Cpl Gilad Shalit was seized by Palestinian militants in an attack on an Israeli border post on Sunday,
Or if it was Iranian, Baathist or Syrian financed terrorists killing US soldiers in Iraq, we might get something like this from the BBC:
two US soldiers missing in Iraq since Friday were abducted at gunpoint by masked militants, witnesses say.
A huge hunt has been launched in the volatile area south of Baghdad where the pair were last seen.
Witnesses say they were captured after their Humvee vehicle came under fire at a checkpoint. A third soldier died.
But tonight, it's a question of violent politicised Islamists being arrested in Birmingham whilst planning to kidnap and murder a British soldier. So how does the BBC report it?
During the last ten days, there's been a growing level of challenge to the creeping accommodation with totalitarian, anti-Christian and anti-semitic politics that plagues so many mainstream left-liberal news sources and their commentators.
Now we have a report from a British House of Commons Parliamentary Committee which does not stop at urging Israel to enter negotiations with Hamas, pledged never to cease to work for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Islamic caliphate.
Additionally, a group of peers and MPs has been having meetings with the Hamas regime at a time when its gunmen have been busy running murder competitions with its Fatah rivals.
The Parliamentary Select Committee on International Development report also advocates that should Israel refuse to give Palestinians more access to crossing into Israel, the EU should end its Association Agreement (co-operation and trading agreement) until the Israeli government does so:
The UK should urge the UK to use the Association Agreement with Israel as a lever for change and consider suspending the Agreement until there are further improvements in access arrangements.
paragraph 38
This report comes from the Select Committee on International Development. Its members are largely unknown MPs who have little prospect of holding office. It's worth noting however that one of them is Richard Burden. He happens to be Chairman of the House of Commons Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary group, which is the lobby group of members of Parliament who support the Palestinian cause. If you go to his website and click on the link in the section "Middle East Crisis" you will be taken to a page where he lists his tirelessly one-sided series of letters, early day motions and the like, blaming Israel for every twist and turn of the continuing conflict.
The Committee's main argument seems to be that Israel should negotiate with Hamas because it was democratically elected, and the present isolation of Hamas is driving it closer to Iran. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The view that closer talks with Israel will cause Hamas to cease taking money and arms from Iran seems to be so bizarre that it defies description. Indeed, it was the concessions by Israel in withdrawing from Gaza that enabled Hamas, main instigator of suicide bombing attacks on Israel, to claim "victory" and strengthen their electoral popularity. Their own report acknowledges that it was Fatah corruption and not isolation by Israel that helped Hamas to victory in the Palestinian elections.
Ironically, there are liberal Arab commentators who readily acknowledge the threat posed by the most extreme Islamist groups in the Middle East, particularly those like Hamas, associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
MEMRI has an article by Dr Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian born political scientist who teaches in the USA and writes for the London-based Al Shaq al Awsat newspaper. This is what he has to say about what Hamas represents for the future of the Arab world, quite apart from its exterminationist threats against Israel:
today - after the Muslim Brotherhood has conquered a significant part of the symbolic Palestine - the incitement has become Islamist, and the domestic has become commingled with the external. This is because the structure of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological discourse is not based on the separation of the domestic and the external, and because their ideology transcends the borders of [particular Arab] states. Hasn't the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt said that he had no objection to having [even] a Malaysian Muslim rule Egypt, as long as it was not ruled by a Coptic Egyptian? Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood conquest of the symbolic Palestine means giving the [Palestinian] problem a religious character - and herein lies the danger.
"First of all, giving the Palestinian problem a religious character will lead to a Malaysian Muslim having more rights in Palestine than a Christian Palestinian. Likewise, it will transform [the Palestinian problem] from a resolvable territorial struggle into a religious struggle that cannot be resolved..."
.....
