The controversy of Zion

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I’m going to have a last try at this and then leave it. I suspect we’re at the far shores of reason here anyway. A contributor, who strangely cannot find his shift key when he types the word  ‘Jew’,  asks how it’s possible for a British patriot, or a Christian, to be a Zionist.

Well, on the patriotic issue, it didn’t seem to trouble Winston Churchill all that much. There’s no essential conflict between being a British patriot and supporting the idea of a Jewish National Home, or even a Jewish state.

In an earlier posting I’ve explained how Zionism came about, and why. Anyone who loves his own country can sympathise with someone else’s wish to do the same. I also think Irish nationalism, for example, is a worthy cause. I just oppose and condemn those who would attain it through violence.

But that sort of support doesn’t mean blanket, unquestioning support for everything all Zionists do, or support for a Jewish state if it acts in ways which damage Britain. Or even if it does things which are stupid and wrong in general.

As for Christianity ‘tearing up’ the old covenant, I don’t think that’s the view of any serious exponent of the faith. It was common once, but it isn’t any more.  Christianity has grown up and learned a greater tolerance. The old Christian problem with Jews is restricted to people such as Mel Gibson’s father, and perhaps Mr Gibson himself when he’s been at the Tequila Slammers.

The last Pope, for instance, described the Jews as ‘the elder brothers of our faith’, and made great efforts to end the former hostility. There have been similar gestures, as it were, from the other side. The great French philosopher Henri Bergson, a Jew by birth, came to the conclusion that Christianity was the fulfilment of the Jewish faith.

He would have converted to Roman Catholicism towards the end of his life – but by then the Nazi persecution had begun and he felt that such an act might have been seen as a betrayal or an act of cowardice. So he didn’t.  He also refused Marshal Petain’s offer of a special exemption from Vichy France’s anti-Jewish laws.  But a Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral, at Bergson’s specific request.

Vote for us, we’re not them

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

 

I prefer not to write about the ‘Liberal Democrats’. I regard them not as a party but as a receptacle. People vote for the ‘Liberal Democrats’ not because of what they are, but because of what they are not. In some areas, and at some times, they are not the Tories. In other areas, and at other times, they are not Labour. In Scotland they are also not the Scottish Nationalists.

That is why their leader’s main task is to be as inoffensive as possible to as many people as possible. Any serious sign of principle or politics, or even personality, could alarm these soft and easily frightened voters. Poor old Charles Kennedy just turned out to be too much of a character. Poor old Sir Menzies Campbell is turning out to be too little of one, which matters less. After all, voters are so sick of the main parties that Sir Menzies’ party has continued to do remarkably well at the real polls.

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

The casualty rate among British soldiers in Afghanistan is frightening, far higher than in Iraq.  Lance Corporal Jonathan Hetherington is the sixth to die this month, the 21st in the Afghan operation as a whole. And that casualty rate is not falling, as some senior officers predicted it would.

In any war where our national interests are at stake we have to tolerate the deaths and injuries which result. But we still do not have any explanation of what British soldiers are doing in this graveyard of past expeditions, or what the purpose of their mission is.

Former Defence Secretary John Reid, who has now moved on to attacking liberty here at home in Britain, was notably clueless when he suggested that the mission – whatever it is – could be completed without any fighting.

The new Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says Lance Corporal Hetherington died in a ‘noble cause’. So he did – he died for his country, for his fellow-soldiers, for the traditions of his regiment and the Army, which goes where the politicians send it because that is its duty.

But the questions of why the British Army is in this place, what good it can possibly do there, or how anyone can know that its mission is accomplished, badly need to be answered.

Nelson Mandela, Terrorism and Margaret Thatcher

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Dripping Wet Dave Cameron has now had his picture taken with poor old Nelson Mandela, who has become a sort of tourist site for politicians and rock stars on pilgrimages to the fashionable left's current alleged paradise, South Africa.

And he has denounced Margaret Thatcher's long-ago policy towards Mr Mandela's African National Congress, a policy he cannot really understand because he was more or less a child when the Cold War was still being fought.

The truth about Britain's relations with South Africa is much more complicated than simple-minded leftists, such as Dave, think it is. It wasn't a matter of wicked imperialist Britain cheerfully egging on the Apartheid State.

The Nationalist government, which took power in 1948, was an anti-British government, which had its roots in the crushing of the independent Boer Republic by Britain half a century before. The bitterly anti-British National Party defeated the old United Party of Jan Smuts, which had been pro-British in the 1939-45 war. Many of the Nationalists had been open sympathisers of the German Nazis during that war. A leading Nationalist, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, who would later  become leader of the Apartheid State, was interned by Smuts because of his noisy enthusiasm for Hitler. The Nationalists resented British domination, feared British immigration and wanted as little to do with the British Commonwealth as possible. They didn't want to speak English, and they thought British policies towards the country's Black people were soft.

It was not just a technical disagreement, but an actual dislike and hostility. That is why they ran a campaign to rid South Africa of the British monarchy, ending in a referendum - an awkward fact for republicans who seem to think that all republics are good and all monarchies bad. They also got rid of British-style currency and measurements. But above all they embarked on what was called 'Grand Apartheid', the stealing of voting rights from Black citizens, the legal separation of the races and the whole monstrous apparatus of legalised racialism the world would grow to hate.

