Spectator Blogs

Safe -- but where's the bunting?

, 12 Mar 2010 18:12:40 GMT

Good news: it appears that the BBC journalist Paul Martin, who was kidnapped by Hamas four weeks ago, has been released.

What’s that – you didn’t even know a BBC journalist had been kidnapped by Hamas? This isn’t surprising. Virtually nothing has been written about this. And even now that Martin has been released, I can’t see any domestic coverage of this at time of writing -- not even on the BBC website home page, although it does appear on the BBC World Service page. Compare and contrast with

Is this why the Palestinians 'deserve' a state, Mr Biden?

, 12 Mar 2010 17:47:32 GMT

The New York Times reports that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah have dedicated a public square to the memory of a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history:

The woman being honored, Dalal Mughrabi, was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that sailed from Lebanon and landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They killed an American photojournalist, hijacked a bus and commandeered another, embarking on a bloody rampage that left 38 Israeli civilians

Iran threatens genocide yet again

, 12 Mar 2010 00:30:10 GMT

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The Palestinians and the nations of the Middle East will be rid of a ‘bad omen’ once Israel is annihilated, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday, in a speech communicated by Press TV. Israel, a foreign presence and a ‘Western prodigy’ in the region, had ‘reached the end of its road,’ Ahmadinejad told supporters in southern Iran.

Well, I think that doesn’t leave much room for doubt.

No wonder he's smiling...

, 10 Mar 2010 17:14:00 GMT

Israel is in the doghouse with America because it revealed during the visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden that it was building more houses for Israelis in east Jerusalem. According to Biden and outraged western received opinion, this ‘undermines peace efforts’.

Why? To be more precise, why does this initiative – or indeed any of the ‘settlements’ -- undermine peace efforts while the actual reason for the absence of peace, the fact that the Abbas administration has said it will never accept a Jewish state of Israel and refuses to

Just when did the EU sign up to this?

, 09 Mar 2010 22:22:08 GMT

The drug legalisation lobby group Transform purrs on its website:

As Steve Rolles heads off for California, I am at the UN's annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna for which Transform has ECOSOC special consultative status. We are here as more than just spectators. In addition to attending a range of meetings that I will report on over the next few days, we have co-organised our own event, as part of the rapidly growing campaign for an Impact Assessment of drug policy, with our

The president who made his country a global mockery

, 09 Mar 2010 21:57:14 GMT

As predicted here, Obama’s foreign policy has collapsed in total ignominy. We are now all very much less safe than we were before this man was elected to the White House. A new poll -- for the Democrats, forsooth -- suggests that a majority of Americans think the USA is less respected in the world than it was two years ago and think President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security.

You don't say.

As this piece in American Thinker observes:

The jihad in Nigeria

, 08 Mar 2010 17:44:39 GMT

Utterly appalling violence by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria where the latest tally after weekend attacks on three mostly Christian villages is some 500 dead. The media have described these events as ‘riots’; I would call this a jihadi pogrom. It is but the latest episode in what the media persist in characterising as inter-ethnic violence, but which is in fact a systematic attempt by Muslims to murder and ethnically cleanse the Christian community. The onslaught is described as ‘retaliation ‘ for violent attacks in Jos last January, in

A rational article provokes bigoted frenzy at the FT

, 05 Mar 2010 17:26:51 GMT

A few days ago, the historian Andrew Roberts wrote a piece in the Financial Times trenchantly defending the presumed assassination by Israel in Dubai of the Hamas terrorist Mahmoud Habhouh. In this article, which was itself a response to two examples of standard boilerplate bigotry that the paper had run about this, Roberts wrote:

All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ

This sceptr'd isle

, 05 Mar 2010 12:34:58 GMT

Last night I was chatting with a friend, a distinguished writer. He told me the following anecdotes. His son had taken his children back to their boarding school after the half-term break and was driving straight back home, around 50 miles away. He had consumed neither drink nor drugs and was driving steadily and carefully while listening to music. He became aware of a car following him closely for most of the way; to his astonishment, when he pulled into his drive the car followed him and out got two