Oliver Kamm

More on Yassin II

I have devoted a long comment to Anne Applebaum, political columnist for the Washington Post, because she has an outstanding intellect and formidable erudition. I now devote a very short comment to Baroness Shirley Williams, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.

What words come to mind when considering a man responsible for the violent deaths of hundreds of Jews and bent on the creation of a genocidal theocracy? To Baroness Williams, musing inconsequentially in the International Herald Tribune, the most appropriate term for (and only reference in the entire article to) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is:

... revered spiritual leader.

Even if you grant, as Baroness Williams apparently does (read her article and see if it makes any more sense to you than it does to me), that all Palestinians without exception practised this reverence, her description still strikes me as somewhat, well, incomplete.

I have been searching for several days for a witty or at least searingly ironic description of a woman who for reasons I have never been able to fathom has long been considered an asset to the quality of British public life. But it's no good.

Shirley Williams is a peerless fathead.

More on Yassin

See if you can spot the non sequitur in this unhinged editorialising by the Middle East correspondent of the Church Times, the newspaper of the Church of England:

The assassination of the Hamas leader, who was disabled, has intensified Arab anger over what is perceived as Israel’s arrogance — and its uncritical support from the United States.

If I were a murderous bigot in a wheelchair, I’d be pretty offended at the insinuation that I was any less culpable for my acts of terror merely because I was physically incapable of carrying them out other than through an intermediary.

Mind you, the Church Times is a model of sagacity compared with one of its clerical interlocutors:

Palestinians feel so helpless,” said Canon Naim Ateek, Canon of St George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem. “It seems there is no power in the world that can stop Israel. The Israelis assassinate people without taking them to court or proving that they are terrorists. They get away with it because they keep waving the red flag of terrorism.”

Assassinating people without taking them to court or proving that they're terrorists? I certainly hope so. Hamas’s 1988 Covenant posits an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and denies that the Jews have any historical connection, let alone legitimate claim, to the land of Israel. In service of that crazed ideology, the organisation indoctrinates young people to explode bombs concealed under their clothing in order to remove Jews not only from the Holy Land but from this world altogether. Hamas has killed literally hundreds of Jews in terrorist attacks since the launch of the current Intifada.

I have been no closer to this subject than to read about it in the newspapers – accounts that are far more harrowing than the sanitised images of the after-effects on the television news. Among so many acts of barbarism, two in particular stick in my mind. Hamas’s bombing of, respectively, a Jerusalem discotheque in June 2001, in which 20 teenagers died, and a Tel Aviv pizza restaurant two months later (15 dead, including very young children) were beyond conventional categories of wickedness, for they targeted – targeted – those without the slightest connection to the political complexities of the conflict.

In the circumstances, the notion that Israel should have issued a subpoena on Hamas’s leader is worse than futile: it’s frivolous. What if he didn’t turn up to the hearing? Targeting a known terrorist leader (whom the Palestinian Authority, in violation of its own treaty obligations, refused to apprehend), while avoiding civilian casualties, strikes me as a morally unexceptionable act. Whether it was strategically prudent is another matter, on which there is a legitimate argument to be had. On that point I’ll say this.

The best case against Israel’s actions was made by Anne Applebaum, an outstanding commentator on international affairs (and author of one of the finest historical works, or indeed books of any kind, I have ever read), in the Washington Post last week:

At this point, it isn't clear whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever be sublimated into politics... But a "two-state solution" might emerge, either through the (now unlikely) path of negotiation, or a (far more likely) unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank. Assuming that Palestine becomes a viable state at all, democratic competition might be possible there. Hamas, the Palestinian movement that is part charity, part terrorist organization, might be converted into a political party -- like the [El Salvadorian] FMLN or the IRA.

I use the word "might" with strong emphasis here, because at the moment none of this seems remotely possible. Still, the hope that it will be possible is, in the end, the only criterion by which to judge last weekend's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader, as well as Israel's threat to kill more Hamas leaders: Do these actions make Hamas's transformation more likely? Or do they push that possibility even further into the distant future? I haven't yet seen evidence that leads to any conclusion but the latter.

