From the perspective of the people of Gaza, Hamas simply abandoned the arena and fled into the crowded neighborhoods. Once there, since the second day of the campaign, Hamas fighters have hurriedly shed their uniforms. Many of them simply deserted and returned to their families, taking their guns with them. In some locations, Hamas prevented civilians from leaving neighborhoods that were in the line of fire; overall, it invested great effort in blocking civilians who wished to flee to the south of the Strip. Hamas forcefully appropriated the few international Wall Street Journal (Europe), 20 January 2009 In Britain, the war in Gaza has revealed the extent to which the media, intelligentsia and political class have simply crumbled in the face of the global jihad. The U.K. is a major player in European and world politics and is America’s most significant strategic ally. Until now, it has been considered one of Israel’s firm supporters and a linchpin of the Western defense against the world-wide Islamist onslaught. With the reaction to Gaza, however, that reputation is no longer sustainable. Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within Britain have now coalesced, as a result of the media misrepresentation of the Gaza war as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of hatred against Israel and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews. Throughout the war, London’s streets have witnessed a hallucinatory level of violent and explicit support for Hamas from Muslims, members of the far left and supposedly progressive individuals. Night after night, Israel’s embassy in well-to-do Kensington found itself under violent siege. Demonstrators attempted to storm the building, howling their support for the terrorist body whose genocidal intentions toward Israel and the Jews necessarily includes killing every one of the occupants inside. Certainly, there have been anti-Israel protests around the world. But in Britain, not only have these been particularly violent but the authorities have done nothing to stop such incitement of hatred. The police told pro-Israel demonstrators on at least one occasion to put away their Israel flags because they were ‘inflammatory.’ Yet officers allowed some anti-Israel demonstrators to scream support for Hamas — and even to dress up as hook-nosed Jews pretending to drink the blood of Palestinian babies. In general, the police have reacted passively to the violence. One recent video clip captured the astonishing spectacle of Muslims stampeding through London’s West End hurling traffic cones and other missiles at the police, all the time shrieking ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘cowards.’ The police ran and stumbled backward rather than standing their ground and stopping the rampage. Not only has such violence barely been reported. There has also been no acknowledgment of the explicitly Islamist nature of these demonstrations. Keffiyeh-clad demonstrators prostrated themselves in prayer or shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ as they attacked Jewish-owned or -founded stores, such as Starbucks and Tesco, on numerous occasions. Instead, the political class has simply regurgitated Hamas propaganda. In a debate in the House of Commons last week, one MP after another expressed horror at Israel’s supposed crimes against humanity in Gaza. More serious still, Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell cited as fact the Hamas claim that 300 children had been killed in Gaza, even though Israel has given a much lower figure, and said the Israeli action was ‘disproportionate’ and the bombing was ‘indefensible and unacceptable.’ Similarly, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, commenting after this weekend’s cease-fire that ‘too many innocent people’ had been killed, made no mention of Israel’s strenuous attempts to minimize civilian casualties, nor Hamas’s responsibility for holding Gaza’s civilians hostage. In fact, the British government has effectively taken the view that Israel should not be allowed to defend itself by military means against the Hamas rockets that ministers have taken care to condemn. From the second day of the war, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was calling for an immediate cease-fire by both sides. Since Hamas would take no notice, this in practice amounted to pressure upon Israel to stop defending itself. It was Britain which took the lead in framing the United Nations resolution calling upon Israel to withdraw all its forces from Gaza while making no mention whatever of Hamas. And it was Britain which also drew a disquieting moral equivalence between Hamas terrorism and Israeli self-defense. Certainly, neither Mr. Miliband nor Mr. Brown — a reputed supporter of Israel — can be unaware that it was Tony Blair’s refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire by Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war that finally led his MPs, already enraged by his support for the war in Iraq, to force him prematurely out of office. But Britain’s new coolness toward Israel is due to much more than this. The government’s failure to support Israel’s war against Hamas as the front line of the West’s defense against the global Islamic jihad reflects its failure in turn to acknowledge the nature of that world-wide phenomenon. Last Thursday, Mr. Miliband wrote in the Guardian that there was no single, unified Islamist threat but merely a set of various local grievances, such as Kashmir or the Golan Heights. Such startling ignorance of the goals and ideological antecedents of the Islamic