Today’s Jerusalem Post runs a commentary by Professor Gil Troy which should be read by anyone who is fed up with the kind of reactive, take-action-only-after-the-roof-has-fallen-in approach that has been a characteristic of pro-Israeli advocacy for far too long.

Troy pegs his piece off this year’s forthcoming “Israeli Apartheid Week” from March 1 to March 14, (yes, that’s right, their intellectual capacities do not even extend to knowing how many days there are in a week!). Events will be held in cities across the world and Troy sensibly suggests that action should be taken to ensure that the organisers and participants do not have things all their own way.

He offers for consideration a three-pronged strategy which he characterises as the “Three P’s”:

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If you thought that the Financial Times was the kind of news outlet that remained above the fray in its coverage and commentary on Israel’s predicament in the Middle East, you’d be wrong. A new, in-depth study by the respected media monitoring group Just Journalism shows that this quintessentially establishment newspaper yields to nobody in its anti-Israeli bias and its wilful distortion of Middle Eastern realities.

At this stage in the proceedings I should offer full disclosure: I am an advisory board member of Just Journalism and key quotes from a letter sent in my name accompanying the report have been quoted in several world media outlets from the New Republic to the Jerusalem Post.

The key findings of the report, taken from the Executive Summary, are as follows:

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In the latest non-story about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year, Britain’s Independent newspaper splashes an “exclusive” revelation across its front page today from an unnamed “high-ranking” Israeli commander saying that Israel “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza” by putting Palestinian civilians at risk to minimise the risk to Israeli soldiers.

The article is a garbled, evidence-free piece of anti-Israeli opportunism which appears designed to keep the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza high in the public consciousness. But the purpose behind the apparent absurdity of making a front page article out of such a flimsy pseudo-exclusive is revealed in an editorial accompanying the report which rehashes one of the most enduring calumnies in the arsenal of Israel’s detractors.

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Melanie Phillips — the outspoken and brilliant analyst of British establishment hypocrisy and denial over Islamist extremism — has once again become the target of a vicious and wholly dishonest attack for her courageous stance.

Long a hate figure among the weakest and the worst in Britain’s opinion forming classes, her prescient book Londonistan has been lambasted by a Guardian columnist who draws from a bizarre report by the University of Exeter’s European Muslim Research Centre which blames writers such as Phillips for fanning the flames of Islamophobia by having the effrontery to draw attention to Islamist extremism.

Bizarre, indeed deranged, as this line of thinking may be it is an all too familiar illustration of the mindset of a British establishment which simply cannot cope with the consequences of its decades-long love affair with multi-culturalist political correctness.

As Phillips rightly says in her blog in the Spectator (see link below): “The real agenda of this study is censorship by intimidation – to defame and smear all those who comment, however responsibly, on a matter of such intense public importance as Islamic extremism and terrorism.”

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Reasonable people can disagree over the wisdom of the Iraq war. But having watched Tony Blair’s performance at the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday — the fifth (!) attempt by the British establishment to find a smoking gun proving Blair “lied” about WMD and was little more than a “poodle” of George W. Bush, the notorious redneck — I am finally persuaded that on balance it was the right thing to do. The world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein and through six hours of testimony the former prime minister provided a cogent, compelling and reasoned set of arguments as to why that is the case.

He also showed a level of understanding about the dangers of WMD and the specific threat posed today by Iran that was a class above his critics whom he had no problem whatsoever in routing convincingly.

But the arguments about Tony Blair in general and the Iraq war in particular concern me less today than the sheer contempt shown by the BBC for basic standards of fair reporting as it once again confirmed its status as a propagandist standard bearer for liberal-left prejudices.

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