UK embassy staff in Jerusalem charged with gun-running for Hamas, cat out of the bag for Britain’s MidEast diplomacy
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011Friendly with dictatorships however vile, accommodating of an anti-Semitism that knows no parallel since Germany in the 1930s, and willfully contemptuous of Britain’s long term interests in the war against terrorism, UK foreign policy in the Middle East had surely reached rock bottom long, long ago. Not so. When it comes to the British Foreign Office and its relations with Israel, there are always new depths to be plumbed.
And so it is that we wake up today to the news that two staff at the British consulate in Jerusalem have been arrested by the Israeli authorities for gun-running for Palestinian (Hamas) terrorists planning to cause carnage by bombing a packed football stadium.
The Foreign Office is being quoted as saying that security procedures will be reviewed and that the Israeli authorities do not believe the incident has anything to do with the staffers’ jobs at the embassy. But how can British embassy security procedures be anything other than severely compromised when the Foreign Office itself adopts such a conciliatory line towards Palestinian terror groups?
On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary programme Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.