This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column Most people still won’t face what really happened ten years ago today. We still get the standard-issue rubbish about how New York was attacked because ‘Islamists hate our way of life’. And we still get the thought-free incantation that ‘9/11 changed everything’, a vacant slogan used to justify unending, dangerous attacks on our freedom. This general unwillingness to think got us into the futile war in Afghanistan, and the appallingly costly and bloody and pointless war in Iraq. The pathetic Blair creature, who has learned nothing from his life, wants us to be even stupider, and launch a war in Iran as well. Perhaps we won’t accept the truth because it is so awkward. It is certainly awkward for me, as I’ll explain. But before I go any further here, let me dispel any idea that the Manhattan massacre was connived at by the US authorities. This is obscene, baseless drivel, grossly disrespectful to the innocent dead and in defiance of a huge body of knowledge. Those who spout it should be subjected to cold contempt. And I must here very strongly recommend the superb new account of the outrage, The Eleventh Day, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, a wholly absorbing and powerful narrative full of good sense, properly weighed facts and clear understanding. It deals with many important points. There’s the bungling of the security services, pretty much standard in these over-rated organisations. It is to cover their blushes that a million pairs of tweezers have been pointlessly confiscated by boot-faced airport security guards. There’s the creepy suppression of 28 pages of the US Congress’s inquiry report into 9/11, believed to endanger Washington’s very special relationship with Saudi Arabia. But most impressive is their description of how and why the official 9/11 Commission deliberately ducked the issue of what motivated the murderers. ‘All the evidence,’ the authors correctly say, ‘indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators.’ They were striking at America’s alliance with Israel. The hijacked planes, as I wrote on this page ten years ago, were Yasser Arafat’s cruise missiles. That is why news of the New York murders led to grisly demonstrations of joy and triumph across the Middle East, film of which was quickly suppressed by the Palestinian movement for fear of a wave of American rage directed against them. And it worked. American wrath and thunderbolts fell on Afghanistan and Iraq, not on Gaza or Ramallah, let alone on Saudi Arabia, where most of the murderers came from. Within weeks, George W. Bush had reversed a long-standing policy and come out in favour of a Palestinian state. This interpretation doesn’t suit me personally at all. It scares me stiff. I stick to it because I cannot avoid the fact that it is true. I believe it is the duty of the civilised West, having created the state of Israel, to defend its integrity and independence against irrational hatred and murderous threats. I believe this in spite of the fact that Israel has done, and continues to do, many wicked things. I believe also that the West is deeply unwilling to face facts about this. It repeatedly pursues a policy of forcing Israel to give up territory in return for unenforceable promises of peace. This sort of negotiation was last used by Neville Chamberlain towards Hitler over Czechoslovakia. It failed, and is universally reviled as ‘Appeasement’. Yet now it is called ‘Land for Peace’, and applauded. The Muslim world has never properly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state. We have never asked it to because we thought we could buy peace with concessions. Israel is already so small it will eventually disappear completely if we carry on buying peace with slices of land. This is because I am used to more and more of my thinking and feeling being done for me by the TV or the cinema, thanks to music, special effects and fast, clever editing. Mr Cameron’s bodyguard of media flatterers also let him get away with this teenage stuff, not worthy of a man in such a responsible and serious job. And they have given a similar free pass to the Chancellor, George Osborne, for a gross and inept jest at a magazine awards ceremony. Well, they did lose the last election, as I knew they would and said they would. But until now, nobody much as noticed. Now the would-be leader of the Scottish Tories, Murdo Fraser, has suggested that the party be dissolved and re-established under another name. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But in the meantime, it is encouraging to see that at last someone else, from however different a perspective, has recognised my basic point. It doesn’t matter what they do. The Tories are institutionally finished. And if they died, Labour wouldn’t be far behind. As I repeatedly said, they were now so loathed by so many people that, whatever they did and said, they could not command a majority. Millions of people, I said, would rather tandoori their grandmothers than vote Tory ever again. Far from calling, as my critics wrongly claimed, for one more Eurosceptic heave, my view was far more radical than that of David Cameron and his ‘modernisers’. The thing neededto be destroyed – not renamed, but actually destroyed in a fourth catastrophic election defeat which caused it to be wound up, the tragic fragments reverently collected up and given decent burial, and an entirely new party – not ‘centre right’ butquite radically conservative, could then move in to the vacant space. This remains my view. Except that the fourth election defeat in a row has been wrongly presented as a victory ( ask most Tories if their party lost the last election. They think it won. If it had, the en thusiastic leftism of the Cameroons would lack its current excuse). Their view was, more or less, that the Tory Party could be detoxified by becoming more soppy liberal. This had major difficulties. One, if it did this, it would inevitably lose a significant minority of voters, probably to UKIP or abstention. This minority wasn’t enough to form a positive threat. But it did form a negative threat. Its existence would deny the party seats where they