Diary
David Cameron's politics of McCarthyism
27 July, 2010
As I am on holiday for a week, there will probably be no blogs until the following Friday.
Any pretence that David Cameron is a friend of Israel has been blown to smithereens today. In his visit to Turkey today, the PM made a series of scathing anti Israel remarks designed to placate his hosts, and much of the world media. He reiterated his belief that Israel's interception of the Turkish flotilla was 'completely unacceptable' and added that "Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp." "Humanitarian goods must flow in both directions," he added.
There was no mention of the Turkish IHH terror group that set out to cause a major international incident, no mention of the fact that Hamas terror is the real reason why Gaza is being blockaded, no mention of Egypt's blockade, no mention of the humanitarian assistance already given by Israel to improve life for Gazans. No, these were one sided remarks calculated to win favour with a Turkish audience.
But why is David Cameron, normally a man of shrewd judgement, going out of his way to insult his Israeli ally?' The answer is that he supports Turkey's proposed membership of the European Union. Indeed he has even accused those who oppose its membership of blatant Islamophobia.
But this implicit charge of racism is nothing short of scandalous. Granted, some national leaders may oppose Turkish membership for irrelevant historical and cultural reasons.
But there are serious reasons for why we should be wary of Turkey joining the EU. For one thing, it has a massive population which would give Turkey the second larges voting rights of any EU country by 2020. It also has a large rural population which would test the EU's finances and a number of question marks about human rights and democratic governance. More importantly, this country is ruled by a hard line Islamist who has turned Turkey into an ally of Iran and Syria. Do we really want these two sponsors of terror as neighbours of an enlarged Europe? It is a serious issue that cannot be trivialised.
But by condemning his detractors as racists, Cameron is silencing debate in the most egregious fashion. He is mimicking the worst features of New Labour's 'thought police' who used to viciously clamp down on critics of immigration and multiculturalism. He is engaging in the politics of McCarthyism and this is worse than misguided; it is evil.
topSimon Mostyn
27/07/2010
I see arguments on both sides re Turkish membership of EU. DC probably thinks that if Turkey joins the EU, they will be more inclined to look West rather than East (towards Syria and Iran). With the state the EU is in at the moment, the thing I find baffling is why Turkey would want to join at the moment.
Is an American attack on Iran imminent?
25 July, 2010
On the face of it, the signs that the US may be about to contemplate military force against Iran should be welcomed. A former head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, told CNN today: "My personal view is that Iran left to its own devices will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon and frankly that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.” The military option, he added, "may not be the worst of all possible outcomes" and it now "seems inexorable."
The reason for the new mood music, if indeed that is what it is, does not appear to be the result of growing pressure from Jerusalem, nor is it the result of a Damascene conversion from the White House. It appears to have resulted from a Saudi ultimatum to the US. King Abdullah is alleged to have told President Obama: "We cannot live with a nuclear Iran."
In itself this is hardly surprising. For years, the Saudis have led a Middle East Sunni bloc that is terrified of Iran's growing power and hegemonic ambitions, a fear that has been exacerbated by Iran's nuclear programme. Saudi rulers know full well the potential for destabilisation in the event that Iran develops even one atomic weapon. So any American change of heart would be welcome, even at this late stage.
But what does it say about Obama that he bends to the will of oil rich autocrats in Riyadh and not his democratic ally in Jerusalem? More to the point, why is Obama having to bow to pressure at all? That he is incapable of asserting American power without being pressured by others is surely the most revealing thing of all.
topCameron makes two gaffes in 24 hours
22 July, 2010
David Cameron has made two tremendous gaffes in the space of 24 hours, which is impressive by the standards of any Prime Minister. His first was over the fraught issue of Afghanistan, where he stated that British troops would leave the country by 2015 while insisting that this could only happen if the job was done. But which is it? There is naturally no guarantee that Afghan forces will be competent to take over from NATO in five years time. So either British forces make a hasty and ill advised retreat or Cameron’s pledge is a hollow one. This mixed message can only undermine our forces and give much needed succour to the enemy. It is a recipe for policy confusion at the highest level.
