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I spoke to the LRB, which denied that its anti-Zionist agenda had had anything to do with it: “The Arts Council never raised this as a subject,” said Nicholas Spice from LRB, claiming that the reason LRB was no longer going to get public funds in the manner it had previously obtained them was simply because they had decided not to apply for them. Hmmm. That would be very strange indeed since Spice acknowledged that LRB was loss making!

Why a loss making venture would cease to apply for state subsidy of its own volition is totally beyond me. Spice said that LRB would now be applying for grants through a different route and confirmed that the magazine had been awarded a 10,000 pound grant from the Arts Council for a literary festival in the summer. But that is a subsidy for a festival, not for the magazine as such. In any case, LRB has regularly received grants of over 20,000 pounds in recent years. Why accept half of what you usually get when you’re still making a loss?

Here’s my take on this. The following facts are not in dispute: 1) From 2012 the Arts Council will cease funding a virulently anti-Israeli magazine which since 1980 has received 767,000 pounds in state subsidy via its standard donor programme. 2) The magazine makes a loss. 3) Money that LRB can still get from the Arts Council will next year go to funding a literary festival not the magazine itself. 4) Just Journalism put out a very widely read report on LRB’s anti-Zionism in November 2010 pointing out that “between 2000 and 2010, public money, to the tune of over £188,000, was drawn from to pay for 92 articles on Israel-Palestine, 91 of which put forward a staunchly pro-Palestinian narrative and many of which depicted Israel as, ‘a bloodthirsty and genocidal regime out of all proportion to reality, while sympathetic portraits abounded of groups designated as terrorist organisations by the British government such as Hamas and Hezbollah”. 5) From 2012, LRB will no longer have money from the Arts Council to pay for such articles.

Yes, yes, yes. It’s impossible to prove causality here. But since it is hardly likely that LRB, or indeed any such organisation in a similar situation, would own up to having had its subsidy cut for political bias, it is reasonable to employ our powers of intuition as to what is the most plausible explanation for all this.

In any event, this is certainly a day to celebrate. The British magazine that was the first outlet in the world to publish the notorious Mearsheimer and Walt conspiracy theory about the “Jewish lobby’s” alleged stranglehold over US foreign policy will no longer have public money to pay people to write such articles in the future.

“Jerusalem suffered a spate of bus bombings by militants between 2000 and 2004, but attacks had stopped in recent years,” the report said. What? They just “stopped”? Like yesterday afternoon it “stopped” raining? An act of God, perhaps? As fully paid up opponents of the security barrier and of pretty well every other security measure taken by Israel in recent years the BBC knows full well what it is doing here.

It was clearly necessary to tell readers that it has been quite some time since anyone has carried out an attack. But for an anti-Zionist outfit like the BBC, this poses a problem. Everyone who follows the story knows that Israel has taken radical steps to prevent terror attacks and that such self-defensive operations are always referred to by the BBC as themselves functioning as a “root cause” of terrorism.

For an objective and unbiased news organisation it would be compulsory to point out that Israel has taken such steps and that, therefore, it is now incredibly difficult to mount terror attacks though, of course, no security system is foolproof. But this doesn’t quite fit the narrative, does it? So the BBC simply omits all mention of the matter leaving the reader in a state of blissful ignorance.

As I say, nothing to get overly excited about. But a nasty and malicious piece of reporting nonetheless.

The story was reported in the media, but if you’d blinked you’d have missed it, and the slant of the reporting was that Israel was at least as much to blame for the killings — due to settlement policy — as the killers themselves. Melanie’s column was a typically robust effort to point out the moral depravity of news outlets such as the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN and the BBC who, if the situation had been reversed — if five Arabs including a three month old baby had been knifed to death in their beds in a lethal racist attack by Jewish “settlers”, for example — would have given it saturation coverage.

So not so much a “funny old world” as a “brave new world”: a prominent British columnist does what prominent British columnists are supposed to do — she attempts to shift the terms of the debate back on to a more rational and principled footing — and the net result is that the police have been called in, with the Guardian newspaper cheerleading on the sidelines, because she has offended Muslim sensitivities.

As Nelson summed it up, the train of events went like this:

“1) Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, gets angry about what he reads on Melanie’s blog.
2) Complains to the PCC [The Press Complaints Commission].
3) Complains to the police.
4) Phones up The Guardian and says “The PCC are investigating The Spectator!! Story!! Police too!!
5) The Guardian duly writes it all up, on its website.
6) The Independent follows up The Guardian.
7) An inverted pyramid of piffle is thus constructed.”

