Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 11

No laughing matter: Europe’s appeasement of Iran

Remarks this week about Iran by US National Security Adviser John Bolton contained some of the most ferocious language ever used by an American administration about a foreign state.

Bolton told the Iranian regime: “If you cross us, our allies or our partners; if you harm our citizens; if you continue to lie, cheat and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay. Let my message today be clear: ‘We are watching, and we will come after you.’”

Earlier this year, the US pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran, re-instituting potentially crippling sanctions against the regime. At the UN, President Trump delivered a similar message. America, he said, would not allow “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” to possess “the means to deliver a nuclear warhead to any city on Earth.”

Bolton went further and threatened “terrible consequences” for those doing business with Iran. But Britain and Europe are intending to do exactly that.

Earlier in the week, the EU and the three European co-signers of the Iran deal – Britain, France and Germany – said they would set up a new payment system to allow oil companies and businesses to continue trading without relying on the US-led global market. Commentators agree this sanctions-busting ruse is unlikely to work.

Big companies are already pulling out of Iran because the US says they can trade with Iran or America but they can’t do both. The European maneuver is likely merely to antagonize the US. As its Secretary of State Mike Pompeo angrily said, the Europeans were now “solidifying Iran’s ranking as number-one state sponsor of terror” with “one of the most counterproductive measures imaginable for regional peace and security”.

So why are the Europeans hell-bent on propping up Iran and the wretched nuclear deal? Economic self-interest is an important factor, but it’s not the only one.

The Obama administration and the deal’s other sponsors convinced themselves that the agreement would tame the Iranian regime, strengthen Iran’s supposedly “moderate” President Rouhani against hard-liners, and somehow defuse Iran’s nuclear weapons threat.

This last assumption – repeated this week by Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May – was the most baffling, since the deal’s “sunset clause” would enable Iran to break out into nuclear weaponry after some 15 years or so. The deal’s backers also ignored key facts, such as that the only person who matters in Iran isn’t Rouhani but the supreme leader, and that lifting sanctions would enable the world’s most lethal terrorist state to ratchet up its murderous assaults and regional power.

In other words, to avoid taking a decision with difficult consequences the deal’s backers convinced themselves that black was white. Such mental contortionism is typical of the mentality of appeasement. And that happens to be producing a particular echo right now. For this Sunday sees the 80th anniversary of the infamous Munich agreement, the deal signed by Britain, France, Italy and Germany that permitted Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Western Czechoslovakia.

When the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned from Munich and waved this agreement in front of wildly cheering crowds, the received wisdom was that this had averted war. One year later, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.

There were two main reasons for Britain’s appeasement mental- ity in the thirties. The first was the profound national trauma inflicted on the country by the First World War.

The terrible carnage in the trenches wiped out virtually an entire generation of the brightest and best. It changed Britain forever; it damaged its religious faith and its confidence in the future; it destroyed its belief in Western civilization and in itself.

The war was viewed as senseless slaughter. This post-traumatic war phobia was amplified by a chronic pessimism about Britain itself. In the late twenties and early thirties, Britain was struggling with economic depression. The Empire was beginning to fall apart with uprisings in India and Palestine, while Britain was losing out to the expansion of Italy, Germany and Japan.

So, most of the support for appeasement came from a perception (however misguided) of the national interest.

Starting from the premise that simply anything was better than war, the appeasers proceeded to construct arguments to justify it. They told themselves that once Hitler’s territorial designs over Czechoslovakia were met, his aggression would diminish. Several even convinced themselves that Germany was entitled to rule the Sudetenland.

But their premise was wrong. Appeasement didn’t prevent war; it merely made an always inevitable war even more terrible.

This is why the appeasement of Iran is so terribly wrong. The regime should be fought and defeated by any means possible.

A recent seminar on the Munich agreement at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs heard from National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Minister Yuval Steinitz, who was Israel’s chief negotiator during the Iran deal negotiations.

He observed that even if the US is forced to operate Iranian sanctions alone, it can exert greater economic pressure than can the rest of the world. That’s not just because of the sanctions themselves but also, crucially, because of the secondary sanctions the US will impose against those who try to evade them.

The Iranian rial is already in free-fall. One year from now, predict- ed Steinitz, Iran’s economic situation will be dire. Maybe the regime will be forced back to the negotiating table; or maybe it will go for broke and accelerate its nuclear weapons program.

If it were thus to step-up uranium enrichment or restart its mothballed centrifuges, he said, the US would unleash military strikes against it. Even if Iran has buried its nuclear infrastructure underground, he said, no such facility in the world is immune to air attacks.

And the regime knows it – which is why it is so desperate to keep the nuclear deal in existence. Without it the regime’s options are extremely limited; which is why the European attempt to keep rewarding Iran as if the deal still existed is such a blow against world peace.