This is a thoughtful argument far removed from most European politicians’ spurious assumptions of moral equivalence between the parties and journalists’ habitual resort to obfuscatory cliché (that ‘cycle of violence’ again). It also has the merit of recognising that the things we value in politics are incommensurable: justice is a virtue, but then so are other things (such as security) that might conflict with justice, and it’s not obvious how one should give a rank ordering to those values.

Where I believe Mrs Applebaum’s argument is mistaken, however, is in what she omits rather than what she says. In order for conflict to be ‘sublimated’ into politics, it is crucial that terrorist movements become convinced that their objectives are unattainable, and that they must therefore settle as best they can before they are extirpated altogether. There are some terrorist movements that will never take part in a political settlement – Mrs Applebaum rightly cites al-Qaeda in this context – and that therefore must be literally fought against to the death. There are others that conceivably might be diverted from acts of urban terror into distinctly murky but still less destructive forms of agitation. But – and this is the essential point – all terrorist movements must nonetheless be fought against as if they are of the first type, for only then will we be able to make a reliable judgement on the relative likelihood of different groups’ abandoning political violence.

Like Mrs Applebaum, I don’t know whether the Islamist terrorists of Hamas can ever be detached from the Islamist cause of al-Qaeda (though I am deeply sceptical). But the only certain way to find out is to force the choice upon them: “Abandon terror and embrace politics, or we will hit you again and again, not to contain you but to destroy you.” The flaw of commission in Mrs Applebaum’s argument – the only point on which she herself embraces the fallacious pieties of European politicians – is when she refers to a ‘two-state solution’ for Israel and the Palestinians. A territorial accommodation in which a secure Israel co-exists with a sovereign Palestine must one day come about, and I profoundly hope – though very much doubt - it will be within years rather than decades. But that is not a solution to the conflict: it is an outcome of the end of the conflict. To end the conflict requires redressing that imbalance whereby one party desperately wishes to settle and the other is thus emboldened to continue with its war to kill large numbers of civilians and demoralise the rest. Such a policy means accepting that diplomacy has a limit as well as a role. That limit was (rightly) tested and found immovable owing to the intransigence and duplicity of the Palestinian Authority at Camp David and Taba, and the consequent encouragement given to such movements as Hamas.

It’s for this reason that Israel’s current policy of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza while striking at Hamas is the best hope for peace. A negotiated territorial settlement leading to a two-state accommodation, as envisaged in the [Cliché Alert] Road-Map is highly desirable, but it is not going to happen, or at least not at any time soon. In the meantime, a cold peace is attainable, in which Israel abandons strategically unnecessary and politically indefensible settlements while at the same time making clear to her enemies that she does so from a position of strength and not weakness.

Probably the most obtuse and reflexive of front-rank British politicians remarked after the assassination of Sheikh Yassin:

It is hard to think of a more provocative act than this.

On the contrary, while we cannot foresee the enduring consequences of the assassination, there is a strong case for concluding that Israel thereby struck a blow for peace as well as justice. Nothing in the short term will prevent the efforts of Hamas to bomb more buses and restaurants other than good intelligence, an impermeable security barrier (which is not a ‘wall’, and not a political boundary, as its critics falsely claim), and a determination to crack down without hesitation or clemency on the progenitors of terror.

And that is quite an intelligent long-term strategy too.

UPDATE: Two correspondents have taken issue with my description of the Church Times as the newspaper of the Church of England. They are right to do so: the newspaper is published independently rather than being an official organ of the Church. I ought to have described it instead as the principal Anglican newspaper. Apologies for this careless error. I have discussed the views - of which I am strongly critical - of the Church of England hierarchy on Iraq and Israel here and (on my old Blogger site - scroll down to the entry entitled 'Misreading Israel') here.

Portrait of an underachiever

More ructions in the Liberal Democrats, according to the Press Association:

Senior Liberal Democrats today rallied round their embattled leader Charles Kennedy to deny suggestions that his position was in doubt because of concerns about his health.... Mr Kennedy himself used an STV interview to shrug off claims that he suffered from “stage fright” which emerged following his failure to attend the House of Commons for the Budget speech.

“When people talk about ‘Do you blink at the big moment?’, I just say to them: Ranging from presenting Have I Got News For You to speaking to a peace rally of one million people in Hyde Park doesn’t strike me as somebody who baulks when the pressure is on. And I don’t think that is going to prove to be the case,” he said.

