Friday, 11 February 2011


Thursday, 10th February 2011

The American debacle in Egypt

9:48pm


The lethal results of Obama’s jaw-dropping incompetence have just got a whole lot worse.

By reaching out his hand of friendship to the enemies of America and the free world and dumping on its allies, he has alienated those upon whom America has depended. By trying to push Mubarak under the Islamist bus, Obama has now managed to lose Saudi Arabia which, we learn, has actually been moved to revolt against America’s ditching of the Egyptian president -- indeed, the Saudis actually threatened the US that if it withdrew its aid programme to Egypt in order to force Mubarak out, the Saudis would step in to bankroll Egypt themselves. For King Abdullah has well understood the message that is flashing round the world in neon lights as a result of Obama’s behaviour: America shafts its allies.

By its own...

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The 'Palestine Paper' that got away...

7:55pm


That fine blogger Elder of Ziyon has a great scoop in the shape of a ‘Palestine Paper’ that the Guardian unaccountably chose not to reveal. The PLO, no less, recorded the legal rights of Jews to land they owned prior to 1948 -- some of which they had bought from the Arabs -- in areas now considered beyond the 1967 border (in reality, the 1948 ceasefire lines; Israel has never had proper ‘borders’ because the war of extermination against it has never actually ended). Elder writes:

...in 2008 the PLO wrote a paper describing the legal rights of Jews to lands that they owned prior to 1948.The intent was to have a position ready in case Israel brought the issue up in negotiations. It was not presented to Israel.

It is astonishing to read paragraphs like these

...

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Wednesday, 9th February 2011

A monstrous inversion

10:41pm


I have only just caught up with the astonishinginterview on the Today programme this morning with the former British ambassador to Israel, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. Anyone who hasn’t understood that large sections of the British ruling class have simply departed from reason altogether over the Middle East should listen to this interview. For Sir Sherard appeared to be inhabiting a looking-glass world. Every single thing he said was, frankly, a monstrous inversion of history, justice and rationality.

Anyone who really loves Israel and wants it to survive, he said, wants it to make the peace that has been on offer since 1937, when the British proposed the division of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs.

But it was not the Jews who turned down that offer – but the Arabs. The Jews accepted it. It was not...

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With friends like this, who needs enemies?

8:47am


I have previously noted (here, here and here) that the Cameron government is shaping up to be one of the most hostile towards Israel in living memory. David Cameron himself and Foreign Secretary William Hague have consistently treated Hamas propaganda about casualty figures in any war with Israel as reliable, even though they are invariably a pack of lies, and have furthermore astoundingly replicated the Arab strategy of turning Israeli self-defence into aggression at every opportunity. While he was in opposition, Hague infamously condemned Israel’s behaviour during the 2006 war in Lebanon as ‘disproportionate’; Cameron himself condemned Israel for its ‘attack’ on the Turkish terrorist boat the Mavi Marmara and designated Gaza a ‘prison camp’.

Now Hague is at it again. With the Arab world convulsed by the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt and with the acute...

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Tuesday, 8th February 2011

David Cameron's important speech

4:22pm


With the exception of the predictably sour comments by the usual suspects, David Cameron has had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to his important speech on multiculturalism last Sunday in Munich. At last, people have said, the Prime Minister has thrown off the shackles of political correctness that have paralysed debate and has spoken the truth about multiculturalism and Islamic extremism. Lord Tebbit has even gone so far as to surmise that if he goes on like this Cameron will win the next general election.

Steady on, chaps.

I have three things to say about this speech.

First, the Prime Minister did indeed travel a huge distance from the ruinous position taken by the previous government on both multiculturalism and Islamic extremism. The most important change he made was to end the absurd idea that the only threat comes...

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Labour's social engineering destroyed British education. Oh wait...

10:22am


Education Secretary Michael Gove is attracting a lot of admiration and even more flak for his attempts to halt the catastrophic deterioration of Britain’s education system. More than most, Gove understands that the driver of this calamity is the way in which previous governments turned the education system into a tool of social engineering to bring about ‘social equality’, aka identical educational outcomes regardless of academic merit, achievement or knowledge. To that end, standards were lowered throughout the system in order to give under-achieving children the illusion of examination success. And young people from disadvantaged backgrounds but with inadequate education were shoehorned into the universities – which were bribed and blackmailed to discriminate against more able candidates from good schools or leafy suburbs -- just so that they could boast meaningless letters after their name. That was considered to represent...

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