The success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine means turmoil in Egypt. Today, this country is witnessing a fierce battle pitched between the ruling National [Democratic] Party and the banned Muslim Brotherhood party, and it appears that the battle is going to the Muslim Brotherhood. In light of the storm of responses to Egyptian Culture Minister Farouq Hosni's statements about the hijab, [3] it became clear that [the number of] Muslim Brotherhood [supporters] inside the National Party might be greater than [the number of] members in the banned [Muslim Brotherhood] organization [itself], and that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated into all Egypt's state apparatuses.
"The Egyptian press is perhaps the best reflection of this infiltration: The front and back pages of Egypt's government papers belong to the ruling party, while the 20 inside pages of every paper belong to the Muslim Brotherhood - and they do what they want with them, [via] their correspondents, theoreticians and propagandists. Whoever reads the Egyptian press today cannot but notice that Egypt is living in the Muslim Brotherhood era."
"As was clarified to me by a member of the National Party, 'there is [only] one party in Egypt, and that is the Muslim Brotherhood.' Over more than 30 years, the Muslim Brotherhood has been gaining control over Egypt's domestic arena - its streets, its institutions, and its press - and nothing stands between it and [full] control except for foreign issues, the first of which is the Palestinian problem.
"If the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine [i.e. Hamas] wins, they will set the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt at the top of Egypt's political pyramid. When [Hamas leader, Palestinian Prime Minister] Isma'il Haniya comes to Egypt, he will go to the Cairo branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of meeting with the senior officials of the Egyptian state. Likewise, we will hear Haniya defending from Gaza the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, bestowing upon them the legitimacy of the Palestinian problem - which in the Arab mentality is above all criticism."
Dr Fandy sees Al Jazeera as a mouthpiece for this Muslim Brotherhood expansionism across the entire Middle East. According to him, the Hamas regime in the Palestinian territories is the flag carrier for the political takeover of the entire Middle East. You can make your own mind up about whether he or Richard Burden and his fellow committee members have a better understanding of what the issues are with Hamas and an electorate which chose to vote for it
"The Muslim Brotherhood has at its disposal media that transcends [state] borders, from newspapers to satellite channels, which have taken over the minds of millions - not only in Egypt and Syria, but throughout the entire Arab world. These are media that are tried and [ideologically] guided, and which level accusations of heresy and treason against those who disagree with them...
"'[Al-Jazeera] is the channel of the Muslim Brotherhood,' said Muhammad Dahlan, a sworn Fatah man, as he described Al-Jazeera TV, which is today incontestably the biggest Arab news channel. If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over the symbolic Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood channel - formerly Al-Jazeera - will serve as a propaganda outlet for the new religious symbolism of the Palestinian problem.
"Al-Jazeera wastes no time, and it is already propagandizing for [Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader] Mahdi 'Akef and the [Muslim Brotherhood] organization, at the expense of the Egyptian state; for [Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leader Ali Sadr Al-Din] Al-Baynouni and his party, at the expense of the Syrian state; and for the Muslim Brotherhood in Algeria at the expense of the Algerian state. If you watch a debate program presented on [Al-Jazeera] by a [certain] non-Muslim host, you will be amazed at the supreme effort he makes to defend the Muslim Brotherhood, and you'll think that by the end of the program, he will be reciting the Muslim declaration of faith. [4]
"The Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the symbolic Palestine will not liberate the land of Palestine - not before the Muslim Brotherhood subjugates the entire Arab world to its rule. The Muslim Brotherhood prefers to eliminate the nearby enemy - the existing Arab states - in order to prepare the means for facing the distant enemy, [namely] Israel.
UPDATE: I originally looked in the HC report for who had been appointed, as is usual with Select Committee Enquiries of this kind, as specialist academic adviser to the group. I was surprised to see only the House of Commons Clerk to the Committee named.
But today I found this website claiming that Dr Karma Nabulsi, former PLO representative, and pro-Palestinian activist, had been the adviser. The adviser would of course be the person who selects all the papers, prepares briefings, advises who should be called as witnesses and maps out who the Committee should visit.
