the view of most of the imams preaching in the mosques in the West. But others, including Osama bin Laden, a disciple of al-Maudoodi, believe that the Western-dominated world is too mired in corruption to hear any argument, and must be shocked into conversion through spectacular ghazavat (raids) of the kind we saw in New York and Washington in 2001, in Madrid last year, and now in London.'

And to those who bang on about the Iraq terrorism recruitment agency, Taheri points out that this is a category error:

'It is, of course, possible, as many in the West love to do, to ignore the strategic goal of the Islamists altogether and focus only on their tactical goals. These goals are well known and include driving the “Cross-worshippers” (Christian powers) out of the Muslim world, wiping Israel off the map of the Middle East, and replacing the governments of all Muslim countries with truly Islamic regimes like the one created by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and by the Taleban in Afghanistan.

'How to achieve those objectives has been the subject of much debate in Islamist circles throughout the world, including in London, since 9/11. Bin Laden has consistently argued in favour of further ghazavat inside the West. He firmly believes that the West is too cowardly to fight back and, if terrorised in a big way, will do “what it must do”. That view was strengthened last year when al-Qaeda changed the Spanish Government with its deadly attack in Madrid. At the time bin Laden used his “Madrid victory” to call on other European countries to distance themselves from the United States or face similar “punishment”.

'Bin Laden’s view has been challenged by his supposed No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who insists that the Islamists should first win the war inside several vulnerable Muslim countries, notably Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Until yesterday it seemed that al-Zawahiri was winning the argument, especially by heating things up in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yesterday, the bin Laden doctrine struck back in London.'

As I predicted yesterday, a number of commentators have rushed to blame Tony Blair and President Bush for causing yesterday’s carnage in London by having the effrontery to defend their countries against the war declared upon the west. Not that they see it that way, of course — the west’s defence is deemed to be aggression and the Islamist jihad merely an act of self-defence. Thus the ageing revolutionary Tariq Ali writes in the Guardian:

‘The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little to the everyday lives of most Europeans does not mean the anger and bitterness they arouse in the Muslim world and its diaspora is insignificant. As long as western politicians wage their wars and their colleagues in the Muslim world watch in silence, young people will be attracted to the groups who carry out random acts of revenge. At the beginning of the G8, Blair suggested that "poverty was the cause of terrorism". It is not so. The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. And unless this is recognised, the horrors will continue.’

No point telling Tariq Ali or the Guardian’s comment page editor that Iraq, Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza were only ‘occupied’ as a defensive move because they were all being used as the front line of attack against the west. For such people, America and the west cannot ever do self-defence because by definition they are colonialist oppressors and therefore their very existence is an act of aggression.

More generally, it is specifically Iraq that is presented as terrorist year zero. The Islamic world was all sweetness and light, it appears, until the Iraq war acted as a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda. Thus Paul Reynolds, the BBC news website's World Affairs Correspondent, writes of Tony Blair:

‘He is committed to staying in Iraq and to the hope that, in due course, the insurgency there can be overcome and Iraq will develop into a functioning, democratic state backed by its oil riches. Britain therefore remains in the front line, and the option of withdrawing from Iraq and minimising the risk of further attacks is not presently open to British voters. They have taken their decision and must accept the consequences’

(my italics).

Note in particular the pronoun ‘they’. For Reynolds here goes even further than blaming Bush and Blair for creating terror. It’s apparently all the fault of the British people for voting Blair back into power – for which they must ‘accept the consequences’ of being blown to bits on public transport! What an extraordinarily malevolent thing for anyone to write, let alone someone being paid to do so from the pockets of the very people he is so venomously blaming for their own destruction.

The reason why blaming al Qaeda’s terror on the war in Iraq is morally so obtuse goes deeper than the astonishing historical amnesia displayed by those who appear to airbrush from their memory the declaration of war upon the west and associated acts of terror over more than a decade culminating in 9/11. It is because it takes an element of truth and then draws from it a perverse and amoral conclusion. The element of truth is that the west’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq undoubtedly have exacerbated jihadi fervour and drawn more into the cause. The amoral conclusion is that therefore these actions by the west were wrong.

The truth is that, for countries that believed Afghanistan and Iraq had already inflicted aggressive acts of violence upon the west and were poised to inflict even worse, there was no reasonable or principled alternative but to wage war upon them. The fact that any attempt by the west at self-defence would enrage yet more Islamists was merely the other prong of Morton’s Fork, and illustrated the dilemma posed by all terrorism – if its victims defend themselves, this recruits more to the terrorist cause, but if its victims don’t defend themselves this encourages the terrorists to redouble their attacks because their whole strategy is to demoralise their victims in every way in order to finish them off altogether. This is, after all, the terrible dilemma faced all the time by Israel – a choice between, on the one hand, protecting its citizens from genocidal attack by means which inflame the Arabs in the territories simply because they perceive any self defence by the Israelis as aggression thanks to the warped ideology with which they have been brainwashed, and on the other hand, appeasing terror by a variety of means which are all taken as a sign of weakness and which act therefore as a spur to redouble the terrorist war.

