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 Nightma