So that's the Chair of the British-Palestinian All Party Committee as one of the Select Committee members and a leading pro-Fatah Palestinian activist campaigner as its adviser. Very balanced, in the best British Parliamentary tradition.
I have a feeling that we are far from hearing the last of the ramifications of the UK government's decision to refuse the request of the Catholic Church to have its adoption societies excluded from the new legislation which will give equal access to all goods and services to gays and lesbians (and others).
It's being portrayed as an issue about the right of gays and lesbians to be treated equally with heterosexuals by adoption agencies. But the government decision potentially opens the door to many other policies and practices being changed.
Dave Hill , who is no bigot, finds himself puzzling over this question:
If I object to the government allowing publicly-funded Catholic adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples (which I would) should I not also object to my local authority allowing Orthodox Jews to have the municipal swimming pool to themselves during Sunday afternoons (which I don't)?
Here's my answer:
It isn't restricted to orthodox Jews. It's a single sex swimming time. So it offers opportunities to various groups, who also pay for the facilities through their council taxes, who would otherwise be excluded by mixed swimming only setups. These could include strictly observant Muslims, radical feminists and others who feel for a variety of reasons that they cannot be in a mixed sex swimming environment. The majority who enjoy mixed sex facilities get those for the great majority of the time they are open.
It's difficult to know what to say about today's responses by Palestinian groups to the latest suicide bombing in Eilat, which has so far claimed three dead.
the international media is this morning failing to note that dozens of other would-be bombers have been prevented from entering other parts of Israel in recent months due to Israel’s security fence. The media reports today have also failed to note that rockets continue to be fired almost daily into Israel from the Gaza strip.
Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are among those groups that have claimed responsibility for this morning’s murders in Eilat. The U.S. government, European Union and the government of Ehud Olmert have all recently given money to Fatah. Israeli Police are currently searching for other bombers believed to be on the loose in the Eilat area.
A Hamas spokesman called this morning’s attack on ordinary Israelis “natural”.
The Palestinian Maan news just announced in Arabic that the suicide bomber is Mohammed Fasial al-Saqsaq, aged 21 from Gaza.
And in the last few minutes on the main webpage of Fatah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, together with al-Quds Brigades and the “Army of Believers” claimed “full responsibility” for the attack and declare that al-Saqsaq is a “hero Shahid (martyr)”.
There's a photo of Yasser Arafat alongside the Fatah web page announcement.
Meanwhile, the BBC News web page announcement mentions the claim by Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and its allies without making it clear that they are part of Fatah. Instead, we get a quote from a Fatah spokesman for the Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas telling us how much he regrets this attack which his own party's website is glorifying as the act of a hero:
A senior aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack.
"We reject these acts and we do not believe that they are in the interest of the Palestinian cause and that they blacken the image of the Palestinian people," Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP news agency.
A series of unofficial video clips of the "World Civilization or Clash of Civilizations?" conference has gone up on YouTube.
I'll be trying to add pointers to some highlights and lowlights on the clips as soon as I can. You can see how accurate Jonathan Hoffman's account which I posted was here.
For starters, listen to Ken circa 5:40 minutes into his clip attempting to use John Stuart Mill to justify his version of multiculturalism. It's another example of Ken not understanding his own propaganda, since it appears to be at odds with his own practice of promoting and giving taxpayer-paid platforms to individuals and groups who militantly advocate the suppression of the individual liberty which Mill proclaims.
For those of you who want to dip into the whole thing, here are the clips, which are being updated during the day with the great transcripts being provided by Vicktorya and the folks at 910group.com who have done a really brilliant job bringing this extraordinary stuff to the public. Meanwhile, the Mayor's office is still sitting on the official videos and transcripts which were made at our expense as London taxpayers.
I forgot to make the core connection in my post yesterday.
The whole point was President Katzav's outbursts reminded me of him in the first place, when he did this maudlin speech. But the soundbite clip I would really have liked to find was his "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more". Not that the Nixon and Katzav speeches were alike on the surface. Nixon's was sentimentality where Katzav's was concealed and not so concealed rage. But essentially they were both about two men in power feeling overwhelmed with self pity at their fall, and a million miles from seeing themselves as the authors of their own misfortunes.