So now we know that the leader of the Liberal Democrats considers reading aloud from, respectively, an autocue and a piece of paper is to be under pressure. I suppose it's an arguable case, but what is not arguable - merely preposterous - is his assertion that he has addressed a peace rally of one million people in Hyde Park. He appears to be alluding to the Stop the War Coalition's rally in February last year, but of course the Stop the War Coalition is not a peace organisation. Its Chairman, Andrew Murray, is a declared supporter of a tyranny actively developing a nuclear weapons programme (North Korea), and the organisation itself is controlled by the Socialist Workers' Party. The SWP, a totalitarian and antisemitic party committed to the ideals of the Bolshevik coup against constitutional government, actively campaigned not for peace but for the military victory of Saddam Hussein.

Every time I make these observations I receive indignant messages - on this blog and to me directly - protesting that I am smearing the Liberal Democrats by association. Let me anticipate them this time by pointing out that their party's participation in that rally was not merely a matter of associating with dubious causes: Charles Kennedy spoke from the platform of this most toxic political cause.

It's a matter of simple decency that democratic parties police their own boundaries and make clear what is illegitimate opinion. Taking their lead from Charles Kennedy (one of the few times that's ever happened), the Liberal Democrats lamentably failed to observe those boundaries when pressing their anti-war case. In the local elections last May, the Liberal Democrats ran a campaign in Luton, in a ward with a large Muslim population, with a leaflet that read: "The Labour Government’s hands are full of Iraqi people’s blood, while a blind eye is turned to atrocities in Kashmir and Palestine."

When this was recounted in the press (The Times, 28 April), I wrote to Kennedy - copying it to my Liberal Democrat MP - to ask him what action he proposed to take. In reply I received a perfectly irrelevant statement of Liberal Democrat policy on the Iraq war; so we must assume that the Liberal Democrats do not regard the malignant extremism of its representatives in the Biscot ward of Luton to be a matter of moment. Thus has the character of the British polity been safeguarded under the Liberal Democrat leadership of the Rt Hon Charles Kennedy MP.

A pointless death in an ignoble cause

The Press Association reports:

The mother of a British peace activist shot in Gaza today paid a moving tribute to his courage at a memorial service for him.

Photography student Tom Hurndall was hit by a bullet as he shepherded Palestinian children to safety in the Rafah refugee camps.

Friends and family were today joined by MPs and campaigners to remember his life as they gathered at the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral to remember him…. Jocelyn Hurndall told the hundreds assembled in the central London church of her son’s “conviction and compassion” and “concern for the vulnerable”.

She said: “Those were the convictions that led him to make that noble gesture, sacrificing his life so that a young Palestinian could live.

“He has come to represent courage, humanity, and decency. Thousands of people who have never met Tom have written to us expressing how much of a difference he has made to their lives, and how their faith in humanity has been enhanced.”

I can understand Mrs Hurndall’s wish to map what she believes to have been her son’s personal qualities to his political convictions. There is, however, absolutely no reason that the rest of us should take her judgements seriously.

Tom Hurndall’s political affiliations were despicable. So far from being a ‘peace activist’, his favoured cause was hostility to Israel. He was in Gaza on behalf of an organisation called the International Solidarity Movement, which declares on its web site, “we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle.”

Since I first wrote about this simultaneously mindless and monstrous remark, the ISM has posted a disingenuous explanation of it. It runs:

The ISM does not support or condone any acts of terrorism, because terrorism is not legitimate armed struggle.

But of course this begs the question. The ISM assumes the truth of its conclusion – that it does not condone terror – in its premises, for it does not regard what Palestinian bombers do as terrorism. I have read the ISM’s polemics with some care, and I have yet to find an instance where a suicide bomber is described as a terrorist other than in an ironic sense intended to denigrate the unenlightened judgement of those of us who abominate his cause. ISM correspondents’ own preferred label is, extraordinarily and revealingly, ‘martyr’.

