One way or another, events in Gaza must bring about some new stage in the perpetual wrestling match between Israelis and Palestinians. Best would be a clear-cut Israeli victory, one that puts a complete end to the firing of rockets from Gaza, and so frees the Palestinians from the Islamists of Hamas who are leading them to total perdition. This would further inform the Arab and Muslim world that hurt to Israel only carries a far greater cost to itself.

We have often been in this position when Israel wins militarily but is deprived of the political consequences by the interference of the outside world in favour of the Arabs and Muslims responsible for the fighting — for instance, after the Six Day War in 1967, again in 1973, and after the 1982 war in Lebanon, and the latest repeat was in 2006 with Hizbollah. The thwarting of victory invariably means a repeat of violence on the part of the defeated, for they find themselves relieved of what ought to be the finality of defeat. 

Failure to understand this fundamental reality leads French President Nicolas Sarkozy to call now for an unconditional truce, or Prime Minister Gordon Brown to say that cease-fire in Gaza is vital. Interventions of the kind are only attempts by rather secondary politicians to lay claim to an undeserved status, but more dangerously they ensure the perpetuation and repeat of violence. If Europeans are going to rescue Hamas, why should it change its conduct?

These events brought to mind a short story entitled “The Night the General Danced,” by George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the wonderful novels recording the successes and failures of his hero Flashman, a British soldier in the days of the Empire. This story is set in the Gaza of 1947 when a British airborne division was still in occupation. A General orders his Scottish regiment to celebrate by dancing Scottish reels. As they do so, Jews and Arabs start shooting at each other out in the Gaza night. Worked up by dancing, the General and his Scotsmen go out after them. The firing stops because the Jews and Arabs run away, realising that there are men fiercer and more determined than themselves. And that is what the likes of Sarkozy and Brown ought to realise in turn: Either send in the troops or shut up and let others get on with it. Why, they and their likes can’t even set anyone dancing.

By chance, I happened to notice that George Macdonald Fraser died exactly a year ago today — January 2. He was a splendid writer, a sane and realistic man in war and peace, and he deserves a salute.       

The death of Harold Pinter brings back memories. I had first met him after the Six Day War of 1967 when he was full of excitement about the Israeli victory. He knew nothing about the Middle East, nothing about Arabs, nothing about politics or the Cold War, and in fact showed no interest in these topics. But Israel had won, hurrah.

Lots of people whose opinion I respect think highly of Pinter’s plays. His obituaries are fulsome, treating him as one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, “incomparable” according to the Times, “creator of masterpieces” according to the Daily Telegraph. My trouble is that I could never see anything to them. The plays develop nothing, they are devoid of humanity, free of drama or ideas, and all in a language so flat and narrow that it is deadly dull. How could someone with so minimal a vocabulary and so one-dimensional a mind consider himself a poet? Chaim Bermant, a true wit, once started his review of a Pinter play with the sentence, “Pinter is a man of few words, most of them bad.”  Bermant spoke for me, and so did the coruscating Mark Steyn when he categorized Pinter’s work as “a pause followed by a non sequitur.”

I expect that Pinter sensed that I thought there was nothing to his plays. But something more profound must have happened to turn this upwardly mobile and originally pro-Thatcher Conservative into a radical ranter way beyond satirizing. I suspect that it was insecurity about himself, his origins, his social position, his talent. Maybe he felt he was a fraud, acting out a part that didn’t fit. At any rate he forfeited even residual good manners, taking every opportunity to shout out anti-American slogans in a four-letter saloon-bar manner, just a remorseless and ignorant bore.

I first took him on at a dinner when he attacked the lady sitting between us, saying amid the usual flood of swear words that because she was pretty she thought she could get away with criticizing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who were fighting against fascist America etc. etc. At another dinner he praised Ayatollah Khomeini for his anti-Americanism, and again I responded, only to discover that he had never before heard the terms Shia and Sunni. He caught prejudices in the air as other people might catch colds, and he lacked the information with which to cure them.

One day he picked a quarrel with my wife, who answered that when he became commissar would he make sure that she was sent to an American prison and not the Soviet Gulag. Gobbling with rage, he jumped up to bad-mouth her to me, too angry to realize she was my wife. On yet another occasion, in his own house, he heard someone say that she was a friend of mine. Again he leaped away and left the dining room in fury. Apparently I had the power to deprive him of dinner at home.