It isn’t yet clear on what grounds the investigation is being conducted, but you can bet your boots that it is the following paragraph from Melanie’s piece that they are salivating over:

“So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ — because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages — but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick”.

An “Arab massacre”? What, all of them? “Such savages”? So all Arabs are “savages”? Oh, come off it. It is quite clear that she is referring to the “savages” who slaughtered a family in their beds, and it is “such savages” and those who incite them with whom peace cannot be made. It is also clear that in this instance the thrust of the argument is against the New York Times, itself being used as a proxy for the liberal left media in the West, and not the killers as such.

And it is precisely because the multi-culturalist assumptions underpinning the western liberal left media lead consistently to a downplaying or sanitisation of crimes, however appalling, committed by non-white, third-world perpetrators designated as “victims” that Melanie Phillips employs such strong language to jolt western readers out of their dogmatic slumbers. Again, that’s what columnists are supposed to do, and in any other situation this affair would have passed off without notice.

But, as Nelson makes clear, changes are afoot in modern Britain that threaten to rip apart the fabric of one of the world’s most developed free societies: “Freedom of expression is under attack in Britain, from our notorious libel laws to this new phenomenon of police forces being asked to investigate what people put on their blogs,” he said.

And as we know from cases involving Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and others across the continent, all of this is starting to look like a depressingly common feature of the new European politics. To those who value freedom, merely sitting on one’s hands is no longer an option. We all hang together, or we all hang separately, as Benjamin Franklin is said to have averred at the siging of the American Declaration of Independence.

So write to Fraser Nelson at the Spectator, or Melanie Philllips on her blog, and tell them you support their right to be heard. Surely, that’s the least you can do.

At this point one could take the discussion in several directions. But, unfolding right before our eyes (NB: See postscript below following UN vote) , there is a fine (if that’s the right word) illustration of the futility of using “international law” in this manner as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi slaughters his own citizens in broad daylight while the world twiddles its thumbs because China and Russia refuse to give “legal authority” to any form of intervention via the UN Security Council. Ponder that thought:

Two dictatorships — China, which massacred 3,000 peaceful demonstrators in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and holds millions in labour camps; and Russia, which has killed at least a hundred thousand in Chechnya in the last 15 years and which now occupies part of the sovereign state of Georgia — have the power to determine what does or does not constitute “international law”. That puts things in some perspective doesn’t it? And to be honest, there’s nothing especially difficult in exposing the fatal flaw in the international-law-as-categorical-imperative line of thinking.

The greater mystery lies in why such an obviously flawed proposition is fetishised in the manner in which it is by European elites and opinion formers (not to mention the Obama administration). Let me offer the following as one possible explanation.

The paradox of relativism: a world view saturated with post-modernist relativism still needs some frame of reference so as to impose order and project power. Unable to accept, for example, that democracy is “objectively better” than dictatorship or that freedom is “better” than oppression, let alone that the Western liberal-democratic tradition is “superior” to other models of government, there is a gaping hole that needs to be filled when we come face to face with mass injustice. International law fills that gap and does so very effectively since it conveys the sense of certainty that relativism inevitably always lacks, while simultaneously making its peace with multi-lateralist and multiculturalist assumptions — we are all equal at the UN, or at least on the Security Council — which themselves derive from post-modernist relativism.

Of course, those whose primary interest is the state of Israel might say that this is to over-intellectualise the matter. For Israel bashers it’s always a case of any stick will do. If it suits them, one day they’ll quote “international law”. On another day it’ll be a quote from Amnesty International. On another it’ll be a critical remark from a Nobel Laureate. Fair enough.

But I still think there is something more all embracing going on in the use and abuse of the notion of “international law” which constitutes a broader attack on the promotion and sustenance of Western values generally. It does not take much searching through the archives of the Guardian or the BBC, after all, to note that it was the weapon of choice against the Bush administration on a variety of fronts, but especially on Iraq. It is the “illegality” of Tony Blair’s actions in supporting Bush that always forms the centrepiece of the polemic against him. And yes, against Israel, the Guardian, the BBC, the British Foreign Office, the European Union and NGOs galore consistently throw “international law” in the country’s face as a means to deligitimise its behaviour, whether it concerns self-defence operations against Hamas or over the “settlements” in east Jerusalem.

If there’s a beginning, middle and end point to any process of thought, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle right now on this one. I’d welcome thoughts in the comment section below.

Postscript: So the UN did in fact, finally, reluctantly, grudgingly, belatedly, pass a resolution enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya. Better late than never. But that does not alter the core of the argument. The formulation of international law is arbitary, inconsistent and largely corrupt.