Britain’s new Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, is being quoted on Tuesday as employing the kind of deeply hostile rhetoric against Israel that is more usually associated with the extremist and activist community or with well known detractors of the Jewish state in the British media.

Cameron is quoted on the Conservative Home website — a popular site for grassroots supporters which is close to the party but which is not formally affiliated to it — as calling Gaza a “prison camp” in a speech he made while on a visit to Turkey. This sort of language lies at the softer end of an extreme form of discourse which routinely describes Gaza as an “open air prison”, or even a “concentration camp” and which always airbrushes Hamas anti-Semitism and its annihilationist ambitions against Israel and the Jews out of the equation.

Cameron employed precisely such a strategy in his speech, where he — or his speechwriter — even blundered into territory which could be construed as making him look soft on terrorism.

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This weekend’s release of thousands of secret official files about coalition operations in Afghanistan paints a harrowing picture of the fog of war, most troubling of all of the accidental killings by our soldiers of hundreds of innocent civilians – revellers at wedding parties, kids in school buses, ordinary people going about their daily business who tragically found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Given that the Taliban systematically hides behind the civilian population this sort of thing is, of course, inevitable. Nonetheless, it is understandable that the revelations by Wikileaks have caused embarrassment to the governments of all the coalition countries.

But for those coalition countries in Europe – Britain first among them – who are currently cheerleading the passage of the Goldstone Report on Gaza through the United Nations this is more than an embarrassment. In the light of Goldstone, it represents an outright threat to the security of their soldiers on the ground as well as to their national interests in international tribunals.

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The way in which different European countries respond to the debate over Islamic face coverings for women is beginning to offer important insights into how well they are mentally and culturally equipped to deal with the continent’s ever expanding Muslim populations.

After the French parliament almost unanimously approved a ban on the burka on July 13, the focus of attention in Europe has now shifted to Britain where Conservative MP Philip Hollobone is introducing a bill to parliament which would forbid the wearing of the burka or the niqab in public places.

It has now emerged, however, that the deeply entrenched forces of multiculturalist political correctness in Britain have already begun to mobilise. Hollobone is being threatened with legal action under the Equality Act for refusing to hold meetings with voters in his area who insist on wearing their veils.

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For those that are not aware of it, Jose Maria Aznar, former Prime Minister of Spain and one of Europe’s most distinguished elder statesmen, has launched a major global initiative to bring reason and decency back to the discussion of Israel.

I would encourage readers to go the new website by clicking here.

The website will explain who is involved and how you can help. It is the most important initiative of its kind for decades, and I would ask all of you to send the link to the website to everybody on your email list.

A major new survey by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research suggests that British Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, with a very large proportion indicating that Israel forms a significant component of their Jewish identity. The report simultaneously represents a devastating blow to anti-Zionist Jews who are given huge prominence in the British media — particularly in the BBC and the Guardian — in order to give the impression that significant sections of Britain’s Jewish community are as hostile to Israel as much of the non-Jewish population.

The survey was conducted among 4,081 respondents in January and February 2010. The following are selected results taken from the report.

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