As for Katzav, this is the real life outburst that yesterday's post was based on:
(warning: includes hair-raising obscenities-- in Hebrew)
How wrong could I have been?
I'll get to that in a minute.
But while I was searching YouTube in vain to find a clip of President Katzav's extraordinary outburst vigorous speech of self-defence last Tuesday, I came across this brilliantly executed semi-fantasy take on one of the most ....er.... unbuttoned... moments of his hour long diatribe speech. He responded in mid-flow to an interruption from Gadi Sukenik, an Israeli equivalent of Jeremy Paxman, who fronts a major national news show on Israel's popular Channel 2, by launching into this attack on him :
You have talked for six months, and now it's my turn! No, you won't talk here! If you don't like it, you can get out! I was silent for six months, and now you don't want to hear the truth! Channel Two - yes, Channel Two, the same station that has been spilling my blood for six months!
The YouTube flash movie clip brilliantly takes some of the actual opening words from Katzav's speech then morphs the shouting exchange into something altogether more explicit, mainly centering on the relative sizes of their strategic equipment and the professions and equipment of their mothers, before they both turn on the hapless female anchor in the studio and slap a sexual insult on her.
I'm stunned and appalled by the mountain of accusations of sexual crimes that have accumulated against President Katzav, but I'm also aware that behind the as yet unproven accusations stands a still deeply embedded culture which tolerates and even celebrates the sexual objectification and harassment of women, particularly when it comes to the self-abrograted prerogatives of men in power positions. Whether the clip intended to or not, it encapsulates that point neatly and tellingly.
Imshin wryly looks at the eagerness of one Israeli male she's close to to use the Katzav scandal as an excuse to slaver over some Israeli starlet who's spotted a great opportunity to get publicity for herself.
Both she and Karen Alkalay-Gut have written several posts about their own stories of past experience of sexual harassment seeming to have been a routine feature of life for attractive women in Israeli public institutions.
Not, of course, that this is uniquely a feature of Israel. The paradigm case of the sexually predatory male-in-power was of course John F Kennedy, who was covered up for by everyone from journalists to staffers and the FBI.
And of course, there's the extraordinary indulgence granted in English political culture to Alan Clark and John Prescott.
So, back to how wrong could I be?
When Moshe Katzav was originally elected President of Israel, I was actually really pleased. It was mainly because I thought it was great that an immigrant from Iran who grew up in a development town became head of state in preference to Shimon Peres, who seemed at the time to think he was entitled to the post, as a sort of consolation prize for no longer being Prime Minister.
I also saw it as positive that for the first time, someone who appeared to be either religiously observant, or at least very sympathetic to Jewish and Muslim religious culture, had got to be head of the Israeli state. Yes, I'm aware that his appointment was a result of the shennanigans of the notorious Likud Central Committee , but then the whole success of the post-1979 Likud project was based on politically empowering the Mizrachi Sephardi majority traditionally sidelined by the left-wing Ashkenazi elite.
My own awareness of that particular elite grew long years after being startled at the age of eighteen by my experience of living with my beloved Tel-Aviv cousins. They seemed like more or less an ordinary family-- they ran a custom lighting business. But it was still a home where government ministers, generals and the business and professional elite of the day might drop by any day, and the then president's sister was a regular visitor. Bit of a contrast to my own experience of growing up in the back streets of Stepney, where the nearest I got to our own British power elite was seeing the then Princess Elizabeth sweep past in a limousine in the year of her wedding when I was just three.
There you are. And I have to say at one time, quite a few years ago, I thought Chaim Ramon might offer hope for a new, less bureaucratic and self-satisfied direction to the Israeli Labour Party. Where is he now? Disgraced former Minister of Justice in the Kadima government, after accusations of sexual harrassment of a young woman, that he's fighting as hard as Katzav. At least he had the grace to resign.
