Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 16

Our crazy world: Prince William’s ME trip, Trump/Kim meeting, UN

Our crazy world: Prince William’s ME trip, Trump/Kim meeting, UN

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the forthcoming visit of HRH Prince William to Israel, that most intriguing face-to-face meeting between US President Trump and North Korea Chairman Kim Jong-un, and the interesting developments at the UN over its attitude towards the Hamas onslaught against Israel at the Gaza border.

You can read more of my thoughts on Prince William’s imminent visit to the Middle East here.

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Prince William: an FCO hostage in a minefield

It was always a racing certainty that next week’s visit to the Middle East by Prince William, featuring the first official visit to Israel by a member of Britain’s Royal Family, would prove to be a diplomatic minefield.

It now turns out, however, that rather than playing the role of minesweeper-in-chief Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has left one of its own landmines defiantly in place – and is guiding Prince William straight for it.

Prince William is to visit Jordan, Israel and the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority. That much has been known for some time, as has the ostensible aim of this visit to be “apolitical” and not take sides between Israel and the Arabs. Really?

The official itinerary for the royal visitor, published a few days ago by his office at Kensington Palace (but using briefing notes that will have been provided by the FCO) says that the last leg of his visit will be to the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

This deeply tendentious phrase is standard fare at the FCO. But what’s raised eyebrows is that the itinerary goes on to say, after HRH meets Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and speaks at the UK consulate in east Jerusalem,

“The next day’s programme in the Occupied Palestinian Territories will begin with a short briefing on the history and geography of Jerusalem’s Old City from a viewing point at the Mount of Olives. From here His Royal Highness will travel a short distance to the Church of St Mary Magdalene where he will pay his respects at the tomb of his great-grandmother, Princess Alice.”

This wording places Jerusalem’s Old City and the Mount of Olives within the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”. This goes even further than Britain’s ludicrous but customary refusal to accept that any part of Jerusalem is within Israel. Absurdly, in British diplo-speak Jerusalem has thus resided in geopolitical limbo – a city apparently situated in the middle of nowhere.

That was bad enough. But through this wording of HRH’s itinerary, Britain is implying that the Old City of Jerusalem, which houses the holiest sites in Judaism and Christianity, belongs as of right to the “Palestinians” and is illegitimately “occupied” by Israel. (That may be the inescapable logic of Britain’s position, but it normally sidesteps this most sensitive of implications). Worse still, it appears that the UK government is also saying that the Western Wall – the retaining wall of the ancient Jewish Temple, one of the most sacred places in Judaism – also belongs as of right to the “Palestinians”.

The Israeli website Ynet reports that, in his proposed visit to the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, Prince William plans to visit the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of Saint John the Baptist and the Western Wall.

“According to sources in Jerusalem, the palace intentionally avoided mentioning these sites in a bid to prevent a politicization of the visit… While Israel accepts Britain and the European Union’s definition of east Jerusalem as ‘an occupied Palestinian territory’, the Old City is a completely different story and the Western Wall is considered a red line. Including the Western Wall in the PA leg of the visit is a serious move, which Israel doesn’t know how to respond to.”

If Israel really has accepted “Britain and the European Union’s definition of east Jerusalem as ‘an occupied Palestinian territory’”, it has made itself complicit in one of the Arab world’s Big Lies. For the issue here is not just about the territorial status of Jerusalem’s Old City and the Western Wall.

There are no “occupied Palestinian territories” because there never were any Palestinian territories at all. There never was a sovereign country called Palestine, and there never were Arabs called Palestinians – until they were invented solely to destroy the Jews’ historic entitlement to the land.

For around four centuries, the lands which now constitute Israel, the West Bank and Gaza were occupied by the Ottoman empire. After the First World War they were administered by Britain under the Palestine Mandate; after the 1948 Arab war of extermination against the new State of Israel the area beyond the ceasefire lines, including east Jerusalem, was illegally occupied by Jordan (which desecrated and ripped up synagogues and ancient Jewish gravestones).

“Occupied Palestinian territories” is quite simply a lie several times over. This is spelled out with crystal clarity in a new book, Israel on Trial: How International Law is being Misused to Delegitimise the State of Israel by two international lawyers, Matthijs de Blois and Andrew Tucker and published by the Hague Initiative for International Co-operation.

The authors write that the assumption that East Jerusalem and the West Bank “belonged” to the Palestinian Arabs before Israel conquered them in its (defensive) Six-Day War of 1967 is made with no legal or factual arguments to support this claim. On the contrary, the legal evidence runs comprehensively against it.

