Thank you all for your support, advice and friendship throughout the year. This is very much a two way process and I value each and every comment and each and every email. I hope that 2011 brings you every success and that you will continue to work with me to promote the values and principles we share.

So, all that remains for me to say as I close off for 2010 is this:

Thanks again, and Happy New Year!

Please see my piece on the subject of Muslim persecution of Christians in this week’s Jewish Chronicle. To do so, click here.

Earlier this week, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, announced that it had identified four million of the six million victims of the Holocaust. The project to discover the names of all of those who were murdered is a profound and moving testament to the Jewish people’s commitment that the victims of the greatest single crime in history should never be forgotten. When Yad Vashem makes announcements of this kind, all decent men and women pause, reflect and bow their heads.

But the world we live in is not solely comprised of decent men and women. Here is a selection of comments representative of a disturbingly large proportion of the 443 entries posted by readers following the publication of a news report on the Yad Vashem announcement by Yahoo, the world’s second most popular search engine and internet portal after Google:

“What about the 50,000 + Palestinians that have been murdered since 1948 by the Nazi A.K.A Zionists?” (By AK)

“What about the Armenians? I saw worst pictures of them being slaughtered than I did of the Jews.” (By Flour)

“What about those who were not Jews? Do they deserve to be counted? Do the even count?” (By Native)

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Just sneaking in before the December 31 deadline, I think we have a winner for the 2010 Politically Correct Idiot Of The Year competition. Writing in today’s Guardian (where else?), we have the celebrated Henning Mankell, crime writer and dramatist. He is assessing the motivations of Taimour Abdulwahab, the Islamist terrorist radicalised in Britain who self-detonated in Stockholm last week, but thankfully failed to kill anyone but himself. What is so impressive about this piece is its all round, no-stone-left-unturned, right-from the get-go, cretin-level stupidity.

It all begins with the headline, and the subheading explaining that headline: “Stockholm bombing: We need action not just words to prevent it happening again“. And now the subheading: “In the wake of the Stockholm bomber, all of us Swedes must unite against Islamophobia“‘

If it looks like a dog, smells like a dog and barks like a dog, chances are it’s a dog. But this is no ordinary dog. This is the Hound of the Baskervilles.

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The least successful US president of the 20th century seems hell bent on backing every anti-Israeli manoeuvre he can attach himself to, rarely missing the opportunity in the process to blunder into a diplomatic minefield he is clearly not competent to navigate. That’s right, Jimmy Carter is at it again. This time he has given his backing to the notion of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence on 1967 lines. The idea — unworkable in practice and a surefire recipe for renewed violence — is that the Palestinians would make such a declaration in the middle of 2011 and then, Kosovo style, get as many UN member states as possible to recognise it. Brazil and Argentina pre-emptively recognised Palestinian independence earlier this month in anticipation of such a move.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph has reported Carter as telling Brazil’s Folha de S. Paulo newspaper the following: “I am very happy to see that Brazil recognised the Palestinian state with the 1967 borders… We cannot count on the United States alone to bring peace, since it agrees with almost everything that Israel does… Brazil can help because it has a lot of influence among developing countries. Brazil can be one of the leaders of this process.”

The trouble is that not even the Palestinians can agree on this.

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