British governments never approved of this or supported it. It wasn't a British colonial legacy but a white nationalist revolt against the British Commonwealth. At that time, for better or worse, Britain was pulling out of Africa and abandoning the idea of white rule. Harold Macmillan pointedly went to South Africa in January 1960 and made his 'wind of change' speech to the Parliament in Cape Town, warning of the new force of anti-colonialism. The South African government were duly annoyed. But since Britain's colonial retreat wasn't a specially successful policy, it was hard for London to tell Pretoria that Ghana, or Zambia, or Kenya offered a better example of how things ought to be done. It wasn’t just Western nations that came to terms with Pretoria. Many of the so-called ‘Front Line’ states in Africa had secret relations with a government they publicly boycotted.

As to what Britain could do to put pressure on South Africa, there were problems. Apartheid South Africa was a wealthy, independent, well-armed country with a near-monopoly of important commodities, run by stiff-necked, ruthless  people who ignored criticism and rejected interference. In an Africa where Soviet and Chinese interference was widespread and dangerous; Britain, Western Europe and the USA were not as fussy about their allies as they might otherwise have been.

The arms embargo against Pretoria was completely ineffective, and - as such things often do - led to South Africa developing its own highly effective weapons industry and building (and testing) its own atomic bomb, now dismantled. Most other types of sanctions, from sports isolation to trade boycotts, didn't work either. The sanctions, which did eventually work -a refusal by the major banks to renew essential loans -, were so radical that nobody would have dared use them in Cold War days, for fear of the consequences.

For the real problem was the Communist domination of South Africa's main liberation movement. The African National Congress was heavily penetrated by the South African Communist Party, probably more slavishly loyal to the Kremlin than any other Communist Party in the world. If the South African regime had fallen, and the ANC had taken over, it would almost certainly have meant the country becoming a client of the Kremlin. Since South Africa occupies one of the prime strategic sites in the world, and produces large numbers of very valuable commodities, many of them militarily important, this would have been a grave blow to the West. Like it or not, this was a powerful consideration in Washington, London, Paris and Bonn in those days.

It's also worth noting that Nelson Mandela was not the only leader of the ANC - and that the ANC's training camps outside South Africa were often run by tyrannical militants on very harsh lines. In fact, when Nelson Mandela was still free, he was well known as an opponent of Communist influence in the ANC, being a Xhosa aristocrat, largely educated by British Christian missionaries. He admired British parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Mandela undoubtedly possesses a great fortitude and moral strength, but it may be that his magnanimous behaviour also has some connection with his education. What if he had been educated by Moscow-trained Marxists? Would he have been the same man?

In the years before Mandela's imprisonment, the ANC was divided by fierce factional battles, and was in competition with the (then) formidable Pan Africanist Congress.

It has even been rumoured that Mandela was denounced to the police by pro-Communists who saw him as a threat to their control of the ANC, and preferred to have him sidelined as an imprisoned martyr.

Was the ANC a terrorist organisation, pure and simple? It is a complicated question. Acts of inexcusable terror were carried out against innocent people in the name of, and by the ANC and its 'military wing’, 'Spear of the Nation.' During the bombing campaign of the 1980s many civilians, black as well as white,  were killed.  Wimpy Bars were a favourite target. But while I don't think it true that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter', I do think there are circumstances where the resort to violence can be justified. An obvious example of this is the French Resistance against the National Socialist German occupation, and similar groups elsewhere under Hitler’s rule. There was absolutely no lawful means of protest or reform.

                       Terrorism, in my view, is the deliberate choice of violent methods when some other legitimate redress is available. All roads to constitutional change in South Africa had been closed by the early 1960s. On the other hand, it was not a wholly closed society. It had a partly free press, and a small but courageous parliamentary opposition. The courts, when given the chance to uphold the law, often did so. The ANC consciously chose not to follow the successful example of the Indian Congress, of non-violent civil disobedience. Who knows if this would have been more effective? The violent and bloody response of the Apartheid regime to protests, starting at Sharpeville in 1960, made such a policy risky but not impossible. 

                      Terrorism also usually involves the deliberate murder or intimidation of non-violent political figures who are seen as rivals by the terrorist leaders. Some terrible things were done - such as the 'necklace' lynchings of alleged traitors in the townships, publicly endorsed by some leading ANC figures, especially by Winnie Mandela  in 1985. But many ANC supporters did not resort to such tactics, and Nelson Mandela himself had been in prison for some years by the time these actions were under way. The ANC of his era did nothing more violent than blowing up electricity pylons. 

We must also remember that the ANC faced an increasingly lawless, violent and dictatorial state, which used torture and murder in secret. And the democratic and lawful forces for change, while courageous and determined (and now largely ignored), were hopelessly outnumbered.

                     The non-white peoples of South Africa had been systematically deprived of political and civil rights, or of recourse to the courts. It is certainly not fair or right to equate the ANC with the Provisional IRA, which consciously and deliberately chose murder when constitutional and legal methods were available, and which purposely supplanted the constitutional SDLP.

So the ANC lies somewhere in the borderlands, not in the same class as the PLO or the Provisional IRA, but not wholly blameless either. But in the depths of the Cold War the ANC was also not an organisation that Western governments could deal happily with, because of its close links with an enemy regime which was -like its mirror image in the apartheid state - lawless, repressive, brutal and even more intolerant of opposition.

And it seems quite clear to me that it was only the end of the Cold War - which removed this issue - that opened the way for change in South Africa. Margaret Thatcher and other Tories may well have been wrong to dismiss the ANC too readily, some Tories undoubtedly shamed themselves by becoming apologists for the Apartheid tyranny, and those who wore 'Hang Nelson Mandela' badges were ignorant, stupid and silly. Even the South African courts (a good deal more independent than Soviet ones of the same era) had spared Nelson Mandela from the death penalty.

