It's always instructive to go by what people say, rather than the perception of them that mainstream opinion holds. So here's a question to those who say that Hamas is moderating in office - that the reality of authority is leading to greater promise for peace: have you actually read what they say? Do you listen to their words?

Sheik Ahmad Bahr is the acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. And here's what he said on Friday:

Ahmad Bahr began: "You will be victorious" on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere.

Bahr continued and said that America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America, by whom many are blinded today. Some people are blinded by the power of America. We say to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.

The Hamas spokesperson concluded with a prayer, saying: "Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them."

The voice of peace: Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.

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David T on Dialogue with Islam, a Hizb ut Tahrir front. As he puts it:

Hizb ut Tahrir should be congratulated. The sort of respectability that these events bestow upoin this organisation remain a pipe dream for other British fascist political parties.

As Daniel Finkelstein says, George Galloway doesn't like it up him.

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I mean, really...

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Sam Tanenhaus’ An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers was first published in the US in 1998. I read it when it came out and immediately recognised it as not merely one of the best written, but also one of the most important books of its kind. Not only did it present a rounded, fascinating portrait of Whittaker Chambers, one of the most significant figures in the revitalisation of conservatism in the United States (and thus, by extension, across the free world); it also dealt fully with the infamous Alger Hiss case.

You can buy copies of An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers here, via Amazon. I cannot urge you too strongly do so. You will not regret reading one of the greatest biographies written. (There are more details at the publishers' site here.)

The idea for this book came to me in late 1988, a time when the cold war had reached its ceremonial endgame: Mikhail Gorbachev acknowle­dging the autonomy of peoples long after they had liberated themselves, valiant students halting tank columns in Tiananmen Square.

It made for impressive, if occasionally hollow, spectacle, and it inspired a chorus of sweeping pronouncements in the United States. “‘Peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world,” Francis Fukuyama exulted in “The End of History,” the period’s signature manif­esto, published in the summer of 1989, six months before the Berlin Wall came down. At the time it was still possible to think that “the developed world,” having writhed through a century-long “paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war,” had suddenly achieved “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”

It didn’t take long for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism. But for a brief period it really did seem that history, if it had not actually ended, had at least momentarily stopped, particularly for baby boomers like Fukuyama (and me), born in the 1950s. The cold war was the only geopolitical reality we knew—or could seriously contemplate—raised as we were on the eschatology of the nuclear “option,” as the experts called it, the same experts who drew up mathematical formulas to explain how many cities we could afford to have vaporized, and which ones, in the event of a “showdown.”

Every child knew the “ultimate apocalypse” was eminently thinkable. We all had watched footage of blossoming mushroom clouds and fictive images of a finger pushing a button. It was thinkable for a more literal reason: it had already happened, twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we knew who had dropped the bombs. It is not a coincidence that in the blackest of black cold war comedies, Dr. Strangelove, it is a homespun American general, not a sinister Russian, who strikes the nuclear match.

In such a climate, politics unfolded as constant low-grade emergency, with occasional oscillations and pulse-quickening alarms: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the planes shot out of the sky. We were calmly assured, after each bleak episode, that all was being efficiently managed. And perhaps it was. But the stresses showed, most obviously in the near normalization of violence in the 1960s, much of it televised: racial battles in city after city, armed militants storming campus buildings. The first presidential election I followed closely, in 1968, when I was twelve, included two assassinations and a police riot in Chicago.

This was the steep cost of “the twilight struggle,” in John. F. Kennedy’s lugubrious phrase, the contest between the planet’s only remaining great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, lethally well-matched colossi, each geographically vast, each primed, after many years on the sidelines, to dominate the global game. Each also espoused a purifying doctrine, the Soviets’ derived from Marx by way of Lenin, the Americans’ derived from . . . what exactly? Here was the trouble. A nation so new and so devout in its pluralism could offer no theology but itself, the miracle of its existence, in all its superabundance, the same theology our leaders offer today. In those days too our presidents, each in his turn the “leader of the free world,” told us that we were innocent of imperial ambition and desired only that other peoples be free—free, that is, to become like us; this applied not only to the “captive nations” behind the Iron Curtain, but also to the left-leaning social democracies of corrupt Europe. The battle was moral, for “hearts and minds.” Of course this was what the Soviets, though the vocabulary was different, claimed about their utopian project.

So in 1988, my question was not why there had been a cold war, but rather how it had come to assume its curious shape. These thoughts led me to George Orwell, the truest prophet of the "twilight struggle," whose Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in the incubatory stage of the cold war, had foretold much of what was to come: the all-seeing television eye, the creepy language (Orwell could easily have coined "balance of terror," "limited nuclear war," "Mutually Assured Destruction"), the proxy wars staged in distant regions of the globe (Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Congo—the Congo?), the orchestrated paranoia. It was all the more impressive because Orwell’s strength, as everyone knows, was his litera­lism, his English “common sense.” He was not an especially imaginative writer. Yet he had seen with matchless clarity where things were headed, and this in turn suggested his novel had been as much a feat of reportorial study as of invention: his starting point had been a concrete set of facts. But which facts? I grew obsessed with the idea of rewriting Nineteen Eighty-Four, in reverse. Like Orwell I would begin with the year 1948 (a simple transposition of digits had yielded his hypothetical future date) but my account would be factual. It would describe what had actually happened that year. There was no shortage of events to choose from: the Berlin blockade, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the advances of Mao’s Red Army, the formation of Korea’s “Democratic Republic,” the disintegration of governments in Greece and Belgium, and all the rest.

Except my history had to take place in America, where the cold war— one side of it anyway—had sprung into being. Also I preferred an event or sequence of events that could be related narratively and on a human scale. And so I found myself examining the case of Alger Hiss, the senior diplomat who in the summer of 1948 had been accused on the floor of Congress, more specifically by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of being a Soviet agent and then had stood trial (twice) for lying about it. From the opening days of congressional testimony up through Hiss’s perjury conviction, in January 1950, the event had attained the scope of a great political trial. There had been a clash of ideas and worldviews, moments of genuine surprise and reversal. And there had been serious consequences. The case had initiated the Red hunts (or “witch hunts”) of the early 1950s, which themselves mirrored postwar purges in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, though of course the outcome in America had been much milder. Political figures like Rudolf Slánský and László Rajk were branded Titoist “spies” when they dared resist Stalin’s clenching grip and then were rushed through mock trials and summarily executed.

In the U.S. the purge had been bloodless. Well, almost. The “atom spies,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were killed—an appalling and unwarranted fate, to be sure, but one the defendants consciously chose, when plea-bargains were available. Even so the scent of blood had hung in the air. But not in the Hiss trials. There was much posturing, along with naked displays of opportunism, during the congressional hearings, but the trials were models of restraint. Even Hiss’s sentence was surpassingly mild: five years for perjury in a minimum-security prison in Pennsylvania. He was released sixteen months ahead of schedule, a better man for the experience by his own account, and he lived to the age of 92. The very ordinariness of this outcome—and Hiss’s continued presence as a hero-victim of the left—felt right for the story I wanted to tell. It suggested that the case had been absorbed into the larger narrative of cold-war America.

But there were complications. For one, there was strong evidence that Hiss, unlike Slánský and Rajk, really had been a spy (though I was prepared to conclude otherwise, once I began my own in-depth examination of the case). This didn’t bother me terribly much. What, exactly, did guilt mean in the first years of the cold war? Besides, a guilty man is often more interesting than an innocent one. There was also the suggestive arc of Hiss’s public life, the familiar tale of a rapid upward climb— triumph at Johns Hopkins University, then at Harvard Law, secretary to Supreme Court giant Oliver Wendell Holmes, State Department mandarin, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at age 42—followed by a terrible fall. And his private life was rich in misery and shame. He had grown up in Baltimore in conditions of shabby gentility, his family well established but in decline. There were two brutal suicides (Hiss’s father and sister) plus alcoholism (in the Prohibition period, when liquor could kill). Hiss, the survivor, had borne this suffering stoically, but the wounds were deep. Though a gentle man, he now and then revealed his contempt for the bluestockings among whom he had been reared, the “horrible old women of Baltimore.” More telling, at the peak of the Moscow trials he had observed, admiringly, of Stalin, “he plays for keeps.” His most impressive trait, the one outward clue to the Bolshevik within, was his discipline. It had seen him through much.

Yet this same discipline made Hiss, finally, uninteresting, as was glaringly evident during the HUAC hearings. One could understand why he tenaciously maintained his innocence and wriggled out, insofar as he could, from under the mounting evidence. What rankled was his refusal to bring even a hint of imagination to his role. In the tensest moments of the hearings—moments that came as close as any such ritualized event ever can to offering authentic revelation—Hiss refused, time and again, to declare himself, to say who he was and what he really stood for. Instead, retreating behind the boyish grin and well-tailored suits, he took refuge in hedged lawyerly answers, in hair-splitting qualifications, and murky evasions. He was a “flat” rather than “round” character, whose single idea of how to meet the signal crisis in his life was to pose as a Gilbert and Sullivan parody of the civil servant, in almost comical defiance of the truth, for it was well known that Hiss had belonged to the most radical faction of the New Deal in its most experimental phase, when it had included burgeoning leftists enrolled in Communist “study groups” or “cells.” So common was this knowledge that when Hiss was girding for his first HUAC appearance, John Foster Dulles, his sponsor at the Carnegie Endowment and the most conservative of men (later Secretary of State under President Eisenhower), counseled Hiss to admit he’d flirted with radicalism in his youth, like so many others, but had since outgrown it. Hiss, rejecting this advice, instead feigned wide-eyed innocence, testifying not only that he had not been a Communist but, absurdly—with no trace of irony— that he’d not known any Communists. This was not simply the overstatement of a “guilty” man. It was a reverse instance of the abject confessions made by Bolsheviks who had wilted before Stalin a decade before. As they had owned up to crimes they had never dreamed of, so Hiss prostrated himself before his inquisitors, falsifying his past and disguising his actual beliefs. It was impossible not to see in this performance the careerism that had served him so well in his “other” life.

If there was a British equivalent to Hiss it was the Cambridge spies. Like him they were at once audacious and craven, and their radicalism, like his, was bound up with the resentments and antagonisms not of the proletariat but of the social-climbing middle class. The parallels were clear enough to one of the Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean, who reportedly confessed to Cyril Connolly, “I am the English Hiss.” Orwell, again, had grasped this phenomenon at its root. “It was only after the Soviet regime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it,” he had written in the mid 1940s. And, he was certain, they were impelled by a “secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.” The romance of the proletariat, in other words, faded before ambitions fed by the private history of hidden injuries and accumulated abasements. And it is no less true today: The intellectual left still nurtures the dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the lash.

But if Hiss disappointed, his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, did not. To reread transcripts of the hearings and the trials—as well as contemporary reportage, including Alistair Cooke’s tour de force, A Generation on Trial—is to be startled by the almost mesmeric force Chambers exerted in his role of reluctant informer. This was partly because, in addition to being the prosecution’s chief, and on key matters, its sole witness, Chambers was also, in the language of the day, a “self-confessed Communist,” a courier for the Soviet spy network who still seemed morally trapped within the nimbus of his crimes. That such a man existed in the flesh and, what was more, had come tumbling into view from the gilded pinnacle of the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, was itself a remarkable fact at a time when the home-grown “Communist menace” still consisted, in the public mind, of immigrant Jews or shadowy figures like the Comintern official Gerhart Eisler, who had sneaked out of the country, aboard a liner headed for Poland, while awaiting trial in New York. Whittaker Chambers was one of the few American Communists his countrymen had laid eyes on, and a curious specimen he was, with his risibly WASPY name, the toad-like somnolence of his physical being, the cadaverous-looking dark suit too long in the sleeves, the wry half-smile, verging at times on a smirk, hinting at arcane, hideous truths available to him alone.

Strange that such a man had been a Communist spy, stranger still that he was an “old-stock” American and also an intellectual—indeed much more of one in the traditional humanistic sense than Hiss. A gifted litera­ry man and largely self-taught linguist, Chambers had been a published poet in his twenties, had translated Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel from the German and mastered French sufficiently well to have been commissioned to translate the last volume of Proust. When FBI interrogators showed him the final report they had written after grilling him for many months, Chambers had scrawled on the last of its many pages the concluding line of The Inferno (E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle). “He spoke Gipsy!” his long-time friend Meyer Schapiro, the great art historian, told me in 1990, the astonishment still fresh.

Not that this earned Chambers much respect. It is almost impossible to convey the robustness of Chambers-hatred when I began writing this book, nearly thirty years after his death and forty years after the Hiss verdict. Though few remembered the details of the great case, many still had a vivid picture of Chambers, the turncoat and snitch. They blamed him for the rise of Richard Nixon, who as a thirty-five-year-old “freshman” congressman ingeniously stage-managed the HUAC hearings, and also of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose first carnal bleats—“I have here in my hand a list of 205,” etc — came fifteen days after Hiss’s ­sentencing in the winter of 1950.

I had doubts about Whittaker Chambers, too. I was aware of him chiefly because of my longstanding interest in the intellectual world of the 1930s-50s. Many of the period’s best writers had known him, but few had anything good to say about him. Saul Bellow once wittily remarked that Chambers had done more public harm as the culture editor of Time than as the accuser of Alger Hiss—a judgment colored, no doubt, by Chambers’s having rather hilariously dismissed him one or two days into a film reviewing stint at Time magazine in 1943 when Bellow was a postulant freelancer, recommended for the job by their common friend James Agee. (In later years Bellow often related this incident, with retrospective delight, and a version of it appears, in veiled form, in his novel The Victim.)
Chambers’s relationship with another major figure, Lionel Trilling, was more complicated and ambiguous. The two had a history dating back many years, beginning with their days together at Columbia University in the 1920s when both were undergraduate contributors to the campus literary magazine. Chambers was the more mature writer (as Trilling readily conceded; the mentor they shared, the poet Mark Van Doren, agreed). But he also burned with extra-literary hungers. He was, Trilling later recalled, “the first person I ever knew whose commitment to radical politics was meant to be definitive of his whole moral being, the controlling element of his existence.” And there was a shocking physical emblem of his Otherness, his gruesomely decayed teeth (not fixed till he got to Time; they would provide a source of absurdist byplay during the Hiss confrontation). “That desolated mouth was the perfect insigne of Chambers’s moral authority,” Trilling wrote. “It annihilated the hygienic American present—only a serf could have such a mouth, or some student in a visored cap who sat in his Moscow garret and thought of nothing save the moment when he would toss the fatal canister into the barouche of the Grand Duke.”

The two reconnected in the 1930s when Chambers, after some years in the “open” Communist Party, joined its conspiratorial underground, and was doing industrial espionage, while Trilling, safely nestled in the outer orbit of fellow-travelers, observed Chambers’s revolutionary escapades with mingled amusement and awe. The Middle of the Journey (1947), Trilling’s penetrating novel about the 1930s Left, includes a character modeled on Chambers— a Communist defector shunned in New York intellectual circles by his former acquaintances when he reemerges from the Soviet underground, precisely as Chambers had been shunned when he quit the Party in 1938. A decade later, when the Hiss case went to trial, one of Hiss’s lawyers, scouring literary Manhattan for witnesses who might impugn Chambers’s character, approached Trilling but was sent away with the words, “Whittaker Chambers is a man of honor.” In his last years Trilling seemed embarrassed by this remark and studiously put distance between himself and Chambers, explaining that, yes, he had known Chambers for many years, and yes, he believed he had told the truth about Hiss, but Trilling and Chambers, of course, had not ever been “friends.” In fact, the two had been close enough for Chambers to sound out Trilling’s wife, Diana, herself a formidable writer and critic, for “secret work” in 1933. “I knew that I was not going to do what he asked of me,” Diana Trilling later wrote. “Yet I was enormously flattered that he thought me capable of such an assignment and I was ashamed to refuse him. . . . I felt greatly complimented.”

Here then was the truth about the intellectuals and Chambers. They admired him even as they recoiled from him. They were engagé; he was thoroughly enrolled in the revolution—and preparing for the moment when he would be summoned forth to play a historic role, the role, as it happened, of witness, or scourge. It was one for which he was superbly cast, with his gravid air of fatalism, of persecution and guilt, of tormented secrecy and penitential disclosure. Even so the charges he made against Hiss (and others) came forth reluctantly. And, more remarkable still, he perjured himself repeatedly on Hiss’s behalf, until Hiss, in a ghastly miscalculation, dared him to produce evidence that would substantiate his charges.