jihad, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, is of a piece with the British government’s stubborn refusal to accept that the West is under assault from a war of religion. The government denies this fact because it does not want to face up to the unpalatable realities of fighting such a war. So although ‘middle Britain’ is beginning to grasp that the Islamists in Gaza are the same as those rampaging through the streets of London, ministers are intent on appeasing Muslim extremism and intimidation both at home and abroad. Accordingly, while Britain’s security services have had significant success in smashing Islamic terrorism plots, government strategy for combating Islamist extremism rests upon seeking to mollify Britain’s two million or so Muslims by avoiding confrontation — which means turning a blind eye to threatening statements. Recently, prominent British Muslims who advise ministers against Islamist extremism wrote an open letter making the veiled threat that unless the government condemned Israel there would be a rise in violence in Britain. Ministers’ openly stated fear that this will indeed happen as a result of the war in Gaza makes them anxious to show Britain’s Muslims that they oppose Israel’s actions. They don’t understand that, by showing such weakness in the face of intimidation, they are not just betraying their Israeli ally but also undermining the Western defense against the jihad. Across the spectrum, Britain’s elites are terrified of dealing with militant Islamism. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in a pattern which goes back to the foundational Christian blood libel against the Jews, they are concealing their fearful inability to deal with Islamist aggression by displacing the blame onto its Israeli victims instead. Daily Mail, 19 January 2009 Stop, I feel dizzy! British politics is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. Only five minutes ago, it seems, Gordon Brown was hailed as the saviour of not just the British economy but the planet. Around the world, his prescription for dealing with the financial crisis was being talked up as the most life-enhancing development since the invention of penicillin. In Britain, opinion polls suggested the public agreed he was the best person to steer the country through this crisis. The charge that he had actually helped create and even exacerbate it through astronomically reckless levels of borrowing fell, apparently, on deaf ears. Accordingly, the Prime Minister’s previously dire political situation changed virtually overnight. The Tories, who appeared able only to criticise his fiscal stimulus package without producing an alternative, left themselves wide open to Brown’s lethal taunt that they were the ‘do-nothing’ party. The credit crunch had saved him from political oblivion. Brown up, Tories down. Now, however, two opinion polls have suggested that Brown’s strategy has flopped. One gave the Tories a 13-point lead, a seven-point jump from last month, with six out of ten saying Brown was doing badly as Prime Minister. Another gave them a nine-point lead, with a majority saying they trusted the Tories more than Labour to improve their standard of living. Undoubtedly, many people no longer believe Brown can save Britain’s economy, let alone the planet. As redundancies rise, they observe the mounting evidence not merely that his approach hasn’t worked, but that the economy is still in freefall. Now the Government is apparently to announce yet another desperate measure to get things under control. Taxpayers will take on the ‘toxic’ debts of High Street banks, in an insurance scheme that would see liabilities of up to £200 billion potentially kept on the public books for years. This shows that last autumn’s £37 billion bank bail-out has failed. Taxpayers are to shoulder an even greater financial burden in yet another attempt to unblock Britain’s paralysed financial system, but with no greater certainty that this will work either. People can see that the Government is throwing eye-watering amounts of public money at the problem — but with no sign that any of these measures is having the slightest effect. The distressing impression that the Government hasn’t got the faintest idea what it is doing was reinforced by the business minister Lady Vadera, who confided that she was seeing ‘a few green shoots’ of recovery — this on the day that 3,000 jobs were axed and the FTSE fell by more than 200 points. Displaying similarly magical qualities of vision denied to lesser mortals, the housing minister Margaret Beckett has claimed there are signs of an ‘upturn’ in the property market — despite official figures showing house prices plummeting at an unprecedented rate. It can also hardly have helped endear the Prime Minister to the public that the more catastrophic the state in which the economy was shown to be in, the more he appeared to gain a spring in his step. Nor does it help that in other areas the Government appears to want to punish productive members of the public rather than help them cope with difficult times. While the economy totters from ruin to catastrophe, the return of ‘class war’ as the Government’s big idea, not to mention the ruinous absurdity of reducing carbon emissions to curb global warming when the climate is actually cooling, suggests a government which has chosen to locate itself firmly on Planet Make-Believe. With Brown thus down, there is nevertheless no full-throated public enthusiasm for the Conservative Party’s position — as David Cameron himself understands. While the public may have decided to vote against Gordon Brown, they are not yet prepared in large