It’s a repulsive moral evasion. What distinguishes the suicide bomber is not that he commits suicide (an act that is itself at odds with the historical notion of ‘martyrdom’) but that he explodes bombs - invariably among large numbers of civilians, with the intention of killing as many of them as possible. Indeed ISM correspondents are so habituated to the use of euphemism that they even put scare quotes around the term ‘suicide bomber’, which is itself an obfuscation. (My own preference is for the term ‘suicide murderer’, given that it precisely identifies the aim of the bomber while also explaining an incidental circumstance of his bombing.)

In the circumstances, I find it impossible to take seriously the ISM’s dainty dissociation of itself from terror. Take – almost at random – the judgements of one of its correspondents writing from (naturally) California. He is careful to recite the catechism of his movement’s public relations office (“suicide attacks against innocent noncombatants are also [i.e. in addition to what Israel’s defence forces allegedly commit] a war crime”) while at the same time making it clear that he sees something noble and even heroic in acts of barbarism. He asks rhetorically:

Is there a proud people anywhere that might not be driven to such measures to defend themselves[?]

Yes, of course there is. Against oppressive states such as apartheid South Africa, nationalist and progressive movements for reform have abjured terrorism in favour of negotiation. Car-bombing has recently come to Iraq owing to the activities of Islamist and Baathist fanatics against a nascent constitutional government: it was inconceivable that such methods could have been practised by the proud and courageous Iraqi Kurds against the unrivalled despotism of Saddam Hussein. In the case of Israel, which occupies land that it wishes not to have, that is unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, that offered almost all of the West Bank to a putative Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, the notion that acts of terror against civilians could have any possible justification even in principle is wickedness itself.

Yet this ISM correspondent offers an explanation for the acts of one suicide-murderer that I had to read twice in order to grasp it in its full horror (emphasis added):

What led Amer to put on a vest of Semtex and cause his flesh to be scattered by its explosive force? … I can only speculate, but it may have been the strong sense of moral right and wrong, of justice and injustice, that his parents instilled in him.

Because ‘Amer’ is a pseudonym, I am unable to check which incident in the many terrorist atrocities that Israel has suffered is the one he was responsible for. I suspect, however, that the reason the ISM correspondent fails to mention any other victims of this ‘vest of Semtex’ is not, in fact, that ‘Amer’ was the only fatality of his own bomb, but rather that in the ISM’s moral calculus, dead Jews do not figure.

This is the unworthy and mendacious organisation to which Tom Hurndall gave his allegiance. So far from being a humanitarian protecting Palestinian children from harm, Hurndall was a neophyte aggravating a tense and inflamed conflict by methods that exploited the essential decency of those he was protesting against. ‘Human shields’ do not operate against nihilists who have contempt for human life (the ISM has no record of shielding Israeli civilians from suicide-murderers by travelling on Jerusalem buses); the ISM’s rationale is rather to make it as difficult as possible for Israeli Defence Forces to carry out their work, on the correct presumption that the IDF will wish to avoid risking the life of anyone not directly connected with terrorism.

Because Israeli forces do not target civilians, what the ISM achieves by its efforts is merely to endanger its own volunteers. There are disturbing indications that the ISM is aware of this and is encouraging its young and inexperienced members to risk their lives nonetheless in pointless gesture politics. After the accidental death of the young American activist Rachel Corrie, who with monumental stupidity lay down in the path of a bulldozer, the Washington Post carried this chilling quotation (link from Jurjen Smies, whose own analysis of the Hurndall and Corrie cases I have found illuminating):

"It's possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked," Thom Saffold, a founder and organizer of the International Solidarity Movement, said in a telephone interview from the group's base in Ann Arbor, Mich. "But we're like a peace army. Generals send young men and women off to operations, and some die."

It will be no surprise to my readers that the MPs who attended Hurndall’s memorial included Jenny Tonge and Jeremy Corbyn. Dr Tonge was recently sacked as a Liberal Democrat frontbench spokesman after she disclosed she was an ideological apologist for terror. I recall Corbyn, an Islington Labour MP, expounding in the 1983 general election his support for a ‘democratic secular state of Palestine’. This was a formulation that the PLO had used for years as a euphemism for the abolition of the Jewish state, a course that could have been effected only by means of a second Holocaust against the Jews. (It’s a measure of how unreal and extreme the Labour Party was at that time that its Party Conference in 1982 carried a motion with those exact words, alongside a more conventional one that envisaged two states. So far as I recall, the Tooth Fairy spoke for both motions.)