But once it was clear that the Soviet menace was gone, and the West was no longer afraid of handing one of the world's most important countries to Moscow control, Mrs Thatcher played a significant part in the release of Mandela and the peaceful handover of power. I say this as someone who has no special admiration for Lady Thatcher and no links with the Tory Party. It just happens to be true.

By the way, it is worth noting a few other things about Mr Mandela and the new South Africa. As I pointed out in my Channel Four documentary, 'Mandela, beneath the halo', Mandela is not above criticism and has served as a figleaf for the ANC, often doing little or nothing to oppose or criticise its wrong actions since he emerged from prison. Given his enormous world status, it is reasonable to argue – for example - that he could have opposed the ludicrous arms deal, under which the country is spending billions on jet aircraft and submarines to fight an imaginary enemy.

His slowness to recognise the AIDS problem, his failure to promote more inspiring rivals to the uninspiring Thabo Mbeki, his consorting with horrible Third World dictator figures such as Fidel Castro and Muammar Gadaffi,  are not the acts of a saint but the deeds of a fallible human being. The new South Africa, where inequality of wealth has now replaced the old inequalities of race, is no sort of paradise. The ANC itself is far too powerful and is deeply intolerant of serious opposition.

Left-liberal voters will not switch to the Tories because Mr Cameron has made his ritual pilgrimage. They will never forgive the Tories for being Tories, whatever they do. His action, much more a matter of image than of thought, is yet another of those gestures which will make the Tory Party a little less unpopular among the people who will never, under any circumstances, vote for it. As for those who might vote for it, this event ought to warn them that they are dealing with a man who values appearance above substance.

Right of Reply (again)

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

A few more thoughts, kept as simple as possible. Why do some people think it necessary to distort and misrepresent what I say, in contributions posted inches away from the articles which they have twisted?

The most prominent example of this is the character who claims that I think with my genes. Rather than admit that the evidence is all against him, he alters the truth and denounces me as a ‘liberal’ - because if I did think with my genes then that is what I would be.

The fact that I am obviously not a liberal is less important to him, than staying inside the closed circle of his reasoning.  How sad.

Likewise, I have never suggested disbanding the RAF, or not having an air force, or anything which could conceivably imply that. Yet one correspondent repeatedly claims that this is what I think. Why can he not cope with the obvious truth?  I just believe it should not be used for the  deliberate slaughter of civilians. Does this person actually read what I write and realise just what a ridiculous charge he is making? Does he really think that the only purpose of an air force is to blow civilians to bits in their homes? Another closed circle, I fear.

Israel’s survival as a country did not depend on attacking Hizbollah in the Lebanon. Quite possibly that attack has worsened its chances of survival.  Israel is quite capable of coping with a rocket bombardment from the Lebanon, having shelters, a warning system and the ability to absorb large numbers of evacuees in safe areas without major disruption.   

I think it is becoming increasingly widely accepted that Ehud Olmert’s attack on the Lebanon was a hopeless over-reaction to a deliberate provocation - a provocation which succeeded beyond Hizbollah’s most ambitious hopes.

Of course it is bad when your soldiers are kidnapped and rockets fall on your country. But how much worse it is to lose the world propaganda battle on every TV station in every Western country (an outcome entirely predictable to anyone who has studied the hopelessly biased but powerfully effective coverage which Western stations give to the Middle East).

And worse still to go into combat against someone you cannot actually beat, and who you suspect has arms and equipment which will enable him to destroy your most advanced tanks.

I am at a loss to know what has been gained by this juvenile, ill-considered adventure. If  these militant ‘supporters’ of Israel  cannot see far enough to recognise a major setback - in propaganda, morale and military standing - when they see one,  and if they demand total subservience to Israeli government policy as the only acceptable form of support, then they face a very hard time indeed.

At least when Britain’s confident power was battered by a tiny guerrilla army in the Boer War, people had the sense to see that it was a warning that we needed to heed. "We have had no end of a lesson" Kipling wrote "It has done us no end of good".

I wonder, when Ehud Olmert has gone back into the obscurity from which he so recently emerged, some of these enthusiasts will reconsider. I certainly think that plenty of wise Israelis will do so. The real risk to the survival of Israel is not Hizbollah. It is that the Western world will cease to support it, and that it will be forced, inch by inch into a deal requiring the ‘right of return ‘of refugees. That, as any sensible person knows, would mean the end of the Jewish state in less than a generation.

I can easily see President Hillary Clinton - a very real possibility - introducing this idea into future talks at Camp David. Such talks will be one of the outcomes of the Lebanese bungle, which simple minds still regard as a success.

Finally, I am amazed by the airy rejection of my proposal for a return to Christianity and Patriotism, as our best defence against Islam. I would like to know why these things are seen as either difficult or impossible. Both these forces remain strong in our society, despite a 50-year campaign of denigration by the elite. I should say the country is just about ripe for a major swing towards morality, as the ghastly baby boomer generation fades away and its children view the hedonistic wasteland left behind.

As for patriotism, what is all this football-worship if not a sort of displacement of proper love of country, which so many have been taught for so long is wicked and bigoted?

All it would take to revive them would be a little willpower on the part of the defeatists who now complain so much - yet will not do anything and claim that such a revival is ‘cloud cuckoo land’.

I don’t believe, as some claim, that the re-Christianisation of Britain will make Muslims convert to Christianity. I’d certainly like to see lots of Muslims sign up for 1662 Anglicanism, but I’m not optimistic at present.

I just think that it will rob Muslim militants of much of their case, if we can demonstrate that we can be both ordered and free.

