Forget Ebola. It’s Tolerance that’ll finish us first.

Liberals claim to be all about tolerance, and it’s tolerance that is threatening to destroy so much of what we value and hold dear.

Netanyahu is no liberal but he is an inveterate tolerator. Witness the situation in Jerusalem where it’s been 9 months since the so-called ‘silent intifada’ really started. Random stoning of cars escalated to petrol bombings and then the blowing up of a city petrol station. Jostling of yeshiva students in the Old City graduated to knife attacks. And what became almost daily Arab attacks on the new light railway culminated horribly last week in the death of a little baby in the deliberate ramming of a line of waiting passengers.  
In the face of public anger, the border police now admit they’ve been prevented ‘like dolls’ from taking firm action by a government that hoped the problem might go away.

But just like graffiti on a wall, if you fail to clean up quickly you will only get much, much, more … until it’s all over the place and out of control.
Netanyahu applied the same foolish tolerance to rocket fire from Gaza. A year ago it was just monthly. Then by his turning the other cheek it became weekly and then daily. The miracle that most missiles fell into open spaces only encouraged that complacency until that tolerance so emboldened the enemy that Israel wound up with 50 days of incessant rocket fire all the way up to Hadera.
The clear lesson is that there needs to be ZERO tolerance for this kind of thing. If we had cracked down hard on the first light railway attack and the first Gaza rockets, things would have turned out very differently. We would have prevented many deaths and millions of shekels in damages and war costs.

Further afield, tolerance is undermining and endangering society and world order.  Why do we tolerate radical leftist professors who are poisoning the minds of our university students, and Islamic hate preachers infiltrating our student unions? Why do we tolerate immigrants who stridently reject the norms and ethos of the host country? If you are invited into someone’s home, do you not show consideration and respect? Or do you just dump your stuff at the door, put your feet up on the table and demand a free meal without any offending ingredients?

Then there are government employees, who it seems cannot ever get fired no matter how incompetent they may be. Where I live in the UK, this charge has been levelled at  the Home Office and Border Agency both of which have been labelled as ‘unfit for purpose’ for bungling deportation orders for illegal immigrants and failing to stop convicted killers and rapists waltzing in and out of Britain from their home countries in Eastern Europe. There’ll be lots of official enquiries but, you can bet next year’s salary, no-one will be fired or step down.
In America there’s been so much incompetence exposed in the Obama administration – the IRS, Obamacare, Benghazi etc. – that the common refrain is: “What does someone have to do to get fired by this administration?” 

Which brings me back to Ebola.

On 9-11 President Bush dramatically grounded all aircraft flying over the United States. It was a bold and unprecedented order.  No question that if Ebola ever escaped into a major US city there could be a hundredfold more deaths than on 9-11. And yet Obama’s ‘health experts’ insist a travel ban on Africa is unnecessary and would be ‘counter-productive’. 
Now we hear that a doctor who had been working at the epicentre of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea casually flew back to New York, rode the subway, went bowling and socialising before his temperature shot up to 103.  At the very least, ordinary citizens might have expected the authorities to screen or quarantine returning doctors and nurses who had been in direct contact with Ebola patients. Did they stop this doctor when he boarded in Africa? Or when he landed at Kennedy?
And what about the doctor himself?  He knew where he had been. Was it responsible or reasonable of him not to take basic precautions of his own?  
They call themselves ‘Doctors Without Borders’. I’d call them Doctors Without Sense.
As usual, there are cries of foul and incompetence. But it will make no difference. No-one will get fired.  It will just be another thing tolerated.

It’s a sick truism that the only place heads do roll is in the sands of Iraq.
And that too is down to tolerance.
Tolerance of pure evil.
The evil is nothing new, only its execution.

But even now America and Europe are tolerating the purveyors of Islamic fundamentalism and murderous Jihad. They like to call it ‘engagement’ but it is really the same old appeasement which so emboldened Hitler to plunge the world into war. It’s all in the labelling – just like the toxic debt which brought down Wall Street in 2008 was packaged as CDOs and other innocuous derivatives. Maybe they’ll to the same to nuclear waste one day.

Whether it’s tolerating Iran so determined to deploy the first Islamic nuclear bomb, or Qatar as paymasters of Hamas, or Saudi Arabia the font of Wahhabist fundamentalism and home to most of the 9-11 hijackers. These terror capitals are to be shunned, not tolerated.

Mayor Rudi Giuliani famously cleaned up street crime in New York with a simple but firm doctrine of Zero Tolerance.

We need strong world leaders to apply that same doctrine in foreign policy and government service.

Are we getting soft in the head ...?

It happens all the time.
A neighbor knocks on your door and says: “I’m having some people round, would you mind if I parked in your driveway?”
But how would it be if you knocked on your neighbor’s door and said “I promise I won’t park in my own driveway.”
He’d be pretty astonished and think you were a bit soft in the head.

But that is exactly what Prime Minister Netanyahu did this week.

He sent a message to Jordan’s King Abdullah, reassuring him that he has no intention of allowing Jews to pray on their own sovereign and biblical Temple Mount.
The last thing I would ever call Bibi is soft in the head. But you do have to wonder why he felt it necessary to make such a grovelling statement, least of all to the King of Jordan.

Let’s not forget how Jordan treated the Old City after taking occupation of Jerusalem in 1948 and beginning an ethnic cleansing of its centuries-old Jewish population. Not content with removing the Jews, they destroyed all the synagogues – 58 in all, including the magnificent Hurva shul which has been so beautifully restored under Jewish liberation.
For the 19 years of its occupation of Jerusalem, Jordan refused to abide by the Armistice Agreement entitling Jews to have access to their holiest site, the Western Wall. Instead only the privileged few were able to snatch glimpses from Mt Zion on appointed days.

Today Jordan needs Israel more than we need them. Aside from saving his father King Hussein from more than one Arab assassination attempt, Abdullah knows the Jordan River is his safest border. He faces the new ISIS threat from the East and an unstable Syria to the North. And he’s probably shrewd enough to have figured out that the State of Israel will survive a lot longer than the crumbling House of Saud in the South.
And, for all his flag-waving for the Palestinian cause, the Jordanian King is terrified that Abbas will ever get control of the West Bank. He knows it will rapidly be taken over by radicals like Hamas and subsumed into the federation of terror enclaves funded by Iran and Qatar.

In spite of these stark realities, Netanyahu still felt it necessary to kowtow to an Arab king who occupies the East Bank of the homeland which was mandated to Jews by the League of Nations. The part that Britain stole from that mandate to gift to his grandfather. The same Britain whose parliament was last week so keen to dispossess us of our West Bank as well.

And, whilst on the subject of that vote – it was not just about dispossession of the West Bank. It’s inevitably about the creation of a new terror front on the narrowest part of our tiny Jewish state. The diehard Arabists of the British Foreign Office hope to achieve what they set out to do in 1948; leaving their arms and equipment for the Arabs to smother the new-born Jewish state in its cradle.


Since 1948 we have celebrated independence 66 times. But we are fooling ourselves with parades, street parties and concerts. True independence means asserting our national and sovereign rights in our own land.

This is our driveway. We park here.
We come and go as we please.