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he legacy of the Six-Day War Posted By Melanie Phillips On May 29, 2007 @ 4:57 pm In Diary | Comments Disabled I attended an excellent seminar yesterday in Jerusalem, run by the estimable Shalem Centre, on the legacy of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs, the 40th anniversary of which falls next week. Michael Oren, a notable historian of that war who has been mining the treasure trove of recently de-classified documents about it, related how, during the period leading up to June 1967 when attacks upon Israel were mounting, the tension in Israel became unbearable as...

I have written an article for this week’s Spectator magazine about Dave Gaubatz, a former USAF special agent who says that in 2003 he discovered four of Saddam’s WMD bunkers — only for the Iraq Survey Group to fail to excavate these sites, allowing the material to be looted by the Iraqis, Syrians and Russia and taken to Syria. If Mr Gaubatz is correct, it means two things: that the invasion of Iraq was more than justified on the grounds originally given, that Saddam was in breach of the terms of the ceasefire of the 1991 war and that he...

Spectator, 20 April 2007. It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Dave Gaubatz, however, says you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know because he found the sites where he is certain they...

It's a fair bet that you've never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It's also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch. Dave Gaubatz, however, says you could not be more wrong. Saddam's WMD did exist. He should know because because he found the sites... the American administration failed to act on his information, 'lost' his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam's WMD to end up in...

Britain on its knees The British marine hostage saga is a debacle of the first order – a grim parable of the degraded state to which Britain has now descended and an alarming portent for the free world in its fight to survive. Relief at the safe return of the 15 sailors, and the fact that we must always bear in mind that none of us knows how we would ourselves behave in such circumstances, cannot nevertheless mitigate the sickening realisation that the hostage fiasco is another terrible milestone in the west’s current suicidal trajectory of decadence and moral collapse....

The appeasement of Iran Daily Mail, 28 March 2007 Admiral Lord Nelson must be revolving in his grave. While on patrol in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq, 15 Royal Marines and sailors were seized by Iran on a trumped up charge that they had entered Iranian waters. Six days on and there is no sign of their release. On the contrary, Iran has stepped up its aggression, threatening to charge the kidnapped marines with espionage and even denying them British consular access. We have been here before. Three years ago, six Royal Marines and two sailors were abducted...

Coming from Britain to Canberra to interview members of the Australian government is like leaving a fetid malarial swamp to be douched with fresh cold water from a mountain spring. These guys are so on-side in the great fight for civilisation against barbarism that they make ‘Bush’s poodle’ Tony Blair sound like a Harold Pinter wannabe on a bad day in Basra. As Britain impatiently awaits the disappearance of the Prime Minister it has impaled on the turnpike of Iraq, as it pulls troops out and as both Gordon Brown and David Cameron delicately signal that they will distance themselves...

Leading UK columnist Phillips trying to convince Brits their country is threatened by radical Islam. Much has been written over the last couple of years of the exodus of Jews from France. In the face of a wave of violent anti-Semitism, thousands have left Paris, Strasbourg and Marseilles for Israel. In certain middle-class neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Netanya and Ashdod, it's impossible not to notice them. Last week's aliya figures from the Jewish Agency disclosed another trend: Quietly, without fanfare, another community seems to be on the move. Immigration from Britain was up by 45 percent in 2006. In absolute numbers...

I am currently in America. The Republicans I have been meeting are remarkably upbeat about the Democrat victory in the mid-term elections. Partly, this is because they are so disenchanted with President Bush who they think has long lost the plot. Partly it’s because at this stage in the electoral cycle the President – whoever he is – has generally run out of steam anyway. But mainly it’s because they have a win-win view of the Democrats’ dilemma. Either, the Republicans think, the hard realities of coping with defending the country against terrorism at home and facing up to the...

Obsession I have just viewed the film ?Obsession?, the documentary about radical Islam?s war on the west, extracts from which were shown on Fox News in the US at the weekend and which you can read about on this website. It should be made compulsory viewing for every politician and pundit who clings to the misguided belief that all we face is terrorism rooted in various grievances around the world. It is the single most powerful and terrifying public exposition of the fact that a global Islamic jihad is now being waged from Bali to Istanbul, from Chechnya to Madrid,...