enough numbers to vote forDavid Cameron. If last night’s political briefings were correct, today’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle will reflect the Tory leader’s concern that his team is regarded as too shallow and lightweight to be trusted with such intractable problems as the economy — a perception heightened by the unfortunate episode of George Osborne’s dalliance last summer with Oleg Deripaska on board the oligarch’s yacht in Corfu. Hence his decision to expand the role and importance of the formidable William Hague and even bring back Ken Clarke, the ultimate ‘big beast’ of Tory politics, into the Shadow Cabinet jungle. This would be a high risk move, indeed, given Clarke’s pro-EU views and his incorrigible tendency to act as a loose cannon. But Cameron is undoubtedly right to see the need for some weighty big hitters around him. One of yesterday’s polls also revealed that half of all respondents thought the Tories were ‘not yet ready for government’ — up four points from last September — while almost four in ten thought it was right to describe them as the ‘do nothing’ party. In particular, Cameron needs a very big beast indeed to take on the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson — whose position has become one of the most extraordinary features of this weirdly discombobulated political landscape. Mandelson was brought back into government as a desperate measure to save the Labour Party from all-but certain annihilation under Brown at the next election. Since then, the reported love-in between these two former mortal enemies has become one of the wonders of the world. But the unforeseen consequence has been that Mandelson’s presence has actually made Brown seem a much diminished figure. Mandelson exudes confidence, makes (whether or not you agree with him) a masterful presentation of his case and seems in command of every situation. Brown, by contrast, whose role appears to consist of making comments the interpretation of which defy the ingenuity of the human mind while he struts the world’s stage, looks more and more like the front man for the real Prime Minister, the lordly Mandelson. Whether he’s selling off the Royal Mail, reading the Riot Act over getting credit moving to cash-strapped businesses or pushing the third runway at Heathrow, it is Mandelson who appears to be running Britain - yet he hasn’t even been elected to Parliament. Is it not extraordinary, though, that both parties are shoring up their own weaknesses by bringing back re-treads who have left the political front-line on account of their failure, mendacity, treachery, ideological incompatibility or sleaze? Both Government and Opposition appear to be marching together under the same slogan: ‘Forward to the past.’ Ultimately, however, such re-arrangement of the political furniture is unlikely to make much difference. For the public are terminally disenchanted with the entire political scene. Totally bemused by the financial meltdown, they perceive that no politician appears to have a clue either. MPs themselves hardly exude any more confidence in themselves. With their woeful attendance records, long holidays and shorter hours, and with ministers making announcements anywhere but in the Commons chamber, there is a palpable sense that power has moved elsewhere. Almost certainly, an electoral tipping point was reached some time ago when people decided that it was ‘time for a change’. If so, there’s virtually nothing Labour can do to avert defeat. But far deeper and much more dangerous is that the entire political process is simply becoming irrelevant to people’s lives.
Tuesday, 20th January 2009
Gaza returns to rule by thug
1:18am
Further evidence is surfacing that, far from having enhanced its reputation in the eyes of the people of Gaza, Hamas has been shown up as brutal thugs to their own people but cowards who run away when confronted by a proper army. The Jerusalem Post reports:
...Monday, 19th January 2009
The mild-mannered British desire for the annihilation of Israel
1:28am
The British sociologist Frank Furedi reports what he has heard from Britain’s educated classes since the Gaza crisis began:I am standing in a queue waiting to buy a train ticket from London to Canterbury. A well-dressed lady standing behind me informs her friend that she ‘can’t wait till Israel disappears off the face of the earth.’ What struck me was not her intense hostility to Israel but the mild-mannered, matter-of-fact tone with which she announced her wish for the annihilation of a nation. It seems that it is okay to condemn and demonize Israel. All of a sudden Israel has become an all-purpose target for a variety of disparate and confused causes. When I ask a group of Pakistani waiters sitting around a table in their restaurant why they ‘hate’ Israel, they casually tell me that
...Wisdom -- or insanity?
1:07am
We will not know for some time whether the tactical considerations behind Israel’s cease-fire in Gaza are shrewd or insane. I have to say that it seems to me crazy to leave Hamas still in control in Gaza, but I hear the counter-arguments. There is a tendency in the west – and indeed in some parts of Israeli society too – to view through a western and thus distorting prism matters in the Middle East which are driven by a very different cultural dynamic. Accordingly, I suggest that while deciding how to assess what's happened, it’s worth bearing in mind the following:
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
January 20, 2009
Britain’s surrender
January 19, 2009
Big beasts return to a fading landscape
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