Faced with this intrinsic dilemma posed by terrorism, in which both courses of action have a downside, the only moral choice is to fight terror by the most vigorous means of self-defence possible. This is because while in the short to medium term this may recruit more to the terrorist cause, the alternative route of appeasement is to commit cultural or national suicide. In other words, for free peoples there is no alternative. That is why blaming the continuing war by al Qaeda on the west’s actions in Iraq is such a degraded and disgusting position to take.

Touching and heartening messages of sympathy and solidarity have been arriving in Britain from across the world after today's horrendous acts of mass murder in London. For me, however, the most poignant are those which call up the heroic image of the British wartime spirit: that stoical, phlegmatic response which is determined to continue as before in the face of unspeakable acts because to do otherwise is to give terror its victory. And yes, there's plenty of that stoicism and quiet heroism around, and it was on display today.

But alas, there is something else, something horrible and warped, also lurking just below the surface. It is the belief that this monstrous event would never have occurred had Tony Blair not taken us to war in Iraq, that that war has created more not less terror and that the British would not have been a target at all had we distanced ourselves from the US. It is a view which has so far only been expressed openly, as far as I am aware, by far left groups such as the SWP. But it is believed far more widely than that, and I expect to see mainstream writers saying as much over the next few days. The great question is which of these rival impulses will define the mood among the British public as a whole. Are Britons still the people of the Blitz, or have they become like Spain after the Madrid bombings?

Our friends in America look at Tony Blair, whom they admire so much for his staunchness in the struggle to defend the west, and they imagine that Britain overall is in that same mould. Well, it is not. It is impossible to overstate the pernicious influence of the viciously anti-American, defeatist, appeasement-minded media and intellectual class, which has quite simply shifted the centre of moral gravity and subjected the country to a remorseless diet of distortions, lies and illogicality.

As a result, Britain has never properly understood or faced up to the nature and scale of the threat it faces, or indeed that it was always a target of attack along with the US. This lack of understanding of the war against the west may well lead the British to blame not al Qaeda but Blair and Bush - the very outcome desired by al Qaeda, and which therefore makes it so much more likely that it will attack countries where the population is perceived to be flaky. Every utterance since 9/11 by an appeasenik, it has to be said, made today's attacks that much more certain.

On the other hand, the British who are so slow to anger are bloody-mindedly warlike when finally roused. How they react to today's obscenity will be a critical turning point in this war. As we grieve for those who have lost their lives or who have sustained terrible injury in today's act of war, we must also hold our breath.

A pink object with trotters and wings has just flown past my window. An official committee has cast doubt on the science and politics of global warming. The cross-party House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has rubbished the Kyoto protocol, saying that climate targets will make little difference to global warming and that the science of climate change presents a number of significant difficulties which need to be resolved. As the Scotsman reports:

‘In a report seemingly timed to have maximum impact on the G8, which is due to release its climate change communique tomorrow, the peers said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-backed environmental watchdog, is tainted by "political interference". Policymakers were too focused on mitigating climate change, rather than adapting to it, they said. Lord Lawson, a former chancellor and committee member, was critical of the way that Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions had been "subcontracted" to the IPCC, which he described as "very, very flawed".'

In the Times, Rosemary Righter administers a much-needed dose of reality to the climate change psychosis:

‘The major point this report makes is that the links between economic growth and global warming have “not been sufficiently rigorously explored”. Put less gently, some of the IPPC “scenarios” — including the ones that predict global warming in excess of 5C — are based on fantasy.

‘Climate change modelling involves combining scientific data, observed and projected through models, with economic forecasts. Assumptions about per capita emissions of greenhouse gases, for example, are critically affected by things such as the future size of the world’s population, global growth rates, energy efficiency, and the prospects of developing new technologies that reduce future reliance on fossil fuels. The IPPC’s “high end scenarios” assume not only that carbon and methane emissions rise steeply, when they are currently stable or actually shrinking, but artificially inflate the magnitude of global warming by assuming that the world’s population will be half as large again 2100 as it is expected to be. The IPPC also consistently factors in global growth rates that are far higher than those historically recorded.

‘These “worst-case scenarios” are constantly cited, erroneously, as forecast, and they are seriously distorting policy. It is urgent to arrive at more realistic estimates, to be clearer about the trade-offs involved and to be more honest about the high costs that generations now living will asked to bear, for benefits that lie far in the future.’

It will be fascinating to see how the climate change lobby now reacts to these overwhelming truths. So many vast reputations have been made from this scam, so many empires created on the back of it and so many billions invested in it that its proponents simply cannot admit that it is utter tripe. Stand by for the Lords committee to be fingered as oil industry patsies and worse. But the fact is, they have begun to puncture the illusion by telling the truth; and eventually, however long it may take, truth will always drive out the lie.