This essay asks two questions: Are Europeans in the throes of passive cultural and political suicide as they ignore the threat of fanatical Muslims in their communities? And if so, have the leaders of the Democratic Party in America joined the Europeans in sleepwalking towards a precipice? My main source for answering the first question is a book review titled Suicide of the West, by Theodore Dalrymple which appeared in the Clairmont Review of Books, Fall 2006. Dalrymple reviewed three books in pursuit of his theme of the "Suicide of the West" — namely, Why the Continent's Crisis is America's...

October 24, 2006 Britain is turning on the US, at its own peril USA Today, 24 October 2006 Everyone knows that Europe is a continent stuffed with craven, terror-appeasing fromages who loathe America. Britain, by contrast, led by the lion-hearted Tony Blair, is full of stalwarts who stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the defense of the West. Right? Wrong. Fury at Prime Minister Blair for being President Bush’s “poodle” has reached such a pitch that the most successful Labor prime minister in memory is being forced out of office because of his support for U.S. policy...

How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it would appear to be. An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour. So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff. So what was printed on those leaflets that was so threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the law? Why, none other than the majestic words of...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

The London bombings that on July 7, 2005 rocked a once-thought solid nation to its core and raised deep questions about the future of England. Eerily mirroring the September 11th attacks on the United States, the attacks on Britain brought Britain face to face with a dark secret about itself. The terrorists who had carried out this atrocity were not foreign marauders but British-born Muslims who had been living among ordinary Britons for decades. Melanie Phillips, acclaimed author of Londonistan, sits down with Steve Emerson to talk about the legacy of the bombings, what steps her country has taken to...

On July 7, the United Kingdom observed the first anniversary of the bus and Underground attacks in London that claimed fifty-two lives. One year later, according to the New York Times, “Britons are still asking what inspired the onslaught by British-born Muslims and whether the dark undercurrents of July 7, 2005, could resurface in a new attack.” If they really are asking whether such an attack could happen again, there’s a new book they ought to read. It is titled Londonistan, by British journalist Melanie Phillips. It is Phillips’s response to what she calls Britain’s state of denial regarding the...

On July 7, the United Kingdom observed the first anniversary of the bus and Underground attacks in London that claimed fifty-two lives. One year later, according to the New York Times, "Britons are still asking what inspired the onslaught by British-born Muslims and whether the dark undercurrents of July 7, 2005, could resurface in a new attack." If they really are asking whether such an attack could happen again, there's a new book they ought to read. It is titled Londonistan, by British journalist Melanie Phillips. It is Phillips's response to what she calls Britain's state of denial regarding the...

I have just taken part in a debate on the Jeremy Vine show with the Conservative MP John Gummer about the anti-American protests which are dogging and interrupting the progress of Condoleezza Rice as she visits the Blackburn constituency of her friend the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. You can listen again to this item here. It is a telling commentary in itself on the times in which we are living that a Conservative politician took the line that the protests were entirely justified because the Americans are so awful and they are doing such terrible things in Iraq and we...

I was abroad all last week and so have only just been catching up with the reaction in Britain to the creation of Hamastan in the West Bank and Gaza. As one might have expected, much of it has been a woeful combination of the staggeringly ignorant and the wilfully blind. The prevalent view seems to be that a) now they have the weight of responsibility on their shoulders, Hamas will be forced to become more moderate b) only if we talk to them will we have any chance of persuading them away from violence and into a peaceful democratic...

The day before Britain's second bombing, London's mayor made a series of statements that came close to justifying suicide bombings and even providing incitement to others to carry out further attacks LONDON — Shortly before yesterday's attacks, a poster campaign was launched to display London's spirit of defiance in the face of terrorism. In Churchillian tones, the poster declared that the city was 'united in the face of these attacks' and that Londoners 'will not let anyone divide them'. The message was signed by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Immediately after the bombings two weeks previously, he struck a...

LONDON — The sickening atrocities were shockingly all too predictable. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens warned long ago that they were 'inevitable'. As time went on after 9/11 with no British attacks, police and security experts repeatedly warned that there was no room for complacency and that the only reason attacks had not occurred was because a number of attempts had been foiled. And yet, despite all this the brutal truth is that in many respects this country has simply not taken the terrorist threat seriously enough. Flinching from the tough-minded measures that cried out to be taken,...

As I predicted yesterday, a number of commentators have rushed to blame Tony Blair and President Bush for causing yesterday’s carnage in London by having the effrontery to defend their countries against the war declared upon the west. Not that they see it that way, of course — the west’s defence is deemed to be aggression and the Islamist jihad merely an act of self-defence. Thus the ageing revolutionary Tariq Ali writes in the Guardian: ‘The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Just because these three wars are reported sporadically and mean little...

