I'm sorry there's been so little on this site this week. Here are a few things I've seen or done.
Gerard Baker in The Times today aptly comments:
Let’s never lose sight of a simple chilling fact that unites the suicidal maniacs in Britain and the sweet reasonable hostage-saviours in Gaza. Hamas was the big winner this week. That makes us all, whether we’re sipping beers in pavement cafés in Israel, boarding planes in Glasgow or out for a ladies’ night in the Haymarket, much, much less safe.
I have an article this week in The Jewish Chronicle, which you can read here. It's an adaptation of my comments on this site a week ago about the Milibands, the Jews and foreign policy. You can also read David Aaronovitch's latest column for the same newspaper, entitled "Anti-Zionists should grow up". It refers to an anti-Zionist campaigner called Tony Greenstein, whom I met once more than 20 years ago and who has remained in my memory as the stupidest man I've ever met. I don't necessarily recommend your following this link but it will provide you with supporting material for that judgement.
Only on the letters page of The Guardian would you find an argument, expounded without irony, of the form "as Osama Bin Laden made clear..." (last letter on the page). Its author is maintaining that there are substantive causes in Western foreign policy for Muslim anger. The letter, like so much along the same lines that appears in that newspaper's comment pages, is inflammatory nonsense, but I was particularly taken with the notion that we ought to tailor our foreign policy to the demands of a man who asserts (in his 1998 statement "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God". It is, of course, strictly true that the jihadists hate us for, among many other reasons, our foreign policy. The only proper response is satisfaction that we have that effect on them.
On the same subject, I called after the 7/7 bombings for the sacking of the editor of The New Statesman, John Kampfner, on account of his emblazoning the front page with the preposterous and indecent message "Blair's bombs". The author of that cover story, John Pilger, this week pronounces the failed bombing of a nightclub in London and of Glasgow airport "Brown's bombs". I modestly direct you to irrefutable evidence I have previously cited that by the same criteria (which is to say, entirely bogus ones) all of these terrorist acts are in fact "Pilger's bombs". Unlike most of the writers listed to the left of this post, I have never once written for The New Statesman, and I expect the invitation to make this observation will be some time coming.
I took part this morning in a pre-recorded discussion for GMTV's Sunday programme (which goes out at some unearthly hour on Sunday morning: hence the pre-recording, and the unlikelihood that many of my readers will see it) with the civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti. We were debating how to respond to terrorist threats. In short, I feel there is a serious risk of underreacting to the fortunately incompetent attempted attacks of the past few days. There is of course a trade-off to be made between gaining intelligence about those who wish us harm and the popular disaffection that might arise through security measures. The classic instance is internment without trial and the euphemistically termed "deep interrogation" methods used in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s: the additional intelligence these practices yielded was slight, and the resentment they generated was great. The judgement comes down to how you assess the gravity of the threat. International law allows the suspension of some non-absolute rights (an absolute right would be a right not to be tortured) during national emergencies, and internment has been practised in wartime. The wartime cases of, for example, the appalling Oswald and Diana Mosley - who were incarcerated reasonably at the start of WWII, but unreasonably when the direct threat of invasion had eased - and the innocent and grossly maltreated Japanese-Americans indicate that the criterion of an emergency can be abused. But the current British constitutional settlement seems to me an entirely sensible one. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act of 2000 ensures that there is judicial scrutiny of intrusive measures such as the interception of communications, and we have not resorted to emergency war powers legislation. What I would like to see, however, is an easing of the criteria for holding suspects and eavesdropping on Internet communications. Our intelligence services and armed forces have strict rules of engagement, and we must be prepared that at some point - as nearly happened in the past week - these will fail.