That is how we were within living memory. It is how we could be again. What feeble gutlessness is it to dismiss this possibility. Look at Poland, wiped from the map twice in two centuries by military force and unexampled savagery, yet now alive again as a thriving nation and culture - in which Christianity and patriotism support each other.

Are we, with our thousand years of recorded history and our island  refuge, never yet conquered or occupied,  less capable than the Poles of recovering what is rightfully ours?  What feeble, miserable rubbish.

Outflanking the BNP

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

In the fuss following the uncovering of the alleged terror plot, John Reid’s other amazing statement hasn’t been analysed as much as it should have been.

Mr Reid conceded - on behalf of the government - that it wasn’t ‘racist’ to be worried about immigration.

I think this is very important. I suspect that Labour is now shamelessly going to become a stridently anti-immigration party, growing ever more so as the election approaches.

I also think that Labour is going to be crudely ‘tough on crime’ in ways which will be popular but which will attack the liberties of the law-abiding.  I predict now that, within ten years, senior Labour politicians will be at least seriously discussing the return of the death penalty, but without the sort of safeguards that I would call for.

This has nothing to do with principle or a real change of mind. It is caused by fear of the BNP, or something similar, eating deeply into the Labour working-class vote. It is another symptom of the diseased state of both the major parties, which grow steadily more desperate as their traditional voters die or desert.

I do not think it will work. The only real defence against the BNP would be existence of a decent, mainstream party that genuinely understood the concerns of middle Britain, but condemned bigotry and remained wedded to this country’s long traditions of liberty under the law.  Such a party can only emerge out of the collapse and split of the Tories, and the subsequent collapse and splitting of New Labour. This should have happened at the last election, but too many people (not many, but sadly enough) wasted their support on the Tories.

It could happen after the next election, if only voters refuse to back these discredited, played-out organisations - and stay away from the BNP too.

A bidding war between the Marxoid Mr Reid and the National Socialists of the BNP will offer no hope, only authoritarian posturing and slogans.

What does it matter what sex your MP is?

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

On some subjects I am thoroughly sexist because it makes sense to me to be so. I don’t think women should serve in the Royal Marines. I think men in general are poor at handling small children. I know men can’t have babies or breastfeed. I support cheap car insurance for women because they drive much more safely than men. I’m sure all of us could –if we wished – come up with many other examples where sex discrimination, one way or the other,  is right and reasonable.                           

But I cannot understand why it now seems to be generally accepted that it is a good idea for there to be more women MPs. Dave Cameron’s plan to force his dying party to accept 1960s Californian ultra-feminism generally gets a good press. Almost every media commentator seems to accept the idea that there is something bad about having a mainly male parliamentary party. Why? Have they ever actually thought about this? Well, of course they haven’t. Thinking’s a thing that makes them nervous.

As it happens, there are very good conservative reasons for being against this leftist dogma. And it is a sign of how the Tories have been captured by the forces of Cultural Marxism that the ridiculous ‘A’ list is in being at all.                            

The first is this: What kind of woman is most likely to become an MP? Well, given that politics is now a career, with promotion, fat salaries, lovely perks and big pensions for those who climb the greasy pole, the most likely sort to pursue this job will be the careerist woman.                              

You know the type – the school of Cherie Blair and Nicola Horlick, who do not go out to work because they desperately need the money, but because they believe that work outside the home is the key to feminine fulfilment.                              

Well, it’s my view that this opinion is very thoroughly represented already, among men and women in politics, the civil service, the quangoes and the education system – not to mention the media. . And it’s also my view that a career woman MP will by her nature be actively unsympathetic to a woman who thinks it better to stay at home and look after her children.                                 

After all, there’s a deep conflict here. If the state supports subsidised nurseries for the wageslave or careerist woman, the higher taxes will fall on the single-income homes where mothers stay at home – homes already under pressure because they have only one salary, and which will not benefit at all from these subsidies.       

In fact, a woman who thinks it better to stay at home is pretty much excluded from being an MP, since it would be quite impossible to combine the two under the current arrangements.                                 

There’s another reason as well. Most women don’t actually like arguing for its own sake. They seek consensus and peace, and a very admirable characteristic it is too.

Margaret Thatcher and Barbara Castle were both exceptions to this, and so is Ann Widdecombe, but that is partly because they were raised and trained when, if you didn’t fight, nobody took any notice of you.

These days, women-only shortlists and ‘A’ lists propel women into politics, who have never needed to show any fire. Look at the Labour backbenches at Prime Minister’s Question Time, and you’ll see the result- ranks of loyal lobby fodder in pastel shades.                                 

But half the point of the British House of Commons is that it works as a safety valve for a deeply divided country.  It is an arena for verbal warfare, where Norman and Saxon (the real, ancient division at the heart of our class system) can rail at each other.

One of the things that is wrong with it at the moment is that it doesn’t do this. Partly this is because the political parties are all dead, and represent only themselves and the bank accounts of their millionaire donors.                                 

So all three front-bench teams are pretty much interchangeable. If you didn’t know, could you really tell them apart? Mr Cameron is such a blatant copy of Mr Blair that it’s almost funny.                                  

But another reason is that there are now so many women, who really don’t appreciate or even understand the need for a proper shouting match, and who actually complain about the raised voices, the late nights and the rough stuff.

The real argument about the ‘A’ list is not whether it is working, but whether it is right.  Which it isn’t.

I wouldn’t bash a burglar. Nor should you. But I wouldn’t leave my front door open either

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

What would you do if you found a burglar in your house? I was rung up on Monday by two radio stations who wanted me to talk about a survey which showed that most people have pretty belligerent ideas about what they would do.