needed them most. What they gained, they would lose. The other was, that a large number of people would continue to believe that deep down they were the ‘same old Tories’, even if they were not. This ludicrous fantasy still persists in places like the new Statesman and the Leader’s Office of the labour Party, where the blindingly obvious unprincipled liberalism of Mr Cameron and his friends is still construed as a cunning ploy. Only one other group believes this, and it is a diminishing one – the tweedy old Thatcherites who fooled themselves that Mr Cameron was putting on all this husky and hoodie stuff, to get elected and then turn round and rend the Left. I met a lot of these, when a couple of years ago, I spoke at a Bruges Group meeting at the Tory conference and told them what sort of government Mr Cameron would head. I got a cool reception. As I was right, and they were wrong, I’ve been particularly pleased to receive one or two letters from people admitting they had been mistaken. But too late. Or is it? Should hope be kindled in my pessimistic breast (can you have a pessimistic breast? A poet would know)by Mr Fraser’s initiative. Well, not precisely. It is, in his case, wholly cynical as far as I can see, a bit like renaming the Royal Mail ‘Consignia’. The new party will be the Tories, but under another less toxic name. It will (and this is the clue to what’s going on) ally with the Tories at the Westminster Parliament. In short, it’s just a PR dodge trying to get a few more seats for the Tories in Scotland at the next election, which is going to be a tricky one for Mr Cameron. The Scottish Tories used (I think) to be pretty widely known as Unionists, not as Conservatives. Their main activity was getting huge amounts of public money shipped north of the border. Their vote was based upon Protestant Unionism, not always that much different from its cousin in Northern Ireland, which to this day attracts many working class votes which would go Labour on the mainland. When Protestant Christianity and Unionism gave way to secularism, the cultural revolution and the European Union, it quickly shrivelled. It seems to me that Scottish Nationalism has neatly replaced Unionism, and will continue to do so as long as it stays just short of independence, using the threat to squeeze powers and money out of London, much like Quebec in Canada. I don’t think the Tories will ever get that essentially 19th-century vote back again, in any foreseeable circumstances. In fact if if a genuinely conservative London government took us out of the EU, Scotland might well want to stay in, as might Wales. That could be interesting. The effect of EU membership on the Federal State which has been the United Kingdom is one of the most unexamined issues of our time. But I digress. Mr Fraser’s diagnosis is right. His cure is nothing like enough. The whole thing must go, and what remains afterwards must obviously have been purged by defeat and collapse. This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column What a pity that nurses are to stop wearing their scarlet Do Not Disturb waistcoats as they patrol hospital wards. These fetching items of clothing sum up modern Britain so perfectly that they should be much more widely available. The Prime Minister could wear one during meetings with constituents worried about crime, disorder, immigration, EU control of Britain, wasteful foreign aid or the dismantling of the Armed Forces – all subjects on which he doesn’t want to hear from us, thank you very much. The police could wear them as they stroll, chatting to each other, through the streets, while they ignore all the things they regard as too trivial to trouble them – public swearing, alfresco widdling, cyclists scattering old ladies, littering, canna¬bis smoking, car theft and burglary. You know the sort of thing. Teachers could wear them as they fail to teach yet another generation to read, stopping their ears to half a ton of research telling them that synthetic phonics works, because they think it is ‘authoritarian’. BBC complaints officers could wear them as they explain to licence-payers that their tastes, concerns and political views have no place on the airwaves, and they should be grateful to have the BBC at all. All these people – and plenty more known to us in our daily lives – no longer do the jobs they are paid to do. Isn’t it interesting that the work once done by the police is now handed to powerless Police Community Support Officers, that ‘graduate’ nurses are too grand to wield a bedpan and delegate such stuff to support workers. Teachers, apparently unable to teach much, have legions of ‘assistants’. Rubbish dressed up as TV ‘Culture’ When a nation goes rotten from the top down, it has some curious effects. One of them was on view last week when the BBC showed an expensive and slick drama, Page Eight. The camerawork, the production and the editing were of the best. The actors, especially, were superb. Bill Nighy played every Left-wing Oxbridge graduate’s fantasy of himself, haggardly handsome, effortlessly attractive to women, lived-in, witty, successful yet still rebellious. Michael Gambon was a wonderful old geezer. Rachel Weisz was the new Thinking Man’s Crumpet. Ralph Fiennes was more believable as Prime Minister than any of the past four real ones. He was also the only character in the entire drama who didn’t smoke roll-ups. I watched it with enjoyment, until I realised that it was rubbish. The plot didn’t make sense. Does a man on the run from a villainous state go to visit his ex-wife? Most of the scenes were wholly unbelievable, made bearable only by the quality of the acting. There were cliches as lumpy and wooden as tree stumps. This would have been for¬giveable in an episode of Spooks, which everyone knows is tosh. But this is supposed to be ‘Culture’ with a capital ‘C’, the work of the immensely grand liberal-elite playwright Sir David Hare. The Government did not like the scenes at Wootton Bassett as the dead came home, and wants to make sure that nothing of the kind ever grows up again in any other place. It wants to be free to conduct more stupid, unwanted wars, without being reminded of the true cost of them. From