Once again, an extremely shrewd, insightful and sobering analysis by Amir Taheri of the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of Iran. Taheri's main point is that Ahmadinejad is altogether a different kind of animal from his predecessors and very much more impressive. It's not just that he's a serious scholar and former soldier. Crucially, he also comes from a humble background and has no connection with the mullahs (making him, although Taheri doesn't quite say this, a symbol of uncorruptibility which was possibly the crucial factor behind his election). And he is also a sincere religious believer, unlike his predecessors who wanted to have their religious cake and eat it in westernised ways, and were thus not so much moderate as unprincipled and confused.

As a result, Ahmadinejad presents a threat to the west which is unambiguous:

'He has no inferiority complex toward the West and is sincerely convinced that Islam alone offers a blueprint for the perfect society. He says that men and women can never be equal although this does not mean that women should not have rights or be respected. He does not hide behind labels such as “Islamic democracy”. Instead, he states that Islam, which represents perfection, is incompatible with democracy that is, by definition, imperfect.

'Rafsanjani and Khatami claim that Ahmadinejad wants to create a Taleban-style system in Iran. Nothing is further from the truth. Ahmadinejad is no mulla Muhammad Omar and Iran is not Afghanistan. What Ahmadinejad shares with Mulla Omar is the belief that a non-Western, largely Islamic, method of organizing society is possible. Omar built his version and Ahmadinejad, if given a chance, would try to build his.

'Ahmadinejad's election is good news for all concerned, if only it clarifies the situation. Having tried to dodge the inevitable duel between Islamism and democracy, the Khomeinist regime, by propelling Ahmadinejad into the presidency, declares its intention to take the modern, Western-dominated, and “utterly corrupt” world head on. We shall see which side wins.'

Like a number of other similar heretics, I believe that -- upsetting as this may be to many, and provoking once again the fury of transplant surgeons -- people from whom organs are harvested for transplants are not necessarily dead. I was long ago persuaded that the definition of brain death failed to exclude some cases where there was still some activity in the brain, and that certain disquieting features of organ harvesting – such as the practice of sedating the ‘brain-dead’ person to avoid inflicting any suffering during the procedure – demonstrated that, in the view of certain doctors at least, such patients were not dead at all.

Now, a staggering article in Critical Care Medicine by Robert Truog and Walter Robinson admits that the definition of brain death is merely an artificial construct to allow transplants to take place – but then goes on to say that organs should nevertheless be harvested from people who are not dead:

‘Brain death is essential to current practices of organ retrieval because it legitimates organ removal from bodies that continue to have circulation and respiration, thereby avoiding ischemic injury to the organs. The concept of brain death has long been recognized, however, to be plagued with serious inconsistencies and contradictions. Indeed, the concept fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical understanding of death. We review the evidence and arguments that expose these problems and present an alternative ethical framework to guide the procurement of transplantable organs. This alternative is based not on brain death and the dead-donor rule, but on the ethical principles of nonmaleficence (the duty not to harm, or primum non nocere) and respect for persons. We propose that individuals who desire to donate their organs and who are either neurologically devastated or imminently dying should be allowed to donate their organs, without first being declared dead. Advantages of this approach are that (unlike the dead-donor rule) it focuses on the most salient ethical issues at stake, and (unlike the concept of brain death) it avoids conceptual confusion and inconsistencies.’

So ‘do no harm’ in these instances apparently means taking the organs out of living individuals on the grounds that they are either about to die or are ‘neurologically devastated’ — and thus as good as dead. In other words, a living person who has no sensation and no apparent prospect of functioning as a sentient individual is deemed to be no longer alive and can be duly cannibalised.

This monstrous reasoning is remorselessly deconstructed by another article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by M Potts and David Evans. Starting with a laconic acknowledgement of the moral doctrine which most of us naively and wrongly imagined still applied in this society:

‘The "standard position" on organ donation is that the donor must be dead in order for vital organs to be removed, a position with which we agree’

they argue strenuously that

‘removing vital organs from living patients is immoral and contrary to the nature of medical practice.’

The fact that they have to make such an argument at all is itself an eye-opener. But first they rightly address the premise from which Truog and Robinson start, that brain-dead patients are not necessarily dead – an assertion previously dismissed out of hand by the medical profession. Potts and Evans write that Truog and Robinson

‘…note that the concept of brain death "fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical understanding of death". We believe this claim well founded. There were never sound empirical grounds for criteria of death based on the loss of testable brain function while the body remains alive. One difficulty is the near impossibility of diagnosing—with the necessary certainty—the "irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem" while the rest of the body remains alive. The Harvard tests—essentially of brain stem mediated reflexes and ventilator dependence in patients whose coma appeared irremediable—clearly lacked the power to make that diagnosis. The many protocols now in use worldwide fail similarly. Indeed, their very number proclaims the fact that the syndromes they diagnose cannot be one and the same true entity. And prominent among the variations is the apnoea test, which may lead to the misdiagnosis of respiratory centre failure if inadequately stimulating and, if stringently applied, may itself be the cause of death.’