At the UN, Trump was laughed at mockingly when said he had already been an effective president. Yet he has weakened the world’s principal genocidal terrorist state – while Britain and Europe, having empowered it, are now trying to strengthen it still further.

Trump may make some people laugh at him; but the appeasement of evil by Britain and Europe should make us cry.

Jerusalem Post

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Two state solution? Actually, no: the true signature cause Labour cannot admit

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has told his party’s annual conference that if he becomes Prime Minister he will immediately recognise a Palestinian state. Immediately. Why? What kind of priority is this for a British Prime Minister?

Labour delegates also voted to condemn Israel’s use of force against violent riots on the Gaza border, urge more UK funding for UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinians, and back a freeze on British arms sales to Israel. And in a veritable sea of hatred of the Jewish state, they waved Palestinian flags provided for them by the conference organisers as they debated “Palestine”, which delegates had voted was a priority issue ahead of the NHS, Brexit, social care and welfare.

How come that’s such a priority?

At a fringe meeting Len McCluskey, the Unite trade union leader who previously dismissed the party’s antisemitism scandal as “mood music”, spat his venom against Israel.

Unite represents mainly low-paid British workers in the service sector. Unite is obsessed by hatred of Israel. Why? What possible reason can there be for this? What impact does Israel have on the lives of such workers? None.

All this has made one thing crystal clear. Palestinianism is now the signature cause of the Labour party. Members don’t wave the flag of the potential state of Kurdistan, or Tibet, or identify any other foreign cause to be more important than British domestic issues.

So why has Palestinianism become the cause of causes? The answer is that the obsession is not with the fate of the “Palestinians”, whose lives in fact have been made wretched by their own leaders and the Arab world in general. The obsession is with the Jews.

The foundational aim of Palestinianism is to destroy the state of Israel and deny the historic right of the Jewish people to their homeland. That is what the “Palestinians” constantly proclaim in their speeches, maps and insignia, educational materials and media, and in their rejection of every single attempt to provide them with a “two-state solution” and their resort instead to terrorism and war.

In Judaism the people, the religion and the land are inextricably fused. The signature cause of the Labour party is therefore, in effect and despite the pious espousal of a “two-state solution”, the destruction of Israel and the denial of Judaism itself. This is the core reason why the party is unable to purge itself of the poison of antisemitism.

In a disgusting conference speech, Corbyn further protested “the ongoing denial of justice and rights to the Palestinian people”, declared Labour was “united in condemning the shooting of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza by Israeli forces and the passing of Israel’s discriminatory nation-state law” and that “the continuing occupation, the expansion of illegal settlements and the imprisonment of Palestinian children are an outrage”.

No. The true outrage is the distortion, twisted thinking, selective reporting, blood libels and malevolence in those statements, and their consequent incitement to hatred not just of Israel but of its supporters too. The obsession, the falsehoods, the double standards, the singling out of Israel alone for this kind of malice, the denial to the Jewish people alone the right of national self-self-determination in their own historic national homeland (for that is the import of the attack on the “nation-state law”) – this is the “new” antisemitism, the application to Israel of the same techniques of vilification that have been applied to the Jewish people without remission down through the centuries.

In the light of all this, Corbyn’s professed hatred of antisemitism and his acknowledgement of the Jewish people’s “long and terrible history of persecution and genocide” culminating in the Nazi Holocaust was sickening.

This was waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise his onslaught on Israel and Judaism. He ramps up his solidarity with dead Jews in order to mask the agenda of disempowerment, death and destruction embodied in the agenda of Palestinianism that he supports for the living Jews in Israel.

So when he said, “I say this to all in the Jewish community: this party, this movement, will always be implacable campaigners against antisemitism and racism in all its forms. We are your ally”, this seemed like just another obscene Labour hypocrisy.

In pre-Israel Palestine under the British Mandate, the Arabs became Hitler’s legion in the Middle East. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who intended to exterminate the Jews not just in Palestine but thought the Middle East if Hitler won the war, incited hatred and pogroms against the Jews through fabrications, blood libels and genocidal demonisation – in exactly the same way as does his latter-day cheerleader, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, the liberation poster-boy of the British Labour movement.

Despite the 1917 Balfour Declaration committing Britain to re-establish the Jewish national home in Palestine, a pledge enshrined in international law though the 1922 Mandate, the British military administration backed by elements in the Colonial Office set out to frustrate this binding obligation.

Officials and officers consciously fomented hostility between Arabs and Jews to make it impossible to recreate the Jewish national home. Deciding that the Arabs were more malleable than the “upstart” Jews, they also set about talking up a mythical pan-Arab claim to Palestine which they knew did not exist. In subsequent Arab pogroms against the returning Jews, British officials provoked and even armed the Arabs and then stood aside as the slaughter took place.