Cameron’s second gaffe was his breathtakingly ignorant comment that Britain’s wartime role in 1940 was as a “junior partner” to the USA. He said this in the context of discussing the ‘special relationship’ where he affirmed that it was important to ‘tell it like it is.’ “We are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner,” he told Sky News. Now it is one thing to make a political statement of the obvious, albeit one devoid of warmth and sentimentality, and entirely another to re-write history.
Perhaps someone should remind the PM that in 1940, Britain stood alone against Nazism while American was isolationist. It was a year in which a British Prime Minister sought in vain to obtain America’s entry into the war or at least some level of financial assistance. America was nobody’s junior partner that year while Britain was the effective superpower.
Cameron’s comment will offend all those that remember 1940 with unashamed pride. He should apologise for this. Yet it is intriguing that he should make such a mistake in the first place. Does it not say something that an incredibly well educated man could make such a gross blunder? Does Cameron not realise the sacrosanct status of this year in British national identity? Or does he believe, like Tony Blair, that Britain is merely a young country and that its revered national mythologies matter very little today? Perhaps he was so desperate to emphasise our junior status vis the US that he retrospectively applied it to the past. Whatever the reason, his gaffe was revealing.
topAnglo-Jewry remains strongly attached to Israel
19 July, 2010
A report by the Institute for Jewish Policy (www.jpr.org.uk) has given a remarkable insight into Anglo-Jewry's attitudes towards Israel. On balance, there is a great deal to celebrate. Here are some of the key findings (summarized on page 9):
For 82% of respondents, Israel plays a ‘central’ or ‘important but not central’ role in their Jewish identities. • 90% believe that Israel is the ‘ancestral homeland’ of the Jewish people. • 72% categorize themselves as Zionists; 21% do not see themselves as Zionists,and 7% are unsure. • 87% say that Jews in Britain are part of a global Jewish ‘Diaspora’; just 19% regard Jews outside Israel as living in ‘exile’. •77% of respondents agree that Jews have ‘a special responsibility to support Israel’. • An overwhelming majority (87%) agrees that Jews are responsible for ensuring ‘the survival of Israel’— over half (54%) the non-Zionist respondents also agree.
In one sense, this provides cause for cheer. As the excellent Robin Shepherd points out, the findings are a riposte to those, such as Independent Jewish Voices, who argue that Zionist organisations, like the Board of Deputies, are not representative of the community. A clear majority identifies with Zionism and Israel while most Jews back Israeli measures of self defence, such as Operation Cast Lead. No longer can self indulgent critics of Israel, including those who write in the Guardian, claim to be the true voice of Anglo-Jewry. They are fringe critics.
But the report does throw up some worrying revelations. The most startling revelation was that more than 50% of British Jews believe it is right for Israel to negotiate with Hamas. (This will be the subject of an opinion piece to come soon.) Anglo-Jewry has mixed views on security issues:
Half the sample (50%) agrees that ‘Israeli control of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) is vital for Israel’s security’, while a sizable minority (40%) disagrees. But a clear majority (55% against 36%) also considers Israel to be ‘an occupying power in the West Bank (Judea/Samaria). Two-thirds (67%) favour giving up territory for peace with the Palestinians with 78% favouring a two state solution. Again, this is all a clear riposte to those who believe that Anglo-Jewry is hawkish when it comes to the peace process.
Do read the entire report - it is truly enlightening.
topMore UN impotence
14 July, 2010
Nothing better illustrates the impotence of the UN, and the folly of other nations relying on it, than the current build up of Hezbollah strength in southern Lebanon. In recent weeks, the Iranian backed terror group has massed up to 20,000 troops on Israel’s border in clear defiance of UN Resolution 1701 which has called for Hezbullah to be disarmed. In 4 years, neither Lebanese nor French forces have done any such thing. Under the watchful eye of ‘peacekeepers,’ the terrorist militia has been busy replenishing its strength at every opportunity. All that the UN could do in response was pass a somewhat lily livered resolution, calling for the ‘safety of UNIFIL and United Nations personnel’ to be respected. I am sure Tehran’s ayatollahs were quaking in their boots!