That Chambers’s disclosures were truthful we now know with certainty, confirmed as they were by documents released from Soviet and American intelligence archives in the 1990s, cited in this book. And very few now seriously argue that Chambers’s testimony was inaccurate in any meaningful way.

Today Chambers compels new interest, because of his second historic role, as a principal founder of modern American conservatism. In fact there were hints of it in his Time period, for example in his historical fable, “The Ghosts on the Roof,” published in March 1945, a month after the Yalta summit. At the time the Big Three accord was almost universally praised, and an enfeebled Roosevelt (weeks away from death) had gone before Congress to summarize all that had been won. But the clear victor, plainly, was Stalin, still a wartime ally and a hero to many. In Chambers’s analysis, whimsically put in the mouths of the murdered royal “ghosts” of the 1917 revolution, Stalin was the latest and most audacious of Russian czars, “greater than Rurik! greater than Peter! For Peter conquered only in the name of a limited class. But Stalin embodies the international social revolution. That is the mighty new device of power politics which he has developed for blowing up other countries from within.”

Chambers the Cassandra could be heard also at key moments in the Hiss case—most memorably when he and Hiss were at last brought together publicly, and Chambers was asked (by Nixon) about rumors that his accusations arose from some obscure personal animus (involving, it was speculated, both mental illness and homosexuality). Rather than attack his attackers, Chambers accepted the burden of moral guilt and recast it in the rhetoric of high sacrifice: “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we all are fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of historic jeopardy in which this nation now stands, so help me God I could not do otherwise.”

It was classic Chambers down to the echo of Martin Luther (“ich kann nicht anders“), fraught with suppressed melodrama. In one sense he was not an intellectual at all. He was not a systematic thinker, in contrast with his friend James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist reborn as right-wing sage whose analysis of modern bureaucracy, The Managerial Revolution, was a source text for Orwell, and whose aggressive “rollback” doctrine provided the theoretical basis for today’s preemptive “war on terror.” What Chambers had was imagination. No one ever spun cold war poetry as he did, reams of it, first in Time and then in his memoir, Witness. He was the first great technician of the new era’s magnificent cant. At the time very few saw this. Rather, they noticed the cant, but not the magnificence, partly because Chambers’s tone was distinctly old-fashioned. Though steeped in the Modernists, he was untouched by them. His models were St. Augustine, Victor Hugo, above all Dostoevsky. And his preferred contemporaries were the ideologues-philosophes Koestler (a reciprocal admirer), Malraux (ditto), and Camus. When I began serious work on this book and sent letters to writers who might have known him, the most telling reply came from Czeslaw Milosz, who as it happened, had not met Chambers. Still, he wrote, “I have always felt great sympathy for him and thought about his tragic life. He suffered much . . . and was excluded from the circle of people worthy of having their hands shaken.” The only full acknowledgment Chambers received in his lifetime came in the spring of 1959, two years before his death. In the summer he traveled to Europe at the urging of Koestler, who arranged for him to meet Manès Sperber, the great Galician novelist (and ex-Communist) and introduced him to Margarete Buber-Neumann, the daughter-in-law of Martin Buber and friend of Milena Jesenská, beloved of Kafka (the two women had been together at the Nazi death camp in Ravensbrück). “So there we sat and talked,” Chambers wrote in a letter to a friend. “Then, we realized that, of our particular breed, the old activists, we are almost the only survivors.” It is fitting that of all Chambers’s English contemporaries it should have been Rebecca West, herself driven by ideological furies, who deemed Witness, published in 1952, one of the great modern autobiographies, “so just and so massive in its resuscitation of the past.”

Written in the immediate aftermath of the Hiss case at the urging of James Agee, Witness is indeed a towering memoir, but it is more urgently a spiritual manifesto and a call to moral arms. Chambers had completed the arc of disenchantment—his last shreds of patience with the left destroyed by the Hiss case—and now stood defiantly on the right. He was all for America now, but betrayed himself in his prose, which as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. noted in a review, exuded “an un-American . . . or at least un-Anglo-Saxon intensity.” This did not lessen its impact on postwar conservatism—among the movement’s writers but also among its political figures, keenly responsive to Chambers’s distillations of large ideas into quotable oratory and to his oddly sonorous invocations of the apocalypse. The Second World War, he wrote, “simplified the balance of forces in the world by reducing them to two.” This was more or less what most Americans, including American intellectuals, believed in 1952. But Chambers typically went further, embracing a Manichean dualism, though even this had its Marxist angle. As a practiced revolutionary he knew—as did Lenin and Trotsky, for all their fealty to “historical materialism”— that political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.

American conservatives, in their prolonged moment of ascendancy, which looks now to be ending, excelled at the politics of stark polarizing choice, beginning with the presidential election in 1968 of Alger Hiss’s prosecutor, Richard Nixon, who in the years following the case remained Chambers’s friend and in some sense his disciple. It was Nixon who shattered the “consensus” politics that had prevailed during the first twenty-odd years of the cold war and contrived a strategy of divisiveness in which the “silent majority” of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens seized the whip from the unbelieving elite—the people who (in Nixon’s view, not entirely wrong) had never forgiven him for exposing Hiss. Another Chambers disciple, Ronald Reagan, posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom (the nation’s highest civilian honor) and more than once startled aides by reciting passages of Witness from memory. Its tonalities are audible in the scripts Reagan wrote for his popular radio addresses in the 1970s, when he was mounting his run at the presidency, and also in his notorious formulation “the evil empire,” derived from Chambers’s description of Communism as “the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.”

The epithet “evil empire” sent shudders through much of the civilized world when Reagan first uttered it in 1983. But he was speaking in terms the Soviets themselves understood; he gave voice to the binary theology that joined the two great powers in their elaborate ­death-struggle. Schlesinger, no admirer of Reagan, writing in 1985, pointed out that the Soviets too saw “the enemy as unchanging and unchangeable, a permanently evil empire . . . Each regime, reading its adversary ideologi­cally rather than historically, deduces motive from imputed essence and attributes purpose, premeditation and plan where less besotted analysis would raise a hand for improvisation, accident, chance, ignorance, negligence and even sheer stupidity . . . Moreover, ideology, if pursued to the end, excludes coexistence. How can we compromise with evil without losing our immortal soul? Ideology summons the true believer to a jihad, a crusade of extermination against the infidel.”

The danger too was in overestimating the adversary. In the 1980s, when Chambersian absolutism was very much in vogue, the official view of the Reagan White House was that the USSR was not only “permanently evil” but indestructible, growing in ambition and in charismatic might even as the evidence oppositely pointed to a dysfunctional econo­my, a political spoils system rotten with corruption, republics seething with ethnic hatreds, satellite countries in rebellion. But when the collapse came the Manichean belief that America had singly “won” the cold war seemed vindicated. Our theology had triumphed. Even so forceful a thinker as Francis Fukuyama, updating the dialectic, though along Hegelian rather than Marxian lines, credited the triumph to “the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material world in its image.” Since then Fukuyama has acknowledged he and his fellow neoconservatives were wrong, with terrible consequences. For the fiction persuaded them to inaugurate a new cold war, even though no suitable adversary, and no empire at all, exists for America to struggle against.

Chambers, unburdened by intellectual discipline, also came to re­cognize the folly of the dualism he had espoused so vividly. He was in fact among the first on the right to interpret the death of Stalin, in 1953, and the rise of Khrushchev, as signaling a new phase in the “twilight struggle.” In yet another of his volte-faces, the most unexpected of all, Chambers refashioned himself into a liberal in his last years. He became a defender of civil liberties (including Hiss’s when he was denied a passport) and of the Keynesian policies promoted by John Kenneth Galbraith. He ardently opposed the arms race, which struck him as an exercise in madness. And he came to see that the theology of Americanism was empty. Nations must scrub themselves before they seek to cleanse the souls of their enemies. “It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization,” he wrote his friend William F. Buckley Jr., the young intellectual leader of the nascent postwar conservatism movement, in 1954. “It is already a wreck from within.
That is why we can hope to do little more now than to snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flower pot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable . . . that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.”

Meanwhile, the Manichean Chambers remains a towering presence on the right. In July 2001, the Bush White House, eager to polish its ideological credentials, paid homage to Chambers by holding an event in commemoration of his hundredth birthday. The speakers included William Buckley and Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist best known today for his subsequent role in the Valerie Plame affair, which led to the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s top assistant I. Lewis Libby. The president did not attend, but two of his speech writers, Michael Gerson and David Frum, did, a fact that resonated some months later when, following al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, Gerson and Frum composed the phrase “axis of evil,” ushering in the new counter-jihad.

By then it was plain that “the war on terror” would be fought in precisely the terms Chambers had spelled out in his bleakest phase, the lonely period following the Hiss case; his heirs had settled on an immovably absolutist course. Chambers had furnished the text for this too, in Witness: “In this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed. It is our fate to live upon that turning point in history.”

Substitute “Islamo-fascist” for “Communist” and it is distressingly clear how little has changed. The worldview Whittaker Chambers outgrew is, alas, the one that guides us today. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how he would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of one who knows better.

Sam Tanenhaus
New York, November 2006

Melanie Phillips has a witheringly brilliant post on the loathsome Independent Jewish Voices - "an unlovely collection of congenital Israel-bashers, many of whom are unfortunately prominent in British public life and are lionised by the rest of the intelligentsia who share the same venomous prejudice."

As she writes:

The only time they ever identify themselves as Jews is in order to vilify the Jewish nation state, when — grotesquely — they use their ethnic Jewish identity to armour-plate themselves against the charge of Jew-hatred by wrapping themselves in the mantle of Jewish victimisation.

And here they are again indeed posing as Jewish martyrs. Their complaint is that the Jewish establishment is trying to silence them in their heroic attempt to tell the truth about Israel, in which cause it is they who speak with the authentic voice of Jewish conscience. This is just surreal. These signatories are never out of the media with their revolting rants against Israel. Editors fawn respectfully over their every utterance. They dominate the discussion.

On the contrary, their intention is to silence others. The Board of Deputies — made of representatives who are elected by synagogues and other communal organisations and which therefore speaks for the mainstream British Jewish community — is not even to be allowed by these goons to say anything about Israel because, on the rare occasions when it does so, it dares to defend it. The voice of the Jewish mainstream is to be silenced — because they disagree with it.

Daniel Finkelstein flags up this brilliant Q&A with Martin Amis. Read it all, it's a treat. Much of it is funny, but there are also really strong points strongly made:

What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best? GRANT MULLIN, Surrey

The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don't want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you." Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

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Since I've paid for this - as a London council tax payer - I'll be going to it.

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Via Norm, Harold Evans describes an all too typical incident of the truth about parts of the Koran being verboten.

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The distinguished scholar, Emanuele Ottolenghi - the new director of the Transatlantic Institute - is anwering questions all week at Ha'aretz. You can catch up here.

North Korea summed up.

If Ruth Kelly's speech is more than hot air - and the very fact that she has been as outspoken as she has implies that she indeed willing to act - then it marks a possibly seminal moment:

There are also some people who don’t feel it right to join in the commemorations of Holocaust Memorial Day even though it has helped raise awareness not just of the Jewish holocaust, but also more contemporary atrocities like the Rwanda genocide. That’s also their right.

But I can’t help wondering why those in leadership positions who say they want to achieve religious tolerance and a cohesive society would choose to boycott an event which marks, above all, our common humanity and respect for each other.

...In future, I am clear that our strategy of funding and engagement must shift significantly towards those organisations that are taking a proactive leadership role in tackling extremism and defending our shared values. It is only by defending our values that we will prevent extremists radicalising future generations of terrorists

...I know this message will be challenging for some.

I make no apologies for that. The scale of the threat means doing any less would be a dereliction of our duty. It would be letting down those within your communities who are leading the fight against the extremists. It would be ignoring our shared values.

Here's a translation: you know where you can go, MCB.

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First of all, I think it's important to say that Jack Straw has every right to say what he has about the veil, and I think he has every right to ask women who visit his surgery to remove theirs. He asks, remember; he does not demand that they do.

There is not a word of his, in print or in broadcast interviews, with which I disagree. I find the veil not just a sign of separation but somehow frightening, so deeply does it clash with the norms of Western behaviour. Maybe it's a subconscious association with criminals who cover their heads.

(BTW, people have asked why Mr Straw should have raised such an issue. Remember that he has a track record of saying things which might seem odd at the time but which, in the long term, turn out to have been prescient. There are few politicians better able than Jack Straw to spot a change in wind and position himself to take advantage.

Back in 1993, when John Smith was Labour leader and the word 'modernisation' was banned, Straw caused an enormous row within the party by publishing a detailed pamphlet arguing that Clause IV should be abolished. Smith went berserk. In his view the way to power was to say and do as little as possible. Quite rightly, that strategy was labelled 'sleepwalking to oblivion' by Nick Raynsford. But as I remember well from my own time at the Fabian Society then, Smith and his rather ineffectual henchman David Ward did everything in their power to stop people rocking the boat with anything so bold as an idea.

Straw did himself immense short-tern harm by upsetting Smith's do-nothing applecart and calling for the end of Clause IV.

But he took the long-term view, however, and when Blair took over the following year his reputation as a solid plodder had been left behind and he was regarded as an on-side A-list strategist by the inner New Labour core.

More recently, he deftly switched from being regarded as a Blair loyalist to being seen as a solid Brownite.)

In the early 1990s I used sometimes to sit in for my then boss, Peter Shore, when he was away or ill, and take his surgery in Tower Hamlets. His constituency included the East London Mosque, and many of the visitors to his surgery were Muslims, some of whom had their faces covered by a veil. I agree with Mr Straw that it was very difficult to interact with them, especially as a number had very basic English.

But.

Mr Straw has emphatically not called for a ban; he has simply raised some of the issues around the veil. Where I start to part company with some people who have commented on Mr Straw's remarks is over the question of the legitimacy of the veil per se.

Melanie Phillips, who is a brave and far sighted writer on the issue of the threat from militant Islam, is I think wrong in this instance:

But more significantly – and Straw did not say this – this type of veil is itself a direct threat to liberty. Clearly, it is a matter of debate within the Islamic world whether it – or, indeed, any type of veil – is necessary to satisfy the injunction upon women to preserve their modesty. What is beyond doubt is that the blackout veil is associated with most extreme interpretation of Islam, which holds that Islamic values must supersede all other values, including those of the secular state. Wearing this veil is thus a political statement of cultural and religious hostility to the British state. Objecting to it, therefore, is not an example of intolerance or religious discrimination. Religious garb should certainly be tolerated, even if it is outlandish; what people wear is their own affair. But this veil is not their own affair. It affects the rest of us because it is inherently aggressive and intimidatory. That is why it is unacceptable.

I simply do not see that the veil is "inherently aggressive and intimidatory". Surely that is a better description for proscribing certain codes of dress. The fact that I do not like to see women in them, that I find it slightly frightening, is my problem, not theirs. What matters is not how people dress, but how they act. If their actions are aggressive and intimidatory that is a wholly different thing.

Yes, many Muslims have spoken up in support of Mr Straw and said they dislike the veil, too. But so what? They choose not to wear one. Good for them. I feel uncomfortable when I see my fellow Jews in full Hasidic garb. I do not think I have anything in common with them. But would I want to tell them to dress 'normally'. Of course not. How dare I. That is how they choose to dress, in accordance with their beliefs.

Daniel Finkelstein writes:

If I have understood correctly, most Muslims feel that the full veil is not a religious requirement and Jack Straw does not insist on its removal. The issue is therefore very different from that of the headscarves ban in France.

Daniel clearly grasps the main point, that Straw is making no demand. But he cites an angle others have also cited: that it is not a religious requirement. What does that have to do with it? Isn't freedom about allowing people to wear a pink bobble on their head or yellow and orange striped jump suits if they want, however disconcerting others might find it? Why does the fact that it is not a religious requirement matter? Let's say the Moonies instructed their members to wear yellow and orange striped jump suits. Why should it being a requirement of being a Moonie make the slightest difference to its acceptability or not as a garment?