Their analysis needs to be read in total to understand the full extent of Israel’s rights to be in these territories and retain them. But on the question of whether or not the term “occupied Palestinian territories” has any meaning in law, the answer is conclusively no.

In 1920 at San Remo, the principal allied powers conferred upon Britain the Mandate to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When Israel was finally restored as a sovereign state in 1948 it inherited those rights to all the land under the Mandate (including Jerusalem and what is now called the West Bank). The belated proposal by the UN in 1947 to treat Jerusalem as a separate entity, a “corpus separatum” under international administration, was opposed by the Arabs who wanted to destroy Israel altogether; and so that proposal was rendered null and void.

Accordingly, the authors write, when Israel took possession of east Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 “it was taking physical possession of territory that – as a matter of law – already belonged to Israel”.

And as for the international law that defines an “occupation”, they write: “The law of occupation makes no sense, and has no application, in our submission, when there is no sovereign power that is ‘ousted’ from the territory.” There was no such sovereign power to which in 1967 the West Bank and east Jerusalem belonged. So under international law there is no occupation.

The correct term with which to describe the West Bank and east Jerusalem is the “disputed territories”. If Britain really did want to be apolitical, this is the wording it would use. It chooses not to do so. It uses instead an inflammatory term which propagates a Big Lie.

This tells you everything you need to know about Britain’s (continuing) attitude to the century-old attempt by the Arab world to destroy the Jewish homeland – to which, though law, history and justice, the Jews alone are entitled.

And this is the landmine to which Prince William – an ingenue abroad – is about to be directed by his mine-sweepers to lift up and throw in Israel’s face.

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Marching in lockstep: Islamization and antisemitism

Marching in lockstep: Islamization and antisemitism

Once again, Hezbollah flags flew in London last weekend at the Iran-supporting “Al Quds” march in Britain’s capital city.

Hezbollah, the proxy army of the Iranian regime, is responsible for numerous murderous attacks around the world against Jews, Americans and other Western interests.

No matter. The march—an annual London fixture, no less—featured calls for Israel to be wiped from the map, and was led by a man who previously made the deranged claim that “Zionists” were behind an appalling London apartment block fire last year in which more than 70 people died.

In Germany last week, a Jewish teenager, 14-year-old Susanna Maria Feldman, was raped and murdered. A failed Iraqi asylum-seeker with a long police record was subsequently arrested by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq at the request of the German police.

Mass Muslim immigration is taking a terrifying toll across swathes of Europe. A report published in April by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office revealed an increase of nearly 500 percent in migrant sex crimes during the past four years.

In Sweden, the number of gang-related shootings has surged by 43 percent in the last three years and reported rapes by 34 percent in the last 10 years. The police and others say this is due to hugely increased Muslim migration, and that the Swedish legal system is collapsing with Islamist extremists taking over whole areas.

Between 2012 and 2017, Muslim terrorists murdered 250 people in France. In March, four people were killed in the small town of Trèbes.

In the same month, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, who was murdered in her Paris apartment by a Muslim youth, became the 11th French Jew to have been murdered in an Islamist terror attack over the past 12 years. According to official figures, antisemitic violence in France increased last year by 26 percent.

Yet throughout Europe, there is a paralysis over attributing this cultural catastrophe to the Islamic world. Yes, it’s important to note that many Muslims refuse to subscribe to this, that millions lead unblemished lives in the West and that they are themselves targeted by Islamist extremists. But the silence over the specific religious roots of this widespread extremism is contributing to its acceleration.

In Britain, virtually no concern is expressed over the thousands of young white girls targeted by overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim-heritage rape and pimping gangs. Despite criminal trial after trial of such men, following years of total silence and cover-up, no one questions what this means for British society. A similar silence has descended over the national implications of proven attempts to infiltrate and Islamize some Birmingham schools.

The reason the British government allows the Hezbollah marches is that, farcically, it claims the marchers support its political wing, which it deems legitimate because Hezbollah is involved in the Lebanese government, rather than its terrorist wing which Britain proscribes.

The fact that Hezbollah has effectively taken Lebanon hostage is disregarded. The fact that it has embedded among southern Lebanon’s civilian population 130,000 missiles pointing at Israel is disregarded.

In lockstep with this refusal to acknowledge that Islamic religious fanaticism is Islamic, antisemitism is once more openly stalking Britain and Europe. Put to one side the antisemitism of the left that hides behind hatred of Israel. There is almost total silence over Muslim antisemitism and its symbiotic role in Islamist terrorism.

