MUST READ: BRITAIN'S WAR AGAINST...WELL, YOU KNOW

Britain’s war against…well, you know

Britain is now fighting a war it dares not name. The recent failed car bomb attacks on a London nightclub and Glasgow airport demonstrated once again that Britain is a principal target for al-Qaeda. But even now, the British response is dangerously confused.

After eight people in the medical profession were arrested over these attacks, there was widespread shock that those who cure should also want to kill. This naive and ahistorical reaction demonstrated yet again the extraordinary state of denial about the Islamist jihad. After all, Osama bin Laden’s sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a doctor. So are other Islamist terrorists, including Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas strongman in Gaza.

But because the deeply empirical British do not understand how religious fanaticism twists the human mind, they tell themselves that Islamic terrorism must be driven by rational grievances such as deprivation, ‘Islamophobia’ or British foreign policy.

Many continue to believe that Britain is a target because of its involvement in Iraq. While the war is undoubtedly used to whip up hysteria in the Muslim world, the irrationality of believing that it is the cause of Islamic terror is clearly demonstrated by the fact that British Muslims who have been jailed for terrorist offenses were recruited even before 9/11. Al-Qaeda is also heavily engaged in places such as Indonesia or Africa, which have no connection to Iraq or the Middle East.

In Britain, all these grievance excuses are wearing very thin, thanks to the recent emergence of former jihadists who have renounced their extremism.

Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist, and another former radical, Hassan Butt, have made the case that the doctrines to which they once subscribed are rooted in nothing other than a fanatical desire to Islamize the world.

But while these courageous people are telling Britain that, far from being motivated by despair, Islamist terrorists kill as an act of religious exultation, the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ — and presumably ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islamist’ — in connection with the terrorist crisis. He has also put an end to the phrase ‘war on terror.’

Accordingly, in her statement to Parliament about the attacks, the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, referred to them as ‘criminal’ acts rather than Islamic terrorism and talked about ‘communities’ that are involved rather than Muslims.

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Undoubtedly, the latest attacks upon Britain were designed to test the will of the new British prime minister. His censorship of the language, however, was far from the only indication of a disturbing weakening of that will. For he has brought into his government a string of people who were opposed to the Iraq war, thus signaling a distancing from the United States — and opening up an exceptionally dangerous crack in what should be a staunchly united alliance in time of war.

Such new ministers include Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who blamed Israel in last year’s Lebanon war; the new higher education minister, John Denham, who resigned from the Blair administration over Iraq; and most startling of all, the new second in command at the Foreign Office, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, a former United Nations official who has downplayed the U.N. “oil for food” scandal and condemned the United States over the Iraq war.

Britain has never been in a more dangerous position — not just because of terrorism but because, faced with an enemy whose platform is the decadence and weakness of the West, it is going out of its way to prove the terrorists right.




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1) Britain’s war against…well, you know

MUST READ: STILL BEHIND THE TERROR CURVE

Still behind the terror curve

We have had the closest of close shaves - and who knows whether by the time you read this the bombers will have struck lucky.

The appalling carnage intended by the weekend’s attacks in London and Glasgow was averted only by chance and the alertness of the public and emergency services.

And the danger is far from over. As the Government’s new security adviser Lord Stevens observed, this is a major escalation of the Islamist war being waged against us.

We don’t yet know who was responsible. But what is immensely disturbing is that, once again, our intelligence service has been taken unawares and shown wanting.

If the bombers turn out to be ‘clean skins’ unknown to MI5, the extent of home-grown Islamist terrorism is far worse than it thought and it will have to go back to the drawing board - again.

But even worse, the bombers might have already surfaced on its radar and yet been left free to organise another atrocity.

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Britain is now Al Qaeda’s principal target as well as its principal recruiting ground. This is because Al Qaeda has correctly identified Britain as the weakest link in the Western alliance.

Our Muslim community is particularly vulnerable to Islamist extremism because of the collapse of Britain’s belief in itself and the corresponding rise of multiculturalism and minority rights; the world-class defeatism and appeasement-minded arrogance of its establishment; and the eagerness with which its intellectual elite regurgitates Islamist propaganda in order to bash the West.

Our new Prime Minister has made an impressive start in handling this crisis. His appointments of a former head of defence intelligence as a designated Security Minister and a former Metropolitan Police commissioner as a security adviser were shrewd political moves.

Now we have to see whether the lethally incompetent counter-terrorism strategy will change.



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1) Still behind the terror curve

MUST READ: THE ECLIPSE OF REASON

The eclipse of reason
by Melanie Phillips

Why Britain? As the Jewish community reels under the impact of the boycotts, the wickedly distorted Six-Day War anniversary coverage and the eruption of hatred against Israel, people are asking why this intellectual intifada has surged so strongly in Britain.

Although bad things against Israel and the Jews are happening elsewhere, nowhere else has seen such a relentless concentration of attacks as in Britain, with journalists, doctors, architects and academics declaring open season upon Jewish peoplehood. So why is this country different from all other countries?