With its entrenched culture of appeasing tyranny, the UN has helped to guarantee another Middle East war. But the next war will be much more serious than the last. This is because once again the League of malevolent tyranny (sorry, UN) has looked the other way as Hezbullah has quietly imported a vast quantity of weapons into Lebanon. They are now believed to have some 40,000 rockets and missiles throughout Lebanon. Among these are up to 1,400 longer range scuds, each of which could bring down apartment blocks in Tel Aviv. The civilian death toll from such a sustained missile attack would surely dwarf that from the 2006 war and induce an unprecedented sense of vulnerability. Israel says it has made preparations for a future conflict with Hezbullah, a war that could, in the words of one general, erupt in a day or in a year. Let us hope so; this will be no ordinary skirmish.
topLib-Con naivety in Afghanistan
9 July, 2010
Con Coughlin has launched a blistering attack on the Lib-Con military strategy in Afghanistan. He is quite right to do so for the Lib Dems, whose MP, Nick Harvey, is now the Armed Forces Minister, have made much of running down our defence forces and military commitments in an ideological bid to become more ‘European.’ Thus they have savaged the Trident nuclear deterrent as well as our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is in Afghanistan that the Lib Dem element in this coalition could do the most lasting damage. As Coughlin points out:
‘To grasp the sheer naivety of their position, you need look no further than a resolution they passed at their most recent conference. The motion said that the government's priority in Afghanistan should be the "pursuit of a ceasefire", which would then be followed by an immediate withdrawal. Nick Clegg, now Deputy Prime Minister, voted in favour.’
Talk of a ceasefire and a negotiated outcome to the Afghan conflict is ultra European because it eschews militarism and violence in favour of dialogue and lawful outcomes. There is only one problem though: the Taleban aren’t much interested in conflict resolution. Put more simply, they are only interested in a negotiated outcome that leaves them in control of Afghanistan and in a position to attempt the Talebanisation of neighbouring Pakistan – a country with nuclear weapons.
Yet that appears to be one possible outcome of what Mr. Harvey is attempting with our military. He ‘wants a sharp reduction in manning levels throughout the Armed Forces, with far more emphasis on sophisticated weaponry.’ Recent history shows how inadequate this approach is. Coughlin again points out:
‘The main reason the violence spun out of control in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime was the refusal to commit sufficient numbers of troops. The same has been true of Afghanistan, where it is only the recent arrival of extra American forces that has truly enabled the fight to be taken to the Taliban.’
One of the reasons why British troops are being withdrawn from Sangin is that there simply aren’t enough of them, leaving the Americans, with their greater troop strength, to fill the gap. That sounds fine until you realise that the Americans themselves are talking of a timetable for withdrawal from next year. This is great news for the Taleban who will count the days until troops start to leave the country, before declaring that they have scored a momentous victory against the 'infidel' superpower. Well might they believe that victory lies just around the corner. We should all be rather worried.
topAmerica's phoney Zionist
8 July, 2010
Well, the scales have truly fallen from my eyes. Obama has apparently been transformed from an arch appeaser to a radical Zionist. He now sees the Israeli PM as 'smart and savvy' and 'well positioned to bring about peace' in the Middle East. The Israeli PM has gone from being an intransigent hawk worthy of contempt to a venerated statesman who is "putting his country on more secure tracks.." Now the two men are the best of friends, inseparable allies who are joined at the political hip, all past disagreements forgotten, the hatchet buried, and only the rosiest future to look forward to.
Of course the mid term congressional elections are imminent and the President's approval ratings are at rock bottom. And yes, that includes America's Jewish community who are wedded to the Democrats with a religious fervour. Hence Obama's extended charm offensive which is as transparent as it is shallow. One can only hope that US Jewish leaders see this for what it is: a far from subtle effort to obtain votes and money at the cost of temporarily halting the White House's belligerent rhetoric. Then again, how many lauded this Chamberlainite figure two years ago and suggested he was the West's political messiah. Don't hold your breath...
topA court makes vandalism 'legal'
04 July, 2010
The English legal system, one of the great glories of this country, is being politicised before our eyes. The cause is Israel, or more specifically, the pungent anti Israeli bigotry that is coursing through the veins of the English establishment.
Five ‘peace campaigners’ have just been cleared at Hove Crown Court of causing £180,000 worth of criminal damage to a factory owned by the arms manufacturer EDO MBM. The seven, who admitted causing the damage, justified their actions by saying they were designed to prevent ‘Israeli war crimes.’ At the time they smashed up the factory, Israel was engaged in Operation Cast Lead.