Hezbollah is riddled with Jew-hatred. “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion,” stated its secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, “we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”

Medieval and Nazi-style antisemitic texts and images pour out of the Muslim world. Many if not most Muslim migrants into Europe are bringing with them profound, paranoid and sometimes violent hatred of the Jews.

Yet Britain and Europe treat this as a marginal issue. They don’t get that Jew-hatred is a principal driver of the Islamists’ hatred of the West, which they believe is controlled by the Jews. They don’t get that the Muslim world doesn’t hate the Jews because it hates Israel; it hates Israel because it hates the Jews. And they don’t get that antisemitism is the signature motif of an eclipse of reason.

That should rule out treating any leader who subscribes to such lunacy as anything other than a pariah. Yet Britain and Europe continue to insist that the Iranian Supreme Leader, who is consumed by a genocidal obsession to wipe out the Jewish people, is someone they can do business with.

In France, the justice system persistently refused to regard as an antisemitic attack the murder last year of the elderly Jew Sarah Halimi, who was tortured and thrown from her Paris apartment window by a Muslim despite having vainly reported that she was the victim of his antisemitic threats.

In Britain, attacks on Jews by Muslims are disproportionate to their number in the population. The same is true of antisemitic comments by members of the Labour Party which, despite convulsing over the antisemitism in its ranks, never makes this point.

Indeed, anyone who brings up Muslim antisemitism is accused of Islamophobia. Worse still, this is equated with antisemitism —astonishingly, even by certain British Jewish leaders. Yet the comparison is odious.

Antisemitism is based entirely on lies and demonization. It is paranoid and unhinged. It ascribes to the Jews a demonic power to control the world. It treats the Jews in ways applied to no other people, nation or cause.

It therefore has nothing at all in common with Islamophobia, a term constructed by Islamists to silence legitimate criticism of Islam—and of Muslim antisemitism.

Yet for so many in the West, the only people whose views are beyond the pale are those classified as “right-wing,” “nativist” or “Islamophobic.” This includes those who legitimately and necessarily defend Western culture and oppose Islamization. People demonized by such labelling often defend Israel and the Jewish people far more robustly than so-called anti-fascists who, faced with Islamic cultural encroachment and Muslim antisemitism, look the other way.

This does not mean, though, that we should support all in this “populist” tide. Decent people should shun those who hate all Muslims, or really are neo-Nazis, or are thugs who may hide their contempt for the rule of law behind spurious claims of being martyred for the anti-Islamist cause.

But the threat from such unsavory types is minimal compared to the scale of the threat from Islamization and the desperate battle now underway to defend the West. And the only reason such types are gaining traction at all is that, when it comes to the defense of Western civilization, just about the entire political establishment has given up.

Jewish News Syndicate

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The Legacy: an interview about my novel

The New York Jewish event guide Blueprint has published an email interview with me about my novel, The Legacy. You can access it here or read the text of my Q&A with Blueprint editor Josh Weiss below.

New York Blueprint: Just to start off, can you talk a little bit about where the idea for “The Legacy” came from?

Melanie Phillips: A number of ideas gradually came together. I think a major prompt was my father’s death in 1998. That left me with a strong sense of “unfinished business”, not the least of which was that there were unexplained mysteries about my family background and early life. It’s often difficult to mourn and grieve properly in those circumstances, and so an important part of the novel was the exploration of that process and the attempt to bring about some kind of resolution.

Some years previously, I had come across someone who had stumbled upon a medieval manuscript and that experience had lodged in my mind. I also read a book which related a particularly shocking story about Holocaust Europe and which made an enormous impression on me. Once I had written my own “medieval manuscript” for the novel, the rest of the story, including the mystery that it represents and the attempt to unravel it, gradually fell into place. And it became obvious to me that the journey being traveled by my central character, Russell, would take him into the territory I know so well: the persistent antisemitism in Britain and the deep ambivalence and discomfort of British Jews with their identity.

NYB: You’ve written several other books. Is there a piece of writing advice you’ve learned over the years?

MP: I have written several other books, but this is my first work of fiction and I was daunted at the prospect; it seemed a very different and more exacting challenge. The best advice is to put all that out of your mind and just start writing. Don’t think about the Everest of words you have to scale. Don’t measure every paragraph by some unreachable standard of literary excellence. Just get the words down on the page – because you can always change them! – and keep going.

NYB: What, in your opinion, was the most difficult part about writing this particular story?