Then, addressing the argument that it would be permissible to use as donors at least two classes of patients who had given prior consent: the ‘permanently unconscious’ and the ‘imminently dying’, with society determining the ‘minimal threshold of lively existence below which donation would be permitted’, they robustly declare:

‘We believe that removing vital organs from a still living donor is the taking of innocent human life. The argument that such removal is morally no different from "allowing to die" by removing a ventilator is seriously flawed. When a ventilator is removed from an apnoeic comatose patient, it is the disease or injury that causes the loss of the patient’s ability to breathe spontaneously. As Margaret Somerville notes: "the withdrawal of life support treatment such as respiratory support involves a situation of multiple causation in which one cause (respiratory failure) is sufficient to cause death; the other cause (turning off the respirator) is not sufficient in the absence of respiratory failure". The situation is different when vital organs are removed from a patient. Removing a vital organ, such as the heart, directly causes the death of the patient, and is not merely allowing the effects of disease or injury to take their course. It is the organ removal surgery that kills the donor. In addition, withdrawal of life support may be an acceptable omission of burdensome treatment, rather than an act that is more likely to involve an intent to kill the patient. The issue in removing vital organs from brain dead individuals is not, therefore, whether to withdraw burdensome life support from a dying patient but whether such organ removal is a morally acceptable form of killing.’

That is indeed the issue. What in heaven’s name have we come to as a society, to have arrived at the horrific and degraded situation where we have developed ‘a morally acceptable form of killing’ — and cannot even acknowledge truthfully that that is what we are doing?

Akbar Ganji is dying. The Iranian dissident who has been in jail for six years for speaking out against the tyranny that rules his country (and about whom I wrote a post on June 9) has released a Letter to the Free People of the World written on the 19th day of his hunger strike in solitary confinement. He writes:

‘Today my broken face is the true face of the system in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am now the symbol of justice. The justice that, if viewed correctly, puts on display the full extent of the oppression of the rulers of the Islamic Republic. My outworn body and face reveals, paradoxically, the claimed justice and the true oppression. Anyone who sees me now asks in surprise "Are you Akbar Ganji? What have they done to you?"

’Yes, I am neither sick nor on hunger strike [sarcasm]. They have made me lose weight from 77kg to 58kg through improvised tortures. They hide this outworn body from the public to hide the reality of the Islamic Republic… I have opposed the unelected and indefinite rule of Mr. Khamenei. I have said that [his] life-time unaccountable absolute power is at odds with democracy. I said expressing this opinion will be faced with Mr. Khamenei's quick and harsh reaction. What took place proved me right. He does not tolerate any personal criticism.

‘Karroubi, Moeen and Hashemi Rafsanjani all tasted Mr. Khamenei's "religious democracy" in this election. The widespread and organized interference of the Guards Corps and Basij caused the outcry of even Larijani's campaign staff and the person of Mohsen Rezaei. A sultanist system is at odds with democracy. In such a system the sultan rules supreme and everyone else is at his service. Mortazavi [Teheran’s prosecutor] has told my wife: "What will happen if Ganji dies? Dozens die everyday in prisons; Ganji will be just one of them." These are Mr. Khamenei's words that are uttered through Mortazavi's lips. Ganji dies, but the demand for freedom, democracy, political justice, hope, aspirations and ideals won't. Love for others and self-sacrifice for people will always continue to live.’

Once again, where are the voices of the world protesting at the persecution of this fighter for freedom? Is not his fight our fight? Where in particular is the voice of America, the country that tells us its mission is to encourage the oppressed peoples of the world to rise up against their oppressors in the cause of democracy and human rights — the cause for which Akbar Ganji is so heroically laying down his life?

With all the political arm-twisting over climate change going on before G8 begins, the BBC as usual missed the real story this morning. The Today programme (0714) reported correctly that a row had broken out over last month’s ‘unprecedented’ declaration by the world’s scientific academies that there was now ‘consensus’ for the view that climate change was real, that human activity had caused concentrations of greenhouse gases to rise to pre-industrial levels and that government should act.

Unfortunately, this happy consensus promptly broke apart. Bruce Alberts, President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, furiously complained that Lord May, President of the Royal Society, grossly misrepresented the US Academy’s position in a press release that he allegedly spun out of all recognition. Lord May’s crime seems to have been to have said US policy was misguided and blamed the Bush administration for ignoring what the scientists were saying.

But this complaint about spin, embarrassing though it is, pales beside what the Russian scientists have been saying about this ‘consensus’. For the Russian Academy of Science has protested that its name has been taken in vain. It had not seen the ‘consensus’ statement before it was issued in its name, and now that it has done so it thinks it is rubbish -- because it sticks by its belief that the man-made global warming theory is rubbish. And it has asked its president, Yuri Osipov, to withdraw his signature. As it said:

‘1. The Council-Seminar announces that the Russian Academy of Science has not been given the opportunity of working over the text of the «Academies' statement. The Academies' statement itself has not been discussed by any of the collective bodies of the Russian Academy of Science. The decision to support it has not been taken by any of the collective bodies of the Russian Academy of Science.

'2. The Council-Seminar sees the Academies' statement as lacking scientific proof and having contradictions in logic in its many assertions.

'3. The Council-Seminar attracts attention to the fact of absence at the present level of knowledge of cost-effective methods of stabilization of greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere.