They obviously expected me to say I would lay landmines in my front garden, or blow his head off with an arquebus, or catch him in a man-trap. I do indeed dream of doing such things, and not just to burglars. But I have more sense than to live out these revenge fantasies.

The radio stations lost interest when I told them my actual plans. First, I would politely offer the burglar a cup of tea. Then I would ask him to sign a release form stating that I had not harmed or obstructed him in any way. Then I would invite him to leave. Afterwards, I would write to the police (why trouble them with silly phone calls when they’re so busy on diversity training? Why waste time waiting for them to answer the phone, when there’s so much clearing up to do, and at least the glaziers and locksmiths answer their phones) and ask for a crime number.  As I understand it, this is what the police and the government would prefer me to do.

What’s more, I know from all too many stories from the real world that if I used force of any kind, I might well find myself at least threatened with prosecution, with all the stomach-knotting hell involved. And, quite possibly, I would actually be prosecuted, especially if I were judged to have hit the fellow (let’s be sexist here. Most burglars are male) too hard. I have a strong feeling that I shall finish my days in Long Lartin or Belmarsh, but for what I think and write and say,  rather than what I have done, and I want to put it off as long as possible. I hate plastic cutlery.

In any case, my brief brushes with real violence have taught me that you can never be sure how it will end – but you can be certain that if it ends badly, others will judge it to be your fault.

Of course I want the law to be different. But as long as so  many of you out there insist on keeping the Useless Tories alive, despite my repeated pleas for you to abandon them and ram them head first down the plumbing,  the law won’t change. They helped to make it what it is. They won’t admit their mistakes. And so we will just have to make as much mockery of the present laws as possible.

And actually I hate the idea of my home becoming a violent battlefield. If I support laws that would allow me to defend my home, it is not because I relish the idea of clubbing, shooting or otherwise savaging intruders. Far from it. It is because I think such laws would frighten burglars away and prevent far more violence than they led to. If they knew I was licensed to shoot them dead, or wallop them with a lump hammer, if they so much as dared cross my threshold, then they simply wouldn’t risk it.  Common sense suggests this. American experience confirms it.

It would also help greatly if the police would go back to patrolling the streets on foot by night and by day, the most effective deterrent to most kinds of crime ever invented. My book (‘The Abolition of Liberty’) explains how and why this excellent system was dropped, also explains that it was quite needless, and reveals also that we now have more police officers than we have ever had, so it would be easy to go back if only someone in authority would make the effort.

Yet amazingly the most senior police officer in the land, The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, does not seem to know the history of this. Heaven knows how much time this man has spent at various universities and colleges being stuffed with ideology about ‘modern policing’. But he said in a Monday interview, commenting on a police patrol of a London tower-block "It’s as if, when the slums they replaced were flattened, the police stopped patrolling."

There’s no ‘as if’ about it. Car-borne, fire-brigade policing, which reacts to crime after it has happened rather than deterring and preventing it from happening at all, was launched in the 1960s in Kirkby New Town, Liverpool. Kirkby, typical of the sprawling, dehumanised ‘New Britain’ we built in this period, was almost impossible to police in the traditional manner.  Having been made to ‘succeed’ there by the usual use of statistics, car-borne policing was forced on old-established towns and cities too, backed by powerful forces in the Home Office,  and has been ever since.

In the same interview, Sir Ian claims that people in the newly-patrolled areas are leaving their front doors open, or unlocked, in a way they have not done for 25 years. I doubt it. In fact the only response to this ridiculous claim is a hollow cackle. But I wish it were true. Actually, many houses, flats and shops in the harder areas of Britain now have bars on their windows and doors, or steel shutters. Most of us, even in gentler places, are adding locks and bolts to our doors and windows, because we are afraid of that burglar in the night.

The interesting thing is that this is not necessary, and that if the police returned to wise, conservative and tested ideas, we would all be much safer. The crucial thing to grasp is that it is politics, not stupidity, incompetence, or lack of funds, that stands in the way.

It is the liberal consensus about crime, the moronic, demonstrably untrue belief that it is caused by poverty,  that prevents the police doing what they ought to. That consensus, supported by all major parties, must end if we are to do anything serious about crime or disorder. 

Right of reply

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

I'd like to devote this week's commentary to replying to some - though sadly not all - of the points made here by contributors and adding some remarks on the current alleged terror plot. I think the subjects we have been dealing with - the Lebanon war, Anglo-American relations, the question of terror - can all be dealt with as aspects of the same problem. Having lived in a relatively peaceful and ordered world, which we thought we understood, we now live in one which seems far more dangerous, and it is much harder to know who - and what - to believe.

What's more, the old certainties which sprang out of the Second World War seem to be less and less of a guide to the future. And it is increasingly obvious that the 1939-45 conflict was nothing like as simple as we used to believe. But, since terms such as 'appeasement' are being used, and our various enemies are being compared with Hitler, it is worth looking at that war again.

First of all, can I deal with some responses to my repudiation of the bombing of civilian targets. One writer said that I presumably wanted to abolish the RAF. This is absurd. I did not know that the main purpose of the RAF was to bomb civilian targets. I assumed that it its main purpose was to defend our own airspace, and to act in support of the Army and Navy in surface operations. Our nuclear missiles, which are designed to destroy cities, are intended as a threat, never to be used. I am also accused of soppy pacifism. Wrong. I am anything but a pacifist and regularly attack the foolish reductions in our military strength made by Labour and Tory governments. I believe in strong armed forces to deter war. If war begins, I believe that such wars can only be won by the most ruthless violence directed against the forces and resources of the enemy.