Not surprisingly, the Arabs took this as their cue for yet more violence. “The government is with us” they cried as they carried out their attacks. As anti-Jewish riots continued, the British authorities did nothing to stop the incitement to violence being promulgated month after month, with the Arab press branding the Jews “the human sexual disease” and “a menace to all mankind”.

As the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jews in Europe, Arab storm-troopers marched in Palestine openly shouting “Heil Hitler”. Most of the ring-leaders of these riots were on the British government payroll. In 1936, after the British had again ignored Jewish pleas to prevent what was coming, more than 1,990 attacks took place in which some 700 Jews up and down the country were mutilated and slaughtered under the noses of the British Palestine police – whose activities were confined as usual to forcibly disarming the Jews.

In 1947, hours after the UN voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state (with Britain abstaining), the Arabs launched their war to exterminate the Jewish state at birth. Still the British stood by, refusing to allow the Jews to arm themselves while the Arabs attacked them.

Repugnant as this British behaviour was at the time, what is less understood is that it also sent a lasting message to the Arabs – that violence pays, and that in their genocidal war against the Jews of Palestine they were pushing at an open door.

When you look at those Palestinian flags being waved at the Labour party conference, the echoes are unmistakeable.

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The blood of slain Israelis stains many hands

It’s often claimed by Western enemies of Israel that the military actions of the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas in Gaza are disproportionate because such actions kill Arabs while Hamas attacks don’t kill Israelis.

That’s apparently why the Western media ignore the thousands of rockets and aerial firebombs launched from Gaza to kill the residents of southern Israel, reporting instead IDF military action to stop such attacks as the wanton killing of civilians.

When an Israeli actually is murdered by an Arab in cold blood, however, this isn’t reported as wanton killing of the innocent, if he happens to be the wrong sort of Israeli. Then it’s suggested his murder is his own fault.

The killing of American-born Israeli Ari Fuld on Sept. 16 has caused an outpouring of grief in Israel. The impassioned eulogies to him poured out not just because his wife, four children, parents and the rest of his family have been so cruelly bereaved.

It’s because he was a brave and outstanding fighter for Israel and the Jewish people, and admired even by his political opponents on account of his warm nature. He devoted his existence to fighting a great evil to which he has now lost his own life.

The Western media, however, don’t count Ari Fuld as a victim at all because, as a resident of the Judean town of Efrat, he was a “settler.”

The murder of other Israeli residents of the disputed territories is similarly shrugged off or unreported by the Western media. For them, “settlers” are dehumanized and their lives reckoned as of no account. Thus their murder is, in effect, justified and condoned.

This revolting attitude is all of a piece with the moral depravity of much of the West over the Arab war against Israel. Parroting the misleading mantra of a “two-state solution,” they deny the truths of history and law and ignore the real Arab agenda of colonial conquest and the extermination of Jewish nationhood.

For the supposed “settlers” are not in these lands illegally. They are entitled to be there. In the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922, the international community gave the Jews alone the right to settle what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza in recognition of the unique right of the Jews to recreate their ancient national homeland.

The real occupiers are the Arabs. Over the centuries, they were among the waves of conquerors of the land of Israel, including Romans, Greeks, Selucids, Fatimids, Crusaders, Mongol tribes, Tartars, Mamelukes and the Ottoman Turks.

Those who today have invented for themselves a fictional “Palestinian” identity may not even have descended from the original Arab imperialists. Some may be the heirs of those who flooded into Palestine, many illegally, from neighboring Arab states on the back of the returning Jews in the early years of the last century.

The historian William Ziff noted that the serial occupiers of Israel themselves brought in many other cultures. Ziff described the people of the land as a “human patch-work of Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Kalmucks, Persians, Crusaders, Tartars, Indians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Turks, Mongols, Romans, Kharmazians, Greeks, pilgrims, wanderers, ne’er-do-wells and adventurers, invaders, slaves.”

To add to their historical and legal illiteracy, those shrugging aside the murder of Israeli “settlers” also turn a blind eye to the complicity in these crimes by the people they champion: the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Through its educational materials and other media, the P.A. routinely incites hatred of Jews and the murder of Israelis, teaching its children that “all Israelis deserve to be killed and that dying while committing a terror attack is ‘the path to excellence and greatness … the great victory.’ ”

The Arab writer Bassam Tawil has specifically blamed the murder of Ari Fuld by 17-year-old Khalil Jabarin on incitement by Abbas. According to Palestinian terrorist groups, Jabarin decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli “crimes” against the Al-Aqsa mosque and other Islamic holy sites.

Two days earlier, in a speech to the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah widely reported in Arab media, Abbas had repeated the lie that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.