As I say, I think Jack Straw is not merely within his rights to say what he has, but deserves praise for raising the issue. And I've not so far read anything attributed to him with which I disagree, since he is simply talking about what he prefers, not what he demands. It's when it moves into the realms of the proscriptive that I think we start to lose sight of what it means to live in a democracy.

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ConservativeHome has two reviews of Michael Gove's essential book, Celsius 7/7. The strapline is:

Reviewed from different perspectives by Robert Halfon and Brian Jenner

Well, yes. Have a read of both reviews and it's clear what those perspectives are: respectively, sensible and idiotic.

Yesterday's 9/11 memorial concert in Grosvenor Square concluded with a group singing of All You Need Is Love. (I am told there was something similar at the NYC event but I can't back that up.)

No. Love most certainly is not all we need. We need soldiers. We need determination. We need resolute political leaders. And we need to adopt an adult approach to the threat we face instead of wallowing in infantile slogans.

There could be no clearer demonstration of the refusal of so many to recognise the nature of the threat we face. Love is not all we need.

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The Sunday Telegraph had an interview which has not been picked up as much as it should have been.

Muhammad Abdul Bari, the new(ish) secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain had this to say about 'Islamophobia':

But some police officers and sections of the media are demonising Muslims, treating them as if they're all terrorists — and that encourages other people to do the same. If that demonisation continues, then Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists — 700,000 of them in London. If you attack a whole community, it becomes despondent and aggressive.

Read that again. Even the BNP has not gone so far as Mr Bari in saying that all - not some, but all - Muslims are potential terrorists.

It is difficult to imagine a more obvious example of incitement to religious hatred than the claim that every Muslim in the country is potentially a terrorist. Even the worrying polls 'only' show that 16 per cent of Muslims believe the 7/7 bombers' cause was just. The only conclusion one can draw from Bari's remarks, however, is that we should view every Muslim with suspicion - a shocking contribution to community relations and, one would have thought, a baseless allegation.

Surely he must be prosecuted immediately for this flagrant incitement to religious hatred, if we are not to conclude that there is one rule for Muslim leaders and one rule for the rest of us.

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As Clive Davis rightly says, Martin Peretz' new blog, The Spine, looks like becoming a must-read. His first post, on spinelessness, is spot on.

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There's a terrific post by Harry at his eponymous Place, on the impact of Blair's departure on the only issue which really matters: the fight against Islamism:

It should go without saying that I agree that it has been to Blair's great credit that in the face of rabid opposition from sections of his own party, large swathes of the media and mainstream 'Middle England' opinion, Blair has stuck firmly to support for the struggles against violent jihadism. He took the right stance over Afghanistan and Iraq and he refused to buckle for demands to take a softly pro-Hizbullah stance in the recent conflict in Lebanon.

Blair's approach has involved support for the broad position adopted by George W Bush and this has, of course, been his major crime in the eyes of mainstream opinion (I refuse anymore to refer to this as mainly a problem of the left -- the opinions of Max Hastings, Mathew Parris, Simon Jenkins, Douglas Hurd and the Foreign Office Establishment show that the mainstream right are just as guilty of getting it wrong) and it is ultimately what will be considered to have cut short his premiership.

But in the bigger picture, it is not being pro-US or pro-Bush that makes Blair right. It is the fact that he understands the nature of the Islamist threat and has an intelligent explanation of the best way to try and defeat it that makes him the most progressive of democratic leaders on this issue.

Bush has recently started to talk about the fascist or totalitarian nature of violent Islamism -- Blair has been pointing that out for years. Bush has recently started to talk about the battle of ideas and the need to challenge the ideology of Islamism -- Blair has been making that point for ages. Blair's ability to link the struggle against Islamism with the wider struggles for human liberty, economic progress and the extension of global rights, has never been properly articulated by Bush's administration. To find such arguments in the US one usually needs to search out articles by neo-conservatives -- it is not part of the regular rhetoric of the White House.

...Atlanticism is a cold-war expression and we are in a very diffent conflict now. It was essential, from a western democratic perspective, in the cold war that Western Europe and the United States spoke the same language and took a united stance against the Soviet Union. This conflict is much more complicated and the next phases may well result in Europe being more radically effected than the United States. As the memory of September 11 fades, the temptation towards American isolationism, or at least disengagement, will grow. I fear however that we in Europe will not need particularly long memories to be aware of the Islamist danger.

I don't agree with all of Harry's argument but, as ever, it's a thoughtful post which merits reading.

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Bill Maher, interviewed by Larry King:

KING: What did you make of the whole Middle East thing about Hezbollah?

MAHER: Well, I wrote a -- we were just talking about Arianna in the back. I wrote a little blog for Arianna about that because it was her birthday, you know. I'm not a big blogger but when it's her birthday you can't turn her down. And I was saying that to me, you know, the world is Mel Gibson because the world is anti-Semitic.

KING: The world?

MAHER: Absolutely and the proof of that is that they ask Israel to maintain a level of restraint when they're attacked that no other country would ever be asked to uphold.

I mean can you imagine if there was a terrorist organization that took over the country on our northern border, which would be Canada, and they started shelling us in our northern cities and Minnesota and Bangor, Maine was being shelled, what do you think George Bush would do?

I think he would nuke them before breakfast. And, look, you know I don't like George Bush but he is the best president we've ever had on Israel because for some reason he gets that.

I think the reason he gets it is because he's a crazy evangelical Christian. He thinks the world is going to end in our lifetime, so Israel needs to be in the hands of the people who it was in the hands of when Jesus returns which would be the Jews. That's why the Christians do so.

KING: Did Hezbollah in a sense though PR wise win that?

MAHER: PR wise of course because the media always likes the underdog or what they perceive as the underdog, not that they're really the underdog at this point. Did you see those pictures of Hezbollah handing out cash?

I had Spike Lee on Friday night and I was saying, you know, when you see Katrina a year later these people can't get help. A day after the war ended there is Hezbollah handing out and peeling off hundred dollar bills, American, U.S. currency, hundred dollar bills.

KING: Where did it come from, Iran?

MAHER: Where did it come from? It came from U.S. consumers buying gasoline. I wish someone would do a little tape where they would morph that, morph the guy at the pump paying for his gasoline here in America into the Hezbollah guy peeling off those hundred dollar bills. Yes, we buy gasoline. It does to Iran because they sell us the oil. They get the money to Hezbollah. Hezbollah shells Israel. It's a continuum.

So, you know, I feel really bad for Lebanon. I'm sorry you got your country all bombed up. But, you know, when you let a terrorist organization take over your country that's what's going to happen. I'll tell you two Arab countries that never get bombed, Egypt and Jordan, because they made a peace treaty with Israel. Try it.

It's not just Bush who gets it. Bill Maher does, too.

A commenter has kindly posted a url for the Hollywood ad, so I am reproducing it here:

(via RadioBlogger.)

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I somehow missed this useful article by Jonah Goldberg on how "Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked".

It dovetails with this piece by Hadassa Ben-Itto on "the methodical mind poisoning of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who are being told that Jews pose an existential threat."

Not everyone in LA-la land is a pinko 'root causes' relativist, as this Jersusalem Post report makes clear:

Any Hollywood producer would give his right arm to work with the stars listed in a full-page advertisement published last week in the Los Angeles Times, among them Nicole Kidman, Bruce Willis, Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Danny DeVito, William Hurt, James Woods, Gary Sinise and Millie Perkins.

The list isn't the cast of an upcoming blockbuster, but a plea by much of the Hollywood elite to back the fight against Hizbullah, Hamas and worldwide terrorism.

The ad, which has resonated across the global entertainment industry with additional placements in trade publications Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, describes its signatories as "pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organizations such as Hizbullah and Hamas."

"If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world," the petition goes on, "chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die. We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs."

The wording may not be forceful by the standards of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations, but for Hollywood, which has often remained silent in the face of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attacks, the statement was a bit of a bombshell.

If anyone has a link to the ad, I'd be grateful if you could email me with it, so I can post it. Thanks.

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I certainly don't agree with Shaheed Malik, the Labour MP, on much but on the biggest issue of the time - the need to fight and defeat Islamist terror - he has been a strong voice. (Which is why it was disappointing that he didn't join his colleague, Khalid Mahmood MP, in ignoring last week's infamous round robin letter).

He makes a fundamental point in today's Sunday Times:

I believe that as a Muslim there is no better place to live than Britain. That doesn’t mean that all in the garden is rosy; often Islamophobia is palpable. But my message is: whether you are white, Asian, black, Muslim, Christian or Jew, if you don’t like where you’re living you have two choices: either you live elsewhere, or you engage in the political process, attempt to create change and ultimately respect the will of the majority.

When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments — I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it — he accused me of doing the BNP’s work. He is entitled to his opinion. However, a little honesty, like mine, in this whole debate might just restore trust in politicians and ease the population’s anxieties.

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Is there a finer leader than John Howard?

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said Hezbollah must be disarmed if the UN truce in Lebanon is to last.

Mr Howard said the UN Security Council resolution to end hostilities was not specific enough and needed a clear authority to disarm Hezbollah.

Not only does he get it globally, his domestic leadership is breathtaking.

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Sarah Baxter has a superb piece in the Sunday Times on the incongruity of feminists who ally, even if only passively, with Islamists:

On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.

Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat?

...I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades.

Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words.

...Chesler has fallen out with many old friends in the women’s movement. They have in effect excommunicated her for writing in right-wing publications in America, but she has found it impossible to get published on the left. There are whispers that she has become paranoid, mad, bonkers, a charge frequently levelled against the handful of women writers who are brave enough to tackle the same theme.

In Britain there is the polemicist Julie Burchill, who has written incisively about the desire of terrorists to commit acts “not so that innocents may have the right to live freely on the West Bank, but so that they might have the right to throw acid in the face of innocent, unveiled women”. Well, the outrageous Julie has always been bonkers, hasn’t she.

Then there is “mad” Melanie Phillips, the Cassandra of our age, banging on that “if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around”. Of course she would say that, wouldn’t she. She’s Jewish, and anyway didn’t you know that she is crazy enough to believe in two-parent families? In America the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin died last year virtually unmourned by women on the left in part, as her friend Christopher Hitchens remembered, because “she wasn’t neutral against a jihadist threat that wanted, and wants, to enslave and torture females.

“That she could be denounced as a ‘conservative’,” he concluded, “says much about the left to which she used to belong.”

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Oliver Kamm has a terrific post which destroys the 'it's all our fault' argument posited by some in reaction to the terrorist plot to murder thousands of people which was foiled yesterday.

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This superb piece by Daniel Schwammenthal on 'Europe's Wilful Blindness' is well worth reading.

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This from the FT - an interview with the (British) Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Mark Malloch Brown, a man who speaks in the true terror appeasing voice of the FCO:

It’s not helpful for it again to appear to be the team that led on Iraq or even on Afghanistan. It’s not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism. Hizbollah employs terrorist tactics, it is an organisation however whose roots historically are completely separate and different from Al Qaeda.

You can hear it now, can't you? "It is not helpful to couch our discussions with Herr Hitler in the language of international conquest. The Chancellor employs aggressive tactics, but Germany has a historic presence in the Rheinland, Sudetenland and Poland. We need to look at events from Herr Hitler's point of view, and reach a satisfactory accomodation with his desires, which spring from German history".

Few things more worthwhile have happened in recent years than the utter humiliation of the UN and its terror-appeasing functionaries such as Malloch Brown.

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UPDATE: I have taken down a post which was here before, with pictures such as these:

I've taken down the post because it was based on their being from the recent Religion of Peace demo, and I have it on good authority that these were taken at the 6th Feb rally. So even though the basic point still stands - these militant Islamists are the enemy of freedom and civilisation - it's a point that was already made at the time.

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Newt Gingrich's latest email roundrobin contains this horrifying map showing the arc of terrorist attacks from Islamists and regimes which are seeking WMDs. Here's his commentary on it:

It begins in North Korea on our Independence Day, when an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the Western Coast of the United States was fired -- with Iranian observers present for the launch. It moves on through Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, where there have been several terrorist operations, to India, where seven bombs exploded two weeks ago.

The pattern of global Islamic terrorist threats and attacks picks up again in the war in Afghanistan and into the Middle East, where the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance is not only waging war against Israel but also operating in Iraq, killing our troops as well as innocent Iraqi civilians, in an attempt to destroy any chance that a free Iraqi government will succeed.

The arc continues through Britain, where two more Islamic organizations were banned as terrorist groups just last week. Then it crosses the Atlantic to Canada, where, according to a remarkable article in Investor's Business Daily (IBD), the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations is urging Muslims not to cooperate in terrorism investigations.

And finally, the global threat comes to the United States, where, according to the article in IBD, the Department of Homeland Security is investigating a pipebomb found in Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans as part of a plot to shut down commerce on a critical waterway. Experts also say that the recent plot to blow up New York City tunnels had a "good chance of success."

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Matt d'Ancona has a superb piece today on the Spectator's website:

“It’s very, very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics that have been used,” he [Kim Howells] said in Beirut on Saturday. “You know, if they’re chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don’t go for the entire Lebanese nation.”

In a single outburst, the minister embarrassed Number Ten, which has been treading a delicate path through this immensely sensitive terrain, and bought into the two myths about the Israeli bombardment: first, that it is “disproportionate” (what, precisely, is the proportionate response to Hezbollah’s abduction of soldiers and deployment of Katyusha rockets?); and, second, that the Israeli strikes amount to “collective punishment” of the Lebanese people.

It is no surprise that so many have resorted to lazy attacks on Israel in this frightening crisis. Old-fashioned rhetoric and thinking are comfort blankets when the shock of the new is so sharp. But they merely postpone the moment of intellectual and strategic reckoning. Egeland, Howells and many like them are reaching for the old anti-Israeli playbook, as if the Jewish state was facing another Intifada.

In fact, 21st Century Hezbollah is one of the best-armed, best-co-ordinated guerrilla armies in the world. In addition to the Katyusha rockets supplied by Tehran via Damascus, the group has deployed a cruise missile known as the C-802 – an Iranian-made variant of the Chinese silkworm – and a Syrian-made 220mm rocket. This is asymmetric warfare only in the sense that a nation state is fighting what Philip Bobbitt would call a “virtual state”: a highly sophisticated terrorist organisation. This confrontation is as far removed as possible from the stand-offs between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths of the Intifada era.

In truth, the world is already at war, though not in any conventional sense. In Iraq, the Islamists attack the elected Government and the Coalition. In European and American cities, silent cells plot horrors greater even than the Madrid and London bombings. Iran, a theocracy determined to acquire nuclear weapons, fights against Israel via the murderous agency of Hezbollah. The West, for now, allows Israel to fight back. But for how long? How much easier to focus on the bloody leaves of Lebanon and avert our gaze from the horrors of the global wood.

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It's only a small gesture, but via this site you can send pizzas to the brave IDF soldiers fighting to combat terror.

Those who cross the line of acceptable behaviour must always be brought to account, so it is quite proper that the news agenda is dominated by suspicions concerning Lord Levy, the policemen who shot Jean Charles de Menezes, and the NatWest Three.

Yet there has been barely a whisper since the revelation last week that civil servants at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have been supporting the activities of Islamists dedicated to the destruction of Western society.

Last week the journalist Martin Bright published an exposé of the FCO’s behaviour (http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/libimages/176.pdf) and showed that the FCO is actively promoting engagement with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood and its associated groups.

Mockbul Ali, the FCO’s Islamic issues adviser, pressed for the granting of entry visas to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to promote the establishment of an Islamic state brought about by jihad.

Mr Ali has also championed entry for Delwar Hossain Sayeedi a Bangladeshi MP who demands further terror against the West because the UK and the US “deserve all that is coming to them” for overthrowing the Taleban in Afghanistan. His previous visits have been accompanied reportedly by violence. To Mockbul Ali, all this marks Sayeedi as a “mainstream” figure.

Mr Ali’s views, based on the supposed merits of “engagement”, are now mainstream within the FCO. His colleague Angus McKee has even proposed direct funding of groups dedicated to wiping out Western civilisation: “Given that Islamist groups are often less corrupt than the generality of the societies in which they operate, consideration might be given to channelling aid resources through them, so long as sufficient transparency is achievable.”

