If I had a penny for every time some know-nothing European bureaucrat or some shifty UN official has lambasted Israel for fomenting extremism among the Palestinians due to the blockade of Gaza, military interventions, targeted assassinations and the like I’d be a very rich man. Problem is, all the available evidence shows that Israel’s tough stance has worked wonders in making the Palestinians realise that there is nothing to be gained and much to lose by supporting extremists.

A poll out today in the Jerusalem Post shows not only that two-thirds of Palestinians oppose rocket attacks — they want the Hamas ceasefire with Israel renewed when it expires in September — but also that Hamas would get an absolute pasting if elections were held tomorrow. This is all terribly embarrassing to the bien pensants whose line of argument would mean that Hamas should now be registering polling figures somewhere up in the stratosphere and support for rocket attacks should be surging. Not a bit of it. The poll of 1,200 Palestinians, by Arab World for Research and Development, put support for the more moderate Fatah at 56 percent compared to 33.5 percent for Hamas.

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Readers may have noticed that the UK’s Methodist Church last week launched a boycott of Israel. I have an op-ed on the matter in today’s Jerusalem Post. Click here to read it.

The irrepressible Melanie Phillips highlights today yet another searing indictment of the Islamist extremists who run Gaza, and their UN apologists who with mindblowing intransigence refuse to recognise the real root cause of what is going on there. It transpires that Hamas has yet again torched a UN run children’s summer camp to prevent the heinous crime against Islam of little boys and girls playing together and having fun.

To all sane and reasoned individuals — ie. not the British foreign office, not the Obama administration and most certainly not the United Nations — this would come as yet another piece of evidence of the vile, extremist nature of the people who run Gaza and remain intent on holding it in a state of backwardness and religious-ideological conformism.

So here is John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, on the BBC:

“”This is another example of the growing levels of extremism in Gaza and further evidence, if that were needed, of the urgency to change the circumstances on the ground.” In other words, it’s Israel’s fault.

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If there’s one thing that you should never forget when writing a review of someone’s book it is this: what you write will reflect just as much on you as on the book you are reviewing. Go over the top in praise of something that’s actually pretty run of the mill and it will make you look shallow. Start slamming something that’s a work of art and you’ll look like a philistine who couldn’t get the measure of a much greater mind. Start ranting and you’ll make an ass of yourself. Get personal and you look like a weirdo.

Enter John Crace, feature writer for the Guardian, who earlier this week reviewed
Melanie Phillips’ new book, The World Turned Upside Down. If you read the review you’ll learn nothing about Melanie’s book. But you will learn a lot about John Crace.

Here’s how he starts out, mockingly using the first person singular as if it were Melanie Phillips talking about her own reasons for writing her book:

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So, the Muslim country whose rulers perpetrated the first genocide of the 20th century (against the Christian Armenians) is now reverting to old form in its ideological leanings and its hegemonic ambitions. As with all forms of political Islam, the variety espoused by Turkey’s current leadership has inevitably matured into a self-consciously anti-Western and anti-Israeli (anti-Semitic — see quotes below) movement.

In a brilliant deconstruction of where Turkey is now headed, Joshua Teitelbaum — a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and, inter alia, principal research associate in the Lauder School at the IDC — paints a depressing picture in today’s Guardian.

Noting that support for Turkey is at an all time high in the Arab world after it championed the terror flotilla to Gaza last week, Teitelbaum says:

“Israel’s relations with Ankara – military, economic, and tourist (Israelis once flocked to Turkey) – have been sacrificed on the altar of Turkey’s retrograde aspiration to lead the Islamic world and establish itself along with Iran as an alternative to American power. Turkey is once again turning eastwards.”

He also outlines the hysterical tones in which Israel is now being talked about by the Turkish leadership in the wake of the flotilla incident:

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