No mention of any of this in Western media. Nor the fact that the P.A. immediately said it would pay the Jabarin family 1,400 shekels per month (nearly $400) for the next three years as a reward for Ari Fuld’s murder. According to the P.A.’s finance ministry, its total “pay-for-slay” budget amounts to 1.2 billion shekels ($335 million) this year and last.

Until now, the West as a bloc has been complicit in Arab violence against Israelis. Over the years, it has thrown money at the “Palestinians” in the pious hope that it would help build their society and thus promote peace. In fact, it has been used to help promulgate hatred and incite mass murder.

Now, U.S. President Donald Trump has called time on this appalling charade. The United States has cut its funding to the “West Bank” and Gaza, closed the PLO office in Washington, and set in train moves to abolish the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s definition of Palestinian refugees.

By defining that status as uniquely inheritable, UNRWA has ludicrously multiplied the number of “Palestinian refugees” down through the decades.

The definition turned these “refugees” into a weapon of war deployed against Israel by the Arab world, which has used them as pawns to incite hatred and violence, and gain the backing of the credulous and Jew-hating West.

Responsibility for them rests therefore not with Israel but with the Arab world itself, which must now be forced to deal with them.

Britain and Europe, however, remain complicit in the murderous attacks on Israelis because they continue to fund UNRWA and the P.A. rather than holding them to account for their behavior.

Now Abbas is to visit Ireland, which is virulently hostile to Israel. The Irish leader, Leon Varadkar, has promised to raise with Abbas the violation of human rights by the P.A. and Hamas. His priority is “the fact that homosexuality has yet to be decriminalized in Gaza.”

Varadkar doesn’t even seem to know that Abbas has nothing to do with Gaza, which is ruled instead by Hamas. And while gays are certainly persecuted throughout “Palestinian” society, Varadkar seems not to grasp there are no human rights there for anyone, and the Palestine he is so keen to establish would be a police state.

Such Israel-bashers don’t care about the welfare of the “Palestinians.” They don’t care about truth. They most certainly don’t care about the Jewish people. They are driven by, at best, indifference to the Jews and, at worst, something much darker.

Ari Fuld and the thousands of other Israeli victims of Arab attacks (including those who weren’t even Jewish) were murdered out of a fathomless hatred of Jews and Jewish nationhood, aided and abetted in the West by the ignorant, the ideological and the bigoted.

Abbas has Israeli blood on his hands—but Britain, Ireland and Europe are continuing to help plunge them in it.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Hoorah for brave Belgian who dares cry Leave

Hoorah for brave Belgian who dares cry Leave

Mon dieu! It is being hailed as possibly the most sensational conversion since Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity.

Marc Roche, the Belgian-born former City of London correspondent for the arch Euro-federalist French daily Le Monde, and an eminent standard-bearer of the Europhile cultural establishment, has just published a book entitled Le Brexit va Réussir (Brexit will Succeed).

He says that once Britain leaves the EU, it has the wherewithal not just to survive but to prosper. Cue utter stupefaction in France where it is an article of faith that there can be no life outside the EU, and where wanting to leave it is viewed as proof of mental derangement (no similarity with Britain’s Remainers, obviously).

Roche himself used to share that general view. So what made him change his mind? He did something considered unthinkable in such refined circles. He went and spoke to people outside the metropolitan London bubble.

To read my whole Times column (£) please click here.

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Our crazy world: hate-ed at Tufts U, Trump and UNRWA

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the new Israel-bashing course that has been introduced at Tufts university in the US, and the implications of President Trump’s latest moves towards UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority.

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A great and unspeakable evil

On Sunday, a man who devoted his existence to fighting hatred and genocidal mass murder lost his life to the very evil that he fought.

Ari Fuld, a 45 year old father of four from the Israeli town of Efrat, was stabbed in the back outside a supermarket by an Arab teenager. Despite his wounds, Fuld chased and shot his attacker, thus preventing any more casualties. He was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

This murder has hit Israelis hard. Ari Fuld was but the latest in the unending procession of Jews who have been murdered in the Arab war of extermination against Israel. Each of these murders is an unspeakable tragedy.

But the murder of Ari Fuld has caused particular grief because he was a fighter for his people – a selfless, tenacious Israel patriot who worked tirelessly and put his life on the line to stand up for the rights of the Jews in their historic land and to protect them from harm. And now he is fallen, a victim himself of that very harm.

Fuld worked at Standing Together, an NGO that supports Israeli soldiers. He was committed to fighting the lies and demonisation about Israel that pour daily out of the western media.

The Times of Israel reports: “He was mourned in an outpouring of social media tributes throughout the day, with friends and ideological opponents alike eulogizing the Israel advocate and former karate instructor as an unflinching champion of the Jewish state and fearless fighter to the end”.