The ignorant frivolity of these politicians’ public pronouncements provides an unfortunately apt epitaph for Hurndall and his campaigning. So far from representing ‘courage, humanity and decency’, he was a foolish, fond young man, used by others in an ignoble cause. His death is, in the true sense of that much-abused word, tragic, because it was utterly futile. His mother’s wish to find redeeming significance in her late son’s cause is doomed: there is none to be found, and that in the end is the most dispiriting aspect of the entire charade.

Plain English Baloney II

A few months ago I wrote about an absurd organisation of self-publicists called the Plain English Campaign. The joke - not that it's funny - is that a body ostensibly concerned with clarity of language is both incompetent in its own use of English and heedless of the task it sets itself. Urging a good and precise use of English is a public service; the Campaign, however, spreads not clear language but that snobbery about ideas that is one of the most debilitating characteristics of English public life. (Compare what the word 'intellectual' suggests to the average Englishman compared with the average German - for whom the term is entirely legitimate and comprehensible - and you'll gain an impression of the Campaign's ethos: a snide, obscurantist and peculiarly parochial mockery of those who are supposed to lack practical common sense.)

The Campaign has again been treated with undue respect by almost all the broadsheet newspapers today, and the BBC, for another exercise in smugness:

"At the end of the day" has been voted the most irritating phrase in the English language in a survey. "At this moment in time" and "like", used like a punctuation mark, shared second place and "with all due respect" came fourth.

The Plain English Campaign questioned 5,000 people in over 70 countries.

"Using these terms in daily business is about professional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ring tone on your phone," the campaign concluded.

Now, there is nothing wrong and much that is valuable in shaming the users of cliché into abandoning their comforting but otiose figures of speech. Private Eye famously denounced the redundant use of 'situation' (as in 'We are in a war situation') some years ago, to good effect. Even the most careful writers are susceptible to reaching for hackneyed phrases in order to avoid the task of finding fresh ways of expressing what they mean. (I note without surprise that I used the cliché 'no longer on the scene' in one of my posts this week, and it will probably not take much effort to find others.) The Campaign is right to deride such circumlocutions as "at the end of the day" and "at this [present] moment in time" (my mother's most-hated cliché, incidentally: she is a professional translator, who once put the phrase in the English version of an Asterix book - in an exposition of a nefarious plan by a Roman economist, naturally - in order to make plain her feelings about it).

But the Plain English Campaign opposing cliché is like Jeffrey Archer calling for higher standards in public life. Here is what the Campaign's spokesman, John Lister, said of this 'survey':

"The problem with cliché is they're [sic] things that were once fresh but are now so overused that, as soon as you hear it, your mind shifts your impression of the speaker," he said.

"You're thinking 'Why are they using these phrases that are so old hat?'"

You read him right: clichés are old hat. Dead as a doornail, in fact.

Those Hamas analyses

Stephen Pollard writes to say:

Hamas said Israel had 'opened the gates of hell'. Is that to allow wheelchair access for Yassin?

Complaints to him, please, not to me.

Another of my correspondents, with an equally prolific newspaper output, alights on a previously-unobserved ideological tension within Hamas's propaganda of the deed:

Given that they don't care about death, they seemed surprisingly irritated.

'Ridiculous'

More from the Liberal Democrats' Spring Conference: The Observer records a curious judgement by Charles Kennedy and an apt riposte (ignore the journalist's irrelevant speculative explanation for its motivation) by the Home Secretary:

Kennedy ... called for a renewed involvement of the United Nations in Iraq to tackle the 'thugs' of al-Qaeda.

In a sign of the Government's jitters over Iraq, that drew an unusually sharp retort from [David] Blunkett, who dismissed him as 'astonishingly naive', adding: 'We are fighting a war against franchised terror groups of suicidal, maniacal killers, whose very aim is to destroy our democratic values and institutions such as the United Nations. To describe them simply as thugs is ridiculous.'

I always try to be fair, and have even in the past been generous, about Charles Kennedy, and so I shall be in this case. Clearly the message he intended to convey was that, as religiously-inspired terrorists, al-Qaeda may aptly be compared to the Thugee movement of rural India from the 7th to the 19th centuries. The Thugees sacrificed their victims - usually travellers who were waylaid - by strangling them in homage to the goddess Kali.