MP: I had set myself the difficult challenge of writing about different eras – medieval England, Holocaust Europe, contemporary Britain and Israel. I therefore, had to think myself into different voices and mindsets to bring all these characters equally to life.

NYB: I’m curious why you decided to make the character of Russell Woolfe a TV producer?

MP: Russell didn’t start out as a TV producer but as a university lecturer. However, as the story of the manuscript took off the plot started to go down a cul-de-sac. I realized that it would make more sense and the plot flow more naturally if Russell was a TV documentary-maker instead. Plus that’s a world I know rather well.

NYB: The book covers a lot of historical ground. What kind of research did you have to do before writing anything?

MP: I did a great deal of research for this novel. Although it is a work of fiction, there are two incidents central to the plot which actually took place. I was anxious to represent these as accurately and as fairly as I could. As I have already said, I had previously read a book about one of these incidents. But on the daily life of Jews in medieval times, I had to do a lot of digging because sources were few and far between.

NYB: What do you hope readers get out of the book?

MP: I hope Jewish readers recognize their world in it and identify with the emotions and experiences of at least some of the characters. I hope non-Jewish readers learn much about Jews and Judaism, both today and in the past – the beauty and resilience of Jewish experience, as well as the never-ending obscenity and ultimate mystery of antisemitism.

I wanted to prise open the stereotypes and look at what motivates people to behave in certain ways – to get under the skin of both the antisemite and the Jew who despises the Jewish part of himself. I wanted to show that we all have the power to change and to grow and that we all need to know what we are, to anchor ourselves in a cultural identity and to feel we belong.

And I wanted to show that things are often not what they seem to be, that to avoid pain we sometimes live in a world of fantasy including denying our identity; but history lays claim to us regardless, and in one way or another we need to make our peace with it.

I have been enormously touched by people who have read “The Legacy” and who tell me how strongly they identified with it, how they laughed and cried over it and how they couldn’t stop turning the pages. I can’t hope for any better reaction from reading my novel.

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The titanic struggle to save the United Kingdom

No-one should be in the slightest doubt about the titanic struggle becoming more desperate by the day to defend British democracy and restore the UK as an independent self-governing nation.

An all-out attempt is being being made to frustrate the wish of the British people, expressed by 52 to 48 per cent in the 2016 referendum, to leave the EU.

Last night, after a day of drama and arm-twisting, Theresa May’s government narrowly escaped defeat over the EU Withdrawal Bill.

A number of amendments to the bill, which had been passed by the unelected House of Lords and were designed to tie the government’s hands in its negotiations with the EU, were returning to the Commons.

The most contentious amendment required the government to seek approval from parliament on the next steps to be taken if the Brussels talks remain deadlocked at the end of November or if the Commons rejects the terms of the deal.

This was designed to prevent the government from deciding that no deal was better than a bad deal. Since the majority of MPs are Remainers, it threatened to allow them to force the government in such circumstances to negotiate a customs union or remain in the single market, leaving the UK shackled to EU rules and economic restrictions.

May bought off the 15 Tory Remainer rebels with a promise. But what was it? She was said here to have given “personal assurances that she would agree to the broad thrust of their proposals”, but here merely that she would “accept aspects of an amendment” put forward by the leading Tory Remainer rebel, the former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve.

Claims that Mrs May did not in fact promise to do what the rebels wanted produced a furious response and threats of a further rebellion if she went back on the promise that the rebels claim she made.

Yet on BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (1 hr.12 mins in) one of these rebels, Nicky Morgan, conceded that Mrs May had not promised them that MPs would have a veto over the terms of any deal, merely that parliament should have a “meaningful say”. So what would happen if MPs meaningfully rejected the terms of the government’s EU deal? Ms Morgan meaningfully dodged the question.

Like other Remainers, she denied that the rebels were trying to reverse Brexit. But that’s exactly what they are trying to do, and by denying it they are once again treating the public with contempt.

For what they want to do is what parliament is constitutionally not entitled to do – to bind the hands of the government in negotiations. That’s because such a power would paralyse government and render it unable to negotiate in Britain’s best interests.

By demonstrating Mrs May’s extreme difficulty in getting a true Brexit deal through parliament, the Grieve-led revolt has further weakened the government’s already weak hand in Europe. It was therefore an act of national treachery.

The Remainers in parliament maintain with hand on heart that they aren’t trying to reverse Brexit. They are merely seeking to limit the economic damage to the UK, as they see it, by a customs union with the EU or by remaining in the single market. This is a transparently spurious and cynical claim.