Ari Fuld’s work, in common with that of many other activists, was necessitated by the baseless hatred and ceaseless attacks directed against Israel and the Jewish people from the Arab world – sanitised, supported and incentivised by the indifference or active incitement by those in the west who hate Israel and want it gone.

The kind of people who claim that Israelis living in the disputed territories, such as in the town of Efrat, are “illegal settlers” who have colonised Palestinian land – a lie, since there never was any “Palestinian” land, while law, truth and history entitle the Jews alone to live there. The kind of people who, shamefully and disgustingly, shrug aside the murder of Ari Fuld simply because he lived in Efrat.

His murderer was Khalil Jabarin, a 17 year-old Arab boy. He was but the latest in a string of teenage Arab terrorists who are attacking Israeli Jews. The reason isn’t hard to find: as Palestinian Media Watch observes, they are being incited to hatred and murder of Jews by the Palestinian Authority education system and mass media which tell them that “all Israelis deserve to be killed and that dying while committing a terror attack is ‘the path to excellence and greatness… the great victory’.”

The Arab writer Bassam Tawil links Jabarin’s attack directly to incitement by PA president Mahmoud Abbas who he says has Ari Fuld’s blood on his hands.

“In a speech before the PLO Executive Committee in Ramallah on September 15, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the old libel that Israel was planning to establish special Jewish prayer zones inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque. 

“…Abbas’s allegation was quickly picked up by several media outlets in the Arab world, the West Bank and Gaza Strip…According to Palestinian terrorist groups, Jabarin decided to murder a Jew in response to Israeli “crimes” against the al Aqsa Mosque in particular and other Islamic holy sites. In other words, the terrorist was influenced by Abbas’s incitement, and this is why he decided to set out on his deadly mission.” 

The Palestinian Authority is funded by Britain and other western governments. These governments are therefore indirectly responsible for the incitement to hatred and murder of Jews which is poisoning Arab children’s minds. If Abbas has the blood of murdered Israelis on his hands, Britain and the west have helped dip them in it.

This evening sees the beginning of Yom Kippur when Jews fast to repent and seek forgiveness for their sins. It is a day when, as we pray to be sealed in the book of life, we recall those who were martyred on account of their defence of Judaism. We do so in order to reaffirm, in the face of those who rise in every generation against the Jewish people, the faith that has never wavered despite the savage attempts to destroy us.

To this list of those who were brutally murdered for no other reason than the hatred of Jews by a barbaric world, we will add the name of Ari Fuld. May his memory be for a blessing.

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The leverage for Britain in the art of the No Deal

According to a report in the Mail on Sunday, a “gang of four” has emerged inside the British Cabinet to get Brexit through without breaking the government and Conservative party apart.

The quartet, said to comprise two Brexiteers, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab, and two Remainers, Sajid Javid and Matt Hancock, have reportedly formed a “pragmatic” alliance to “get Brexit over the line”.

Apparently, these four ministers will seek to hose down both ultra-Remainers and ultra-Brexiteers who are all likely to object to the final terms of the deal.

What does that tell us? That neither side will get all they want but will have to compromise. And what does that tell us? That Brexit will be betrayed.

Why? Because any “compromise” with the EU means being partly or substantially out or remaining partly or substantially in. But if Brexit is to be honoured, no compromise is possible between being in and out.

Remainers would have little difficulty if the UK were to loosen certain bonds with the EU (if such were ever possible). The converse, however, doesn’t work for Brexiteers. If the UK remains even partly in it will still find itself, at least to some extent, subject to EU laws or regulations. It will still not be in control of its own political, legal and economic destiny.

That’s why the very notion of “soft” Brexit is a sham. So-called “hard” Brexit is not, as routinely presented, a swivel-eyed extremist position. It’s simply what Brexit ineluctably is. It is what the British people actually voted for in the referendum: to leave the European Union. They did not vote to be half-in, half-out.

That’s why the UK negotiating position which Theresa May rammed through the Cabinet at Chequers in July has caused such uproar. As Martin Howe QC wrote in his devastating memorandum, the Chequers proposals would prevent Britain from doing trade deals in its own interests; European Court of Justice rulings would still have supremacy over British domestic courts; and it would lead to a “worst-of-all-worlds ‘black hole’ Brexit” which would leave the UK a “vassal state in the EU’s legal and regulatory tar-pit”.

According to the MoS story, the lynchpin of the Cabinet “pragmatic” quartet is the erstwhile lynchpin of Vote Leave, Michael Gove. It was he who reportedly played a key role in getting his Cabinet colleagues to agree to the Chequers proposals at that fraught and epic meeting.

