So, this week the mask has definitively slipped. A few days ago — see last entry but one — the Guardian put out an editorial slamming the Palestinian Authority leadership as surrender monkeys over leaked documents showing they broadly accepted that the so called settlements in east Jerusalem could reasonably become part of Israel under a peace agreement.

Today, the paper has taken the next logical step. It has given a high profile platform (via an op-ed) to a representative of Hamas — an organisation whose revered founding charter incorporates the ideas and language of the Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of Zion, whose senior members have described the Holocaust as a hoax, whose television stations and ideological supporters routinely refer to Jews as the “sons of apes and pigs”, whose thugs murder homosexuals and beat women, and whose terrorists (not infrequently brainwashed child suicide bombers) have slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the most barbaric manner imaginable.

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Friendly 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?

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Malcolm Grant is the president and provost of University College London (UCL), the academic institution attended by Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He sports a list of awards and titles so long that his business card must be printed on A4 paper. In other words, although New Zealand born, he is a quintessential member of the British establishment.

Here is what he wrote in an article on New Year’s Eve defending UCL from charges that it was an institution rife with the kind of multi-cultural political correctness that had allowed Islamic terrorism to be incubated right under his own nose. Referring to Abdulmutallab’s terror plot over Detroit, he said:

“What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level. He gained admission to University College London, where he studied mechanical engineering with business finance between 2005 and 2008, and was president of the UCL student Islamic Society in 2006-07.

“The events of Christmas Day came as a complete shock to the UCL community.”

Oh dear.

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A Muslim, Palestinian-American soldier massacres 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. Evidence is already available that the perpetrator, Major Nidal Hasan, a military psychiatrist, was incensed at the prospect of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and that he had compared suicide bombing to the bravery of soldiers in combat who might fall on a grenade to protect the lives of their comrades.

It is also clear that he is a very devout Muslim who opposes the wars he feared being sent to fight in. According to the testimony of a former colleague, Col. Terry Lee: “He said maybe the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor…At first we thought he was talking about how Muslims should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but apparently that wasn’t the case.”

So clearly, there are good grounds for suspecting that this might at least have something to do with the kind of Islamist agenda which has provoked massacres from Bali to Tel Aviv, from London to New York and from Madrid to Mumbai. Note that all I am suggesting here is that there are “good grounds for suspecting”. In other words, I am arguing that any open minded and intelligent analyst would want to take that possibility into consideration.

Well, not if you write for the Guardian which raced out two op-eds with the aim not of expressing sympathy for the victims but of starkly warning that red neck, Islamophobic loons were about to have a field day. But if its loons you’re after you rarely have to search further than the Guardian’s editorial page.

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I have frequently argued that it is not really possible to reach a proper understanding of Europe’s problem with Israel (and its appeasement strategies in the Middle East) without addressing the civilisational weakness which underpins it. The freeing of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi on “compassionate” grounds by the Scottish Justice Secretary highlights the problem in bold relief.

Let us leave aside the question of whether oil and other business concerns had a hand in the decision. They probably did, but this cannot be proved. Let us also put to rest the dissembling about whether al-Megrahi was guilty as charged. That was irrelevant. The decision to release him was made on the basis that he was in fact guilty.

Now let’s get to the core of what happened. The Scottish authorities released the greatest mass murderer in the history of the United Kingdom to a vile Middle Eastern tyranny which then sought to make political capital out of his release via a massive hero’s welcome back home. What does this tell you about Britain (and by extension Europe) and the Middle East?

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