The appalling slaughter yesterday of an entire Israeli family of five, including a baby and a three year old, provides a terrible reminder of what the people of the Jewish state continue to face at the hands of Palestinian terrorism. It appears that they were all stabbed to death in their sleep in the West Bank “settlement” of Itamar. Given the successes of the Israeli security services in clamping down on terrorism such events are less common than they used to be, and it is always worth reminding ourselves that it is precisely such security measures that many western governments and large sections of the political intelligentsia consistently oppose.

Nonetheless, terrorists do sometimes still get through. The story isn’t getting much prominence, but given the Japanese tsunami that is perhaps understandable. One thing that is noteworthy, however, is that in so far as it is being reported at all one crucial piece of context is being missed, as it always is in reports about Palestinian terrorism or “militancy” as the BBC prefers to call it.

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This is my piece for this week’s edition of the Jewish Chronicle about the gross hypocrisy that persists at the UN Human Rights Council despite the (purey opportunistic) suspension of Libya. To read it, click here.

Let’s be clear. Everyone hopes and prays that Egypt turns into the kind of liberal democratic state that we in the West take for granted. But a liberal democratic state requires a liberal democratic culture to underpin it. When CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was stripped and repeatedly sexualy assaulted by 200 men screaming “Jew, Jew, Jew” at her in Cairo in February the alarm bells started to ring loudly. I for one remember nothing similar taking place at the mass protests and celebrations that attended the fall of the Berlin Wall. So if eastern Europe 1989 is your reference point of choice, think again.

Now, in even more brutal fashion, it’s the Christians on the receiving end (Lara Logan is not in fact Jewish, but her attackers assaulted her in the belief that she is). According to the latest reports 10 people (mainly Christians) were killed and more than 100 injured yesterday after a protest following the burning of a church south of the Egyptian capital. Over Christmas 23 Egyptian Copts were slaughtered in a suicide bombing and killings of Christians from Iraq to Nigeria are becoming ever more common.

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Isn’t it amazing how our mainstream media outlets have kept our people in a state of unawareness about some basic facets of Arab society? This has been revealed as a byproduct of the obsessive concentration on the State of Israel after the protests and revolutions that are sweeping the Middle East. I have a short piece on the subject on today’s Jewish Chronicle. To read it, click here.

So which is it to be: the end of communism or the rise of the ayatollahs? As we consider the extraordinary wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East there is a certain inevitability about the struggle for an appropriate frame of historical reference against which to judge what is happening. This, after all, makes sense.

Those of us who do not have the habit of consulting fortune tellers to make our political predictions are always on the lookout for familiar structures, recognizable patterns matching events from the past or, if it really comes down to it, something to at least pin our hopes (or fears) on.

Vaclav Havel, one time dissident and former Czech president, is convinced that it’s 1989 all over again: “The authoritarian Arab regimes are the product of the same decades that produced the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It turns out that there are core moral and political standards common to all cultures.”

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