Le Monde has just been found guilty of defamation against the Jewish people, the courts are no place to handle European anti-Semitism Since the intensification of the Palestinian jihad five years ago, Britain and Europe have been convulsed by an eruption of virulent anti-Jewish hatred based on the systematic lies, libels and demonisation directed at Israel by the media and intelligentsia. Still reading? Well done. Others will no doubt already have thrown this article across the room in disgust. For conventional wisdom has it that there has been no upsurge of anti-Jewish hatred, only legitimate attacks on Israel which are...

With respect, the government does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting on top of the yob culture about which the Prime Minister professes to be so concerned. The situation is dire. Vicious, even sadistic crime is commonplace. Disorder and threatening behaviour are a modern plague, and whole communities are under siege from crime and yobbery. Abigail Witchalls remains paralysed having been savagely stabbed in the neck while pushing her 21-month old son in his buggy. Phil Carroll, a father of four, was left in a critical condition after being attacked by two hooded youths who were part...

Fairness, impartiality and objectivity are the essence of public service broadcast journalism. This understanding is enshrined in the BBC’s charter and provides a key justification for the licence fee. Now, however, an explosive insider’s account threatens to blow this cosy assumption clean out of the water as a fraud upon the public. Robin Aitken, who spent his entire career as a BBC journalist, has written a book accusing the BBC of institutionalised leftism. This is by no means the first time such an accusation has been levelled, but generally such critics have been dismissed as parti-pris. This is why Aitken’s...

Advertisement In recent weeks, as the British general election campaign has loomed, it has seemed as if an anti-Jewish virus has been unleashed by the Left. Labor election posters, now withdrawn, portrayed the Jewish leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, as a sinister cross between Fagin and Svengali. A Labor minister, Peter Hain, referred to Howard as an "attack mongrel." And in the House of Lords, a Muslim Labor peer hosted a rabid Swedish anti-Semite who informed his audience of parliamentarians that the Jews controlled the mass media, that they were treacherous and that British Muslims would turn the...

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Is the unimaginable about to happen and the Conservative Party to snatch triumph from near-extinction by winning the general election? Even to ask the question is to acknowledge the seemingly overwhelming odds against such a suggestion. For the Tories to achieve the electoral swing needed to overturn Labour’s massive majority would entail, in the eyes of many, the biggest comeback since Lazarus. But we live in disoriented and volatile times. Polls fluctuate; and the Tories have recently been dissolving Labour’s lead like a blow-torch on an ice sculpture. Beyond the polls, there is now...

Last Thursday, BBC Radio Four's religious homily slot, Thought for the Day, featured the Rev Dr John Bell, a Scottish cleric. By way of introducing some platitudes about peace in the Middle East, Dr Bell said the following: "Two years ago, in a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver, I talked to a waiter called Adam who was an Arab Israeli. That means that he was of Palestinian Muslim stock, born in the State of Israel and, like his Jewish compatriots, he had been conscripted into the Israeli Army. There he had distinguished himself as a good soldier and was made a...

The full extent of the disaster caused by the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy is only now becoming apparent. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that more than 1000 girls aged 14 had abortions last year. In addition, 148 abortions were performed on girls aged between 11 and 13. About 3,500 girls aged under 16 have pregnancies terminated every year. And among the youngest age group, the number of abortions jumped last year by nine per cent. Small wonder that until a week ago the Government was refusing to disclose these statistics on the spurious grounds that...

This week, Strasbourg judges bestowed upon us long-suffering Britons yet another human right — the right to be rude and inaccurate about someone at public expense. In declaring that Helen Steel and David Morris, the so-called ‘McLibel Two’, should have been publicly funded in the successful libel case brought against them by McDonald’s, the European Court of Human Rights effectively said that taxpayers should foot the bill for individuals to malign corporations and other individuals. Almost every day, it seems, the human rights industry throws up fresh absurdities as it trains its legal guns on what it deems to be...

When at the age of 14 Luke Mitchell murdered his girlfriend Jodi Jones, he tied her up, slit her throat and then mutilated her body. After Mitchell, now 16, was convicted at Edinburgh High Court last week the judge, Lord Nimmo Smith, said it was one of the worst cases of murder he had seen for years, and he gave him the longest sentence ever passed on a youth in Scotland. This horrific crime makes you wonder how any human being could do something so inhuman. The answer is not hard to find. The court heard that Mitchell was influenced...