'4. The Council-Seminar noted that the Academies' statement offers costly and ineffective measures to achieve unproven targets.

'5. The Council-Seminar asks the President of the Russian Academy of Science to repudiate his signature from the Academies' statement.

'6. The Council-Seminar reiterates its full support to its Statement of May 14, 2004, including:
- in regard of the absence of scientific basis of the Kyoto Protocol,
- in regard of ineffectiveness of the Kyoto protocol to achieve aims of the UNFCCC,
- in regard of risks to the Russian economy from the ratification of the Kyoto protocol.’

As has been pointed out by Benny Peiser, the natural catastrophes expert at Liverpool John Moores university, by alienating the science establishment of two countries Lord May has plunged the international scientific community into disarray, brought the Royal Society into disrepute -- and exposed the so-called climate change ‘consensus’ as a complete farce.

Astounding interview in last Saturday’s Guardian with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair. An employment tribunal had just torn into him for ‘hanging his own officers out to dry’ to prove his anti-racist credentials, after his force was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after alleged racist remarks at a training day.

The men had faced disciplinary action after an Asian officer alleged that one of the three had made racist remarks at a training day in 1999. The tribunal heard that in a bungled presentation on Islam, he referred to Muslim headwear as ‘tea cosies’, mispronounced Shi'ites as ‘shitties’ and said he felt sorry for Muslims who fasted during Ramadan. Although he apologised immediately, a complaint was made by the Asian officer who also criticised the two other officers for not taking appropriate action over these remarks. All three were brought before a disciplinary panel in June 2001 and found guilty of inappropriate behaviour, but the board ruled that there should be no further action. The tribunal heard that Sir Ian found the panel’s decision ‘extraordinary’ and sought legal advice about having it overturned. They were later cleared on appeal by Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, the most senior Asian officer at the Yard. Ian Pritchard-Witts, the tribunal chairman, ruled that the Yard was justified in suspending the officers during an investigation but concluded that Sir Ian's intervention was unlawful.

“We take the view, using his own words, that white officers were to be hung out to dry. He prejudiced the matter,”

Mr Pritchard-Witts said.

After such a devastating condemnation and an exposure of institutional bullying over remarks which, although clearly inappropriate had equally clearly been made without malice, one might think Sir Ian would have promptly fallen on his truncheon. After all, he had been excoriated by a tribunal for wholly unprofessional behaviour and appalling judgment, revealing himself to be so much in the grip of the witch-hunting lunacy of the age that he had ruined the lives and reputations of three officers who had been arraigned on preposterously inflated charges of racism – the very crime for which Sir Ian was himself ultimately condemned by the tribunal for his treatment of these white officers.

But not only did Sir Ian not resign – he went onto the offensive, in every sense of the word. He showed absolutely no understanding of the ruling, and indeed compounded his original offence by repeating the slur on the three officers:

‘Sir Ian described the remarks at the heart of this week's employment tribunal defeat as Islamophobic: "That language was gratuitous, offensive and deliberate. Officers can expect to be disciplined for using language like that. I want this force to have no place for racism”… Sir Ian said the Met and British policing had no choice but to embrace diversity, because it delivered better protection to the public: “Issues about understanding diversity, about respect for different communities, respect for different traditions in many occupations is broadly a moral case. For the police service and Metropolitan police in particular, it is a fundamental, brutal business case. You can't police London without understanding the diverse communities we serve. How can you police the Chinese community, the Tamil community, emerging east European communities, north African community, how can you do this without understanding and showing respect to the cultures of which this city is made up? That's why I'm so unrepentant.”’

But this case had nothing to do with understanding or respecting diversity. It reflected instead the neurotic hypersensitivity which inflates minor error into the hanging offence of racial insult -- our modern witch-hunt, in which the slightest deviation from permitted speech is regarded as a heresy to be punished by excommunication and banishment.

Nor was this all. For the Guardian informs us of Sir Ian that, having read the damaging headlines about himself after the tribunal’s comments:

‘He feared rank and file officers would believe the claims that he had betrayed their fellow officers, and had even commissioned an instant poll to assess the damage within his force.’

Is this really a proper use of public money, to enable Sir Ian to assess whether his reputation has suffered from a public rebuke? And in any event, it would seem that he is well aware that he is hardly providing unifying leadership at the head of Britain’s largest police force:

‘The Commissioner admitted that while about one in five of his officers backs him wholeheartedly over the need for change, thousands do not or are undecided: "In any organisation you have 20% who are deeply and firmly committed on your side, 70% in the middle who are watching and 10% who are opposed." Sir Ian revealed that he has turned for help to BBC director general Mark Thompson, with whom he "compares notes" on how to transform their respective institutions: "Mark's term as director-general will be turbulent as he's modernising the organisation."’

Just what does this tell us about the leadership of the Metropolitan Police? What, come to that, does it tell us about the BBC -- and about institutional life in general, in what was once a country that totally eschewed the monstrous tyranny of ideology and relied instead on empirical, feet-on-the-ground common-sense and decency?

