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.

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of revolutions sweeping the Middle East there is a certain inevitability about the struggle for an appropriate frame of historical reference against which to judge what is happening.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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My piece in this week’s Jewish Chronicle looks at the question of whether there is any justification for calling Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal following the Obama administrations recent veto of a UN resolution describing them as such. To read the article, click here.

I’m all eyes and ears. Surely it’s going to come from every direction imaginable: saturation coverage on the BBC, leader columns in the Financial Times, op-eds by the dozen in the Guardian, resolutions galore in the European Parliament and the UN, a UK Foreign Office enraged by the cruelty of it all. What on earth have the Israelis done now? Well hold on to your braces, because the blockade of Gaza is back, and, wait for it, it’s now been imposed by Hamas.

Yes, you read that right. Nine months after Israel began relaxing restrictions on exports to the Gaza strip Hamas has re-imposed them. The blockade will apply to all goods that can’t be produced locally or obtained from elsewhere. The reason for the move is partly that like all Islamo-fascist outfits Hamas does not look kindly on things that bear the fingerprint of the dreaded Jew — or as the Jerusalem Post reported it, they’d rather do business with the Arabs — but also it’s because, now that imports are flowing in from Israel, the terror group’s extortion rackets from the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are yielding a good deal less in revenue than they used to.

Surely there’s going to be an outcry! The Gaza “blockade”, let’s not forget, was one of the great humanitarian causes of our time: malnourished children roaming the streets in search of food; babies with jaundice; old women huddled around camp fires because the evil Israelis had cut off the fuel supplies. Believe it or not, a ban on Israeli fuel is part of the new blockade: “Hamas has also stopped the daily fuel supplies it used to receive from Israeli energy company Dor Alon,” the Jerusalem Post reported today. “In the past, Dor Alon used to transfer about 1,000 liters a day to the Gaza Strip for the power station, but now Hamas prefers to receive its fuel from a contraband pipeline it has set up through a tunnel under the Egyptian-Gazan border”.

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