Tony Blair’s staunch support for President Bush over Iraq has done the Labour Prime Minister great electoral damage in Britain, not least among the country’s 1.8 million Muslims. Despite being traditional Labour voters, many are now threatening at the forthcoming general election to support either the Liberal Democrats, who have taken a strong line against the war, or Respect, an alliance between the far-left MP George Galloway and Islamic fundamentalists. The British government’s reaction has been a panicky attempt to appease the Muslim community. In particular, there have been suspicions that a proposal to outlaw incitement to religious hatred is...

I’d like to start with three short anecdotes. A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk: ‘Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel?’ ‘There is no case for Israel’, the counter clerk replied. A distinguished and influential military figure confided to me that Rupert Murdoch had given a personal order that articles in the Times against the Iraq war should be drastically limited — and that he had done so, ‘on the instruction of the Jewish lobby in America’. Furthermore, George Bush had invaded Iraq because ‘he had Ariel...

The war within the west (1) An article in the Guardian provides an unconsciously revealing and quite terrifying insight into the almost unlimited capacity of the British and European establishment for self-delusion over the threat to the west from radical Islamism. Alastair Crooke is a former British intelligence officer who worked in the Middle East, Ireland and Afghanistan, and until last year was a special adviser to Javier Solana, the European Union high representative. There is so much that is wrong and muddled about his argument it is hard to know where to begin. He claims first of all...

The New Frontiers Foundation think-tank has published an utterly extraordinary and brilliant essay [NEW FRONTIERS IN DEFENCE: BETWEEN GLOBAL OPPORTUNITIES AND CONTINENTAL POLICING] which should be compulsory reading for all in Britain’s power elites. It is the most important document I have seen produced by anyone in government for a very long time. It has been written anonymously by someone described only as ‘a senior UK official who has worked on issues of foreign and security policy for most of his professional life’. He has delivered a powerful cri de coeur that Britain, having never recovered from its post-Suez nervous...

The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, is reported in the Times as warning against complacency over the prospects of an Islamist terrorist attack on Britain. She said: ‘ “There is a serious and sustained threat of terrorist attacks against UK interests at home and abroad. The terrorists are inventive, adaptable and patient; their planning includes a wide range of methods to attack us”. She suspected that there might be people in the CBI “who doubt this description of the threat or perhaps question the language used to describe its scale… But I would urge you to consider the events of...

Astonishingly, Michael Howard has declined to express any pleasure at the re-election of President George W Bush, and defiantly insisted instead that he would not allow the White House to tell him how to do his job. Such coolness towards the President is all the more remarkable, since this week Tony Blair gets a privileged early audience with President Bush to discuss Iraq and the Middle East. A Labour Prime Minister is thus being rewarded by a Republican President for his loyalty, while the Tory leader appears merely to have deepened the rift that has developed with the Bush administration...

With the re-election of President George W Bush, the United States has shown that — as a contemporary book has famously claimed — America really is from Mars, while Britain and Europe are from Venus.Both the election result and the reaction to it here suggest that America inhabits a completely different political universe from Britain. In America, President Bush won in large measure because he championed moral virtue. In Britain, by contrast, politicians believe that morality is the political kiss of death. In America, a politician has won because he correctly identified and championed the values of the mainstream. In...

This has got to be one of the strangest, as well as most momentous, American presidential elections in history. It is momentous because the choice being made tomorrow by American voters is not just between two rival candidates but between two diametrically opposed views of the world. It is a choice on which the very future of the west and its values may hang.That is why passions are running so extraordinarily high, not just in America but in Britain and other countries where the nail-biting last throes of the US electoral drama have thrust almost everything else into the shadows.But...

Adultery undermines liberal democracy, but the recent Turkish proposal to outlaw it was fatuous (and fascistic) The Turkish government recently announced that it intended to make adultery a criminal offence. This was not altogether surprising, since the Turkish government adheres to the principles of Islam, under whose laws adultery is a crime punishable by flogging or execution. Nevertheless, it caused such uproar among more progressive Turks, not to mention horrifying the EU, which threatened to tear up Turkey’s membership application as a result, that the Turkish government has now binned the proposal (perversely, along with a raft of reforms designed...

Debate over Iraq, 23 September 2004Panel contribution at debate held at the Imperial War Museum among contributors to 'Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War', published by Cecil Woolf Publishers.When the war in Iraq started, I believed that it was legally justified and morally imperative. Saddam posed a threat to the world. And it was legal because the combination of UN resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 expressly allowed all reasonable means to be taken if Saddam was in breach of the ceasefire condition at the end of the first Gulf War. This condition required him to prove...