And that’s because, as he says, he has qualified some of his previous positions as a result of the “parliamentary arithmetic”. “The critical thing”, he says, “is making sure we leave in good order with a deal which safeguards the referendum mandate.”

But the point about Chequers is that it does not safeguard that mandate; it betrays it. It would keep Britain tied to the EU.

Boris Johnson’s claim to reliability is… well, you know; but his argument on this is correct. By tying the UK to the EU and restricting its ability to trade to its advantage but without a seat at the Brussels table even to make its voice heard, Chequers would leave the UK worse off out of the EU than in.

Now Gove is claiming that the UK can always renegotiate Brexit at a later date. Well, in theory, maybe. But anyone like to bet the ranch on a future government EVER being prepared to open up this wound yet again? Or the EU somehow becoming more emollient after the UK has departed and will be posing such a potential threat to the EU’s own economic protection racket?

Quite.

Gove’s claims would seem to be merely a none-too subtle attempt to soften up the British public for a sell-out pragmatic compromise on the basis that this is the best the UK can achieve in current circumstances.

But is that right?

This fight was always going to go to the wire. It was always going to require Britain to hold its nerve right to the bitter end – and then some.

The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, who until now has been exhibiting those higher diplomatic arts known as bullying, threats and humiliation, has been making optimistic noises about a deal being eminently possible. That’s a signal for the British to start counting their spoons.

Barnier is doubtless calculating that the UK’s terror of ending up with “no deal” means he will finally be able to reel in the May government like a salmon exhausted from swimming upstream. All he has to do at present is make encouraging noises and then, at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, issue the UK with an ultimatum such as: join the EU customs union or no deal.

Indeed, as I can update this morning (Monday) The Times reports that EU negotiators are now accepting the idea of a “frictionless” border between the UK and the Irish Republic based on “technological solutions to minimise customs checks” on the border.

Rub your eyes, eh. For this is precisely what the Brexiteers have been arguing for months as a solution to the “intractable” and “deal-breaking” Irish border problem, only to be told this was yet another example of swivel-eyed Brexiteer lunacy. Yet suddenly we are being told this solution is being “secretly” drawn up by Barnier’s team. It’s all too likely that, at the last minute, he’ll tell May that because he has leant over backwards to remove this apparently immoveable obstacle of the Irish border, she must swallow a customs union as a return gesture.

What these moves show, however, is the desperation on the EU side. We have already seen car manufacturers and others in various EU member states fretting about the devastating impact on them if no deal with Britain is reached. The point is that, whatever the downside of “no deal” for Britain, it would be worse for the EU because they depend on trade with the UK more than the UK depends on trade with them.

So all May has to do is to say she’s more than prepared to walk away with no deal – and mean it.

Anyone see Theresa May doing that?

Quite.

So as a negotiator at this critical juncture, she is worse than useless and should be sacked. Her replacement by a true Brexiteer is probably the only way to get Barnier to believe that the UK really does mean “no deal” is better than a rotten deal such as Chequers or anything else he might dream up.

And for the EU, by contrast, “no deal” is very much worse than a rotten deal. Which is why the ultimate leverage is in May’s hands, if only she would realise it.

So who might that true Brexiteer be? Well there, of course, lies the rub. There is no ideal candidate. Every one of them has some perceived deficit in either character or experience which is said to rule them out as a prime minister.

But here’s the thing. At this most crucial moment – an opportunity for Britain to regain its independence, national identity and self-belief which may never occur again – there’s only one consideration that matters. The issue is not whether the Conservative party leader would make a good prime minister. The only issue is whether that person will resolutely take Britain out of the EU to become again a self-governing nation.

Because if that doesn’t happen, whoever becomes prime minister will no longer matter. Because the United Kingdom itself will no longer matter. And who cares who leads a vassal state?

The Conservatives are not known ever to put the national interest above their personal greed for power. But unless they ensure that Brexit takes place properly and cleanly, it won’t just be the fury of the public they will be facing but their own political irrelevance, brought about by their own craven ineptitude.

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Dual loyalty taunt? Israel slandered? So what’s new?

Within hours of the Labour party giving its members wriggle room to defame Israel without any pushback, posters appeared on central London bus-shelters slandering Israel as a “a racist endeavour”.

The virus of left-wing antisemitism is out of control. Why is anyone surprised? None of this is new. Jeremy Corbyn may have made the poison more toxic but he didn’t release it. He is rather its most malevolent symptom.

I first experienced this in 1982. Colleagues implied that my real country wasn’t Britain but Israel. At the time, I’d never even been there and never wanted to go. All I’d done was stick up for it against the lies and blood-libels.

For that, I was instantly pigeon-holed as not fully British. During the following years, Jewish defenders of Israel like me were accused of dual loyalty.