None of this should come as a surprise. Deluded engagement with those whose existence is dedicated to destroying our society is par for the FCO course. As Halifax wrote to Eden in 1937: “I went to see the PM. He was very strong that I ought to manage to see Hitler . . . He truly observed that we might as well get all the contact we could.” Did we not learn in the 1930s the consequences of such contact with those who seek to destroy us?

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I recommend The British Moment - the case for democratic geopolitics in the twenty-first century, which has just been published by the Social Affairs Unit on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society

I'm proud to have been one of the original signatories to the statement of principles. I should point out, however, that where my name appears as such at the back of the book, I am described as 'Columnist, The Times, Personal Advisor to the PM for Defence and Security, 1984-91'.

Whilst the first part of that is correct, I had not yet gone to university in 1984, and I'm not sure Baroness Thatcher would have been excercising her usual sound judgement had she made me her Defence and Security Adviser at the age of 19.

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I've just read Michael Gove's new book, Celsius 7/7. All I can really do is urge you to buy it. It's a truly marvellous book about the refusal of so many in the West to acknowlege the reality and scale of the Islamist threat to civilisation. It ought to be compulsory reading for anyone who has ever bought a copy of the Guardian out of choice, every BBC journalist, every MP who voted against 90 days detention and everyone who thought Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares was anything other than a piece of terrorist propaganda.

It's so well written that it's impossible to put down. Gove ranges across the history of Islamism, the reality of today's terror, the real role of Israel and the response of Western liberals. It's a book that needed to be written.

Buy it here. You won't regret it.

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There's an excellent piece in the Spectator by Saira Khan, on being a British Muslim:

Not only am I British, but I feel British. The question I put to Muslims who do not feel British — who won’t share the British values of tolerance, freedom and democracy — is, ‘Why are you living in this country?’ This may sound quite harsh, but it is surely a reasonable question.

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Add this to the 'you couldn't make it up' file:

Police family liaison officers are to be assigned to help relatives of terrorist suspects deal with the aftermath of an arrest or raid.

...It is established practice for a specially trained officer to help families of murder victims and serious crimes.

Actually you could make it up very easily. It's oh-so predictable. It’s a perfect example of the decadence which is undermining our ability to defend Western civilisation.

Do I need to point out that there is a difference between being the victim of a murder and being the perpetrator? Of course there are families who have no idea of their sons and brothers’ terror plans. But oughtn’t we to be arresting those families which sit on information and protect their relatives, rather than counselling them?

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This interview with Paul Berman is an automatic must-read.

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A jaw-droppingly stupid piece in the Sunday Telegraph by Mary Wakefield:

For most of us, Syria is the sugar daddy of Islamic terror, riddled with al-Qaeda training camps, funding Hamas and the Hezbollah, goading deranged Iraqi insurgents into battle with the Christian West.

But heh, forget all that. It can't really be true because, as she's just pointed out:

Throughout Syria, passers-by paused to say "welcome" and invite me in for mint tea - no furtive looks, no soviet-style reluctance to be singled out.

This is the sort of drivel we're up against in the fight to save Western civililsation.

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There's much on which I don't agree with Melanie Phillips. Gay marriage, for instance. But on the really big issues, she is usually frighteningly right. I've just bought Londonistan and will read it this weekend.

But agree with her or not, read this Jackie Ashley 'interview' and then answer me this: in its patronising, dismissive, sneering tone, does it not say far, far more about Ms Ashley and her type of Guardianista than it says about Melanie Phillips?

(28)

A perceptive piece by Matthew Parris on Cameroonian foreign policy, which ends thus:

[W]e could be just a few years from a Cabinet in which the Prime Minister, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are to the right of Margaret Thatcher in their view of Britain’s place in the world.

(16)

As the lack posts over the past couple of weeks shows, I've had other things to do and have not been in touch with the blogosphere. I'm back now. The most striking development is that The Euston Manifesto seems to be everywhere at the moment.

Much as I wish its signatories luck, I think they’re fighting a losing - lost - battle. So here’s my version. I'll call it The Maida Vale Manifesto.

If anyone else wants to sign it, email me and I'll post your name. But I don't expect to be flooded with emails. I suspect I'll have to change the 'we' to 'I'.

I'm also going to try an experiment. As readers may know, I had to remove comments because it took so long for me to read everything and delete the libellous and racist remarks which were being posted.

I do miss having comments. There's nothing I like better than a good argument with people who think I'm wrong. So I'm allowing them on this post, and will see how it goes. If people can behave like civilied human beings then hopefully I'll be able to return to full comments on every post. But if the same old problems emerge, I will unhesitatingly close them down.

Sorry to sound like a school teacher, but it has to be said.

*******************************

The Maida Vale Manifesto

We the undersigned have always thought of ourselves as being on the Left. We have held it as axiomatic that the Left believed in fighting tyranny, liberating the oppressed, and spreading wealth and power.

We have had a rude awakening. When terrorists murdered thousands of American citizens, many of our fellow leftists blamed not the terrorists so much as Americans themselves. They had it coming seemed to be the view of many, if not most, of the Left.

This attitude was typified by the Left’s house magazine, the New Statesman, which wrote this in its editorial after 9/11:

“American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.”

This piece of moral degeneracy was far from being a one-off. In the aftermath of 9/11, we were shocked by the frequent incidence of similar sentiments. The New Statesman again typified this after last July’s tube murders, with a picture of a rucksack on its cover, accompanied by two words in large font: Blair’s bombs.

There are many decent people on the Left, who understand the difference between good and evil, and who do not ally themselves with terrorists, murderers and oppressors. The Prime Minister himself is an outstanding example of this, risking his political support within his party to do the right thing at the right time.

But the very fact that supporting the liberation of Iraq from Saddam entailed such a political risk says almost all that needs to be said about the outlook of most Labour Party MPs and members.

Add to this the relish with which large, mainstream sections of the Left – typified by the Mayor of London - now choose to ally themselves with Islamists who seek to destroy the essence of Western civilisation, who would put to death homosexuals and Jews, and who would put women in metaphorical – and sometimes literal – chains, and the moral cancer that has taken hold of the Left becomes clear.

The evidence of reality is something with which we have had to wrestle. It is not easy to acknowledge what the Left has become, and the mindset of leftists. But that evidence is so overwhelming that we can no longer conceive of describing ourselves as being on the Left in any recognisable form.

Theoretical arguments about what is or is not a proper left-wing position are now meaningless. The mainstream Left has demonstrated clearly which side of the battle to preserve Western civilisation and freedom it is on. The Left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy.

Stephen Pollard

(31)

My liking for pop music is almost non-existent. But this has got to be the coolest pop song ever:

Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban

Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up

Osama’s staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out

America won’t turn and run once the fighting has begun

Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too

Syria is forced to leave, don’t you know that all this means

Chorus
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave

All over the middle east,

dictators walk with shaky knees

Don’t know what they’re gonna do,

their worst nightmare is coming true

They fear the domino effect,

they’re all wondering who’s next

Repeat Chorus

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive

Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies

Unemployment's staying down,

Democrats are wondering how

Revenue is going up, can you say "Tax Cuts"

Repeat Chorus

Cheney was right, Condi was right,
Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, we were right,
“The Right” was right and
Bush was right
Bush was right

Click here for the video. Awesome.

(via Arthur's Seat.)

Wow. Peter Tatchell gets it spot on in his remarks on the blog associated with today's March for Freedom of Expression:

Sections of the left moan that the rally is being supported the right. Well, if these socialists object so strongly why don’t they organise their own demo in support of free speech?

The truth is that is that some of the left would rarely, if ever, rally to defend freedom of expression because they don’t wholeheartedly believe in it. Mired in the immoral morass of cultural relativism, they no longer endorse Enlightenment values and universal human rights. Their support for free speech is now qualified by so many ifs and buts. When push comes to shove, it is more or less worthless.

As a left-wing Green, committed to human rights and social justice, I do not share the politics of some other speakers and rallyists. But this is the whole point of Saturdays’ demo – to defend the free speech of those with whom we disagree.

The way Emma Brockes has been traduced by her own newspaper, the Guardian, over her interview with Noam Chomsky, is a disgrace. (Funny - who would have expected to see the words 'Guardian' and 'a disgrace alongside each other?)

David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm and Francis Wheen have, however, been relentless and forensic in their quest to uphold her bona fides. The Guardian, on the other hand, has refused to acknowledge the truth.

The three musketeers have now released a letter they wrote on 1st December to the powers that be at the Guardian, because they have finally hit the end of the road within the Guardian. I won't edit it; you can read it here. (It's long and complicated but extremely instructive as an example of how Chomsky twists the case, and his supporters do likewise.)

Good news that Paradise Now didn't win an Oscar. No doubt as I write there is somone pointing out that it's because 'the Jews run Hollywood'.

Not such good news that Rachel Weisz won for her role in The Constant Gardener, a stupid and dangerous piece of agitprop. (As well as her parroting Le Carre's codswallop whenever she can in interviews, I also have long had an irrational dislike of Ms Weisz - she's one of those people I cannot bear to look at or hear. Fiona Bruce et al.)

(3)

Harry's Place has a very intetesting account of last night's Clare Short sponsored meeting on Hizb ut-Tahrir. I'd suggest reading it all. To judge from the report, it seems Ms Short was her usual self.

Oliver Kamm is, of course, right when he writes that

The issue for public policymaking is not that Holocaust denial is offensive (though it certainly is that) but that it is false: malevolently, systematically so. The proper policy with regard to malevolent falsehood is to expose it rather than suppress it. That is the task of historians rather than legislators or the judiciary.

Irving is a truly vile man, and I will lose no sleep over the fact of his liberty having been taken away. Frankly, he deserves almost any indignity which is meted out to him.

What I will lose sleep over, however (albeit not literally), is the cause of his imprisonment. I understand why Austria of all places has a law against Holocaust denial. Unlike Germany, Austria has never properly confronted its past. Both nations, of course, have such a crime on their statute books. But for all the manifest ways in which Austria has a shameful post-war political history, making Holocaust denial a crime is wrong both in practice and in principle.

It is wrong in practise because, far from helping to deal with the legacy of the single greatest crime in human history, it sweeps it under the carpet, allows it to fester, and makes false martyrs out of the most repellent human beings.

And it is wrong in principle because it goes against the very fabric of Western civilisation and liberty that people can be imprisoned for expressing a view, however vile that view may be.

It would ill behove anyone who defends the right of the Danish newspapers to publish cartoons mocking Mohammed then to defend the idea of Holocaust denial being a crime. Free speech is not absolute - I cannot call a certain politician a thieving liar, for instance, without the evidence to back up the statement - but it ought to be a guiding principle of our societies.

(It is important to separate out the expression of a view which might be - and, in Irving's case, is - used by violent thugs to justify their behaviour, from those times when the expression of the view is itself an incitement to violence or other criminal behaviour. In the former case, allowing such an expression is the concomitant of liberty; in the latter it is properly dealt with through the courts.)

Irving is not a martyr. He is not a prisoner of conscience. His cause is not in any way noble. But he is wrongly imprisoned.

The Sunday Telegraph's poll today, which shows that 40% of British Muslims want Sharia law to replace common law and statute in parts of the country, is bad enough.

But for the full impact, it should be read with the paper's interview with one of the leading experts on the subject, Patrick Sookhdeo:

They think they have won the [cartoon] debate. They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not. The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.

It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent.

...In a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.

...Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done. The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work - yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.

It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.

Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.

...The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.

They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.

For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion - and it is their aim to achieve this.

That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.

Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on.

That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" or "violating the rights of Muslims" to deny them sharia law.

There's already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.

Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.

The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that.

The phrase Clash of Civilisations barely begins to describe what is happening. Do read the whole thing.

There's a powerful piece in the Sunday Telegraph by Nonie Darwish. You really should read the whole thing, but the messssage is this:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It's a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

It's time for Arabs and Muslims to stand up for their families. We must stop allowing our leaders to use the West and Israel as an excuse to distract from their own failed leadership and their citizens' lack of freedoms. It's time to stop allowing Arab leaders to complain about cartoons while turning a blind eye to people who defame Islam by holding Korans in one hand while murdering innocent people with the other.

Muslims need jobs - not jihad.

The Mail has a good expose of the Muslim Association of Britain, behind today's rally in Trafalgar Square, which puts into the mainstream some of the facts which readers of sites such as Harry's Place have long known.

There's a superb piece by Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post on the hypocrisy surrounding the cartoon row:

The arguments from Muslims - though not the fanatical, violent manner of many of their protests - would no doubt be taken more seriously if they had also objected to the depiction on Syrian television of rabbis as cannibals. Or if, last Saturday, Britain's Muslim Weekly had not published a caricature of a hooked-nosed Ehud Olmert.

Or if, last Friday, Valley of the Wolves, the most expensive movie ever made in Turkey, had not opened to great local acclaim. In the film American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother. They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine-gunfire, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to prison, where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs and sells them to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

Or if a Belgian and Dutch Muslim group hadn't, last week, posted on its Web site pictures of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. Or if the mere display of a cross or a Star of David in Saudi Arabia wasn't illegal.

And when it comes to newspaper cartoons - the subject of the present unrest - Muslim countries are world leaders in stirring up hate, without a peep of protest elsewhere, let alone the torching of buildings, threats to behead European tourists, and the burning of the Danish flag (which incidentally bears a Christian symbol, the cross).

So much for religious respect.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Incidentally, Gross' piece shows that Chris McGreal's comparison of the Israelis and the Nazis is far from unusual, and he has delightful fellow travellers:

The Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustur, for example, ran a cartoon showing the railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau - but with Israeli flags replacing the Nazi ones, and a sign which read "The Israeli Annihilation Camp." Jordan is supposedly a moderate country at peace with Israel.

To mark the UN designation of January 27 as Holocaust Memorial Day, the cartoonist for Al-Yawm (Saudi Arabia) superimposed the Nazi swastika on the Star of David.

Another example of my wrong-headedness in asserting that the Danes' sense of humour leaves something to be desired. A Dane sent me this:

Danish exports to the muslim countries have suffered severely, due to the controversy surrounding the Muhammad cartoons. Un the up-side, sales of the Danish flag in Gaza have never been higher.

The Jewish reaction to the Iranian holocaust cartoons is not quite the same as the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons.

Oliver Kamm cuts to the chase:

Free speech does cause hurt, and - other than in cases of incitement to crime (as with the disgraceful demonstrations outside the Danish embassy in London last Friday) - we should accept that there is nothing wrong in this. Those who find their religious beliefs offended may be offered sympathy on a personal level (though they will find none from me); they are entitled to no restitution whatsoever in public policy. The state of their sensibilities must be a matter of indifference to a free society.

...The cartoons are indifferent, crude and unfunny, and ought not to have found editorial space when submitted. Now that they have caused widespread offence, it is imperative that they be widely published and circulated. The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output. Some of that output will be offensive and much will be valueless. We have a right to criticise it, and a moral obligation never, never to complain that our hurt feelings require its suppression.

There's an excellent piece in Ha'aretz today by Yossi Sarid:

I don't like the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten; it's a matter of taste. But I very much like the newspaper's fight for its right to publish them, and that is no longer a matter of taste, but a world view: Mohammed is not sacred and Moses is not sacred and Jesus is not sacred; only the lives of human beings, believers and secular people alike, are sacred.

...And who are all the fanatics who were so deeply insulted? The Syrians and the Iranians and the Saudis and the Libyans and Hezbollah, who have already protested strenuously, have fomented violent riots and imposed boycotts.

...An ironic twist: A moment before I became excited about the Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Libyan uprisings, I recalled the films produced in these sensitive countries, which were based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." When rabbis were seen there slaughtering Arab children, the imams remained silent; they didn't even whisper as their responsibility should have dictated.

...And we, the free people, must remember: If newspapers have to be edited according to the "Shulhan Arukh" (code of law) of every faith and religion, we won't even find newspapers worthy of their name in which to wrap herring.

Donald Rumsfeld made a superb speech yesterday in Munich, delineating with clarity the nature of the threat to the West:

[A] war has been declared on all of our nations and on our people...The Cold War wasn't won through fate or good luck. Freedom prevailed because our free nations showed resolve when retreat would have been easier, showed courage when concession seemed simpler and more attractive.

...The Iranian regime is today the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism... The world does not want, and must work together to avoid, a nuclear Iran.