But I believe that violence should be limited (and can be limited, without reducing the effectiveness of our forces) by moral rules. If they cannot be, then I am not sure what we will be fighting for. I am against the deliberate killing of civilians, and against actions, which we know are certain to lead to the incidental killing of civilians. Now, in criticising Britain's bombing of Germany, I am told that I should consider what happened to Rotterdam, Warsaw, London, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Coventry, Liverpool and the other cities attacked by the Luftwaffe.

That is exactly what I do consider. I was born in Malta GC, whose capital was virtually destroyed by the combined actions of the Luftwaffe and Mussolini's Regia Aeronautica. My family hails from Portsmouth, and I did much of my growing up in that badly war-damaged city and also in Plymouth. I lived for a period in Coventry. I have seen the effects, visible even now, of Nazi barbarism in Rotterdam and Warsaw. I could not be unaware of these things if I tried. I believe that the attacks on these places were wrong and disgraceful breaches of the laws of war.

What, then, does that make our bombing of German cities, especially the deliberate targeting of densely-packed working class areas (where opposition to Hitler was concentrated) with the deliberate intent of killing as many people as possible? I cannot see the logic here. If we are right (as we are) to be outraged about the Nazi tyranny's loss of morals when it attacked our civilians, how can we defend our own decision to follow (and redouble) their example? Had our attacks been effective, I suppose a case could be made out for them. But they diverted valuable aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, the gravest single threat to our survival in that war once the Battle of Britain was won. The idea that our bombing of German civilians saved us from the Nazis seems to me to be entirely false. How did it do this? What did it prevent them from doing which they would otherwise have done?

This is emphatically not hindsight. The military scientists Henry Tizard and Patrick Blackett, among others, argued strongly in Whitehall that Arthur Harris's bombing of civilian homes would not destroy German morale or do much damage to their war industries. Equally importantly Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a far from naive man who had before the war been in close touch with anti-Nazis in Germany and who intervened to help Jewish refugees reach Britain from Germany, attacked the bombing of unarmed women and children as early as 1941, and continued to do so throughout the war. He also argued that the bombing, by failing to distinguish between people and regime, doomed German opponents of Hitler to fail in their 1944 plot. He was in a position to know.

I think the argument remains a valid one, and we should not be afraid to have it. If you do things to others when you are strong, you licence those others to do the same to you when you are weak. We may, at present, be a relatively strong and stable country protected by effective armed forces and alliances from predators. The incompetence of our current government, its bungled foreign policy, its mishandling of the economy, its rundown of our military and naval capability and its unbelievable neglect of such things as education, the family and social order mean that Britain may - in the lifetimes of some now living - sink in status. It may cease to be one of the strong countries which does things to others, and become one of the weak and vulnerable countries to which things are done. I suspect that, if we are prepared to face the facts about our own actions honestly, we are more likely to remain strong and free than if we wrap ourselves in myths.

On Israel...

On Israel, I must first deal with the correspondent who wrote to say that I have Jewish ancestry and therefore am not independent in what I say about Israel. Others may draw their conclusions about what prompted this intervention. I could not possibly say. But since we are in the zone of checking whether our grandmothers are in order, and measuring noses, my own estimate is that I am about one thirty-second Jewish by descent. I wasn't aware of this fact until I was well into my Thirties, and don't consider myself anything other than English or Christian by culture, upbringing or religion. My name is Cornish in origin. Under the National Socialist Nuremberg laws, had I fallen into their hands, I should not have been murdered, since as a 'Mischling, Zweite Grade' (Halfbreed, second class) I did not qualify for the death camps. Instead I would have been forced from my job and persecuted in a number of petty and unpleasant ways.

Does this knowledge influence my views about Judophobia? Undoubtedly. I dislike it even more strongly than I would do anyway, and than I did before I discovered the fact aged 32. But it doesn't fundamentally alter my opinions. I disliked racial bigotry before I knew. I disliked it even more afterwards. Does it have a decisive effect on my views about Israel? No. These are formed through a study of the facts and the application of logic, plus what is now a conservative temperament. I suspect these things are more important than my DNA in making my mind up. When I was a teenage Trotskyist, with the same genes as I have now, I was as pro-Palestinian as all the other comrades. I hope my left-wing brother (who shares my ancestry precisely and views himself as more Jewish than I do) will forgive me for dragging him briefly into this conversation. But he has for many years been a trenchant critic of Israel and a supporter of the Palestinian cause, and when I informed him of his Jewish ancestors he became, if anything, rather more so. This view has even survived his recent recruitment to the ranks of the Iraq war supporters in the 'Global War on Terror'. On one visit to Israel I grew used to the sharp intakes of breath and shocked looks when I was introduced to political figures who looked at me and said "Hitchens? Not that Hitchens?" Both of us, I believe, think with our brains, not with our genes.

It is interesting and rather amusing that this should arise when I am being criticised by others for failing to show sufficient support for the Israeli Prime Minister's botched and bungled policy towards Hizbollah. I am even numbered among the Bennites by some who seem to think that support for Israel must be absolute if it is to count at all. One critic accused me of wanting more Israeli military casualties, a propagandist twisting of what I actually said, that casualties among soldiers were preferable to those among women and children. As they must be.

