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 the tsunami of coverage over the previous BBC journalist who was kidnapped in Gaza, Alan Johnston, and the enormous razmatazz over his release. At NRO, Tom Gross makes this key point:

One of Hamas’ aims in detaining Martin was, of course, to further deter any brave foreign journalist on assignment in Gaza who might dare report the truth about the Hamas regime.

Indeed according to the Palestinian Maan news agency (but not reported by most Western media) Hamas detained Martin because he ‘sought to distort the image of Palestinians by going to tunnels, trying to prove that Hamas

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 dead, 13 of them children, according to official Israeli figures. Ms. Mughrabi and several other attackers were killed.

To Israelis, hailing Ms. Mughrabi as a heroine and a martyr is an act that glorifies terrorism. But, underscoring the chasm between Israeli and Palestinian perceptions, the Fatah representatives described Ms. Mughrabi as a courageous fighter who held a proud place in Palestinian history. Defiant, they insisted that they would not let Israel dictate the names of Palestinian streets and squares.

‘We are all Dalal Mughrabi,’ declared Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, who

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.

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 renounce the Arab aim of ending Israel's existence, the sole reason for eight decades of aggression, terrorism and war in the Middle East, is not even mentioned?

Biden also said:

the Palestinians deserve a ‘viable’ independent state with contiguous territory

Why? What have they done to deserve it? In what other conflict in the history of the planet have people who have waged a war of annihilation for eight decades and continue to do so been considered to ‘deserve’ anything, let alone an ‘independent’ existence the sole purpose of which is a military beach-head to finish the]]> 2010-03-10T17:14:00+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5829661/just-when-did-the-eu-sign-up-to-this.thtml
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 colleagues at the International Drug Policy Consortium. We are particularly pleased Carel Edwards the Head of the EC's Anti-Drugs Policy Unit has agreed to speak, as well as the Chair of IDPC Mike Trace, and myself (details below).

What is the EU’s top drug policy official doing sharing a platform with drug legalisers?

You don't say.

As this piece in American Thinker observes:

Barack Obama, in his first press conference after his election, called Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons ‘unacceptable.’ He repetitively offered Iran ‘engagement.’ He set a deadline of year-end 2009 for Iranian compliance, now unilaterally extended another three months.

Iran contemptuously and repetitively responded that it had no intention of abandoning its nuclear program. Obama’s Iran policy is collapsing to the accompaniment of open mockery around the globe. Obama assured us that his ‘engagement’ would make it easier to enlist other countries to stop Iran. The result is the opposite. Virtually every country Obama approached has rebuffed him. Without a

The fact that the jihad in Africa is widely ignored in the west is not just a moral dereliction of duty. It is a refusal by the west to understand what it is actually up against. What is happening to Nigeria’s Christians makes a mockery of the frenzied western obsession with]]> 2010-03-08T17:44:39+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5820471/a-rational-article-provokes-bigoted-frenzy-at-the-ft.thtml
 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 targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy. As for the ‘separation walls’ and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy. There is simply no parallel between apartheid South Africa – where the white minority wielded power over the black majority – and the occupied territories, taken by Israel only after it was invaded by its neighbours. To make such a link is not only inaccurate, but offensive.

Not nearly as offensive,]]> 2010-03-05T17:26:51+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5819451/this-sceptrd-isle.thtml
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 police officers. They claimed he had been driving in a lane where he should not have been. He denied this. After some further questioning they then asked: ‘Have you had a domestic?’ (police vernacular for a row with the wife). Upon being answered in the negative, the officers insisted on going into the house and asking the astounded wife whether she and her husband had had a row. Upon being answered again in the negative, they departed and no more was heard.

This was not the only strange recent adventure involving a roadside encounter with the police to disturb my]]> 2010-03-05T12:34:58+00:00 http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5817896/the-verbal-pogrom.thtml
A propos ‘lawfare’ and Anti-Israel Pogrom week, here are two excellent articles. Alan Dershowitz calls for a real ‘apartheid week’, protesting at the exclusion and oppression of Jews, women, gays and others in Muslim lands:

The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many