The jury accepted their plea of ‘lawful excuse,’ which under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, allows a small crime to be committed if it is designed to stop a much greater crime from taking place. This jury were clearly spurred on by Judge George Bathurst-Norman who said in his summing up: ‘You may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time.’
All this seems extraordinary, even surreal. In itself, the plea of lawful excuse is perfectly valid. If my neighbour’s kitchen was on fire, I would feel justified in breaking down his front door to prevent his house from incineration. If the house contained explosives that could destroy an entire street, the same action would have ample legal justification.
But the case above is different because the aggressive actions of foreign states involve crimes under international, not domestic, law. Israel’s operations in Gaza may seem reprehensible to these seven protestors but the Jewish state should not be held to account in a UK court. The ‘greater wrongs’ of Cast Lead are entirely a matter of subjective judgment, and a flawed one too for they admit Hamas propaganda as fact and ignore the terror campaign against Israel’s civilians.
The campaigners had specifically argued that EDO broke export regulations by supplying military components to Israel that would be used in the occupied territories. However, an independent information watchdog has said this claim is not confirmed by official records
But what has happened in this case is even more extraordinary. An ‘impartial’ judge has adopted a pro Palestinian viewpoint and then imposed it on the members of a jury, effectively predetermining the outcome of this case. This violates the entire spirit of the judicial process, at least in a functioning and mature democracy. It makes a mockery of the English legal system.
The jury also accepted the excuse given by Caroline Lucas, Parliament’s sole Green MP, that the campaigners had exhausted ‘all democratic avenues’ prior to their binge of violence. One supporter of the ‘smash EDO campaign’ put it this way: ‘The bitter experience of seeing millions of people demonstrate against the Iraq war, only for the Government to carry on regardless, inspired a redrawing of the rules of engagement.’
Of course, it this became a standard legal defence, it would be a recipe for judicial anarchy. Self styled peace campaigners could choose their favourite foreign policy bugbears (Palestine would be no. 1 naturally) and claim that because they had been unable to stop some alleged abuse from taking place, they had no choice but to resort to violent intimidation. This would require juries to decide which foreign policies constituted ‘the greater evil’ required by this legal defence, which is a wholly inappropriate power.
In this case, Israel’s perceived misdeeds have given the perfect cover for reckless and criminal behaviour. That an English law court should be complicit with such vandalism is outrageous and a very worrying sign of our times.
Happy American Independence day to my US readers.top
The warped thinking of the Israeli left
2 July, 2010
To gain an insight into the warped thinking of the Israeli left, you can do no better than read the latest diatribe from Larry Derfner, an op-ed contributor to the Jerusalem Post. Derfner has a real problem accepting that most Israelis want peace.
While opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Israelis want peace with their neighbours, Derfner argues that his fellow countrymen are saturated with bigotry and prejudice. They are ‘blindly contemptuous of everybody and everything Arab, ‘drawn to confrontation’ and ‘intractably closed minded.’
He goes on: ‘If Israelis thought they could get away with expelling the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and the Israeli Arabs from Israel, they’d support it.’ This is an amazing diatribe, even by the perverse standards of the Israeli left. Just what evidence does Derfner actually produce to support such contentious assertions? Those who value evidence, facts and logic will be disappointed at this stage. All Derfner can muster from his 25 years of Israeli life is one anecdote. And here it is:
“Soon after I came to this country 25 years ago, I learned that among my relatives, “Tali” was the real Arab-hater, the most extreme right-winger in the family. “For Tali, the only good Arab is a dead Arab, right?” one of my cousins ribbed her one Friday night. “Wrong,” she said. “For me, dead isn’t good enough – he’s got to be buried 40 meters underground, too.”
He then goes on to say that the said relative would vote Labour, not out of a liberal conscience but because of pragmatism.
“Look,” she explains, “I don’t want to live with the Palestinians, and we can’t get rid of them, so the only thing to do is divide the land, let them live in their country and I’ll live in mine.”
In other words, the polls are misleading. Israelis want disengagement despite their bigoted view of Palestinians; the stench of prejudice is still there.
Now of course it would be wrong to pretend that all Israelis are saints or all Arabs sinners. Some Israelis are bigots, though most are not. But Derfner’s argument that the widespread support for peace comes from a hatred of Arabs is his assumption only. He provides no evidence to back up this claim and it is therefore of a piece with his left wing prejudices.