Unfortunately, beyond this historical analogy I cannot go. Whereas the identity of the Thugees' victims was incidental to the terror - what mattered was the religious sacrifice - and no wider goal was sought than this ritual, al-Qaeda's victims are carefully specified: the fatwa endorsed by Osama bin Laden in February 1998 under the auspices of the 'International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders', and in which observant Muslims are urged to kill American civilians wherever they may be found, leaves little scope for exegetical debate. In practice as well as aims and ideology, the movements are far removed from each other. The Thugees murdered their victims individually (though over so many centuries the aggregate number was admittedly huge). Islamist terrorists aim to kill as many infidels as possible, and to do it now. Again Osama bin Laden's May 1998 statement entitled 'The Nuclear Bomb of Islam', which asserts 'the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God', is not the most delphic religious utterance I've come across.

I thus reluctantly conclude that Kennedy's analogy is strained and fallacious. I even have the uncomfortable suspicion that - but no, surely this cannot be - he was not thinking in historical terms, or even thinking much at all, when he drew it, but sought instead to compare Islamist terror to the more common modern usage of the word 'thug', meaning someone like a football hooligan. Such people are violent, odious, often racist and sometimes murderous. They are a threat to the safety of the neighbourhoods they live in. They are not remotely an existential threat to western civilisation. If Charles Kennedy really meant to say what he actually said - that Islamist terrorists are comparable to such people - then it indicates something about him and his party.

The first task of any government is to ensure national security, and I unreservedly support our government's record on this with regard to the war on terror. An opposition party has every right to express tactical disagreements with the government of the day on how to safeguard national security, but in the statement The Observer cites Charles Kennedy goes far beyond such a stance. He is demonstrably uncomprehending of the nature of the threat that Islamist terror poses to the survival of everything that the Enlightenment tradition of tolerance, pluralism, and religious and political liberty represents.

Much has been said in the past few days about Kennedy's personal condition - his health, his drinking habits and his undeniable ineptitude in delivering speeches on important occasions. None of these points seems to me to matter quite as much - if at all - as his chronic lack of imagination. Ernest Bevin was scarcely literate and hardly eloquent (Denis Healey records in his memoirs that Bevin's Commons speeches "often collapsed into tedious obscurity, though he was never guilty of 'clitch after clitch after clitch' - to quote his description of Eden's speeches"), yet he had the insight and imagination to understand implicitly the nature of Stalin's expansionist designs and totalitarian ideology. Acting on this insight, he became the greatest of all Britain's post-war Foreign Secretaries.

Charles Kennedy by contrast is without insight and experience (he has never had a job, having been elected to Parliament at the age of 23). His speeches are wooden and pedestrian, certainly, but then so are his thoughts: the medium is the message, so to speak. There have been some Privy Counsellors in the past who were unfit for an office of state (Jonathan Aitken, for example), and some who were inadequate to it; I cannot for the moment, however, think of any quite so incongruous in that role as the current leader of the Liberal Democrats, a void within a vacuum, a banality made flesh. I can understand why the Home Secretary considers him ridiculous, but I fear it's much worse than that.

The Stupid Party

The Liberal Democrats held their Spring Conference at the weekend, where they reiterated their opposition to what are inaccurately known as university top-up fees. Unsurprisingly, student members of the party held a rally to demand that other people pay for their studies. I was particularly taken with this remark, uttered by one “Thomas Paul, 19, in his second year studying philosophy at Bristol University”, according to the BBC’s report:

I'm going to leave [university] with £12,000 debt which is more than the total earnings for some families.

Indeed it is. And it doesn’t appear to have crossed the beatific slumber that passes for this young man’s mind that it’s Liberal Democrat policy that the entire bill for higher education should fall on the taxpayer, a category that includes families who earn less than £12,000 a year (personal allowance for the current financial year is £4615). As the director of the independent Higher Education Policy Institute put it earlier this year:

Almost everyone except backbench Labour MPs, Liberal Democrats and the Tories has accepted that the taxpayer cannot pick up the entire bill for higher education. There is no country in the world that manages it.

