On Wednesday evening, the Communities Secretary Hazel Blears delivered a major speech on the subject which, far from presaging a change in strategy, was... But Rich points out a further consequence of demonising Israel in this way: If Israel is a Nazi state, then anybody who does not oppose Israel is morally no better than a
Friday, 27th February 2009
A less than engaging strategy
12:58am
A couple of weeks ago, there were claims on Panorama and in the Guardian that the government was about to make a drastic change to its strategy for tackling Muslim extremism in Britain. According to these claims, it realised it had made a catastrophic error in identifying extremism with violence, thus ignoring the conveyor-belt of extreme Islamist ideas which is radicalising ever rising numbers of young British Muslims -- and, worse still, engaging people with those extremist ideas as government advisers on combating Islamist violence. At the time, I expressed scepticism about such an outbreak of realism and suggested it was more likely that an argument was going on in Whitehall between these two factions.Thursday, 26th February 2009
Liberal fascism
6:18pm
On Harry’s Place, Dave Rich makes some good points about the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters as George Galloway, Jenny Tonge, the British Muslim Initiative and others. Its import, as he says, lies in far more than its mere offensiveness and demonstrable barmyness. It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.
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Friday, 27 February 2009
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