[Rumsfeld said violent extremism was a danger faced by Europe as much as the United States. He said Islamic militants were on the move and had to be stopped.]

They seek to take over governments from North Africa to Southeast Asia and to re-establish a caliphate they hope, one day, will include every continent. They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist empire.

Today our countries have another choice to make - we could choose to pretend, as some suggest, that the enemy is not at our doorstep; we could choose to believe, as some contend, that the threat is exaggerated. But . . . what if they are wrong?

The clash of civilisations is multi-faceted, but one of the most pernicious aspects of it is that within the West, between those who either deny or simply do not realise threat we face, and those - such as Rumsfeld - who understand and are prepared to confront the aims of militant Islam.

The cartoon conflict is not some obscure row which has blown up out of all proportion: it is a perfect demonstration of the threat to freedom. As Andrew Sullivan puts it:

It would be hard to illustrate the core issue of our time more vividly: freedom versus religious extremism. From the threat to Salman Rushdie through 9/11 to the murderous thuggery of Zarqawi in Iraq, the line is a straight one. And it must not be appeased.

The Dissident Frogman has designed a series of banners which blogs can use to display their support for free speech. Take your pick.

(via Samizdata)

The BBC's coverage of the cartoon row is up to its usual high standards. I had the same reaction to lats night's 10 O'Clock News as one of the Harry's Place commenters, who describes how it

showed the cover and inside pages of France Soir newspaper (where various cartoons of Mohammed are reproduced) but did so in a ludicrous, semi-blacked out style thereby preventing viewers seeing what the fuss is about. Treating satirical cartoons as if they were pornography is disgraceful. The BBC (rightly) wouldn't hesitate to show clips from Jerry Springer: the Opera - indeed they broadcast the whole thing. Tonight BBC News demonstrated cowardly, one-eyed pandering to an aggressive lobby group.

Is anyone surprised by this? I came across this despatch from Michael Buchanan on the BBC's website, with a conclusion which is so wrong that it beggars belief:

Denmark's reputation as an easy-going, consensual nation has been severely tarnished in recent days. All the Danes can do now is hope the repeated apologies for the offence caused, by both the government and the newspaper, will end this unseemly row.

Er, no. Denmark's reputation has not been tarnished but enhanced. Free speech prevails, with a government defending it to the hilt. It's not Denmark's reputation which has been tarnished, but that of those Muslim countries which have demanded censorship and an apology, and those Muslims who are burning the Danish flag.

As for the idea that, All the Danes can do now is hope the repeated apologies for the offence caused, by both the government and the newspaper, will end this unseemly row, has a sentence more indicative of the BBC world view ever been written? Take a running jump, Mr Buchanan. So much for the BBC as a stout defender of free speech.

All the Danes can and should do now is carry on standing up for the basic Western value of free speech, and hope that other nations do the same.

On further reflection, the Danes should surely apologise for the cartoons and for their media in general. The Islamic press would never, ever publish a cartoon which might conceivably offend another religion's believers. Never, ever.

This cartoon, for instance, would never, ever appear in Al-Quds:

Nor would any of the other such cartoons which have appeared in Islamic newspapers ever appear in them. Never, ever.

Meanwhile, a correspondent has pointed out that when I wrote, "The words 'Danish' and 'humour' are rarely found together", I ignored the fact that when Denmark won Euro 92, a short while after they had rejected the Maastricht Treaty, the Danish Foreign Minister came up with this: "If you can't join them, beat them."

UPDATE: Tom Gross has more examples of cartoons which would never, ever appear.

The words "Danish" and "humour" are rarely found together. The only Danish joke I have ever been told - "Can you play the violin?" "I don't know. I've never tried" - is hardly side-splitting.

Danish humour is best described as literal. Even the only Danish comedian to achieve renown, Victor Borge, made people laugh by playing wrong notes on the piano.

So although it might be unexpected that a series of Danish cartoons have caused the worst flare-up of Muslim intolerance of free speech since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, on another level it is astonishing that such a conflagration has not happened before.

On Monday, the Danish flag was burnt across the Middle East in a series of demonstrations that are increasing in intensity with each passing hour. The Saudi and Libyan ambassadors have been withdrawn from Copenhagen. A full-scale boycott of Danish goods is under way. One Danish company, Arla Foods, which sells $430 million of goods a year in the Middle East, reports a total boycott.

The Danish government has warned Danes against travelling to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Danish aid workers have been pulled from Gaza.

The Muslim Council of Britain has joined in on the act, issuing a press release condemning "the continuing refusal of newspapers in Denmark and Norway to apologise for printing a series of sacrilegious cartoons vilifying the Prophet Mohammed".

The cause of this tribulation is a series of 12 cartoons published last September in the Danish newspaper Jyllends-Posten. They are not very funny. In one, Mohammed cries out to dead suicide bombers waiting to be admitted to paradise: "Stop, stop! We ran out of virgins". Another has him wearing a bomb as a turban.

But they are certainly offensive to a large number of Muslims, as this week's turmoil shows. But so what? Rather more offensive, one might think, than some mocking cartoons is some Muslims' desire to murder me as a Jew.

Indeed, in some ways the cartoons were designed as a deliberate challenge. A biographer of Mohammed had lamented the fact that artists were too intimidated to illustrate his book, and the newspaper called for cartoonists who would be willing to have their pictures published. Offensive and unfunny though they might be, they none the less raise legitimate points about the beliefs and behaviour of some Muslims. Is there, for instance, any non-Muslim who does not find the notion of the 76 virgins who await suicide bombers to be both horrifying and amusing?

If free speech means anything, it surely includes the ability to question, and to mock, the belief that Mohammed rewards jihadists, just as it must also include the freedom to stage Jerry Springer - The Opera and the play Dishonour at the Birmingham Rep, against which Sikhs protested last year.

Europe is not part of the Caliphate, whatever some Muslims wish. One of the defining qualities of Western civilisation is that, while religions of all kinds are tolerated, their beliefs and practices must be subject to secular laws. The idea that any religion should be above those laws is anathema to Western civilisation.

That the issue has taken off with such passion this week is appropriate, because yesterday the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill returned to the Commons.

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, stood firm in his defence of free speech, after ambassadors from 10 Muslim countries complained to him about the cartoons. As he put it: "The government can in no way influence the media."

Our Government takes a rather different approach. The new law will ensure that it will not just be Satanic Verse-style protesters who will try to silence critics, but the British state itself, which will have the power to lock up those who dare to mock Mohammed.

Be in no doubt about the purpose of the legislation. It is those who criticise Muslims who are the target, not those who mock Christians, Sikhs, Hindus or Jews. No other religion has demanded such a law. The Muslim Council of Britain has, however, been lobbying for it since its inception in 1997, and got its way in November 2001, with a clause in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred. It was explicitly included as a sop to the MCB.

Such is the nature of the fight to defend Western values - half-hearted and supine. The right of a newspaper to publish unfunny cartoons about Mohammed, Jesus or any other religious figure is not a distraction in the defence of freedom from terror. It goes to the very heart of what must be defended.

There are few sentences less likely to win friends and influence people than: “Hello, we’re here to mend fences with President Bush.”

David Cameron’s decision to send his top team of William Hague, George Osborne and Liam Fox to Washington next month to do just that is thus an encouraging sign. Far from merely pandering to yoga-class chatter, it seems he has a principled approach to the one issue that matters above all else — defending the West.

By far the easiest approach for Mr Cameron would be to pretend that President Bush did not exist since, by the next election, the leader of the free world will have served his two terms and be back on his Crawford ranch. Mr Cameron will never have to deal with him as Prime Minister.

If Mr Cameron was truly cynical, he would build on his predecessor’s froideur to President Bush and thereby endear himself still further in what pass for the minds of the Juice Bar generation.

When British Prime Minister Hugh Grant told US President Billy Bob Thornton where he could put his government, cinema audiences cheered and commentators bemoaned the fact that the real PM did not behave like Mr Grant’s character. But for some strange reason, Tony Blair decided not to model his foreign and security policy on a Richard Curtis romantic comedy. Nor, it seems, has Mr Cameron.

I would like to report that I have discovered the “points to make” memo that the Conservatives have prepared for their meetings with Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and John Snow:

British bunch of ungrateful x1%£*+@s! Have forgotten sacrifices US made to defend freedom and are making now;

President laying the foundations for the West’s defence;

Not just lefties who don’t get it: most MPs, even Tories, think Frank Dobson knows better how to deal with terrorists than the Anti-Terrorist Squad;

Britain now fundamentally weak-minded nation that thinks Islamist terror is our own fault;

Thank God for Tony Blair;

When Blair goes, Cameron is only hope for full British support for war on terror;

Old Europe so suffused with anti-Americanism that it is a lost cause.

The Independent on Sunday reports today that:

Tony Blair is preparing to scrap a 40-year ban on tapping MPs' telephones...Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping "whatsoever" of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.

But that convention - known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it - is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.

Years ago - in the early 1990s I used to work in the Commons for Peter Shore, about as patriotic an MP as has ever been born, a robust anti-communist and an upright defender against of Western values and freedom. It would be difficult to imagine a man whose phones would be less in need of tapping - nor less of a 'conspiracy theorist' - than Peter.

One afternoon, I was having a phone conversation with a friend about what film we would see that night. We ended our conversation and said goodbye. As I was putting the phome down I remembered something I wanted to tell my friend and put it it back to my ear, just in case he had not yet hung up.

I was, to say the least, surprised by what I heard - a recording being played back of the conversation I had just had.

When Peter came back into the office, I mentioned what had just happened. He looked at me as if I was being rather naive. "They record everything here", he said "You should always work on the principle that you should never a convesation on the phone that you don't want overheard."

Maybe there is an altogether different explanation, and the playback of my conversation was nothing to do with phone tapping. But in the 15 years since it happened to me, I've yet to have anyone come up with one.

I think this is what one might call a different take on 2005 from that of the European chattering classes:

The people of the Arab Middle East experienced a modest but potentially significant increase in political rights and civil liberties in 2005, Freedom House announced in a major survey of global freedom released today.

The global survey, "Freedom in the World," shows that although the Middle East continues to lag behind other regions, a measurable improvement can be seen in freedom in several key Arab countries, as well as the Palestinian Authority. In another key finding, the number of countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free declined from 49 in 2004 to 45 for the year 2005, the lowest number of Not Free societies identified by the survey in over a decade. In noteworthy country developments, Ukraine and Indonesia saw their status improve from Partly Free to Free; Afghanistan moved from Not Free to Partly Free; and the Philippines saw its status decline from Free to Partly Free.

...On the whole, the state of freedom showed substantial improvement worldwide, with 27 countries and one territory registering gains and only 9 countries showing setbacks. The global picture thus suggests that the past year was one of the most successful for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972.

Look at where freedom is increasing, and note the coincidence with the aims and practice of American foreign policy under President Bush. Not, of course, that it is the done thing to look at the facts, when America and President Bush are involved.

There's an excellent interview with the great Robert Conquest by George Walden in the Daily Telegraph.

(Once you get over Walden's typical first sentence - "Fresh from a trip to Moscow, where I chair the Russian Booker..." - it's a good interview.)

A long while ago I was at a conference in Istanbul. The organisers had laid on a minibus to take new arrivals from the airport to the hotel. A few minutes after I had sat down, someone sat next to me. I introduced myself, to which he replied: "Hello. Robert Conquest". I was, as they say, speechless (metaphorically, if not literally).

Great piece on The First Post by Leo McKinstry on how Guy Fawkes would be treated today:

If Guy Fawkes were around today, he would experience a very different outcome. When captured, a finger would not be laid upon him because of the Human Rights Act. He would be granted full legal aid and provided with the services of a high-powered lawyer, perhaps even the Prime Minister's wife.

A support group would be formed to campaign for his release; a large section of the audience on BBC Question Time would work itself into a frenzy of indignation about his imprisonment. He would be made the honorary president of Leeds University Students Union. George Galloway would argue that it is the Government, not Fawkes, which should be in the dock.

After many delays his trial would collapse in farce over a procedural technicality about the collection of evidence by MI5. Released, he would be made a columnist on the Guardian and awarded an Arts Council grant to explore "issues around terrorism".

The government won last night's terror bill vote by 300 to 299. Just two more votes would have made all the difference.

No doubt George Galloway, implacable opponent of the war on terror, was gutted that his deeply principled opposition did not win out. I'm sure he did all he could to defeat the bill.

I can't for a second endorse the view that his decision to place speaking at a money-making 'Audience With George Galloway' in Dublin above representing his constituents in the House of Commons and voting on the bill shows him to be a hypocritical, phony, two-faced, insincere poltiical con artist.

Nor could I agree with those who might think that Vincent Cable's decision to put a meeting with a group of 'trade justice' campaigners ahead of voting on the terror legislation shows what a deeply unserious rabble the LibDems really are.

Oh no. Not at all.

Who'd have believed it of a Lib Dem and a Respect MP?

(Three MPs were absent. Alan Beith was at a friend's funeral, a pretty reasonable reason for missing the vote.)

This is what is called bad news.

Harry, and his Place, are one of the best and most important things about the blogosphere. They perform vital work in presenting the facts about those who would ally with Islamists and what they really say and mean. The consolation is that the other excellent contributors will still be there. But the forces of light cannot afford to lose the likes of Harry.

According to CSpan, Saddam's friend in Bethnal Green is a Labour MP (and the link still has him as MP for Glasgow Kelvin).

A brilliant column by Daniel Finkelstein on Tony Blair's failure so far to pick up his Congressional Gold Medal:

The United States of America is a flawed nation. So is every country in the world. Every one has fought ill-advised wars and exported dubious ideas, pursued questionable foreign policy doctrines and suffered internal dissension and poverty. Every one.

Yet unlike almost every other nation, the United States has also been a beacon of liberty. We know this here in Europe because it was to our shores that American boys came to protect one part of the Continent from the totalitarian instincts of the other part. It was here they gave their lives and here they stayed to defend us from ourselves and here from which they departed when their job was done, without retaining a single piece of real estate, save the cemeteries in which they buried their sons.

...As its name suggests, the medal is not the gift of the President. Nor is it a piece of party patronage. It requires the sponsorship of two thirds of the members of the House of Representatives and 67 Senators. This is a gift from the entire American people.

Congressman Richard Baker said of Mr Blair’s award: “This medal attempts to capture for history what most Americans feel in their hearts — Tony Blair is a hero.” This is a commonly held view in the United States, where even those who hate the war in Iraq are deeply grateful for the way the Prime Minister rallied to their side after September 11, 2001.

...Mr Blair believes that being seen to receive his medal would be politically disastrous, especially among members of his own party. As one Labour MP put it: “As far as many of us are concerned, if Tony takes that medal it would be like taking an award from Satan.”

And that, of course, is precisely why it is essential that not another moment is lost. Tony Blair must fly to Washington. Our Prime Minister must stand under the Dome of the Capitol and receive his medal from our great ally. And he must do this not just because he deserves it. Which, incidentally, he most certainly does.

He must go because the American people need to know how much we value their friendship. He must go because the tide of anti-American feeling in this country needs to be confronted. He must go because he should be proud, not ashamed, that he said yes when our allies came to call and asked whether, after all the support they have given us, we might reciprocate. He must go because the commitment to spread democracy around the world is a brave and noble one. He must go as a bold statement to the enemies of liberty everywhere that those who defend freedom are bound together and are resolute.

Read the whole thing.

Terrific post at Harry's Place on the depressing Question Time last night. One of the site's contributors, Brownie, was in the audience:

I spent the first 10 minutes of last night’s Question Time Special believing I had been transported back to the post-9/11 edition of the same program, a program so utterly beyond the pale that it made me feel ashamed to be British.

The way we started, one could have been forgiven for thinking that everybody, but everybody was responsible for the 7/7 atrocity, apart from the fanatics who actually carried bombs onto trains. “We need to understand why these young men felt so detached, blah, blah…” Self-hating Brits, I’d call them. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just your ordinary Joe: wife and kids, mortgaged up to the hilt, unfulfilling job, not enough money, etc., etc.. It’s a hard enough slog as it is without some one-step-removed apologist insisting that I take partial responsibility for the irrational actions of people I’ve never met, never hurt, but who would, given half the chance, slaughter me and everyone else I love. Its not my fault, see, and I resent being asked to contemplate the possibility it might be. In fact, it makes me quite angry.