On Thursday, Channel Four screens a documentary called Undercover Teacher, in which a reporter, Alex Dolan, worked under cover as a supply teacher. From the account she gave in the Sunday Telegraph, the situation in some of our toughest schools is dire beyond our worst fears. Disorder is so endemic, and the teachers behave in such an utterly powerless and defeated way, that education in such places is out of the question. As she said:

‘What struck me very early on was that poor, even outrageous indiscipline - children leaping across tables or wandering around brandishing fire extinguishers - had become acceptable. At one school, I was calmly advised by a female colleague to lock the classroom door while I was teaching, to "protect" myself and my class from the marauding groups in the corridors. The look of surprise on my face did not seem to register with her.’

One of the most shocking things in her account is the way in which the schools inspectors Ofsted are duped. Despite the disorder, violence and absence of teaching in the school, the inspectors see none of it:

‘When Ofsted inspectors arrived the week after for a two-day visit, however, the school was suddenly transformed. I got through a whole lesson without incident, the corridors were mayhem-free, the atmosphere calmer. The mystery was solved by a classroom assistant who told me in a hushed exchange in the lavatory that more than 20 of the most difficult pupils had been sent on a "day trip". As inspectors monitored lessons, senior managers popped up taking classes that they did not normally teach. Experienced teachers from neighbouring schools were parachuted in. One teacher, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, said: "I've been drafted in basically to give support to this department while HMI are in. It's a bit of a con-job really." Staff at three other schools told me that "hiding" problem pupils from inspectors was common practice.’

No wonder the government thinks things are getting better in the schools, if the Ofsted analyses which inform them are so much at variance with the truth. There’s a simply way round that one, of course -- spot inspections, with no warning given to the schools. I have never understood why this is not routine. But the problem of disorder is, of course, another matter, fuelled by a complex of social pathologies to which this government appears to have no solution.

Another decent Christian writes to express his horror at the Anglican Consultative Council resolution on Israel (see earlier posts below):

'Just a brief note to say that I, along with many other Traditional Christians am thoroughly nauseated by the decision taken by the ACC. As a journalist, you may gather it was imposed upon the Church by a small and unrepresentative liberal elite who have already alienated many people through their stance on a succession of issues. Like others, I have challenged this resurgent contempt where I can. Let's hope we can do better than our predecessors in 1930s Germany. The anti-Semite wing in the Anglican Church is going to have one heck of a fight on their hands. They really have violated Zechariah 2:8. The hypocrisy of their resolution stinks to High Heaven.

'During this period of gathering darkness, I and other believers in the Messiah will continue to uphold the Jewish people in prayer. You and other members of your community are NOT alone.'

Excellent article by Ross Clark in the Times cuts to the quick on the war against drugs (failed). Rightly pouring scorn on the drug legaliser mob who have leapt upon the conclusion by Lord Birt’s Strategy Unit that the attempt to suppress drug supply can never end drug abuse (see my Daily Mail article today), Clark rubbishes all the usual absurd legalisation arguments before getting to the real point:

‘But there is little point in engaging in a war against drugs if we are going to tackle only supply and do so little to fight demand. What effort is going into the punishment of users of illegal drugs? None at all. On the contrary, drug users are increasingly seen as victims, who have no power to resist what is pushed at them by evil dealers and should in no circumstances be saddled with a criminal record.

‘Ann Widdecombe, the former Shadow Home Secretary, was scorned for daring to suggest that anyone caught in possession of cannabis should be fined £100. I have never understood what was wrong with her suggestion. We prosecute those who buy stolen goods, not just those who steal them. We prosecute those who view child porn on the internet, not just the porn merchants. Why are we so feeble at prosecuting those who encourage drug dealers by buying their product? Admittedly, it would be counterproductive to sent drug users to prison when our jails are awash with drugs. But dope smokers forced to do community service with the mentally ill (many who gained their affliction by smoking dope), crack dealers forced to help victims of street crime? Why not?

‘The negative outcome of Prohibition of liquor in America in the 1920s should not blind us to the fact that a war against hard drugs has been fought once — and won. Parts of Britain in mid-Victorian times, most notably the Fens, were plagued by opium addicts. One chemist in Wisbech was found to have 40 gallons of laudanum in stock. Wisbech, not coincidentally, had a infant mortality rate worse than inner-city Liverpool. Yet between the 1870s and 1920s opium taking in Britain was almost entirely eradicated, through a combination of restriction of supply and suppression of demand.

‘If it can be done once, it can be done again. But it will take more than just a campaign against Yardies and South American farmers to succeed. Above all, we should stop treating drug takers as helpless victims, and instead make them responsible for their actions. The drugs problem lies as much with middle-class recreational users as it does with Third World farmers who grow illegal drugs and British gangs who trade in them.’