Clearly, certain factors are unique to Britain. One is the role of the BBC. While other media share the anti-Israel animus, the importance of the BBC in poisoning the public mind can hardly be overestimated. Afforded unique reverence as a global kitemark of fairness and objectivity, its journalism is therefore trusted as the truth by those who know no better.

But what it actually pumps out day after day is little more than Arab propaganda. Over the past couple of weeks, it has simply rewritten history in its on-line bulletins and broadcast coverage to portray Israelis as brutal aggressors, their Palestinian would-be exterminators as saintly victims — and to excise Jerusalem from its central role in Jewish history.

Next, the leadership of British Jews is uniquely supine. Refusing to make the public case against those spreading the lies, it thus fails to challenge in the popular mind what is perhaps the single most agonising and lethal aspect of this madness — the part played in it by Jews themselves.
For the appalling thing is that there would scarcely be such an anti-Israel movement, with such a devastating impact upon public opinion, if it weren’t for the Jews who are its most numerous and prominent promulgators.

In other countries, leading Jews are not afraid to identify these Jewish Israel-haters as enemies of the Jewish people. In Britain, by contrast, the Jewish leadership maintains a public silence on this as on everything else. As a result, the claim that such a campaign cannot be a form of Jew-hatred since Jews are involved in it remains unchallenged.

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1) The eclipse of reason

MUST READ: BEYOND BELIEF

Beyond belief
by Melanie Phillips

True to its ever-more astounding and sickening form, (including this grovelling apology for calling Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, its capital) the BBC has been blaming the carnage in Gaza upon…Israel. According to its ineffable Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, the barbarism meted out by the Palestinians of Gaza upon each other is All Israel’s Fault:

The institutions, and the hopes behind them, have already taken a severe battering from Israel’s military actions over the last seven years and, more recently, by the punishing financial sanctions imposed by Israel and other countries after Hamas won a free election at the beginning of last year… What has happened also shows the failure of the decision of the world’s big powers to isolate Hamas. The financial sanctions they imposed, which caused severe hardship and helped fuel the violence in Gaza by making people even more desperate, were designed to either force Hamas to recognise Israel or to push it out of power. The policy has achieved neither objective.

No mention that aid to Gaza has at the very least doubled since these ‘punishing financial sanctions’ were imposed. No acknowledgement that it was Hamas’s genocidal attacks on Israel that caused these sanctions to be imposed. No awareness of the absurdity of blaming the violence on the ‘desperation’ caused by sanctions when a) it is plainly a power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, b) the Palestinians were given the opportunity to turn Gaza into a flourishing society two years ago, but within hours showed how ‘desperate’ they were not to achieve this by destroying millions of dollars’ worth of greenhouses that the Israelis had left for them to make money from, and c) Hamas is demonstrably not despairing at all but exultant that it can now tyrannise the inhabitants of Gaza all the way back to the 7th century.

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1) Beyond belief

MUST READ: THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION

The two-state solution
by Melanie Phillips

As the Israel boycott sputters on in Britain, with 250 academics denouncing the UCU’s action in an ad in today’s Times and with the House of Lords expressing its concern about the rise in Jew-hatred on campus of which the boycott call is but the latest example, the Palestinians aren’t giving the UCU’s stand against Israel’s ‘occupation’ quite the endorsement it might have expected. Ha’aretz reports:

On Tuesday, a Palestinian journalist likened the Palestinian Authority to a smoke-belching car wreck, adding that it was time to toss the keys to the Israelis. His view is shared by many Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who in recent days have told the media that they are fed up. ‘We’ve had enough, we should be so lucky as to see the return of the Israeli occupation.’

Yes, there are Palestinians in Gaza who actually want the Israelis back in occupation.

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MUST READ: THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS (2)

The war against the Jews (2)
by Melanie Phillips

As the proposed academic boycott of Israel continues to reverberate, it is important to grasp that the appalling animus behind it goes far deeper than a protest at Israel’s behaviour in the disputed territories. It is an attempt to delegitimise Israel altogether in order to pave the way for its destruction. The Engage website has posted a video of key boycott organiser John Rose explaining why Israel should be disbanded or toppled. And on Normblog, Shalom Lappin has pointed out that the Palestinian boycott call that the UCU has voted to circulate to all its branches is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) statement.

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Part ONE was linked too on June 4, 2007...


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1) The war against the Jews (2)

MUST READ: THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS

The war against the Jews
by Melanie Phillips

The hatred of Israel that now courses through Britain’s veins has now erupted in yet another frenzy whose irrationality and spite are scarcely credible. One now gets a whiff of what it must have been like during the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages; one now begins to understand just what Kafka was describing. British Jews are being swept up in a psychic maelstrom targeted at their right to peoplehood. As the violence against Israel increases with more than 300 rockets fired on Sderot and the western Negev since May, killing two Israeli civilians, wounding many others and traumatising untold numbers in addition; as Hamas threatens Israel with an endless war of annihilation; as Iran races towards the nuclear bomb to finish Israel off, Britain’s industrialised and professional classes are deciding once again to take the high ground of moral nihilism and punish not the instigators of this genocidal onslaught but the nation that is their victim.