It is more likely that Israelis see the value of a two state solution on pragmatic grounds. They know that in the long run, the alternatives are just not viable. Yet Derfner leaves no room for this kind of steely pragmatism.
He assumes that Israelis have to want peace for the right reasons, namely out of a feeling of brotherly love towards the Palestinians. What planet is he living on? The Israeli nation has been subjected to years of unceasing, relentless bloodshed by Palestinian terrorism. As Derfner himself admits of Israeli cynicism:
It comes from traumatic bouts of violence and bloodshed at the hands of Palestinians who don’t accept the Jewish state by any means. Israelis have every right to be cynical.
Yet somehow for the left, none of that should be allowed to alter the Israeli mindset. Peaceniks should turn guns into plowshares despite all the suicide bombings. This is naivety of the most malodorous kind.
topThe Tories go soft on crime
1 July, 2010
If there was one thing that used to identify the Tory brand, it was a taking hard line on crime and criminals. People might not have liked the Tory party or its leaders but they identified with this message above all others. It resonated with vulnerable communities blighted by crime, so much so that it was subsequently adopted by Labour when they came to power in 1997. One of their former Home Secretaries, Michael Howard, declared that 'prison works' before he went on to rapidly expand the number of inmates in British prisons. Now all this appears to have been shelved in yet another liberal rebranding of the Tory party.
In his big speech yesterday, Ken Clarke declared that there were too many people in prison, largely because there were more inmates serving short sentences. Prisons were becoming ‘warehouses’ for criminals and those on short sentences had little chance for rehabilitation. A new approach was needed which focused on treating criminals outside prison via community punishments.
He described he current prison population of 85,000 as “an astonishing number which I would have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction if it had been put to me in a forecast in 1992". He then observed that the record prison population and crime rate in England and Wales were among the highest in Western Europe.
Some of these observations are sadly true. In one sense, prison indisputably does not work if its purpose is outright deterrence. After all, a majority of offenders (approximately 65%) go on to re-offend within 2 years. But what the do-gooders always miss is that exactly the same is true of people sentenced to community orders. The difference is that the latter go on to commit more crimes in the community while the former remain behind bars.
In 2001, the Halliday report, Making Punishments Work, estimated that the average offender carried out 140 offences per year, including assaults, robbery, burglary, shoplifting and criminal damage. Locking up even more people will therefore further reduce the number of crimes committed against society.
Clarke’s belief that we should be locking up fewer people on short sentences wrongly assumes that magistrates rarely opt for lighter punishments. In fact, many of those incarcerated for short periods have already been subjected to a variety of ‘community punishments’ which have clearly failed. Under those circumstances, jail is inevitable.
Clarke might be less ‘astonished’ about rising prison numbers were he to acknowledge that crime has been dropping in the last 15 years. In fact, crime as a whole in Britain has fallen by over 40% since the mid 1990s, as judged by the British Crime Survey and other statistical measures. In part, this is a consequence of putting more people in prison, as studies always show a clear correlation between increasing the likelihood of both conviction and incarceration, and falling crime.
The Justice Secretary would no doubt claim that we lock up a disproportionate number of criminals compared to other European countries. As researchers at Civitas have shown, England and Wales (as of 2007) had 147 people in prison for every 100,000 members of the population, as opposed to 122 for the EU as a whole. But this is the wrong measure because what we should really be doing is comparing prison numbers to the actual crime rate, and that gives a very different picture. As Civitas reveals:
If we compare the number of prisoners to the number of recorded crimes, the EU (27) average was 20.7 and the figure for England and Wales was 16.1. In fact, 18 out of 27 EU countries had rates of imprisonment for every 1,000 crimes that were higher. Scotland also had a higher rate, 19.1 per 1,000 crimes.
In other words, we lock up a disproportionately lower percentage of criminals than do a host of other European countries.
Instead of sticking to a Tory agenda on crime, Ken Clarke has adopted a left wing mantra that ‘prison isn’t working.’ This claim is not only misleading but represents a clear betrayal of his party’s core principles. In fact, it represents a betrayal of everything David Cameron was saying on crime only weeks ago in the election campaign.
Mr. Clarke is often described as a maverick with colourful ideas – but that is far too flattering. He is in fact a dangerous maverick.
top