So why was anyone surprised when Corbyn suggested that British Jews who supported Israel were a breed apart who couldn’t understand English irony?

Over the past few decades, Israel has been the victim of a campaign of demonisation and delegitimisation of a kind directed at no other country, people or cause.

Every accusation hurled at it is untrue. Displaced the indigenous people of the land: untrue. Acts illegally: untrue. Racist, apartheid, colonialist state: untrue. Disproportionately aggressive: untrue. Contemptuous of the lives of innocent Palestinians: untrue.

To these obscene falsehoods and more from the left, others have shrugged or, worse, nodded along. Even now, it’s not the lies about Israel that are provoking such horror. It’s the stuff about hook-nosed bankers or Jewish conspiracy theories or Jewish fascists.

Shocking and vile indeed. But this loathing of Jews is umbilically connected to loathing of Israel.

One of the most sly claims is that those protesting about antisemitism want to silence criticism of Israel. That is itself bigoted nonsense. Criticism is rational and legitimate. Pathological lying about Israel is not.

Israel is presented as a demonic conspiracy to manipulate the world. It is dwelt upon obsessively as a global menace. It is singled out for impossible double standards. It is accused of crimes of which it is not only innocent but the victim such as genocidal aggression, illegality, colonialism, racism, ethnic cleansing and the wilful slaughter of civilians.

Precisely the same derangement of reason characterises classic antisemitism. This is not a coincidence.

There is a yet deeper link. Judaism comprises an unbreakable and unique connection between the religion, the people and the land. Denying any one of these three elements is to deny Judaism itself.

This doesn’t mean every Jew must be a Zionist, any more than the fact that many Jews don’t observe Shabbat, for example, means Shabbat is not an essential part of the religion.

What it does mean is that those who vilify Jewish nationhood in the Jews’ historic homeland as innately racist, or who endorse Palestinian fabrications writing the Jews out of their own national story, are not “criticising” Israel. They are attacking Judaism itself.

Britain’s Jewish leadership generally tries to avoid linking antisemitism to the subject of Israel. It says Israel “complicates the issue”. But it is the issue.

One reason why Jewish leaders are reluctant to make this link is that many themselves believe some of the lies about Israel: that the settlements are illegal, for example, or that the Israeli government is the obstacle to peace.

Remarkably, some of the victims of Labour’s antisemitic onslaught themselves parrot wicked falsehoods about Israel — that the IDF deliberately killed peaceful demonstrators at the Gaza border, for example, or that the nation-state law turns Israeli Arabs into second-class citizens. Even while denouncing Labour’s antisemitism, they are currently falling over themselves to repeat such claims.

But accusing the IDF of killing innocent demonstrators is tantamount to slandering them as psychopathic child-killers. Claiming the nation-state law discriminates against Israeli Arabs is tantamount to calling Israel racist — merely because it’s a Jewish nation-state.

It’s almost as if these Jews are saying it’s fine to call Netanyahu a racist or accuse the IDF of being wanton child-killers — but to call Netanyahu a racist “puppet-master” or the IDF “Nazi” child-killers would be antisemitism. The distinction is weaselly and spurious.

Until British Jews themselves distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from the malicious slanders which constitute the new antisemitism, they will continue to contribute inadvertently to the appalling climate of hate which now threatens to engulf them.

Jewish Chronicle

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Demonising Israel and the hijack of language

If there’s one refrain which gets me chewing the carpet, it’s the plaintive question, “Why is Israel unable to get its message across?”

The naivety behind this question is itself a large part of the answer. It’s not just the fact that – as has now become all too obvious – the demonization and delegitimization of Israel is inextricably linked to the ineradicable poison of antisemitism.

More pertinently, Israel has been up against a black propaganda exercise which has inverted truth and lies with devastating effect. Its only equivalent in scale, skill and evil intent is the manipulative mind control practiced by totalitarian regimes.

No coincidence: This strategy of psychological warfare deployed by the Palestinians was devised by Yasser Arafat in cahoots with the Soviets, who knew a thing or two about subverting the values of an entire culture. And the war against the Jews is part of the broader war against the free world and the core tenets of Western civilization.

The attempt to counter this by Israel’s defenders has been woefully misjudged. There’s the defensive-crouch response (“Hey guys, why are you dumping on us – can’t you see we’re the victims here?”) which, by responding on the enemy’s own distorted grounds of purported Israeli aggression, is itself halfway to conceding defeat.

Or there’s the attempt to persuade the world of Israel’s elevated standards of ethical behavior (“Hey guys, look at all the Palestinians we’re treating in our hospitals, even including the ones who’ve just tried to murder us!”)

Since the one thing the Western world does not want to hear is the perceived moral superiority of the Jews – of which it is pathologically, irredeemably and sometimes murderously jealous – this particular approach turns abject stupidity into an art form.