And here's irony for you. Just at the moment when the Katzav speech is making headlines comes this little news story:
A 50-year-old female civilian employee of the IDF has been accused of sexually harassing four male officers and enlisted soldiers in an armory base in central Israel.
.
And as I'm going about my business yesterday, I find myself hearing an interesting BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour report about the eighth century Chinese Empress Wu, who in her seventies was still making young men of her entourage her lovers, seeing this role for them as not justpart of her prerogative but a way of retaining her strength and power .
UPDATE: Oliver Kamm's excellent commentary on the Conference is here.
UPDATE UPDATE:Daniel Pipes' own account is here; more good commentaries from Ami here and from Sharon Chadha here. A very interesting account from Sunny at Pickled Politics is very hostile to Daniel Pipes but acknowledges he and Murray had far better arguments than Livingstone and Yaqoob.
I went to hear Daniel Pipes speak at SOAS on Thursday night. I came away very gloomy about Saturday's debate with Ken Livingstone. Pipes had been so negative - Oslo was a failure, the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan had been failures, Israel has lost through diplomacy what it gained militarily, diplomacy is almost hopeless, the only solution will be when one side gives up its aspirations, the NGOs should adopt the same definition of 'refugee' as UNHCR - someone who has personally fled rather than including the children and grandchildren of a first generation refugee too.
I’m so happy to admit that I could not have been more wrong. Pipes was magnificent at the Conference. Daniel went into the lion’s den and not only did he survive, he pulverised the lion.
On Friday morning's BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, I listened to Jeremy Bowen's latest report on the Israel-Palestinian conflict (link probably good till Friday 26th January, and you can download the clip). What is the solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians? asks the Today Programme web site's caption for the link to the 8:30 report.
Only that's not what you'll get a report on if you listen to the link. What you get is six minutes sixteen seconds of loaded presentation and selective reporting. For a start, the Today programme presenter introducing the report summarised the problems hindering any potential solution as depending solely on whether Israel would agree to cede the Palestinians enough land for their state and whether any Israeli government "would have the strength to defy the settler movement".
No mention in that introduction of any little matters like the Palestinian elected Hamas government which continues to state that it will never recognise the state of Israel. No mention of the whole history of continuing terrorism sponsored by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, including rocket attacks indiscriminately aimed at the civilian population of Sderot. No mention of Iranian political, financial and logistic backing for Hamas and Islamic Jihad's terrorism against Israelis.
Via Roger Simon, an update report for Pajamas Media by Allison Kaplan Sommer which seems to blow a... non-nuclear...missile through the credibility of today's Sunday Times story that Israeli is actively planning a tactical nuclear strike on Iran's nuclear enrichment development facilities:
Anyone reading the Sunday Times story and is waiting for the nukes to start dropping any moment can take a deep breath and relax. There are several reasons to doubt that such an attack is truly imminent or even imaginable.
First and foremost - one must consider the source of this story. The Sunday Times journalist in question Uzi Mahnaimi, is a controversial figure, who co-authored a book with Bassam Abu Sharif, former senior adviser to Yasser Arafat and PLO press officer.
While some may believe he has actual military sources in Israel who use him to leak stories that won’t make it past censors, others think he is used by foreign agents to push stories that embarrass Israel. Still others go farther, calling him unprintable names and charging that that despite the fact he works for a mainstream British newspaper, his sources makes Jamil Hussein look like the White House press secretary.
One thing is clear: Mahnaimi makes a regular habit of reporting that Israel is about to attack Iran. If his reporting was accurate, Iranian nuclear facilities would already be a smoking ruin – not once, but multiple times.
Sounds convincing to me.
Problem is, a much longer story along the same lines, also claiming to be based on Israeli military sources, by Douglas Davis, former London correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, appeared in this week's Spectator.
Sabre rattling? Maybe? Deterrence? Possibly.
The most curious thing for me is both these stories appearing in British media outlets.