For if the UK were to enter into either arrangement, it would remain bound by EU rules and requirements – but with no say over them at all. And of course that’s the strategy: to make the terms of leaving the EU so unpalatable this would create a groundswell for a second referendum which would result in deciding to remain in the EU after all.

Apart from the cynical abuse of democracy involved, this rests upon a key fantasy – that deciding to remain in the EU would restore the status quo. Not so. The status quo is no more. There is no going back.

If the UK were to decide to reverse Brexit, the EU would respond to such a demonstration of abject weakness by insisting that the terms of remaining had now changed. The UK would be made to join the euro, with the catastrophic effects on its economy that would result. And on every other issue on which the EU plans further to emasculate the sovereignty of its member states, the UK would be treated with contempt as a busted flush and its objections brushed aside.

To help bring about this disaster, Remain MPs are now being backed – even more outrageously – by a foreign power interfering in British politics. That foreign power is the billionaire Hungarian-American financier George Soros.

Back in 1993, Soros infamously “broke the Bank of England” when he made over £1 billion betting against the pound shortly before the UK crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

For years, Soros has channelled his billions into organisations devoted to the destruction of western national borders and undermining the integrity of the nation state which he despises.

Now he has thrown his money and energy into “Best for Britain”, a shadowy group said to be “working tirelessly” to secure a second referendum. As the Telegraph reported in February, having obtained a leaked memo from the group:

“It also plans to target MPs and convince them to vote against the final Brexit deal to trigger another referendum or general election, according to a strategy document leaked from a meeting of the group.

“It adds that a series of Momentum-style mass ralliesand concerts are planned and the campaign will have a ‘heavy youth focus’. The memo also reveals a plan to ‘pressure’ MPs in 100 Leave-supporting constituencies, and sets out how organisers ‘have a range of guerrilla marketing tactics’ to build momentum.

“The donors were told that the group’s goal was ‘to raise public support for Remain to a clear and growing national majority by June/July 2018 and channelling that pressure into MPs’ mailbags and surgeries’. The document concludes that the movement ‘must then win the meaningful vote that Mrs May has promised on her Brexit deal in October’ and adds that if she loses, ‘it is likely to trigger a new referendum, or election’”.

And so here we are in June 2018. Lo and behold, yesterday the justice minister Phillip Lee became the first member of the government to resign over Mrs May’s Brexit policy.

The Telegraph reports that sources within Best for Britain said it had been approaching Tory MPs and ministers and urging them to “vote with their consciences”. Conservative sources told the paper that four other Remainer junior ministers were considering quitting their jobs if the Government didn’t not make major concessions on Brexit in the coming weeks.

Mrs May escaped disaster last night by the skin of her teeth. This thing, though, is going to go down to the wire, and given the forces now pulling out all the stops to reverse Brexit the prospects for avoiding a national and democratic debacle do not look good.

Mrs May has played this disastrously from the very start. The only way to negotiate is through strength and Britain had a very strong hand. The EU is terrified of the financial black hole that would open up if Britain just walked away; it’s even more terrified of the competitive edge the UK would have if it really did free itself from the EU’s economic and regulatory shackles.

Yet Mrs May has behaved as if the UK is a weak supplicant begging for favourable terms. The only way to show negotiating strength is to threaten to walk away and make it clear you mean it. Accordingly, she should have publicly and loudly made contingency plans for a no-deal outcome. Yet no such plans, we are told, have been made. So walking away from the EU with no deal in place is said to be simply impossible.

This omission is incomprehensible on grounds of simple prudence alone. And so the only conclusion to draw from it is that Mrs May and her senior officials decided right at the start that they would accept a bad deal for Britain. And that has made just such an outcome all but inevitable.

Brexit represents the one remaining chance for Britain to rediscover its identity and national self-confidence. It is therefore its one remaining chance to shrug off the national demoralisation which has resulted from the anti-western, self-loathing and despairing counter-culture on which the EU itself was founded – and which, in its wildly successful “march through the institutions”, so deeply threatens the future of Britain by making moral and intellectual idiots of its people.

No-one ever suggested leaving the EU would have no downsides. But the freedom to control their own destiny is written into the DNA of the British people. It was that not-yet-extinguished spirit that made its voice heard in the Brexit vote.

If that aspiration is now denied, it is not just the Conservative party that will be finished. The British people will never, ever trust parliamentary democracy again.