The madness continues to escalate. The British ambsassador to Italy, Sir Ivor Roberts, has been outed for having said: ‘If anyone is ready to celebrate the re-election of Bush it is al-Qaeda’. It rates alongside the infamous remark by the French ambassador to Britain that Israel was a ‘shitty little country’ as a revelation, not so much of one diplomat’s maladroit absence of diplomacy but the corrupted mindset of a country’s foreign policy establishment. Indeed, as the Times reported, the ambassador revealed his true agenda by adding that the Jews were behind it all. The Corriere della Serra 'also quoted...

It was just possible, in theory, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, might have confounded those who were aghast that he should choose to commemorate 9/11 by addressing one of the major seats of Islamic learning, Al Azhar University in Cairo. There was the faintest of hopes that he might have used the occasion to speak out bravely against the evil being perpetrated in the name of Islam, and to call upon all people of true faith in the Muslim world to join in the attempt to end it. Alas, his address revealed an Archbishop on his knees...

Due to pressure of work, this is the first opportunity I have had to comment here on the edition of Radio Four's Any Questions last weekend on which I was a panellist. It was, as so many of these discussions now turn out to be, a distressing and alarming experience. The first issue was the composition of the panel. Three of the four panellists — Professor Haleh Afshah, an Iranian feminist from York University, the environmental campaigner Jonathan Porritt and Andrew Gowers, editor of the Financial Times, all take a left-wing or appeasement position on terrorism, Iraq and Israel, as...

One of the repeated mantras of the anti-war crowd is that the war in Iraq has unleashed the furies of Islamist terror. If only Britain and the US had not invaded and thus enraged the Muslim world, they would not be in the front line for attack. If only they had acted like France. Well, now the kidnapping of the French hostages provides the clearest repudiation of that idiotic and ignorant opinion. The French hostages have been taken purely in order to force France to abandon its new law banning the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in schools. It is...

Not for the first time, the Observer provides the clearest, fairest and most authoritative account of the latest installment of the defence against terror. The accounts in the rest of the media in the past few days about the American warnings and then the arrests in Britain of al Qaeda suspects have been quite bewildering. First, there were the warnings from US Homeland Security about imminent threats to various US landmark institutions, round which rings of steel were hastily erected. Almost immediately, the appeaseniks started claiming that the whole thing was a post-Democratic Convention stunt by President Bush -- a...

The Wall Street Journal has skewered John Kerry over his crassly opportunistic, morally and intellectually vacuous speech to the Democratic Convention. Having rightly torn into him for facing all ways over both Iraq and any future theatre of engagement in the war against the west -- and having also sharply criticised President Bush for not properly targeting Kerry's key weakness -- the Journal delivers the following devastating put-down: 'Mr. Kerry's votes were consistently dovish and wrong and are thus a harbinger of weakness if elected. While he now praises Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s Mr. Kerry fought every one of...

The world terror supporters' club, aka the UN, has told Israel to tear down its security barrier. This follows the ruling by the terror court, the ICJ, that the barrier is illegal (see below). Neither of these decisions is binding, but they are intended to build up the global demonisation of Israel as a pariah state, the necessary prelude to its destruction. Meanwhile, in the US where Christian support for Israel is so strong, the General Asssembly of the Presbyterian Church has equated Israel with apartheid South Africa and called for universal divestment from it. These developments all signal a...

The Peter Pan establishment Daily Mail, 12 June 2004 In 1969, I attended an entrance interview at Warwick university. The don who interviewed me was an Amazonian, hippyish figure with wild hair and strings of beads, in a study draped with animal skins and exotic hangings. Why, she asked, did I want to come to university? I gave a toe-curlingly boring reply which had something to do with education. ‘Absolute rubbish’, she roundly declared. ‘You will come to university to subvert society, smoke pot and sleep around’. I was, to put it mildly, astounded (and, I have to confess, impressed;...

So now we see in all their starkness the double standards of the western media. Day after day, the shocking images from Abu Ghraib prison have been plastered all over the media. Yes, the abuse they have revealed is disgusting and appalling and it is right that it should be exposed and that we should be horrified. But nowhere near this attention is being paid to far worse barbarism being committed by our enemies. As Jeff Jacoby observes in the Boston Globe: 'Poor Nick Berg. The anybody-but-Bush crowd isn't going to rush to publicize his terrible fate with anything like...