Unlike other public services, a university education is not available to everyone - so, morally and pragmatically, students should pay for the benefit.

Understandably Thomas, 19, would prefer a system of, so to speak, robbing Peter to pay Paul. He is fortunate that, through the agency of a political party, he is able to present his sectional interests as a considered matter of public policy, but there’s no reason that the rest of us should flatter him.

Ethics and assassination

It’s a defensible position (though not one I hold) to argue that Israel’s security needs would best be advanced by eschewing retaliation against terrorist organisations. What is not permissible – what in fact is downright indecent when Israel’s civilians require reserves of courage merely to travel on a bus or eat in a restaurant for fear that that journey or that meal will be their last – is to dispute the urgency of those security needs. Yet here are two of the most facile remarks it’s possible to imagine concerning Israel’s assassination this morning of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described the assassination as "unacceptable" and "unjustified''. Mr Straw said he did not think Israel would benefit from an attack on an old man in a wheelchair.

And the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the killing was "very, very bad news" for the Middle East peace process.

What moral relevance the Foreign Secretary imagines inheres in being old and infirm is beyond my training in casuistry to identify. Does he suppose that, because Sheikh Yassin was not himself physically capable of killing Jews, Israel got the wrong man? I imagine he does not, for a couple of years ago – after some peculiarly inept remarks and a feeble non-apology on the same subject by Cherie Blair – he made a sharp distinction between those who carry out and those who order suicide-murders:

When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters. They must be so misguided and depressed to do this…

But behind those people are some very evil terrorist leaders who do not put their own lives on the line when they are making sure that others' lives are ended.

The first sentence is of course dangerous nonsense. The distinctive characteristic of the suicide bomber’s actions is not that he voluntarily ‘goes to his death’ but that he takes a large number of other people – killed not quite indiscriminately, for the targets are carefully selected to comprise defenceless and often juvenile Jewish civilians – unwillingly to theirs. To call the suicide-murderer misguided doesn’t quite do justice to his act of unmitigated barbarism, while to attribute to him ‘depression’ – as opposed to, say, fanaticism and zealotry – is a speculative hypothesis proffered without the remotest empirical support.

But the second sentence is entirely accurate, as the Foreign Secretary later expanded upon while trying to extricate himself from his absurd initial pronouncement:

Suicide bombing is not remotely a spontaneous act by individuals. It is an action organised by some very evil terrorist leaders who have hatred for the state of Israel.

In this, he echoes the observation of terrorism expert Walter Laqueur in his excellent survey of current terrorist movements No End to War:

The suicide terrorist is only the last link in a chain. There is no spontaneous suicide terrorism. The candidates are chosen by those in charge of the organization. The suicide terrorists are indoctrinated and trained - receiving intelligence information to guide them - and eventually are given the arms and explosives to carry out their mission. The people who guide suicide terrorists have their political agenda. They organize the missions not as a purposeless manifestation of despair but to attain a certain political aim. While the suicide terrorist may be unstoppable, those behind him are certainly not; they can be deterred by inflicting unacceptable damage on them. Thus the leadership of the Lebanese Hizbullah after years of suicide terrorism [a tactic that it initiated in the early 1980s] discontinued these operations realizing that they were no longer very effective.

This is the rationale of Israel’s actions, and it is a compelling one. Assassinating terrorist leaders is an extreme course, and one that no democracy can undertake lightly. Yet Javier Solana (not a politician but an international civil servant, whom I did not elect and who doesn’t represent my views) is exactly wrong in describing the assassination of Yassin as bad for the peace process: it is a fillip for the peace process, and not only because one of the progenitors of terror is no longer on the scene.

A 'peace process' - a term that is both cliche and obfuscation - is effective only if it binds all parties rather than one alone. Otherwise it may stimulate further violence by undermining deterrence and removing constraints on terrorist organisations. Israeli voters have lost faith in this peace process because the Palestinian Authority has for years ignored its obligations to apprehend, and has tacitly encouraged, the bombers of buses, discotheques and restaurants. Any responsible government has the right, indeed the duty, to protect its citizens rather than place its faith in agreements and negotiations that are manifestly not respected by its interlocutors. In discharging that duty, Israel fights for a wider cause than her national security alone.

I'm off...

... for a couple of days. Back at the weekend.