RUTHFULLY YOURS

If I have said it once, I have said it a hundred times on this website: there is a price to be paid for indulging anti-Zionist bigotry and it is a price which may be paid by some of the most treasured institutions of one’s own society.

British newspapers are reporting today that the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying terror group Hamas (no they don’t describe Hamas that way on the BBC, but it happens to be accurate) played a key role in building the case which led to an arrest warrant being issued against former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni by a court in London 10 days ago.

The Times, in a report whose substance was repeated by the Daily Telegraph, quoted Hamas operative Diya al-Din Madhoun, who runs the terror group’s coordinating committee on such matters, as saying:

“We have provided a group of independent lawyers in Britain with documents, information and evidence concerning war crimes committed by Israeli political and military leaders, including Ms Livni.”

This all has echoes of the Goldstone Report which simply accepted at face value Hamas-supportive “witnesses” to events in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead .

But few decent people now have any illusions about the value of the United Nations as an instrument of either law or international human rights policy. The British legal system, however, draws on traditions dating back to Magna Carta which have inspired and, in important respects, underpinned institutions of justice across the Western world.

The notion that British judges are now at the beck and call of one of the most violent and bigoted terror groups in the world is not merely a cause for shame, it is a call to arms to every Briton with a basic sense of national pride.

Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, Israeli Ambassador to London Ron Prosor warned of “the extremists who abuse the freedoms of the world’s oldest democratic legal system to mount poisonous attacks on democracy,” adding that “It is high time to restore common sense to common law.”

And so it is. But what on earth is wrong with our judicial system that such appalling abuse of the rule of law could have occurred in the first place?

Ambassador Prosor, again:

“In British NGOs, trade unions and universities an obsession to delegitimise and demonise the Jewish state has come to characterise the daily routine.”

The central problem is that the relentless demonisation of the Jewish state has now become so routine, so unexceptional, so “normal” that it has become possible to say and do anything against Israel as long as that deep-seated need to demonise is satisfied.

This is a bigotry gone wild. And, I repeat, it is not just the Jews who are now paying the price.
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For a wider rendition of such arguments, see my recently published book, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, which can be purchased at the following link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=pd_ts_b_6?ie=UTF8&s=books