Just to inform readers that my book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, is now available in paperback. It has a new foreword bringing it up to date and making a few comments about the book’s reception.

Amazon is selling it at £5.99 which is a bargain! So, if you haven’t bought the book already (either for yourself, a friend, your member of parliament or whoever) here’s encouraging you to go out and buy it. To purchase it on Amazon, click here.

Also, I will be starting up the blog again sometime next week. I Hope you all had (or are having) a good summer break.

Dear readers,

Everything is quietening down as we head deeper into August. I will, therefore, not be making any regular postings for the next couple of weeks. Please do come back in the last week of August when I plan to restart operations.

Many thanks to all of you for your comments, your good wishes, and your support.

Happy holidays to you all.

Robin

The fake outrage now sweeping through British media and political circles about Shimon Peres’ analysis of anti-Israel hostility in the UK is something to behold. Peres had made a series of remarks about Britain and other European countries to Tablet Magazine.

As anyone who reads the comments can see (link above) Peres was measured and fair in his analysis which centred on long standing pro-Arab sentiment in important parts of the British establishment, attempts to appease Britain’s Muslim population and traditions of anti-Semitism in some quarters. He did acknowledge that there was also some support for Israel in Britain but portrayed that as a minority pursuit largely confined to sections of the British right.

So, nothing much to take issue with here, right? Not according to Conservative parliamentarian Andrew Rosindell who was quoted in the Daily Express as describing Peres’ remarks as “wholly inaccurate” and “inappropriate”. “Maybe he should spend more time here, get to know the British people and realise we defeated the Nazis in the war,” said Rosindell, making the embarrassingly elementary mistake of confusing correlation with causation — Britain’s brave stance in WWII stopped the Holocaust from being completed, but we did not go to war to stop the Holocaust. We went to war to prevent German expansionism and save our own skins.

But it gets worse.

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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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