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MUST READ: HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF IN BRITAIN

History repeats itself in Britain
by Melanie Phillips

Anyone not yet convinced that Britain has somehow turned against its own most fundamental values, not to say departed altogether from reality, should look at the decision by the University and College Union (UCU) to urge a boycott of academic institutions in Israel.

This deplorable move destroys the most sacred role of a university — to act as the guardian of free speech and inquiry in order that knowledge, opinion and truth can flourish and grow.

Last week, the UCU voted in favour of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in protest at the country’s treatment of the Palestinians. While criticism of Israel is as legitimate as it would be of any other country, to boycott academics because of their government’s policies is abhorrent and unjust.

Once the free exchange of ideas is thus shut down, objectivity, knowledge and justice are similarly extinguished. Ludicrously, such a boycott will silence academics within Israel who are critical of their own country’s behaviour. It will also hurt the very Palestinians who want to study in Israel’s universities — which, security considerations aside, welcome them onto their courses.

Such boycotts run counter to all academic codes. It is a mark of shame against Britain’s universities that they are proposing such a repudiation of the very ethos of academic freedom.
Encouragingly, many academics are horrified by the boycott call, with the Russell Group of elite universities speaking out strongly against it. But this issue goes far beyond the universities. In recent weeks, journalists, doctors and architects have also launched attempts to boycott Israel, and the public sector union Unison is poised to launch its own boycott of all Israeli goods and services.

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The only people who have ever opposed a lawfully constituted, peaceful Palestinian state are the Arabs. And yet Britain’s intelligentsia and union activists are busily boycotting and demonstrating against Israel. They are exactly the same kind of useful idiots who once supported Stalin, and waved aside all those who spoke up against the killings and the terror.

There are those who will dismiss what I say because, as a Jew and a supporter of Israel, I am thought to have a large axe to grind. But people said exactly the same thing to those Jews who tried to warn Britain and the world about Hitler in the 1930s. Britain dismissed such warnings then; and as a result the world paid a terrible price.

Dismayingly, the atmosphere in Britain today is all too similar. It is said that tragic history repeats itself as farce. Those who support the boycotts and demonstrations against Israel are helping ensure that history is to be repeated for a second time as tragedy.



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1) History repeats itself in Britain

MUST READ: BRITAIN'S HUMAN RIGHTS FARCE

Britain’s human rights farce
by Melanie Phillips

The primary duty of any government is to protect its citizens. In any normal society, people who are thought to be dangerous are jailed. Those suspected of terrorist leanings are either locked up or, if they are foreign nationals, thrown out of the country.

But not in Britain. Some of the foreign terrorist suspects are not locked up at all. Instead, the Government allows them to remain in their homes under ‘control orders’. And then it loses them.

Two days ago, three terrorist suspects absconded while under such control orders and are now on the run. We now learn that ’solid intelligence’ indicated that the three absconders intended to blow up British and other Allied troops abroad.

This brings to a total of six the number of terror suspects whom the British security authorities have managed to lose while the subject of control orders.

The system is a farcical shambles. Even worse, the Home Office tried to keep these earlier disappearances secret. We know about this latest triple flight only because the police insisted that the public should be informed of these men’s identities.

It appears that these three men were able to abscond because they were required to do no more than surrender their passports and report to a telephone monitoring company or to the police.

As for why the men weren’t subject to more stringent restrictions, the answer was that they didn’t pose a direct threat to Britain.

But in that case, why were they on a control order at all?

It is surely common sense to acknowledge that, if people are believed to pose a terrorist threat to Britons abroad, they are quite likely to pose a threat to Britons at home too.

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The plain fact is the Government refuses to do anything about it. It regards the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the Convention into English law and in so doing turned it into a judicial straitjacket, as an article of faith.

Dr Reid has, it is true, never hidden his fury at this Act for tying his hands over terror suspects. But it is the government of which he is a member that has tied its own hands in this way.

The truth is that this country cannot fight the mortal threat posed by Islamist terrorism in this way. We should derogate from the Convention or else come out of it altogether.

And we also need a different type of judicial process for terrorist cases. In Northern Ireland, we adopted the juryless Diplock courts to cope with the special circumstances of Irish terrorism. We need something similar to meet the vastly greater threat we now face.

Anything less shows that we are not taking this threat seriously. And the consequences of such frivolity may well be even more loss of life - the greatest human right of all.


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1) Britain’s human rights farce

MUST READ: LIBERALISM v ISLAMISM

Liberalism v Islamism
by Melanie Phillips

I am not going to copy & past any portion of this article, but I advise all of my visitors to read it from begining to end...

I would not do it justice if I excerpted...

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1) Liberalism v Islamism