In a rare piece of good news from the UK, Baroness Tonge has been dismissed as spokesperson for the Liberal Democrat Party in the House of Lords after suggesting that Israel should investigate claims that members of its relief team in Haiti had been harvesting bodily organs and selling them on the black market.

Tonge has a sordid record of anti-Israel extremism. In 2004, she even went on record as saying she might have become a suicide bomber had she been born a Palestinian.

In her latest outburst, she associated herself with a medieval-style blood libel which was started last year by Sweden’s top selling newspaper Aftonbladet. The paper claimed that Israeli soldiers were murdering Palestinian children in order to harvest their bodily organs and sell them on the black market, possibly in conjunction with Jews in the United States. After Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt refused to distance his country from the story it spread like wildfire across the Muslim world and beyond.

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In a story almost too parodical to be true, it is being reported that Muslim groups in the United States (I repeat, “the United States”, not Europe), have issued a fatwa against body scanners now being introduced at airports to combat the threat from terrorism.

Cited by the Huffington Post, the Metro Detroit section of the freep.com website quotes The Fiqh Council of North America, a symposium comprising leading Islamic scholars, as saying:

“It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women…Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of faith. The Quran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.”

The ruling has also been supported by The Council on American-Islamic Relations which said:

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For those that have not yet seen the appalling events that took place at the UC-Irvine campus in California on Monday, watch this video of Israeli ambasador to the US, Michael Oren, trying to give a speech. I am rarely lost for words, but all I can say is that this is absolutely terrifying…

Click here for the video which is inside an editorial in the Jerusalem Post (and have a stiff drink at the ready). The second of the two videos featured is the one to watch if you don’t have time to watch both:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=168254

For a somewhat more extensive video, click here to see this youtube version produced by Standwithus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w96UR79TBw

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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