now on, the bodies of those soldiers killed in the Afghan conflict will be flown home to RAF Brize Norton, and will no longer pass through Wootton Bassett. There are acceptable reasons for that. But there is no acceptable reason for what happens next. They will no longer go through the centre of any town, being routed through suburbs and along fast main roads and bypasses where no crowds are likely to gather. They could go a different way. Brize Norton is on the edge of the town of Carterton, with a similar population to that of Wootton Bassett. There is also a perfectly good and rather beautiful route that would take the cortege to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford through the large and lovely village of Bampton. I have heard the various official explanations for this curious routing, including the shameful, pitiful claim that the roads of Carterton, 22ft wide, are ‘too narrow’. I think the time has come to say that these explanations are so much tripe, the sort of thing dictators and despots say. We are always told that the authorities have given up on cannabis so that they can be ‘freed up’ to pursue other drugs, allegedly worse, and the ‘evil dealers’ who sell them. Since cannabis can unpredictably send you mad for life, I can’t see why it is any less serious than heroin or cocaine. But if the authorities have been ‘freed up’, they haven’t taken much advantage of their freedom. Thanks to Tim Knox and Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies, and to Nicola Blackwood MP, we now know that of 2,530 people convicted and ¬sentenced for supply of ‘Class A’ drugs last year, 1,756 did not even go to prison and none received the maximum sentence (‘life’). There is no ‘War on Drugs’. It is a sham. * Can one of the many reporters in Libya stop gushing for a moment, and ask a few of the romantic rebels what they think of what happened in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and who they think was behind it? The answers might cool their ardour a bit.
10 September 2011 11:49 PM
Yasser Arafat’s cruise missiles did their job on 9/11. Just ask Israel
Sunday, 11 September 2011
As long as the Arab and Muslim world refuse to accept Israel’s existence, we are ensuring horrible misery in the future – either in the Middle East, or here, or in the USA – or all three. In the coming decade we are going to have to choose between pressing, with all the courtesy and force at our command, for a genuine, permanent recognition of Israel, or accepting a weak process of appeasement interrupted by who knows what horrors.
Even though we all know how appeasement ends, I think it is what we have chosen. That is why we hide the truth from ourselves today and every day.
Smiley’s life is best told by the book
The BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was so good it made me get a TV, after years of not having one in my home. Yet when I watched it again a few years ago I found it oddly slow and quiet, not as thrilling as the first time round. I had changed completely in the 25 years between, as we all have.
I’ll be interested to see how the new film version compares, but in the end they can’t beat the book, drawn from life by a wonderful observer. Unlike the TV series, which starred Alec Guinness as Smiley, it gets better every time.
A Government of adolescents
David Cameron's smirking humiliation of Nadine Dorries in Parliament on Wednesday looked planned and deliberate to me. It was a straightforward piece of crude male-chauvinist bullying, more than a little bit smutty. But because Mr Cameron is viewed by the feminist sisterhood as friendly to the unrestricted abortion they all love, while Mrs Dorries is hostile to it, the women’s movement has not come to her aid.
It is impossible to imagine any previous Chancellor making such a stupid public mistake. We have a Government of adolescents, and an adolescent media to sustain and support them. But the world is still a grown-up place. What must the Chinese think?
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Somehow we’re being sold the idea that the Blair-Brown regime sucked up to Colonel Gaddafi, but our current Government kept their distance. This is false. Archives reveal that the ‘Minister for Africa’, Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as ‘Brother Leader’) at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’.
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If we are going to abandon our Christian heritage completely, and abolish the daily act of public worship in schools, shouldn’t Parliament at least debate it and repeal the law? And shouldn’t the Church of England, which handed over many schools to the state in return for this provision, complain?
For years I have thumped my head against a stone wall, trying to explain that I don’t think the Tory Party will win an election if it adopts the policies I favour. For years, my articles explaining this have been met with the idiotic, non-responsive jibe: ‘Well, William Hague tried it in 2001 and look what happened to him’. Actually, Mr Hague didn’t go nearly far enough for me, but it wouldn’t have helped if he had. The problem was that the Tories themselves were a poison brand. People refused to vote for them because of who they were, not because of what they stood for. That is why they needed to be dissolved and replaced. And for that, they needed to lose the last election.
Like the undisturbed nurses, they could all hand out pills – ‘antidepressants’, Ritalin, or semi-legal cannabis to zonk us all into believing that things are just great.
And our immigration officers, as they wave through the next batch of EU citizens anxious to do the jobs we don’t fancy, could all be emblazoned with the words Do Not Disturb: Country Committing Suicide.
Like Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry, other Leftist Corporation favourites, Sir David can do no wrong. And so the best broadcasting skills in the country are recruited to make it look good. But it isn’t.
The bodies of heroes hidden in a cloud of lies
In a free country, the Government should suffer for its lies.
Proof the ‘War on Drugs’ is a pathetic sham
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