There are three strands here. One, does Israel have a right to exist and defend itself against attack? Unquestionably. Two: Is it acceptable to bomb targets knowing that you will kill innocent civilians? No, unless your very survival as a nation depends upon it, which in this case it didn't. What's more, it is stupid to do so in modern media conditions, where your victims will be displayed to the world each night, and you are in danger of losing the strategic struggle for world opinion and so making your long-term survival as a nation unlikely. Three, was Ehud Olmert right to conduct such a war anyway? Should he have responded to the provocations of Hizbollah? I strongly suspect not. And I think it will be the third argument that dominates serious discussion in Israel from now on, and which will eventually bring him down. But will a successor be able to repair the damage to morale, and to the Israeli army's confidence and reputation, done in these few weeks? It seems to me that this will be very difficult.

On terror...

And then there is the great controversy about Islam and terror and something called 'Islamic fascism' Beware of this word 'Fascism' George Orwell pointed out years ago that this was now a meaningless word, except insofar as it always meant 'a person I don't like, and you shouldn't like either'. There are a number of conservative commentators who are convinced that Islamic militants are at war with 'the West' and that something called 'Al Qaeda' is constantly seeking ways of making physical war on us. I am unconvinced. And though I do think there is an Islamic danger to Europe, I think it is of a different kind.

I do not think there has ever been any such organisation as Al Qaeda, which is at most an ideology (see Jason Burke's illuminating book on the subject). Muslim militants confuse the issue by adopting the name 'Al Qaeda' on various websites for various groupings in various places, but this is in a long tradition of people adopting the names their enemies have given them. There is no bearded Bond Movie villain sitting in a cave controlling all Islamic terrorism like a vast spider's web.

Islam's warriors take many different forms in different places and in different specific causes. The Israel issue is the most important of them, deep down a quarrel between the Islamic world and the American-dominated West. It is about the unwillingness of Islam to permit non-Muslims to live under their own laws and government in territory which Islam regards as forever its own. Jews and Christians may live there as 'dhimmis', second class citizens 'protected' but subjugated. But they may not be in charge. This is what many complacent people describe as 'Islamic Tolerance', based upon the mediaeval Pact of Umar. I suspect that those who have experienced it would not use the word 'tolerance' very often.

But to begin with, this conflict was not fought in religious terms. The PLO and Fatah were secular, Arab Nationalist groupings. Some of the anti-Israel terror groups, notably the Christian-born Communist George Habash's PFLP, were anything but Muslim. It was only much later that Hamas (Sunni) and Hizbollah (Shia) became the dominant forces here. This happened largely because Yasser Arafat's PLO became so hopelessly corrupt, and also because nobody was ever sure if Arafat was interested in a settlement or not. Arafat probably wasn't, but had to give the impression he was to stay in the diplomatic game. Hamas and Hizbollah definitely aren't and are much more in tune with general Arab opinion as a result..

I am quite unable to believe that the September 11 outrage was not part of the Palestinian war against Israel. It was aimed, it seems to me, directly at the Israel-America alliance. It followed immediately after the Durban UN conference on 'Anti-Racism' at which the US and Israeli delegations were treated disgracefully and walked out in protest on September 4, exactly a week before the attacks. And the great rejoicing which followed it, in Gaza and parts of the West Bank, seem to me to be highly significant. TV film of rejoicing in Nablus was suppressed under pressure from Palestinian officials, once it became obvious that this was damaging Arafat in the USA. But the rejoicing was genuine enough.

While the US government was acting 'tough' in Afghanistan and limbering up for its futile attack on Iraq. George W. Bush made a number of weak and appeasing responses to the September 11 attacks. First of all he paid the USA's backlog of dues to the UN, withheld for years because of the UN's anti-American policies. Why do this, just weeks after the Durban walkout? Secondly he formally endorsed the idea of a Palestinian State, a major shift from his previous stance. Hillary Clinton, not long before, had got into major political trouble for taking the same position.

Thirdly he sent first General Anthony Zinni and then Secretary of State Colin Powell to Ramallah, in search of some sort of accommodation with Arafat. Neither could get anywhere, because the Palestinians were by then far advanced in their suicide bomb campaign which they did not even have the manners to stop while Zinni and Powell were there.

Even so, the idea that the US was in favour of yet another Israeli surrender was made obvious to the Arab world, and continued with the 'Road Map' to peace. The problem was that the then Israeli Premier, Ariel Sharon, was too canny for Bush. By pointing out that the USA's war on terror was identical to Israel's, and that the US was now suffering what Israel had to put up with all the time, he headed off Washington's undoubted desire to get a deal on a Palestinian State. If America wasn't giving in, then why should Israel? His pull-out from Gaza was likewise designed to ease pressure to give 'land for peace' without making any important concessions. We gave land, he could say. Where's the peace? Now, with only a weakened Ehud Olmert to deal with, expect renewed attempts at such a deal before too long.

It is this weakness, and this appeasing response to terror, which is the main fuel for terror. A lot of rubbish is written about how Britain and America are terrorist targets "because of" their Middle East policy. This is a double mistake, as well as an implied excuse for murder. If the British or American policies on the Middle East were right, too bad if they led to terrorist attacks. That would just be the price a great nation pays for its power. If the policies are wrong, then the fact that criminals attack us shouldn't be the thing that makes us reconsider them. We should change them in our own time and for our own reasons.

But the real cause of terrorism against us is that it has worked in the past, and it is reasonable to suspect that it will work again. Since Ted Heath released the terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled back in 1970, and since Yasser Arafat was elevated from gangster to politician thanks to his terrorist actions, the Western powers have signalled to the Arab and Muslim worlds that terror works. In case they have been in any doubt, the British and American governments have also handsomely rewarded terror in Ireland. It doesn't, I'm afraid, take a sophisticated organisation with dirty bombs or nuclear weapons to grasp this or act upon it. Any freelance killer in a back street with access to some pretty easily available materials can keep up the pressure, in the name of 'Al Qaeda' or whoever he chooses as his franchise. I think this is what we saw on July 7th last year. It is hard to see how any sort of surveillance will be able to spot all such attempts.