Indeed. Until and unless we target drug users as well as suppliers, the signals will be at best equivocal and drug use will continue to grow as a deadly scourge. It makes no sense to demonise drug supplies while regarding their consumers as helplessly passive. Demand drives supply. While we tolerate, ignore or even glamorise drug use we undermine any attempt to curb it. The war on drugs has been lost because it was never fought properly in the first place. Will the bien-pensants of Whitehall, hand in glove as they are with legalisers dressed up as ‘harm reductionists’, ever grasp this? Hell will freeze over first.

A decent Christian who can no longer stand the venomous prejudice towards Israel displayed by the NGO Christian Aid has started his own website, Christian Hate, to expose the charity's biased campaigning over Israel and Palestine. Here's an example of how he thinks it has totally lost the plot, from his fisking of Christian Aid's newsletter last autumn:

'Proportion again…

'Coverage of Israel and Palestine: the front cover; a half-page news item; a three-page feature on the “Child of Bethlehem” Christmas appeal; half of the letters page; a full-page advertisement for the Child of Bethlehem appeal on the back cover. Total six pages. Coverage of Sudan: one news item covering a third of a page. Coverage of Democratic Republic of the Congo: nil.

'Having dealt with the bare statistics, let us examine the Child of Bethlehem Christmas Appeal. The child is Jessica Safar, a seven-year-old Palestinian Christian living in Bethlehem. When she was four she was caught in a gunfight between Israeli soldiers and local youths, and hit by a piece of shrapnel which shattered her right eye. A shocking image of a doll with its eye gouged out brings home the violence she has suffered. Plainly this is a 'terrible tragedy, and it is good to learn that counsellors funded by Christian Aid have helped Jessica cope with her situation. However, I believe some hard questions can and should be asked about the uses to which this tragedy is being put.

'Consider the choices that have been made in designing the appeal: 1. To focus on the conflict in Israel and Palestine. 2. To focus on a Palestinian child who has suffered violence, directly or indirectly, from the Israeli state. 3. To focus on a Christian child living in Bethlehem. At each step I want simply to ask: Why?

'Why single out this conflict when others (several could be named in Africa alone) are having a far worse impact on children? Why ignore the Israeli children who have been murdered in this conflict? Why dwell at length on the misery that the separation barrier is causing for Palestinians without even mentioning the possibility that it is saving Israeli lives – children included? Mahmoud Abbas, elected with a huge majority as President of the Palestinian Authority, has said openly that the Intifada has been a disaster for the Palestinians. Why can’t Christian Aid bring itself to say so?

'Why this child? It’s pretty obvious which other “child of Bethlehem” readers are meant to identify Jessica with. One born in poverty under foreign occupation. One threatened with arbitrary state brutality. And now as then, the persecutors are Jewish. But there is one difference: the victim is no longer Jewish, but a Gentile Christian. What a Pandora’s box of associations with the dark corners of Christian history we open up when we make this conjunction of Jewish violence and a Christian child victim!

'In Matthew’s Gospel the Massacre of the Innocents on the orders of the Jewish king Herod (2:16-18) prefigures the Jewish crowd’s claiming of the “blood guilt” for the crucifixion of Christ: “His blood be on us and on our children!”(27:24). In both cases, of course, God’s intervention prevails over violent Jewish intent. A further parallel is that Gentiles acknowledge Christ where Jews reject him: the Magi at the Nativity (2:1-12) and the Roman centurion who declares “Truly this man was God’s Son!” at Christ’s death (27:54).

'So here we have arrived at the traditional basis of Christian anti-Semitism: the accusation that the Jews killed Christ. In the Middle Ages this developed into the “blood libel” – the belief that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian children in commemoration of the Crucifixion. This is a belief that lives on among some in the Middle East (including the Syrian defence minister).

'The playing down or outright denial of Jesus’ Jewishness forms part of the same syndrome. In old paintings of the Last Supper you will often see just one obviously Jewish face – that of Judas Iscariot. The logic was carried to its conclusion in 1930s Germany, when the so-called “German Christian” movement (Deutsche Christen) sought to reconcile Christianity and Nazism by claiming that Jesus was an Aryan.

'So am I accusing Christian Aid of anti-Semitism here? The answer is not so simple. They would undoubtedly protest that far from being anti-Semites they are impeccably anti-racist. And I don’t believe there is necessarily any anti-Semitism involved at a conscious level. But what I think is crucially demonstrated by this campaign is that for Christians anti-Semitism is not just one form of racism among many, but is something with deep roots in the collective historical unconscious of our faith. Looking for a hard-hitting symbol for a contemporary problem, Christian Aid draw on this poisonous heritage and “know not what they do”.'

I know that this man speaks for many within the church. He should be congratulated for making this effort to restore it to sanity.

Stephen Hayes, whose book The Connection detailed the links that are said not to have taken place between Saddam and al Qaeda, returns to the fray. Marvelling at the bare-faced lies of CNN which has been stating that there were no links -- and that the 9/11 Commission said so, when it said explicitly that there were -- he adds a few more examples of the contacts:

'In 1992 the Iraqi Intelligence services compiled a list of its assets. On page 14 of the document, marked "Top Secret" and dated March 28, 1992, is the name of Osama bin Laden, who is reported to have a "good relationship" with the Iraqi intelligence section in Syria. The Defense Intelligence Agency has possession of the document and has assessed that it is accurate. In 1993, Saddam Hussein and bin Laden reached an "understanding" that Islamic radicals would refrain from attacking the Iraqi regime in exchange for unspecified assistance, including weapons development.