Which is my problem in these sorts of public meetings. I tend to spend more time with my head in my hands than I do with my hand in the air. So when I hear people whose most important decisions each day are what to play on the iPod lecturing the country’s most senior policeman about the rules of engagement for suicide bombers, telling him how his men are “executioners” (these being the officers who ran towards, not away from, a man they suspected of being half a second from committing mass-murder), I want to be sick, have a shower, scream……do anything in fact, but speak.

...[I]t's no surprise that it’s the activist student and early-20-something demographic that gets disproportionate airtime. They are the ones with arms arrow-straight in the air for the full 60 minutes, desperately seeking an outlet for the moral certitude that will otherwise consume them. A rectitude inversely proportional to their knowledge. You know, it’s nothing to be remotely proud of, but I’ve yet to hear an argument from this clique that I couldn’t destroy in a thrice in a forum that allowed for cross-examination of their unintelligent and unintelligible positions. I’ve spent the last couple of years confronting our future leaders of industry and tomorrow’s political elite as they parade through Cambridge market square in orange boiler suits, whilst fellow-students Cassandra and Abigail blow whistles and the token ethnic hands out leaflets so banal, so lame and just so utterly, utterly wrong, that the world famous alumni, with more Nobel Prizes between them than any other institution, are likely so embarrassed by the association that they must wish they’d gone to Trent Polytechnic.

But Question Time is about banging your drum the loudest, nothing more, and quite clearly, it’s something the antis are much better at than we are. Having superior arguments counts for nothing. And even when those arguments get an airing, when was the last time you saw a supporter of the war on QT matching the passion of the righteous stopper, or implacable zealot?

Couldn't agree more with Clive Davis about the BBC's special question time on 'security' (which, of course, is certainly not 'terror'). As Clive puts it:

Where on earth did they get that audience? 70%-80% of them seem to be pro-appeasement. It's almost a re-run of that infamous, post-9/11 edition of Question Time.

It was worse than appeasement. The audience actually booed outright condemnation of the murderers.

I was sent into a real depression by the programme. If it is in any way representative of mainstream opinion then we might as well give up now and hand over Westminster and Whitehall to Hizb ut-Tahrir.

A riveting read by Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, on the notion that Islam is a religion of peace. Read the whole thing, but according to Dr Sookhedo the truth is that it can indeed be a religion of peace, but is just as properly interpreted as a religion of violence:

The funeral of British suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer was held in absentia in his family’s ancestral village, near Lahore, Pakistan. Thousands of people attended, as they did again the following day when a qul ceremony was held for Tanweer. During qul, the Koran is recited to speed the deceased’s journey to paradise, though in Tanweer’s case this was hardly necessary. Being a shahid (martyr), he is deemed to have gone straight to paradise. The 22-year-old from Leeds, whose bomb at Aldgate station killed seven people, was hailed by the crowd as ‘a hero of Islam’.

Some in Britain cannot conceive that a suicide bomber could be a hero of Islam. Since 7/7 many have made statements to attempt to explain what seems to them a contradiction in terms. Since the violence cannot be denied, their only course is to argue that the connection with Islam is invalid. The deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, said that ‘Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together.’ His boss, the Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, asserted that there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist Muslim.

...By far the majority of Muslims today live their lives without recourse to violence, for the Koran is like a pick-and-mix selection. If you want peace, you can find peaceable verses. If you want war, you can find bellicose verses. You can find verses which permit only defensive jihad, or you can find verses to justify offensive jihad.

You can even find texts which specifically command terrorism, the classic one being Q8:59-60, which urges Muslims to prepare themselves to fight non-Muslims, ‘Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies’ (A. Yusuf Ali’s translation). Pakistani Brigadier S.K. Malik’s book The Quranic Concept of War is widely used by the military of various Muslim countries. Malik explains Koranic teaching on strategy: ‘In war our main objective is the opponent’s heart or soul, our main weapon of offence against this objective is the strength of our own souls, and to launch such an attack, we have to keep terror away from our own hearts.... Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision on the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose on him.’

If you permit yourself a little judicious cutting, the range of choice in Koranic teaching is even wider. A verse one often hears quoted as part of the ‘Islam is peace’ litany allegedly runs along the lines: ‘If you kill one soul it is as if you have killed all mankind.’ But the full and unexpurgated version of Q5:32 states: ‘If anyone slew a person — unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land — it would be as if he slew the whole people.’ The very next verse lists a selection of savage punishments for those who fight the Muslims and create ‘mischief’ (or in some English translations ‘corruption’) in the land, punishments which include execution, crucifixion or amputation. What kind of ‘mischief in the land’ could merit such a reaction? Could it be interpreted as secularism, democracy and other non-Islamic values in a land? Could the ‘murder’ be the killing of Muslims in Iraq? Just as importantly, do the Muslims who keep quoting this verse realise what a deception they are imposing on their listeners?

Remember all those Charter 88 actvists who banged on about the need for a written constitution? As if the Terrorists Rights Act wasn't bad enough in putting the judiciary above elected politicians.

Lord Hoffman's oh-so-prescient view of the world ("The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.") is merely the most crass of recent examples of the judiciary's threat to our safety. Today brings an explicit statement by the former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson, on the judiciary's belief that its role is to frustrate the government and law enforcement:

It is the job of governments to put forward measures which make the work of the police and security services easier — and it is the job of judges to resist that where necessary [to uphold the rule of law].

Note the circularity of his final phrase. Since judges interpret in their own way when it is 'necessary' to uphold the rule of law, which is what they determine it to be, the qualifiication is meaningless and redundant.

Heaven forbid that the judiciary might take note of what Parliament decides is in the nation's best interests.

I have a great deal of respect for Shami Chakrabati, director Liberty. I don't always agree with her, but she is eloquent and rational in putting her case.

But this (reported by Harry) is truly bizarre:

Stop the War Coalition Thursday 4th August, Friends Meeting House, Euston. Speakers include George Galloway (MP), Jeremy Corbyn (MP), Tariq Ali, Shami Chakrabati, Lindsey German, Anas Al Tikriti.

As Harry puts it:

That would be the same George Galloway who is such a friend of civil liberties that he is campaigning for the victims of war crimes in Iraq to be denied the legal right to try criminals like his friend Tariq Aziz?

That would be the same Tariq Ali who proudly supports the terrorist 'resistance' in Iraq, a movement that shows such a commitment to Liberty's values of "a society based on the democratic participation of all its members and the principles of justice, openness, the right to dissent and respect for diversity". ?

That would be the same Lindsey German who has such a commitment to human rights and the Geneva Convention that she jointly penned the infamous STWC statement urging Iraq's resistance to fight using 'any means necessary'?

That would be the same Anas Al Tikriti, a leading member of the Islamist Muslim Association of Britain, the UK wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which distributed material calling for 'apostates' to be killed and who supports the murder of Israeli civilians by suicide bombers.

If Ms Chakrabati is prepared to ally herself - and, by implication, her organisation - with such traitors to liberty, democracy and freedom then she will lose any claim to being taken seriously. Far from being treated with respect, she will deserve only to be treated as Respect.

Tony Blair hit the nail on the head today:

I want to say this to you - I may offend people when I say this, but I am going to say it nonetheless - September 11 for me was a wake-up call.

Do you know what I think the problem is? A lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again.

We are not going to deal with this problem, with the roots as deep as they are, until we confront these people at every single level.

And not just their methods but their ideas.

Too many peopke are asleep. They need to wake up and defend civilisation, not those who threaten it.

I've been away since Friday, and am only now catching up with the news. Unless I'm mistaken, the only reference to this story in The Times:

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...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.

was that one story in The Times.

But hold on a minute. We're being told by the Islamist useful idiots that we've only become a target because the PM backed the Iraq war. So let me point out the date on which the plot was due to take effect: 9/11/2001.

So much for that argument.

I reminded readers earlier this week of the New Statesman's editorial after 9/11:

“American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.”

I thought that was as bad as it gets. I was wrong.

This week's New Statesman has a picture of a rucksack on the front, with two words in large font:

Blair's bombs.

I used to write book reviews for the Statesman, but stopped when I could no longer stomach being associated with its views. The final straw was an issue which argued that:

[T]here appears to be something worryingly adrift in the mind of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, a man who doesn't really know who or what he is. More technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity, like an actor. What most people call 'spin', the routine lubricant of all political gearboxes, is, in Blair's case, eloquent self-delusion on a heroic scale.

The issue was devoted to the idea that Blair is deranged.

It now has a new editor, John Kampfner, whom I like a lot. I thought that, under him, the magazine night grow up and stop sounding like the worst kind of extremist left agitator. Clearly not.

Blair's Bombs.

Think about that. There's not even a question mark there, just the bald statement that they were 'Blair's bombs'. This goes beyond even the 'let's understand' nonsense of the Guardian. It asserts that Tony Blair is the culprit behind last week's murders. Not the men who blew themselves up. Not their puppet masters. Tony Blair.

This is not merely moral bankruptcy. It is moral degeneracy.

If I was a newsagent, I would refuse to stock a magazine which peddles such a sickening cover.

In today's issue of the Terrorists' Friend, Naima Bouteldja, ' a French journalist and researcher for the Transnational Institute', writes that:

Portraying Muslim scholars such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even Tariq Ramadan as extremists is absurd

According to Ms Bouteldja,

Caught in the spotlight are some of the very thinkers Muslims and non-Muslims need to hear. First there was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely regarded as a moderate and one of the most respected scholars in the Muslim world.

...And then there's Tariq Ramadan...The attacks on Ramadan are not motivated by fear of religious extremism - this is no rabble-rousing cleric with a perverted take on Islam - but by the cultural imperialism that grips France's republican white majority and the influence of Ramadan's challenge to it among France's 5 million Muslims, especially the youth...[H]e has challenged the dominant French assimilationist model, rooted across the political spectrum, that to be truly French, Muslims must abandon the right to their own identity. Ramadan follows in the footsteps of revolutionary thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in attacking notions of the west's superiority and its seemingly immutable values. He turns the paradigm on its head and establishes the universal values of Islam within the framework of western societies.

If Ms Bouteldja's judgements are correct, the situation is clearly worse than many of us feared. I have regarded al-Qaradawi's repellent views justifying murder and wife-beating as extremist. Apparently not. She says the cleric is 'a moderate and one of the most respected scholars in the Muslim world'. If his is a moderate stance, the clash of civilisations looks inevitable, as nothing in his published statements on such matters is compatible with western liberal democracy.

I'm waiting for the first denunciation of the police for this.

I assume they will be condemned by Mayor Livingstone and the rest of the crowd who would not allow Israel to defend itself from terror. After all, every time Israel conducts a targeted assassination of a terrorist they tell us about the evil of Israeli actions.

Or is it OK for our police to protect us, but not OK for the IDF to protect Israelis? I'm waiting for your condemnation, Ken. Unless, that is, you don't have a problem with the murder of Israelis.

Here we go again. One Norm does not a Guardian summer make…

Today we are treated to a piece by Daphna Baram, the paper’s tame Israeli 'Israel is to blame for everything' extremist. Ms Baram was, of course, paid by the Guardian to produce a book, Disenchantment: the Guardian and Israel, which, surprisingly enough, proved that the Guardian had a splendid record of objective reporting of Israel.

Today we learn that root causes of the Leeds suicide murderers’ behaviour are just as clear and – by implication - justifiable as those in Israel:

But the more important political phenomenon both in the Israeli case and the British one is the stubborn attempt of the mainstream to label anybody who mentions the reasons for the bombings - the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the UK involvement in Iraq - as traitors. The Israeli experience shows that the public, despite the blinding hatred caused by loss, will not buy that line for long.

Precisely the opposite has been the case in Israel, where Israeli politics has shifted on its axis to the extent that even Labour and Shimon Peres are now willing to serve under their former political enemy, Ariel Sharon and with Benjamin Netanyahu.

What else but this sort of nonsense can one expect from the Guardian’s own apologist, who believes that "Blair should be Sharon's cell-mate as a war criminal".

A fascinating piece in the Jerusalem Post by Amir Taheri on what happens when you appease terrorists:

Appeasing terrorists was tried by French president Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s, and made France the most-targeted Western country for a decade.

Mitterrand launched his appeasement weeks after becoming president in 1981. He released all the 31 convicted terrorists in French prisons and lifted the ban on pro-terrorist publications and illegal radio stations. He also abolished the State Security Court, set up to deal with terrorism, describing it as a Nazi-style outfit. He let the Basque terrorists of ETA use French territory as a base against Spain and allowed various Palestinian groups and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to operate in Paris.

Mitterrand feted Yasser Arafat, then regarded as the godfather of terror, and traveled to Cyprus to court Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the principal paymaster of international terror at the time. Mitterrand's appeasement included the Khomeinist regime in Teheran and led to an exchange of ambassadors and high-level contacts.

...Abu Nidal and Carlos visited Paris for business and pleasure. Imad Mughniyeh, a Lebanese terrorist on the American "most-wanted list" dropped in for shopping holidays. Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini sent his nephew, one Massoud Hendizadeh, to set up a terror headquarters in Paris. The Islamic Embassy in the French capital became the center of operations for Europe. Later, when French police issued an arrest warrant for Vahid Gorji, the man who headed the Iranian terror headquarters in Paris, Mitterrand arranged for him to be put on the first flight to Teheran to escape prosecution.

Payback for Mitterrand's policy started with the assassination of General Rene Audron, a senior member of the French Defense Ministry, in 1985. A few months later Paris was hit by a series of bomb attacks, including on two major department stores in which 35 people were injured on Christmas Eve.

In February 1986 a major shopping arcade and a hotel on the Champs Elys e were bombed. The wave of attacks continued with the bombing of the Forum des Halles and the attempted blowing up of the Eiffel Tower.

By March 1986 France was the victim of a full-scale terror campaign, including a suicide operation in which two Arab terrorists were killed on the Champs Elys e. Attacks on the Paris Metro, Orly Airport and shopping centers created a climate of fear. Dozens of other plots, including an attempt to derail a high-speed train, were nipped in the bud by the police.

...But this was not all. Fifty-three French paratroopers were killed in a suicide attack in Beirut in 1983. Also in Beirut a pro-Syrian group assassinated France's ambassador, while a Khomeinist gang held the French ambassador in Teheran hostage for several days. A total of 37 French citizens were held as hostages in the Middle East, and two murdered in cold blood, by the same terror groups that Mitterrand had tried to appease.

The 'it's our fault' remarks of Ken Livingstone, Omar Bakri Mohammed and Anjem Choudary remind me that we've been here before. Only last time - in the wake of 9/11 - it wasn't Islamists and the Mayor of London who were telling us that we haave only ourselves to blame. It was the New Statesman.

This is what its editorial had to say on 17th September 2001:

“American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.”

If Americans had voted for Gore or Nader they'd have been left alone. And, I suppose, if we'd all voted Respect the same would apply here, too.

Now I've seen everything.

One Sayeeda Warsi, a 'Vice-Chair' of the Conservative Party, stood outside 10 Downing Street this morning and said the Prime Minister should have cosy fireside chats with the organisations behind 7/7.

You read that right. It wasn't George Galloway saying that. It wasn't an article on the Grauniad's op-ed page. And it wasn't a representative of one of the Islamist groups. It was the Vice-Chair of the Conservative Party:

We must start engaging with, not agreeing with, the radical groups who we have said in the past are complete nutters. We need to bring these groups into the fold of the democratic process. As long as we exclude them and don't hear them out, we will allow them to continue their hate.

What is Michael Howard's view of this woman's demand? Where is the statement dressing her down, or better still sacking her? More to the point, what do the Davids standing for the leadership have to say?

Truly, when even the Conservative Party starts calling for 'engagement' with terror groups whose only agenda is the imposition of a worldwide Caliphate and the destruction of civilisation, the defence of the West is surely doomed.

Thank God we have a Prime Minister who understands what is at stake. And if this is what the Conservative Party believes - and in the absence of any contradiction of her view from the leader, that is what we must assume - pray it never gets near to power again.

(BTW, although as Chancellor this sort of thing is clearly not part of Gordon Brown's brief, it would be good to hear some similarly robust comments from him, echoing Mr Blair. Not least to dispel the suspicion that, after the PM steps down, it will be a very different story in No 10.)

Once again, do sign the Unite Against Terror site.