But of course, for Remainers parliamentary democracy is axiomatically irrelevant – useful only if they can suborn it in order to bring about Brexit’s reversal, and thus finally destroy the  values and characteristics of this uniquely independent island nation.

Get rid of Mrs May. Now. And draft Nigel Farage.

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Just who is the mortal danger to the free world?

Determined, of course, to present US President Trump as a mortal danger to humanity for meeting and signing an agreement with North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-un, the Trumpohobes have been in full cry this morning claiming that the President suddenly announced a suspension of joint military exercises with South Korea, something that wasn’t in the signed agreement.

This, we are told, is stunning evidence – proof positive! – that at a stroke Trump has imperilled the free world in return for nothing from Kim (thus echoing North Korean’s own propaganda).

In fairness, Japan and South Korea have also expressed concern – although South Korea added: “At this moment, the meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks requires more clear understanding.”

Wise words. Because as US General Jack Keen told a spluttering interviewer on BBC Radio’s Today programme (1.39 minutes in), who had just said that Trump announced this suspension before knowing whether Kim would keep his side of the bargain: “Come on, did you listen to what the President said? He made the suspension of the war game conditional…”

Indeed. Trump declared his wish to end joint military exercises and bring US soldiers home from South Korea provided Kim keeps his side of the agreement and actually shows he is de-nuclearising. This is what Trump actually said in this excerpt from the transcript of his press conference in Singapore:

Q: “Can you be specific of the assurances you are willing to give to Kim Jong Un? Does that include reducing military operations?”

A: “At some point I have to be honest. I used to say this during my campaign as you know better than most. I want to get our soldiers out. I want to bring our soldiers back home. We have 32,000 soldiers in South Korea. I would like to be able to bring them back home. That’s not part of the equation. At some point, I hope it would be. We will stop the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money. Unless and until we see the future negotiations is not going along like it should. We will be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus. It is very provocative.”

Trump’s word “provocative”, as General Keen also observed, was misjudged. The joint exercises are not a provocation but part of the strategy to defend regional security. Nevertheless, the way Trump’s words have been wrenched out of context here is pretty startling (if only too common).

Isn’t it reassuring to know that the media’s finest are protecting us from the terrifying threat to truth and humanity posed by President Donald J Trump?

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Springtime for Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump?

So how should we view the meeting between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un and the declaration they have both signed? Is it a “historic” breakthrough for world peace as is being celebrated by the likes of this commentator; or is it a disgraceful debacle, as is being lambasted by the likes of this one?

Well, as Zhou Enlai reputedly observed when asked about the impact of the French Revolution on western civilisation, it’s simply too early to say.

The terms of the declaration signed by Trump and Kim are studiedly vague. The North Korean regime has previously made promises about de-nuclearisation which it promptly tore up.

As Trump himself has said, however, this is merely the start of a process. It has been suggested that his strategy is to reel Kim in over time like a big fish on a line, with every step towards denuclearisation being rewarded by another step in relieving sanctions. And that may be so.

Certainly, Trump’s over-the-top gushing over Kim should not be taken at face value. This was just part of the choreography for his grand theatre of negotiation. Nor do I think it credible that either he or his hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or even more hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton could have failed to factor in the need for robust verification of the de-nuclearisation process and the difficulties in achieving that.

I was most interested by the body language between the two men, and also by something Kim said. Trump’s bombastic bonhomie seemed to me to signify the biggest beast in the jungle beating his chest to demonstrate his dominance; the more effusive the compliments, the louder the message that Trump could afford to be generous because the other guy had lost. It was not designed to make Kim look his equal. It was designed to humiliate.

For his part, Kim said that many of those watching would think it was a scene from a “science fiction movie” and that the two of them had “decided to leave the past behind.” Now of course, that could be the same old same old reflexive mendacity that we expect from the Kim regime. But it looked to me like a tacit admission that the world has changed; after all, the past that Trump is leaving behind is the US policy of appeasing evil. So it might just mean Kim realises that, for the first time, the regime has met its match.

After all, it is up against a US president who is so volatile he might just mean what he says when he threatens to annihilate North Korea. Certainly the regime’s patron China, which undoubtedly helped force Kim to Singapore, realises it is now up against a US president who might just hurt it badly through a tariff war.

And the Iranian regime, such a close and crucial partner in evil to the psychotic Pyongyang gang, certainly knows it is up against a US president who has already torn up the old western order that Tehran played so successfully for so long. There are reports that, as a result of the US abrogating the Iran nuclear deal, the return of sanctions has had an even greater immediate impact on the Iranian economy than the US had dared hope for.