Given that the demonization of Israel is the key strategy in the war of extermination being waged against it, “getting Israel’s message across” is the equivalent to using a leaky bucket to ward off a tsunami.

The essence of such psychological warfare is as simple as it is seismic. It is the manipulation of language.

Words have been hijacked so that they come to be understood as the opposite of what they really signify. The importance of this tactic can hardly be overstated.

Many people know little or nothing about the Middle East and have even less interest in finding out. For them, it’s just background noise. But if the language which forms that background noise is hijacked, then the story of the Middle East is hijacked too.

Key concepts have been presented as if in mirror writing so that Israel, the victim of aggression, has been turned falsely into the aggressor while its would-be exterminators are transformed into its victims.

And that’s been achieved not just by telling lies about what’s going on today or happened in the past. Crucially, those falsehoods have been framed by language which conditions the listener to accept them because the language itself has been turned into a lie.

Consider, for example, the word “colonialism.” In left-wing ideology, colonialism is the crime of crimes that defines Western iniquity: the subjection of indigenous peoples in the developing world by white-skinned westerners who occupied their lands and ruled, enslaved and oppressed them.

Left-wingers believe that white, Western Israel has occupied the lands of the indigenous Palestinians whom it is proceeding to rule, enslave and oppress.

Every element of this is demonstrably false. Israel is neither predominantly white nor Western. More than three quarters of its population, Jews as well as Arabs, are brown-skinned and originally hailed from the Middle East.

Crucially, the Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land which today comprises Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza. The Arabs merely formed one of the many waves of conquerors, including Romans, Persians, Greeks, Christians and Turks, who first drove out the Jews and then colonized their rightful and historic home.

It is therefore not the Jews who are colonizing, and thus enslaving or oppressing, anyone at all. It is the “Palestinians” who are would-be colonizers threatening again to dispossess the indigenous Jewish people of the land.

So Israel and its defenders should talk routinely about “Palestinians” as colonialists.

Many other words which have been turned into weapons of war against Israel need similarly to be reclaimed from their hijackers and restored to their true meaning.

Israel and its defenders should replace the term “peace process” with “appeasement process.” The “occupation” of the disputed territories should be replaced with “liberation.”

Because of its lethal attacks against Israeli civilians, as well as the abuse of their own civilians as human shields, Hamas should routinely be termed “Palestinian war criminals.”

Similarly, Mahmoud Abbas should always be tagged not just as a “Holocaust denier” because of his infamous doctoral thesis. On account of his continued hero-worship of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who was Hitler’s chief ally in the Middle East and planned to exterminate the Jews of the entire region in Auschwitz-style crematoria, Abbas should be described as a “neo-Nazi sympathizer”.

Some may say this is merely to hijack the language in the opposite direction. Not so. This is using it to express truths backed by evidence rather than lies. To claim the Israelis are Nazis is an obscene lie; but Abbas really is a sympathizer with the would-be leader of the Nazi extermination program in the Middle East.

And truth and evidence cannot ever be said to be hijacking the language.

As a result, background verbal noise composed of truth would begin to permeate the collective Western brain in place of the current background verbal noise of lies.

The consequence would be that the verbal conditioning which is so essential to influencing the collective mind would produce a very different outcome. The falsehoods and distortions about Israel would begin to jar badly against the story implicitly understood by the term “Palestinian colonialists.”

Totalitarian regimes understand the connection between language and thinking. The Soviet communists repeated formulaic slogans over and over again.

In his book The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer wrote that the Nazis used language to indoctrinate virtually the entire population. Through their repeated use of particular words in propaganda, speeches and publications, they changed their meaning and context to serve their purposes.

Exactly the same tactics of language control and the hijacking of meaning are being used by today’s “progressive” cultural totalitarians against both Israel and the West – where words and phrases such as “liberal,” “social justice” or “equality” have been turned into their precise opposite.

Language and thinking are linked. The issue is whether that link is to be used to service truth or lies.

Words are being used to twist and enslave the Western mind and to empower the destroyers of the innocent. Language has to be reclaimed from its hijackers and restored to its real meaning if truth, justice and collective sanity are to be restored.

Jerusalem Post

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Conversation with John Anderson: freedom under threat

Australia’s former deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, recently interviewed me in London as part of series of conversations he has conducted for his website.

Anderson is himself deeply concerned about the increasing eclipse of freedom. The “Great Financial Crisis”, he has written, has exposed the economic and social vulnerability of many seemingly strong and prosperous nations. “Even Australia, free of commonwealth debt and enjoying the benefits of its trade with China, rapidly lost its way”.

So we talked about the sources of political and personal liberty in Britain and the west, the current threats to that liberty and what can be done to preserve it. You can watch the interview here.

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