Here's what I have written for it:

Beyond the murder and the carnage inflicted by terrorists, there is a further insidious danger to our liberty - that posed by those whose words and deeds give support to the terrorists, and whose warped values lead them to side with those who murder above those who promote freedom.

The Guardianista fellow-travellers of terror, who stress its supposed causes, are the useful idiots of the Islamofascists. The terrorists are the operatives of an ideology which has no concern with Palestinians or Iraqis, whom they murder without compunction. They have no concern with anything but the destruction of the West.

At a time when Islamofascism seeks to destroy liberal, democratic civilisation and to replace it with theocracy, it is imperative that those of us who believe in democracy and liberty stand up and fight. Not just against the obvious enemy, but also against the enemy within - those who claim to be on the Left, but whose views have nothing in common with the decency for which the Left ought proudly to stand.

Might I suggest that you sign this statement, at Unite Against Terror:

This terrorist violence is not a response by 'Muslims' to the injustices perpetrated upon them by 'the west'. Western democracies have been responsible for some of the ills of this world but not for the terrorist murders of these deluded Bin-Ladenists.

...These terrorists do not hate what is worst in the societies they attack, but what is best. They despise individual liberty, critical thought, gender equality, religious tolerance, the rights of minorities and political pluralism. They do not criticize democracy because it sometimes fails to live up to its principles; they oppose those principles.

...In the face of such an enemy, we believe it is vital that democratic political forces in all countries unite. We need a global movement of solidarity linking together communities threatened by terror. United we stand against terror.

...We are frequently urged to understand the terrorists, but too often the call to understand is code for justification and apology.

...We stand firmly against those who apologize for the terrorists and who misrepresent terrorist atrocities as 'resistance'.

It's important that, as the statement puts it, democratic political forces in all countries unite - not least against those who claim to be on the Left, but are in reality the useful idiots of the Islamofascists, who come close to (and sometimes actually) justifying terrorism.

There's a breathtakingly self-contradictory piece in today's Guardian by David Rieff.

According to Mr Rieff:

For now the terrorists have no reason to desist since, from their point of view, these attacks, as well as others such as the ones in Bali and Istanbul against western targets, actually comprise a record of considerable success. Spain has withdrawn its forces from Iraq; the Berlusconi government in Italy is under increasing domestic pressure to follow suit; and many people in Britain blame Tony Blair for putting them in the jihadists' firing line.

The conclusion one might be expected to draw from this is that such a response to terror - giving in to the terrorists' demands - is a fatal mistake, and only makes the situation worse.

Nope. The conclusion which Mr Rieff draws in the very next paragraph is the precise opposite:

[Terrorism] can only be defeated by political compromise and negotiation.

Still, I suppose it's something that the Guardian has published a comment piece about the bombings which is merely illogical, rather than downright teacherous.

Scott Burgess in on the trail of the Guardian's cub reporter.

Telling it as it is:

MAXINE McKEW: Prime Minister, if as you say you can't rule out that possibility that we could have potential bombers right here in Australia, what if today's announcement, this redeployment to Afghanistan and our continued presence in Iraq is all the provocation they need?

JOHN HOWARD: Maxine, these people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world - to the world - for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it's also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.

Norm has a brilliant example of the nonsense which underlies the 'root causes' argument, in what is a lengthy ost which simply has to be read:

Note, first, the selectivity in the general way root-causes arguments function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements, actions, etc., for which the proponent wants to engage our sympathy or indulgence, and in order to direct blame towards some party for whom he or she has no sympathy. Try the following, by way of a hypothetical example, to see how the exercise works and doesn't work.

On account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans who have been denied the right to remain in the UK. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this decision and they take out their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame, or even partially blame, this act of violence on the government's decision to halt the deportations, or who would urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn't happen, even though (ex hypothesi) the government decision is part of the causal chain leading to the violence in question. It wouldn't happen because the anger of the thugs doesn't begin to justify what they have done.

The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they're very selective in what they want us to 'understand'. Did you ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews - after the Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens? This would seem to constitute a potentially rich soil of roots and causes, but it goes unexplored by the supposedly non-excuse-making purveyors of a root-causism seeking to 'understand'.

Some of you might have seen an earlier version of this posting, in which I pointed to a vile statement supposedly put out by the Libertarian Alliance, saying this:

They [the terrorists] might have done what Bush and Blair failed to do and directly targeted the guilty men: Bush and Blair themselves. Then they would not be terrorists, but vigilantes.

It turns out that the website which purports to be that of the LA is a fake, and an attempt to discredit the Libertarian Alliance. I am assured by members of the LA that they are shocked and angry that someone should falsely put out such a statement in their name.

If you see reference to such a statement elsewhere, ignore it. It is a lie.

This is the real site.

If you want to know what some sections of the Left believe, here's a lengthy piece on Indymedia, the self-styled
interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a world based on freedom, cooperation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy:

And these are the facts: Tony Blair played a direct executive role in the false flag terror attacks on London, killing over sixty innocent civilians and maiming hundreds, possibly thousands, more. He worked in close cooperation with his namesake and fellow occultist, Sir Ian Blair, and with the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was also kept informed of events leading up to the atrocities.

...When Tony Blair told the press that the bombings bore all the hallmarks of al Qaeda, he broke with tradition and actually told the truth. The fall-guy al Qaeda network is the bastard child of the British intelligence services and the Freemasonic terror school, the occultic Muslim Brotherhood. MI5, MI6 and al Qaeda are virtually indistinguishable. Yes, Mr Blair, the bombings bore all the hallmarks of MI5 - and you know it, precisely because it was you who authorised the attacks.

...Tony Blair has one other ambition that remains unfulfilled. He has stated that he wishes to become the first ever president of a European superstate, a project recently derailed by the stunning French and Dutch rejection of the proposed European constitution. He also wishes, in his capacity as the new Prince of Europe, to remodel the European entity as a UK-US-Israeli forward base for imperial expansion in the Middle East and Central Asia; and he wishes to stamp this initiative with the imprimatur of the British Crown, forcing the United States to play the junior role in a new world order shaped by international bankers in the City of London.

And a selection of comments:

The very fact the Netanyahu and Juliani in London, and Wolfowitz at Gleneagles, were present in the UK at the time, speaks reams and should be ringing alarm bells for everyone.

I agree with James that this is orchestrated and implemented from within the ranks of Freemasonry, and that much of it is financed and organised from within the Square Mile of the City of London, but what we should not lose sight of is that these are, in motive and means if not composition, essentially Zionist entities, as is the Bush administration and the British establishment.

Went through BBC's news 24 live footage of thursday morning - last night. Fascinating stuff I recommend it. News 24 switches over to BBC1 for a news flash at almost exactly the same time as the bus explosion happens. While they are doing this the main screen image is CCTV (provided to the Beeb courtesy of the Met) of Euston road at Kings cross pointing towards Euston. This footage is already on a loop. Had the No 30 bus exploded 5-10 mins earlier or been delayed further by traffic... It would have exploded live on TV News 24 right outside Kings Cross station. (The No 30 bus route is down Euston Road past Kings Cross and it was heading into london) In fact I'm certain that the bus which was targeted remains in the looped footage for some time after it was diverted down Woburn Place and blew up.

It's to maintain the freedoms of these lunatics to post such offensive drivel for which we are now fighting. A sobering thought.

Harry points to a blog I'd not come across before, Pop Sensible, which makes an important point:

The root-causes cited often sound familiarly like, if not identical to, those “grievances” the authors of “understanding” have against the United States and Britain. So this week it is Iraq we have been punished for; the dead Indonesians paid the price for Afghanistan; and 9/11 was for, you know, US foreign policy and “our” support of Israel. (I know I’m using a lot of inverted commas here but the children of Foucault deserve to have some thrown back at them).

All of these explanations are partly true. Shock horror and, indeed, no shit (emphasis on the partly). Even if we accept - and we should - that the chief cause of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is Islamic fundamentalism, those who attacked our capital were, i’m sure, not fans of regime-change; the Bali bombers did, I’m sure, think Australians deserved to die - extra - because of the removal of their allies The Taliban; and Mohammed Atta et al were, we know, opposed to (the existence of a) US foreign policy.

But, so what?

Are critics suggesting that we design our foreign policy in order not to piss off Islamic fundamentalists?

What’s interesting is that those keen to stress the existence of “grievances” focus entirely on “grievances” they think are justified. Isn’t it possible that those fanatical enough to bomb the underground are not thinking straight? Surely it’s entirely possible that those willing to act in the most unreasonable of ways might be motivated by unreasonable justifications?

On Thursday, Ken Livingstone gave his response to the murders: “It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion.” He has been greeted with a paean of praise, even from his political opponents. And certainly, his words alone expressed the sentiments of all decent people.

But with Mr Livingstone, the words alone are never enough. They may imply one thing, but his actions usually give them a different meaning. When the Mayor of London condemns indiscriminate slaughter, those actions suggest that it is the word “indiscriminate” that needs to be stressed.

Mr Livingstone has repeatedly defended the views of the Muslim cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even invited him to City Hall to share his wisdom. Mr Livingstone has proudly hugged him in public. In doing so, the mayor shows himself to be a keen fellow traveller of a man who can be described with some precision as evil.

Al-Qaradawi is a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. His fatwas (published on www.IslamOnline.net) influence its millions of followers. In a sermon delivered in March 2003 he instructed his followers thus: “O God, destroy the Zionist, the American, and the British aggressors.” In his weekly al-Jazeera programme he explained that a person engaged in jihad “is not a suicide [bomber]. He kills the enemy while taking self-risk . . . He wants to scare his enemies, and the religious authorities have permitted this.” In an interview last year he said that Islam justifies suicide bombings in Iraq against the US military and in Israel against women and children.

His praise for suicide murders — “Hamas Operations Are Jihad and Those Who [Carry it Out and] Are Killed are Considered Martyrs” — appears on a website linked to the terrorist group Hamas.

Mr Livingstone has a record of giving succour to terrorists. As GLC leader, he met Sinn Fein leaders when the IRA was bombing London regularly.

Sheikh al-Qaradawi has been banned from the US since 1999. Perhaps that is why Mr Livingstone referred to President Bush as “the greatest threat to life on this planet”. Not the likes of the murderers who struck on Thursday, but the President of the home of freedom.

That Mr Livingstone should be praised for his words in the light of Thursday’s murders, while his actions are forgotten, is simply sickening.

I'll be on the Tony Snow show on Fox News today at 18.30 London time talking about the murders.

Harry's Place has an excellent riposte to the 'it's Blair's fault' noises which are no emanating from the usual suspects. You can read the whole thing here.

Perhaps you think that Islamism is the same thing as Islam. Perhaps you think that it is some form of national liberation struggle, or a reaction against imperialism or Bush's failure to sign up to Kyoto.

It is not.

Radical Islamism - in its most important strain - is a political doctrine which was developed principally by two arab thinkers in the first part of the 20th century - Qutb and Banna - who were deeply immersed, not in the culture of the middle east, but in the theoretical perspective of the European romantic movement. It is not an alien, exotic or even really an "oriental" doctrine. It is directly inspired by the same intellectual currents which gave rise to romantic nationalism in the 19th century, and fascism in the mid 20th century.

You might think that its main aim is to oppose military action in the middle east.

It is not.

Its main aim, explicitly, is to restore the Caliphate, abolished by Ataturk when modern Turkey was established. It is not an anti-imperialist movement. It is an imperialist movement, yearning for an imagined golden age which it hopes to recreate.

The terrorist murders yesterday cannot have happened. They must have been made up. They are clearly, as Michael Moore would put it, part of the fictitious times in which we live.

Michael Moore:

"There is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we've been told."

He's not alone, of course. Adam Curtis, producer of the disgusting BBC series, The Power of Nightmares, (for which I paid, thanks to the license fee), shared his wisdom with us:

Adam Curtis:

[Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism] "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media...In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

That phantom enemy killed 38 people, Mr Curtis and Mr Moore.

If we never hear the names Adam Curtis or Michael Moore again, it will not be soon enough.

As always, Norm puts it as it should be put.

Prior to the election, I worried not only that there would be a Madrid-style bombing, but especially that we would react like the Spaniards. Instead of telling the terrorists where to go, we would prostrate ourselves before them and kick out the government.

It may be less than twelve hours since the murders, but I think it's clear that the reaction has been properly, well, British. We have not, it seems, lost our resolve, and we have not - other than the Respect supporters of Islamofascism - switched blame away from those responsible.

I'm especially struck by one thing. The media have, as one, referred quite properly to the murderers as terrorists. None of the usual militant nonsense. The murderers are terrorists, pure and simple, and no mainstream correspondent is saying anything else.

But here's a thing: will they now realise how wrong they are to refer to as militants the terrorists who do exactly the same thing in Israel as they have done today in London?

Will they hell.

Tim Worstall:

I have a prediction to make, that tomorrow we’ll find out whether Britons are, still, in fact, Britons. Many years ago I was working in The City and there were two events that made travel into work almost impossible.

The first was a series of storms that brought down power lines, blocked train routes and so on. Not surprisingly, the place was empty the next day. Why bother to struggle through?

The other event was an IRA bomb which caused massive damage and loss of life. Trains were disrupted, travel to work the next day was horribly difficult and yet there were more people at work than on a normal day. There was no co-ordination to this, no instructions went out, but it appeared that people were crawling off their sick beds in order to be there at work the next day, thrusting their mewling and pewling infants into the arms of anyone at all so that they could be there.

Yes, we’ll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?

Fuck you, sunshine.

We’ll not be having that.

No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you’ve tried it now bugger off. We’re not scared, no, you won’t change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off.

I would say this comment from the SWP is beyond belief:

The British government cannot avoid its responsibility for these terrible attacks, which are a consequence of its support for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best way to ensure that there are no more such terrible attacks is for British troops to be withdrawn from there immediately.

UPDATE: In a post headed 'vile', it is unfortunately appropriate that I have to report a comment by George Galloway:

"We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."

Galloway is simply beneath contempt.

What a terrible day. Maybe now, after our own bus bomb, people will start to realise what the Israelis have to live with.

Budapest has become the first former Warsaw Pact city to honour the man in large measure responsible for its freedom:

Former Soviet Bloc Capital Officially Honors Reagan

On Friday, July 1, in Budapest, Hungary, the city council approved placing a monument of former President Reagan in the capital city park.

Clive Davis points to a piece in Tha Nation by Peter Bergen which takes apart the pernicious distortions of Adam Curtis' BBC fiction, The Power of Nightmares.

(I get so angry knowing that I was forced to fund this dangerous drivel through the license fee.)

Fifteen questions for a George Galloway fan.

A superb piece by Nick Cohen on the wrong turn taken by Amnesty International:

To Khan [the general secretary of AI], the human-rights agenda is passe and maybe an example of cultural imperialism. 'Amnesty has a middle-class, Western, complacent, white image in many parts of the world,' she told the Financial Times magazine. The stereotype would be rectified by expanding the remit and campaigning against poverty. 'More children die of lack of food or water than [are] killed by torture and the death penalty,' explained a supporter.

This is true, but beside the point. Amnesty is crowding in to a crowded field. All the charities in the Make Poverty History alliance campaign manfully for access to clean water and decent food; what they're not doing is standing up for human rights. Amnesty says it will continue to do so. I hope it will; the organisation isn't in crisis yet, but ever since Khan took over, I've had an uneasy feeling that it is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others. That feeling transformed into a certainty last week when Amnesty described Guantanamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times'.

By all means, Amnesty and everyone else should loudly deplore America's failure to treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But when they've finished, they should check the figures. If they exclude the millions who died of starvation, disease and exhaustion, they will find that 776,098 prisoners were murdered in summary executions in the gulag between 1930 and 1953. At Guantanamo Bay, no one has died of starvation, disease or exhaustion and no prisoners have been executed. Not one. If Amnesty's American obsession prevents it from seeing the worst crimes of the 20th century for what they are, how will it sound the alarm about the worst of the 21st?

A barely reported exchange last week showed why the arguments against Khan matter. Journalists in Johannesburg tackled James Morris, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, who had promised hundreds of thousands of tonnes of emergency supplies to Zimbabwe. Try as they might, they couldn't get him to condemn Mugabe. According to Morris, Zimbabwe was on the edge of famine because of drought and Aids, not because of the dictatorship's destruction of agriculture and suppression of dissent. The mistake the UN made with Saddam's Iraq was to be repeated. Food would go to the regime rather than the needy and the regime would be able to use it to reward friends and punish enemies.

