Priorities

Letter to London Daily Telegraph

Sir: On Wednesday more than 150 people lost their lives and 542 were wounded in an unprecedented spate of 11 bombings in Iraq. I find it appalling that you found no place for this story on your front page the following morning. It was devoted almost entirely to Prince Harry's 21st birthday interview and two other minor reports about store cards and the raising of the retirement age.

Is this responsible journalism? I would have expected less callousness and insensitivity from the cheapest tabloids, but hardly from a newspaper of your pedigree and which has been my daily for 20 years.

Perhaps the answer is that you are circulation-led, and that people don't want to read headlines about carnage and human suffering so far away from their backyard. If so, your readers need to be reminded that this is very much a local-interest story. Wednesday's mass killers in Iraq are from the same brood as the London bombers of 7th July. And Iraq is a place where hundreds of our troops risk their lives daily in defence of the freedom and democracy we all cherish, but will stand to lose through such indifference.

9/11 : A Bad Day to Bury the Holocaust

I expected lots of things from my morning newspaper on this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11. Tributes to the victims and the fire-fighters. Perhaps even news of another bin Laden outrage somewhere in the world to remind the infidels who is calling the shots.

Living in London, I have come to expect the most skewed and specious reports appearing in our news media, especially where it concerns anything to do with the Jewish nation.

But today's front page left me totally nonplussed. For today, of ALL days, plans were revealed to abolish Holocaust Memorial Day because it offends Muslims.

It took almost 50 years for Jews to install a Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain and just 4 years for Muslims to scupper it. Let’s face it; this kind of decision could hardly have been made much closer to 9/11. Few people would have cared about sensitivity to Muslim feelings in 2002 or even 2003. But in 2005? Well, by now all seems to have been conveniently forgotten.

The nation of Islam has yet to apologise convincingly for the immolation of thousands of innocent souls in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon at the hands of its Jihadist agents. And yet, barely two months after the London bombings, we fret over these people’s sensitivities in a context of mass murder?

This is one of those days I am glad my late father was spared from seeing. Had he survived beyond the age of 42 from the heart disease he contracted in Auschwitz, he would probably have been against the idea of a Holocaust Day. He never expected English people to shed tears for Jews then or in the future. All he ever wanted was for the world to know what happened to him, his parents and 6 million of his people. How supposedly civilised and educated people stood idly by as man committed the most unbelievable atrocities against fellow human beings. How, in effect, people turned into something less than animals.

Beyond the Nazi death machine, can there be any better contemporary example of sub-animal behaviour than those who calmly turned passenger planes into firebombs 4 years ago today? And anything more obscene than those of their ilk who danced in the streets in celebration of 3,000 deaths and many times that number of shattered lives of spouses and dependants?

Is not September 11th THE most appropriate day of any year to declare: We dare not ignore the lessons of history? That we can never turn a blind eye to the mass murder of innocents? That to do so will merely encourage others to do the same?

On this September 11th, Tony Blair’s advisors did just the opposite.

They sought to bury history.

And for what?

For peace (with Muslims) in our time?

Dream-on Britain!

KATif and KATrina

There seems to be no end to the parallels being drawn between the New Orleans flood catastrophe and the settlement expulsions in Israel.

From the statistical: numbers of people affected as a percentage of total population. To the spiritual: that this is divine punishment for American pressure for the disengagement.

For me, it's simple.

One was an act of G-d. The other... a man-made disaster.

Bring Back the Mandate

Bring back the Mandate to Palestine? What an absurd suggestion, least of all coming from an ardent admirer of Menachem Begin who did more than most to remove the British from this country.

However, if there is to be a new state of Palestine to be established behind our newest border at Gaza, I say that it should be born out of the same mandatory conditions from which the State of Israel emerged. The parallels are interesting and ironic.

The carve-up of the Middle East into ‘Mandatories’ was initiated by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, using Britain and France as ‘big brothers’ to normalise the territories formerly controlled by the disintegrated Ottoman Empire. Whilst the mandate for Palestine was supposed to be based on the principles of the Balfour Declaration, its British trustees made it their business to frustrate, undermine and ultimately endanger the builders of the Jewish National Home. The British saw their primary role as protecting the majority Arab population and ensuring that they would not be undermined by Jewish immigrants seeking to take over their land and resources. Whilst Jews struggled to procure essential supplies, fuel and, ultimately, arms and ammunition, these resources flowed freely to the Arabs unhindered at checkpoints and seaports.

Isn’t this exactly what is needed for the new state of Palestine? Its Arab population has been undermined for decades by outsiders like Iran’s mullahs, Saudi Arabia’s sheikhs, and Syria’s dictators not to mention the Egyptian born Yasser Arafat. The world now waits to see whether the Palestinian Authority will survive as a fledgling state or if it will be overrun by Hamas and turned into a terrorist kleptocracy. Currently all the bets are on Hamas.

So I say, let the mandate return to Palestine. Let it support Abbas and his people with the same resolve as the British supported the Mufti. Let it control the arms smuggling tunnels just as fiercely as the British operated their roadblocks against the Jews. And if Gaza is to have its own international seaport, let the new mandatory force turn back Iranian arms shipments with the same cold-blooded resolve as they turned back Jewish refugees to face certain death in Nazi-occupied Europe. And let them hang Hamas terrorists with the same convenient interpretation of the Geneva Convention as the British justified the hanging of seven heroes of the Irgun resistance in 1947.

The sad truth is that, for us, the mandate never really did come to an end. Look at us now. With all the world-beating progress we have made in 57 years, we have still been living under someone else’s mandate. Whether it’s the US, the EU, the Quartet or the UN. In all that time ‘the powers that be’ have presumed to re-draw the borders of our sovereign nation… all to keep their oil supplies flowing and, more recently, to keep terrorism off their own streets. Having travelled a treacherous route through Camp David, Madrid, Oslo, Wye, Taba and Sharm the State of Israel is now told it needs a Road Map.

How little has changed since the League of Nations’ mandate was created. It was on a sunny April day in 1920, in the small Italian town of San Remo that officials from Britain and France drew up a new map of the Middle East whilst the American ambassador read a newspaper in his garden. Has this process not continued, with the same indifference to our people, over the last 50 years?

The only way to purge this latent mandate is with the same tactics as we forced the end of the British mandate. We must stop looking and acting like a client state and be prepared to assert our rights to this land with active resistance to external control over our borders and security needs. However daunting it may seem to upset our strongest ally in the US or our largest trading partners in the EU, it would be a far lesser challenge than our fledgling nation stood up to in 1948, when the price of ending the British mandate was having to face invasion by five Arab armies.

This article first appeared in the Jewish Press