What is not true is that we are under attack because Muslims 'hate our freedom' or 'hate our way of life', though some Muslims undoubtedly don't think much of our society and nor do I, or quite a lot of British Christians. The attacks are far more specific, and we need to decide if we want to give in to them or resist them. At the moment we pretend to resist them while actually giving in, this making sure we get more. The choice lies between resolve or surrender, and we should make up our minds which we actually prefer. Personally, I'm for resolve.

But what is true is that Muslim migration into Europe poses an enormous challenge to the sort of society we have become used to. Very large numbers of Muslims now live here peacefully and productively, many of them native citizens with full voting and civil rights. Many of them feel our society is licentious and debauched, and the binge-drinking, violence and sexual abandon of our Saturday-night streets tend to bear them out.

They have now openly begun to ask for a more Islamic Britain, with state-sponsored Islamic schools, their festivals recognised alongside Christian ones, and Sharia law given some status. The really vital question is what our answer is to be to this. I think it much more interesting, and much more pressing, than the pumped-up panic-mongering about a terror threat whose solution is really just a matter of courage versus cowardice.

The remoralisation of our country, and the rediscovery of its Christianity and patriotism, seem to me to offer the best hope, since we could then show to our Muslim fellow-citizens that reformed and tolerant religion, and advanced law-governed nations, offer a good alternative to Sharia Law, and in my view a much better one. That understanding, carried back to Islam's own lands, could change the whole world for the better. If we cannot manage that, then do not be surprised if those Muslims increase and intensify their demands for their rules and customs to be honoured in our country.

No, I do NOT agree with Mr Benn about the Middle East

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

A few words, mainly of thanks, to those who contributed to the discussion about the Middle East which has been posted for the last two weeks. After visiting Cuba and writing at length about it, I didn't feel able to post a new item last week and thought that the issue was so huge that it would do no harm to let it run. I may do this in future when I have been travelling.

But how strange it is that people will persist in thinking that there are only two views on a subject, and that if you don't hold one, you must hold the other. I am accused of supporting New Labour because I condemn the Useless Tories, and here I am accused of agreeing with Tony Benn because I oppose Israeli methods  in the Lebanon.

Now, I do have some admiration for Mr Benn because he thinks for himself, is an opponent of the EU and of attacks on English liberty. But we disagree completely about the Middle East. I am, as he is not, a Zionist. I do not believe in the 'two-state solution' which seems to me to be unworkable and wrong, nor do I believe in 'land for peace', which, to me, is another expression for appeasement through weakness.

My criticism of Israel is this. That I suspect a strong leader ( which Ehud Olmert is not ) would have refused to be provoked by the ambush and kidnapping on the Lebanese border. Terrorists operate by provoking their targets into over-reaction, and into starting wars they cannot possibly win. The only worthwhile victory for Israel in this war would be one that involved a renewed Israeli occupation up to the Litani river, the very arrangement Israel abandoned in 2000 and which i think is impossible now. No UN force would dare take on Hezbollah, and a buffer zone under UN control would quickly fill up with Hezbollah rocket sites once more. America and France have learned the hard way, by heavy casualties, that Western troops in Lebanon are more likely to be targets than enforcers.

Then there is the issue of proportion. I hate to agree with the liberals and the creepy foes of Israel who say that this war is 'disproportionate', but the fact that these people are what they are, doesn't mean they are wrong. I was against the bombing of Belgrade, and the bombing of Baghdad (unlike Jack Straw, who managed to stay in the government drawing a cabinet salary while these things were going on, and whose objections to Israeli bombing are therefore worthless whining).

I was against them because I have in recent years found out what aerial bombing actually does. I grew up in a Britain which cheerfully accepted that it was right to bomb Germany to rubble, because they had started it. I entirely agreed with this view for many years. Then I began to read the full details of what happened when our bombs fell. I was particularly struck by the repeated accounts of the mad women, made insane by the loss of their homes and families, who roamed about Germany carrying their dead babies in suitcases; also by the reports of adult human figures, baked in airless cellars for so long during the Dresden firestorm that they were shrunk to the size of children; and of the great clouds of bluebottles gathered over the ruins of Hamburg after an RAF raid, so devastating that there was nobody to clear the wreckage or bury the huge numbers of civilian dead beneath the rubble. We may not have known then. We certainly know now. This is not a form of warfare that a Christian country can use. By the way this does not even slightly reduce my admiration for the courage of the bomber crews, who were not responsible for the policy of area bombing, or aware of its true effects, and who faced (as most modern bomber pilots don't) serious opposition.

Our ancestors, my grandfather's generation, who grew up before 1914, would have regarded this sort of thing as barbaric and unthinkable. Genuine, terrible shock ran through the country when German warships bombarded Scarborough and Hartlepool, and when German airships and planes dropped bombs in British civilians. Quite right too. We should, in 1918, have banned aerial bombing of civilian areas by treaty and declared it a war crime. Instead, we began to do it ourselves notably in Iraq, because it was cheaper and easier than sending soldiers.

So if Israel wishes to go after targets in Lebanon, it must use soldiers to do so - something it is increasingly doing but which I don't think Mr Benn will support. Yes, this will lead to painful casualties among those soldiers, but - if you must have war - it is better that soldiers die than that women or children do. I might add that such operations will also be far more effective and accurate than the lazy and (these days) rather cowardly method of dropping high-explosive from the sky, while sitting in a near-invulnerable aeroplane.