In April, Zimbabwe was re-elected to the UN Human Rights Commission for the third year running by satirically minded African states, so Morris may have to play the diplomat. To anyone who doesn't, it is obvious that he and Khan are wrong. Zimbabwe is on the edge of starvation because it doesn't have freedom of expression, among other human rights. The great lesson of the 20th century was that tyrannical regimes - the British Empire, Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, Mengistu's Ethiopia - presided over enormous famines. Democracies didn't.

In other words, the choice between human and economic rights isn't either/or. It's both or neither.

I used to be a member of AI, and was proud to be so. I let my membership lapse when I realised that, far from championing human rights everywhere, AI had been taken over by Western self-haters and turned into a political campaigning organisation with a distinctly anti-Western (and specifically anti-American) agenda. I applaud Nick Cohen's sentiments, but fear that it's already too late to save the AI that was.

You can listen here to a debate at the Hay Festival on History will be kinder to Bush and Blair than to Chirac and Schroeder, with John Mickelthwait and Christopher Hitchens taking on Roy Hattersley and Mark Leonard.

It's worth a listen, especially if you like to hear a demolition of the anti-war brigade. (But you will have to put up with the annoying Grauniadista audience, laughing glibly at any anti-Bush remark.)

Harry is spot on in his comments on the victory of the leading supporter of Iraqi terrorists:

Bitter though it is to see an open supporter of the murderuous enemies of Iraqi progressives returned to parliament, I suppose I should keep the matter in perspective. As the Communist MP Phil Piratin said after losing his East End seat in 1950: "We may have lost Stepney but we have gained China".

Well we can settle for Britain.

The problem is what kind of Britain is it going to be if communalism is shown to deliver results, as it did for Galloway? Such poison can spread. There were some strong results for the BNP last night such as 17% in Barking. Anyone fancy a BNP v Respect communalist battle in the future? Its a sickening thought but it was one of the many unpleasant things that went through my mind in Bethnal Green yesterday.

Oliver Kamm has written of the similarities between the two parties, both of which promote fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence. (And I think, since Respect now has to be taken seriously as a force in politics, it should properly be restyled Respect/SWP; that is how I now intend to refer to it).

The Bethnal Green and Bow result is the single most damaging threat to race - properly, religious - relations since Enoch Powell's river of blood speech and the rise of the NF in the 1970s. Those of us who seek to show that Muslim extremists are the exception, not the rule, and that mainstream Muslims pose no threat to Western democracy, have been dealt a severe blow.

Until Galloway's result - based on demagoguery and the idea that there is indeed a fundamental split between the Muslim way of thinking and that of non-Muslims - it was possible to argue convincingly, as I have sought to do, that maintream Muslims had nothing in common with the extremists.

But the Bethnal Green and Bow result makes that argument very difficult. Galloway did not win because he was supported by a small number of Muslim extremists - those who clearly pose a threat to the West and have to be imprisoned. He won because of support from precisely those mainstream Muslims whom I, and others, have argued did not support their militant brothers.

I cannot bear to think this, since the repercussions are so frightening, but what if that view is wrong? What if - as the vote seems to show - it is not just extremists but mainstream Muslims, too, who have views which are incompatible with Western democracy? Respect/SWP supports the right of terrorists to murder Iraqis. And Respect/SWP has now won the support of maintream Muslim opinion in Bethnal Green and Bow.

If the conclusion is that there is indeed a split between mainstream Muslim opinion and western norms, then the repercussions for community harmony and race relations are likely to be dire. It will give right wing extremists such as the BNP powerful ammunition.

It is not, so far, as clear as that. Bethnal Green might - as we must hope - be an exception - a one off result from which more general conclusions ought not to be drawn. And Oona King and the other candidates also won much Muslim support. So it would be wrong to despair. But it would be right to worry.

There is one constituency contest which dwarfs all others in its importance; that of Bethnal Green and Bow. Given the demographic make up of the area, the aptly named Respect (apt, since its candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway, repeatedly demonstrated that he had the utmost respect for Saddam Hussein) have targeted it as a potential victory.

It is imperative that Respect is beaten and that Oona King wins. The impact on community relations if Galloway wins would be catastrophic - far, far worse than that of the BNP council by-election victory in 1993.

The component parts of Respect, the SWP and MAB, are already piling in to the area. Ms King - who in this instance stands as the candidate of decency - needs to be supported on the ground to help counter the Respect threat. If you have time to help, do please contact her office on 020 7729 6682

The Guardian provides a platform to the Soviet agent Richard Gott to share with us his view that

Like Chamberlain, he [Tony Blair] is an arrogant and God-fuelled appeaser, the unseemly ally of an unbridled country that presents a global threat similar to Germany in the 1930s.

Instead of seeking a grand alliance to confront this new danger - "a coalition of the unwilling" that would include the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese - Blair has sided with the evil empire. He has taken up a role as its principal cheerleader, obliging Britain to become a participant in its wars of aggression.

Given Gott's history of working on behalf of one of the vilest regimes in history and of betraying his colleagues and his country in the process, it should come as no surprise that he regards the US as an 'evil empire'. It did, after all, destroy his favoured Soviet empire, and has now destroyed another dictatorial regime in Iraq.

I've long thought it a great pity that we couldn't have Stalin's opinion of the Iraq war. At least we now know what one of his regime's agents thinks.

There's a compelling piece by Johann Hari today on the contest in Bethnal Green and Bow, which is surely one of the most important single constituemcy contests for many a year. It is imperative that Oona King wins - not a thought I would ever thought I'd have.

Here's a striking passage:

But I am programmed as a leftie to try to find the root causes of their anger. I search for it in every conversation, but these aren't displaced Palestinians or Chechens; they are fairly wealthy, fairly well-educated young men (never women, of course) who have grown up in free countries. I cannot find a root cause for their beliefs; they seem to be simply intoxicated by a superstitious, reactionary ideology. You may as well ask about the root cause of the Cambridge spies' conversion to Soviet Communism.

This week, Galloway had the look of a man who has been romancing a beast, only to find the beast has raced beyond his control.

A very interesting piece on the new Pope by Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive.”

For while his predecessor kissed the Qur’an and pursued a consistent line of conciliation toward the Islamic world, despite numerous provocations and attacks against Catholics in Muslim countries, the new Pope Benedict XVI, while no less charitable, has been a bit more forthcoming about the reality of how Islam challenges the Catholic Church, Christianity, and even the post-Christian West. He has spoken up for the rights of converts from Islam to Christianity, who live under a death sentence in Islamic countries and increasingly live in fear even in the West. He has even spoken approvingly of Christians proselytizing Muslims — a practice that enrages Muslims and is against the law in many Islamic countries.

The new Pope has criticized Europe’s reluctance to acknowledge its Christian roots for fear of offending Islam’s rapidly growing and increasingly influential presence in European countries — a presence which, as historian Bat Ye’or demonstrates in her book Eurabia, has been actively encouraged and facilitated by European leaders for over three decades. “What offends Islam,” said Cardinal Ratzinger, “is the lack of reference to God, the arrogance of reason, which provokes fundamentalism.” He has criticized multiculturalism, “which is so constantly and passionately encouraged and supported,” because it “sometimes amounts to an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own.”

He contrasts the modern-day resurgence of Islam with the enervation of Europe. In old Europe, he has said, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one's own desires.” Islam, on the other hand, is anything but relativistic: “The rebirth of Islam is due in part to the new material richness acquired by Muslim countries, but mainly to the knowledge that it is able to offer a valid spiritual foundation for the life of its people, a foundation that seems to have escaped from the hands of old Europe.”

Do read it all - fascinating stuff.

(BTW, has there ever been a better headline than the Sun's From Hitler Youth to Pappa Razzi?)

There's a fascinating piece in the issue of Asharq al-Awsat (an Arab daily published in London) dated 13th April. The contents are in Arabic, but I am able to publish a translation:

The ruling British Labour Party is pursuing its ongoing efforts to restore favour with the country’s Muslims before the election. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke has officially apologised for the government’s about turn on its decision to pass a law criminalising incitement of hatred against Muslims on the grounds of their faith. The law was to have been passed during the parliamentary session which ended last Monday. He made a careful point of mentioning the Liberal Democrat Party’s antipathy towards the law. Commentators accused Clarke of exploiting the issue of Muslim rights in order to make political gain. This unprecedented apology comes around four weeks before the general elections on 5 May. Yesterday’s message to all mosques in the length and breadth of the country placed the blame for the failure of the legislation with the two main opposition parties. The Home Secretary started his letter, obtained by Asharq al-Awsat, by expressing deep regret that the Liberal Democrat and Conservative opposition had forced the government to drop the measure before the parliamentary session ended. He pledged to bring the measure to a vote in the next session. He stressed his party’s commitment to supporting Muslims and making sure they were treated the same as other religious adherents.

In a clear attempt to turn Muslims against the other parties he said “They bare the full responsibility for blocking this law”. He pointed out that they had never hidden their intention to vote against the law. To the mosque leaders he added “I believe that you and rest of British Muslims will carefully weigh up the situation, especially with respect to the opposition shown by the Liberal Democrats”.

Significantly, in some areas where there are a number of potential voters opposed to the Iraq war, it is the Liberal Democrats who are poised to defeat Labour. Most Labour and Conservative MPs voted in favour of the war, while the Liberal Democrats opposed it, increasing their level of support among British Muslims.

Inayat Bunglawala, Secretary of Media Affairs for the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the failure of the other two parties did not excuse the government for not passing the law. He pointed out the bill had not been given enough time for sufficient parliamentary debate. In a telephone conversation with Asharq al-Awsat, he confirmed that British Muslims feel profoundly disappointed that the measure was withdrawn. He added “We are waiting for the Labour manifesto tomorrow. If it doesn’t mention the incitement to religious hatred legislation as part of their commitment if they form the next government, they are clearly not interested in supporting Muslims”. In 2001 the Labour Government backed off an attempt to introduce a similar law.

The story is fascinating. I have dealt before (here and here) with Mike O'Brien's worrying piece in Muslim News. This latest example of Labour pandering and sycophancy shows how the driving force behind the proposed religious discrimation law, and much of Labour's tactics, is not whether a law is needed, or appropriate, but whether it will curry favour with the Muslim vote.

I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I heard Sir David Frost on 'Breakfast With Frost' introduce Vanessa Redgrave thus:

And now, the social conscience of us all, Vanessa Redgrave.

A more accurate introduction would have been something along the lines of:

Terrorists' friend, admirer and supplicant of Saddam Hussein, enemy of democracy and all round malign ifluence.

I have just experienced a wave of sheer joy when I saw this story:

Kerry to meet with French president.

So what?! Who cares?!

Just think. It might actually have mattered.

(6)

Here we go again. Socialist Worker's take on the murder of Theo van Gogh:

The murder of Theo van Gogh follows the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a right wing politician admired by van Gogh, in 2002.

Part of the reason for these killings is that the perpetrators feel there is no viable alternative in this racist climate.

It is no surprise that some individuals are pulled towards desperate acts.

(via Harry's Place.)

Anthony Browne has a more reasoned analysis in a superb piece in the Spectator:

...[T]he Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy. Outside the Netherlands, however, the Left has yet to learn these lessons.

Van Gogh himself was a child of the Left. He did not discriminate when he decided whom to offend. He had deeply upset Christian and Jewish groups, who made written complaints about him. His mistake, however, was to offend Muslim sensibilities.

...True to his polemicist style, van Gogh said lots of objectionable things about Muslims, such as calling extremists ‘goatfuckers’. But that doesn’t excuse the Guardian pigeonholing him as a ‘loudmouth racist’ as a way of avoiding thinking about the complexities of the issue. He was a lifelong socialist, from a leading left-wing family. A journalist friend of his told me at his funeral: ‘He was left-wing, but he had his eyes open. He started seeing these dark developments in society, and surprised himself by having right-wing thoughts.’ A staunch Dutch feminist who knew him told me that his work standing up for women oppressed by religion had inspired her to dedicate her life to it.

Van Gogh was a friend of Pim Fortuyn, the populist politician murdered two years ago for offences against Islam. The hate-mongering Left demonised Fortuyn as a far-right racist, but he was no such thing. On the contrary, he was a flamboyant left-wing homosexual sociology professor who firmly opposed racism and had many black followers. But he started campaigning against Muslim immigration and denounced Islam as ‘backwards’ when homosexual teachers were sacked in the Netherlands because Muslim parents didn’t want their children taught by gays. He was outraged that decades of campaigning for gay rights was going backwards, and that everyone was too frightened to speak out.

What angered them all — van Gogh, Hirsi Ali and Fortuyn — is the way the intolerant left-wing hegemony of political correctness was strangling free speech and democracy — not just causing the problems in the first place, but trying to destroy those who discuss them.

...Democracy too is under attack, with Belgium’s largest political party, the Vlaams Blok, banned last week. Attracting a quarter of the vote in the Flemish region, the anti-immigration separatist party was disbanded because it fell foul of anti-racism laws; unable to beat it in public debate or at the polls, its left-wing opponents killed it in the supreme court. In western Europe in the 21st century, the Left is getting courts to ban political parties because they are too popular.

Repellent though much of Vlaams Blok is, the bigger threat is from courts banning democracy. Democracy works because it is a valve for people’s concerns. What do the Belgian elite want the Flemish to do — overthrow the state in violent revolution? The racist British National party is also repellent, but it is a legally constituted democratic party. The government’s response to the BNP winning a few council seats is to ban all civil servants from being members, and many in the Labour party want to ban it outright.

By curbing free speech and political parties, and demonising those who fight for gay rights and against domestic violence, the Left is telling the world that multiculturalism is incompatible with liberal democracy. The Left’s loss of faith in liberal democracy is a result of its naive belief in human nature. The creators of multicultural societies believe they can abolish tribal feelings of belonging based on shared values, history and culture. Just as communism could only be upheld by totalitarianism, so multiculturalism is being upheld by curbs on free speech and democracy. The lesson of the Netherlands is that there is only so much you can do to change human nature, and the more you shut off the valves of debate and democracy, the more human nature — in all its ugliness — will assert itself, often violently.

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According to its website, Index on Censorship was founded “to protect the basic human right of free expression”. You and I might interpret that to mean that Index champions the rights of authors, artists and intellectuals to express their views. You and I would be wrong. Free expression does not apply, it seems, to those who criticise Islam.

A fortnight ago Theo van Gogh was stabbed and shot in Amsterdam by an extremist Muslim who objected to the Dutch film-maker’s latest work, which lambasted the treatment of women under Islam. To most people, this was a deplorable crime and precisely the sort of outrage that Index would be expected to condemn.

Index certainly published a condemnation. But its hostility was directed not at the murderer but at his victim. In an article by Rohan Jayasekera, the associate editor of Index on Censorship, we are informed that van Gogh’s death was “his very own martyrdom operation”. He was responsible for his own death, implies Jayasekera, because he criticised extremist Muslims. Indeed, he sought his own death: “The inevitable violence of their response was grist to his mill.”

Not that anyone should be surprised. After all, he had made a “furiously provocative” film with the Somalia-born Dutch MP Ayann Hirsi Ali who has campaigned against the abuse of women under Islam. The film was “an abuse of his right to free speech”.

Yes, you read that right. A film that criticises the abuse of women is an “abuse” of free speech. Indeed, van Gogh is the guilty party because, in highlighting the behaviour of extremists, he “roared his Muslim critics into silence” by “effectively censoring their moderate views as well”.

Leave aside Jayasekera’s lesser stupidities, such as the assertion that making a film that expresses one view amounts to censoring opposing views. Concentrate instead on the grotesque warping of morality that condemns the author rather than the book burner and murderer.

Van Gogh may not have been a pleasant man, and he had views with which Jayasekera disagreed. So what? I have a special loathing of Michael Moore, who I believe makes films which distort the facts for pecuniary gain. Does that mean I am entitled to kill him?

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Anthony Browne had a superb piece in yesterday's Times on the truth behind the Muslim Association of Britain. You can read it here.

Do also have a read of the MAB's response. If the issues weren't so important, it would be hilarious.

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