'This understanding, which was included in the Clinton administration's indictment of bin Laden in the spring of 1998, has been corroborated by numerous Iraqis and al Qaeda terrorists now in U.S. custody. In 1994, Faruq Hijazi, then deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, met face-to-face with bin Laden. Bin Laden requested anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq. Hijazi has detailed the meeting in a custodial interview with U.S. interrogators. In 1995, according to internal Iraqi intelligence documents first reported by the New York Times on June 25, 2004, a "former director of operations for Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with Mr. bin Laden on Feb. 19." When bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, the document states, Iraqi intelligence sough "other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location." That same year, Hussein agreed to a request from bin Laden to broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda on Iraqi state television. In 1997, al Qaeda sent an emissary with the nom de guerre Abdullah al Iraqi to Iraq for training on weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell cited this evidence in his presentation at the UN on February 5, 2003. The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Powell's presentation on Iraq and terrorism was "reasonable."

'In 1998, according to documents unearthed in Iraq's Intelligence headquarters in April 2003, al Qaeda sent a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden to Baghdad for 16 days of meetings beginning March 5. Iraqi intelligence paid for his stay in Room 414 of the Mansur al Melia hotel and expressed hope that the envoy would serve as the liaison between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden. The DIA has assessed those documents as authentic. In 1999, a CIA Counterterrorism Center analysis reported on April 13 that four intelligence reports indicate Saddam Hussein has given bin Laden a standing offer of safe haven in Iraq. The CTC report is included in the Senate Intelligence Committee's review on prewar intelligence.

'In 2000, Saudi Arabia went on kingdom-wide alert after learning that Iraq had agreed to help al Qaeda attack U.S. and British interests on the peninsula. In 2001, satellite images show large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists displaced after the war in Afghanistan relocating to camps in northern Iraq financed, in part, by the Hussein regime. In 2002, a report from the National Security Agency in October reveals that Iraq agreed to provide safe haven, financing and weapons to al Qaeda members relocating in northern Iraq. In 2003, on February 14, the Philippine government ousted Hisham Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, for his involvement in al Qaeda-related terrorist activites. Andrea Domingo, head of Immigration for the Philippine government, told reporters that "studying the movements and activities" of Iraqi intelligence assets in the country, including radical Islamists, revealed an "established network" of terrorists headed by Hussein.'

It is simply astounding that virtually none of this has ever been reported in Britain. Isn't there anyone in the British mainstream media, not one single proper journalist or editor who is prepared to start putting this material into the public domain?

Great piece by Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker provides an uplifting vision of what we are fighting for and who is doing the fighting:

'The world’s future lies in the hands of a surprisingly open coalition of countries, regions, cities, and individuals, all of whom are members of the Anglosphere. Anyone, potentially, can join. The Anglosphere is a state of mind, a set of market-centered economic institutions, a philosophical understanding of the role and danger of government power, and a vast, dynamic, and almost universal popular culture, beloved of ordinary people and abhorred by elites.

'More than anything else, the Anglosphere is a set of rules, a paradigm of state and society, which creates freedom for dreamers and strivers to imagine and create the future. It provides property rights and courts, so that innovators can have a reasonable assurance of reaping the benefits of their genius and hard work. It affirms human dignity and certain inalienable rights, although the application of these is often problematic in practice.

'Many great ideas, battles, rulers, warriors, thinkers, doers, artists, and ordinary folk have made the Anglosphere into the dominant force leading the world boldly into a future of increasing human possibilities. The Magna Carta and the American Constitution; Burke and Locke and Adam Smith and the American Founders; Lord Nelson, Wellington, Washington and Eisenhower; Edison, Ford, Matsushita and Toyoda; Shakespeare, the Beatles, J.K. Rowling, Tezuka Osamu and George Lucas. All have had a hand in building and extending the Anglosphere into the world’s dominant system for the production of ideas, culture, and liberty, buttressed by the rule of law.

'Technology, the product of the free exploration and exploitation of ideas, also embodies the Anglosphere, spreading human freedom and human possibilities. The automobile, airplane, movies and television have all transformed, and continue to transform the world. These technologies can be shackled by the hand of the state, of course. But they nevertheless trend toward Anglosphere values, just as water can be damned, but trends toward flowing downstream. Freedom is a force of nature, once unleashed in sufficient quantity.'

These are of course the values of liberal democracy and free societies governed by the rule of law -- values that are now under attack from both within and without the Anglosphere. It's both a poignant celebration -- and a warning.

The Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre published today its summary for the month of June. According to its findings, the number of attacks was the highest since February, with 124 shooting incidents and 120 rocket launches from the Gaza Strip. During the last month, 4 Israelis were killed and 39 were injured by Palestinians attacks...Since the February ceasefire, there have been 800 terror attacks.

Some ceasefire.