The war within the west

I wondered who would be the first person in Britain to openly blame the Jews for the London bombings. Step forward for the garland of hatred Professor Sir Bernard Crick, the government's former adviser on citizenship. On BBC Radio Four's Today programme (0852) this morning, he said:

"It's not easily refuted that these kinds of protests…have been going on since the failure of Israel to follow the UN resolutions after the 1967 war."

Sir Bernard, whose speciality is politics and who is a biographer of George Orwell, has allowed gross prejudice to cloud his grasp of historical facts. Contrary to popular myth, the UN's most important resolutions concerning Israel (which ones he was referring to he did not specify) do not place unconditional obligations on Israel to give up the territories it occupied after the Six-Day War. They require it instead to give up "territories' — the absence of the definite article was deliberate — but not necessarily all of them, and then only if the Arab states that declared war on Israel and thus caused it to take the territories as an act of self-defence abandon that war. That has never happened. To repeat for the umpteenth time — Israel's occupation of those territories was not an act of aggression but an act of self-defence, and its continued presence there while war continues to be waged against it by Arabs pledged to its destruction is sanctioned under international law as a legitimate defensive measure.

There is no doubt that "Palestine" is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic death cult by propagating the big lie of Israeli aggression and oppression and thus inciting hatred and murderous hysteria towards the Jews among Muslims across the globe. To blame the Jews, who are the victims of this terrifying evil and are in the front line of fighting it, rather than those who are perpetrating the lies and racial libels which are fuelling it, is an act of wicked prejudice.

Sir Bernard Crick is not some marginal figure. He is at the heart of the Labour and British establishment. Moreover, the prejudice he voices is shared by a very significant proportion of that establishment. He is therefore a symptom of the moral sickness that has gripped Britain and which poses such terrible dangers to the defence of the west. The hatred of Israel -- and the prejudice against the Jewish people which squats at the core of that hatred -- lies at the very epicentre of the war that now rages. Until and unless this fact is grasped, along with the profound moral inversion that it has caused throughout the west, we will not win this fight for civilisation.