In December 2016, the South Korean firm Hyundai Heavy Industries signed a deal with Iran’s state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines to build four 14,500 twenty-foot equivalent unit containerships and six 49,000-ton tankers for petrochemical products. The contract was worth $700 million.

It was the first shipbuilding order from Iran since sanctions were lifted in January 2016. Now a company official says: “Not a single ship has been delivered to IRISL. It is impossible for us to deliver the ships with U.S. sanctions back in position.”

Similarly, Korean contractor Daelim has cancelled a $2bn contract to modernise a refinery in the Iranian city of Esfahan, and a similar fate may befall a $3.6bn deal with Hyundai. Sanctions are also expected to hit a $3.6bn deal between Iran, Hyundai and Japan’s Chiyoda Corporation to construct the Siraf Refining Park in the southeastern coastal province of Bushehr.

The American strategy towards North Korea cannot be viewed in isolation from its strategy of isolating, weakening and ultimately destroying the Iranian regime. Tehran will be sweating that the outsourcing to Pyongyang of its nuclear weapons programme is not disrupted by the Trump/Kim negotiating process.

It cannot be sure. Trump’s policy of isolating Iran is already working. From being the unrivalled grandmasters of geopolitical chess, the Iranian regime now finds that the board and its pieces have been thrown up into the air by a vandal against the international order whose behaviour it cannot predict. And both China and Russia have already moved as a result to accommodate him.

Who knows where this will end? We cannot at present tell whether Trump will succeed or fail. But one thing seems indisputable: the assistance previously given by the US to the forces of utmost evil in the world has been stopped in its tracks. And only the most unhinged haters of this most extraordinary US President can deny that achievement.

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Prostitution: men shouldn’t get all the blame

Prostitution: men shouldn’t get all the blame

At the University of Cincinnati, the sex war has reached an absurd impasse. A male and female student who woke up together after a drunken encounter have each complained of sexual assault by the other.

Some have speculated that the case might signal a weakening of the presumption that women are invariably victims of male sexual aggression. This premise lies behind the Commons women and equalities committee inquiry into sexual harassment to which I was invited to give evidence last week. The word “patriarchy” hung in the air.

I took a deep breath and suggested that men may be sexually harassed by women, or men by other men and women by other women; and furthermore that society routinely victimised men by presenting them as innately violent, stupid or a waste of space. The Labour MP Jess Phillips expressed shock at the preposterous idea that women might have any power at all, and subsequently remarked on her blog that I appeared to inhabit a “matriarchal media utopia”.

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

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Our crazy world: G7 v Trump, Hezbollah in London, Brexit agony

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the latest developments in our crazy world. We talk about the G7/Trump temper tantrum and just how long it will take for the EU and other G7 countries to work out that in a trade war with the US there’s only going to be one winner and it isn’t going to be them. This leads us to discuss Trump’s negotiating strategy and whether it’s a thing of genius or whether he actually has one at all. Plus the odious spectacle of Hezbollah flags parading on the streets of London and Britain’s deepening Brexit agony, which is truly dreadful to behold.

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Reframing the Middle East narrative: my ten-point guide

Reframing the Middle East narrative: my ten-point guide

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that those trying to defend Israel in the court of public opinion needed a strategic rethink.

Defending Israel against the calumnies being thrown at it is to concede defeat from the start by engaging upon ground defined by its enemies. Instead, Israel’s defenders need to go onto the front foot. They need to do to its enemies what is done to Israel: to paint them as extreme, unconscionable and a mortal threat to life and liberty. But with one key difference: that whereas Israel’s enemies do this through lies, bigotry and irrationality, its defenders should do it through truth, morality and reason.

They should do it by repeated use of high-level speeches, press conferences, videos and other platforms to take the attack to the enemy: proactively and aggressively to destroy the premises on which they base their attacks by redefining who is truly victim and victimiser in the Middle East; reclaiming the language from those who have hijacked it and inverted its meaning in order to twist the western mind; and proactively and aggressively to attack named governments and politicians, media, intellectuals and others for supporting the “Palestinians”’ unconscionable agenda, using their own values to hold their feet to the fire.

Here’s my handy, cut-out-and-keep ten-point guide to the essential messages that need to be got across by proactive, aggressive and repeatedly reinforced initiatives in order to reframe the narrative.

