All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy. As for the ‘separation walls’ and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy. There is The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions There is a case now, therefore, for the evidential basis on which arrest warrants can be allowed to be tougher and for restricting the right to prosecute the narrow range of crimes falling under universal jurisdiction to the Crown Prosecution Service alone. Livni and Ha’aretz naively take this at face value to assume that the... I read this Guardian story with special interest, because I was told only...
Friday, 5th March 2010
A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT
5:26pm
A few days ago, the historian Andrew Roberts wrote a piece in the Financial Times trenchantly defending the presumed assassination by Israel in Dubai of the Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Habhouh. In this article, which was itself a response to two examples of standard boilerplate bigotry that the paper had run about this, Roberts wrote:
...This sceptr'd isle
12:34pm
Last night I was chatting with a friend, a distinguished writer. He told me the following anecdotes. His son had taken his children back to their boarding school after the half-term break and was driving straight back home, around 50 miles away. He had consumed neither drink nor drugs and was driving steadily and carefully while listening to music. He became aware of a car following him closely for most of the way; to his astonishment, when he pulled into his drive the car followed him and out got two police officers. They claimed he had been driving in a lane where he should not have been. He denied this. After some further questioning they then asked: ‘Have you had a domestic?’ (police vernacular for a row with the wife). Upon being answered in the negative, the officers insisted on...Thursday, 4th March 2010
The verbal pogrom
7:09pm
A propos ‘lawfare’ and Anti-Israel Pogrom week, here are two excellent articles. Alan Dershowitzcalls for a real ‘apartheid week’, protesting at the exclusion and oppression of Jews, women, gays and others in Muslim lands:
...Smoke and mirrors over 'lawfare'
6:19pm
The Israeli paper Ha’aretz , along with the Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, appear to have been taken in by Gordon Brown’s noisy but misleading announcement in today’s Daily Telegraph that he will change the law to prevent the abuse of ‘universal jurisdiction’ through threats to arrest visiting Israeli dignatories for ‘war crimes’, an abuse which has caused the cancellation of a number of high-profile visits by Israelis to the UK of which the latest was the planned visit by Livni. Brown wrote:Wednesday, 3rd March 2010
The marginal faith in the Ashcroft alchemy
11:37am
The Guardian carries a story about the whizz-bang computer technology behind Lord Ashcroft’s marginal seats offensive -- the one being touted in some quarters as being on course to deliver victory to the Tories regardless of poor overall national polling intentions. Lower down the story, however, there is an admission that all may not be entirely hunky-dory with the way this ‘full hand-held integration’ is supposed to deliver on polling day itself – although apparently, through some mysterious alchemy not divulged to the reader, it will be all right on the night. But election campaigns are not won on polling day but through the kind of long-term, devilishly focused and manipulative targeting of susceptible voters that we are led to believe the Ashcroft offensive is delivering.
Friday, 5 March 2010
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