Support indigenous people. The Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. While many others have lived there over the centuries, the Jews are the only people – as a people – for whom it was ever their national kingdom, and the only people still around today who had their homeland there taken away from them by force.
Stop Arab colonialism. Historically, Arabs and Muslims were colonial invaders who occupied the land of Israel by force. The “Palestinians” are Arab colonialists who aim once again to occupy the land and wipe out the indigenous inhabitants, the Jewish people, from their own homeland.
End the lie of Palestinian identity. There never was a Palestinian people. Palestine was the insulting name given to Judea by the Romans. The Arabs living there at the time of the Balfour Declaration identified themselves mainly as southern Syrians or else just as Arabs. Palestinian identity was invented solely to rewrite history and destroy the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. Anyone who supports the Palestinian cause is therefore an accessory to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish right of national self-determination.
Denounce anti-Zionism as anti-Judaism. The Jews are a nation. Many fail to realise that because they think Judaism is merely a religion. The essence of Judaism, however, is the religious obligations of the Jewish nation within the land of Israel which is sanctified to that purpose. Denying the Jewish nation its own land is therefore a direct assault on Judaism itself.
No platform for racist ethnic cleansing. The “Palestinians” repeatedly declare that not one Jew will be allowed to live in a state of Palestine. Around 20 per cent of Israel’s population consists of Israeli Arabs with full civil rights. Why can’t a future state of Palestine be 20 per cent Jewish? All who promote the Palestinian agenda, and all who say a Palestine state cannot happen while the Israeli “settlers” live in that territory, therefore endorse racist ethnic cleansing.
No platform for national extermination. The Palestinian agenda is not for a state of Palestine to exist alongside the state of Israel. It is instead to destroy Israel. This is demonstrated continuously by the repeated rejection of the offer of a Palestine state in favour of mass murder campaigns and war; by the “Palestinians”’ maps and insignia showing Palestine replacing Israel; by their teaching their children to hate and murder Jews and steal their land. All in the west who support this agenda should therefore be called out for supporting, at least implicitly, the attempted extermination of a country.
Defend Temple Mount against Islamist cultural cleansing. The site of the ancient Jewish Temple is the holiest place in Judaism. The “Palestinians” have repeatedly tried to erase the proof of its centrality to Judaism by vandalising the site and destroying the archeological evidence. They have also turned it into a military arsenal from where they repeatedly try to murder Jewish worshippers while inciting Islamic holy war. This should be called out for what it is: jihadi incitement, and attempted Islamist cultural cleansing akin to the destruction by Isis of ancient religious shrines in Iraq.
Uphold justice and international law. Israel is the only Middle East country which adheres to democracy and the rule of law and upholds human rights. Israel’s actions are lawful and principled. It should prove it by laying out the historical and legal evidence of international treaties and other relevant legal instruments, and show that it is the despotic and tyrannical enemies of Israel who repudiate law and human rights. Anyone who wants to promote the rule of law and human rights in the Middle East must support Israel against those who so cynically turn law and justice inside out.
Bring war criminals to justice. All decent people should call for Hamas to be held responsible for war crimes, both in launching murderous attacks against Israeli civilians and for using the people of Gaza as cannon fodder and human shields.
Stand against genocidal Muslim antisemitism. The most vile and crude antisemitism, much of it using Nazi tropes and images and exhibiting paranoid fantasies depicting the Jews as a cosmic conspiracy to harm the world in their own interests, pours out of the Muslim world, including the “moderate” Palestinian Authority, in an unstoppable torrent. Yet astoundingly, this receives virtually no attention whatsoever in the west. So there should be a campaign to bring these images and diatribes to public attention and thus demonstrate two crucial points: that the Muslim world doesn’t hate the Jews because it hates Israel but rather it hates Israel because it hates the Jews; and second, that this Muslim antisemitism is a major driver of the jihad against the west.
Stop media collusion with mass murder. The strategy of Hamas is to engender the deaths of as many as possible whom it can pass off as Palestinian innocents, in order to produce media coverage which induces revulsion and condemnation of Israel in the west. Those many media outlets and journalists that do Hamas’s bidding to the letter, failing to report the full context of these deaths or the way these spectacles are cynically staged and presenting the Hamas narrative as factually true without question, should be called out by name as accomplices to mass murder.

If these messages were proactively introduced into public debate at a high enough level to ensure they were reported and repeated, and if individuals and government and media outfits supporting and promoting this unconscionable anti-Jewish agenda were named and shamed for doing so, the climate of opinion over Israel would change for the better very quickly.

What’s everyone waiting for?

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