People used to telephone each other to pass on for a laugh the latest Pinter outburst. Paul Johnson as usual put his finger on it when he called Pinter “one of the great comic characters of the day.” Just a week ago, I went to a Christmas drinks party, and a very old and evidently ill man came hobbling in on a stick. If I had recognized that this was Pinter I would probably have done what I have been doing for years now, namely taken immediate action to avoid him. But instead I wondered who this poor fellow could be. Now I shall go on wondering whatever lay behind the comic act that was Harold Pinter, and, believe it or not, I shall miss it.

Every Christmas Day Queen Elizabeth makes a short broadcast to the nation on television. She uses the occasion to support things like family ties, self-sacrifice, helping others. The personal and unpretentious talk serves to bring us together. Word is that she writes it herself.

Every year, Channel 4, a public service television channel funded by the taxpayer, offers an alternative to the Queen’s Speech. As you would expect with any government-subsided media, Channel 4 is a play-thing of the Left, with virtually nothing to offer to any thinking viewer. An alternative to the Queen’s Speech is the Left’s idea of humor.

This Christmas, Channel 4 gave the alternative speech to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran. Again as you would expect, he produced Islamo-agitprop. The world has only to follow the way of the Prophets. When he rebuked “bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers,” he took it for granted that we would understand the reference to ourselves. He said, “If Christ were on earth today, undoubtedly he would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.”

Here is the device common to the totalitarian mentality of accusing others of the crimes you yourself are committing. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah was responsible for launching the war of 2006; Iran is occupying parts of Lebanon; Iran sponsors terrorism at home and abroad; Iran is bullying its own subjects and its Arab and Israeli neighbours. Who really is the ill-tempered and expansionist power? What does this man know about justice and love for humanity?  In Iran, they stone women accused of adultery, and they execute homosexuals and others in public. Iran is reliably reported to be completing the development of an atom bomb capable of killing untold numbers of people. Love of humanity, indeed.

And who is he to be telling us what Christ might think today? A Shia Muslim himself, he runs a government that does not permit Sunni Muslim mosques in Tehran, that persecutes and imprisons and sometimes murders Bahai’s, Parsees, Jews, and Christians, and puts to death any Muslim who converts to Christianity. A photographer of Iranian origins was tortured to death in prison in Tehran because she was a naturalized Canadian.

Dorothy Byrne is Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs, and she justifies this specimen of Islamo-agitprop under her supervision: “We are offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world view.”  Insight? Alternative? Submission and disgrace are the proper terms for this program. Not so long ago, the Iranians were taking British sailors hostage, returning them in the words of Ahmedinejad as “a gift to Britain.”  Now he doesn’t even need to resort to force to bully us, as Dorothy Byrne and Channel 4 of their own free will have made a gift of Britain to Iran.

“Who is to guard the guards themselves?” asked the poet Juvenal, or in his famous original Latin, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes. One foremost guard ought to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, one Rowan Williams, a Welshman, a theologian supposedly of distinction, and the man in whose hands rests the Anglican community at a time of distress and splits and controversies so deep that Europe is openly labeled “post-Christian” and most people think that this fits the facts.

Brecon Cathedral is close to my home in Wales, and a wonderful building it is too, rescued not so very long ago from such neglect that it was virtually a ruin. There has just been an appeal to raise money on behalf of the cathedral choir. I contributed, and this earned me an invitation to a reception at Lambeth Palace, these many centuries the proud and glorious residence of Archbishops of Canterbury on the banks of the Thames as it runs through central London. The palace has medieval and Tudor architecture, fortifications, a vast park, altogether speaking of faith and certainty emblematic of national identity.

The Archbishop lately backed the introduction of sharia law into Britain, thus creating inequality for Muslims in matters that come before sharia courts. This could only have the effect of separating Muslims from the community, and that separation is already bad enough, what with Islamists in our midst threatening jihad and bringing Muslims generally into suspicion, however unfairly.  I had decided that if I had the chance I would explain to the Archbishop that I had spent a lifetime travelling in the Middle East, could read Arabic, and had observed the damage done by sharia law to those Muslim countries that had it, and how reformers wanted to scrap it in favour of normal civil law.

And there the Archbishop stood — small, bearded, wizened — at the top of a grand staircase with military trophies on the walls, and woe is me, it seemed rude to take him on in his own palace.

Now it’s Christmas, and personalities of all sorts are customarily invited to select their favourite books of the year. In the Times Literary Supplement, surely as prestigious an outlet as any available, the Archbishop of Canterbury chooses to promote a biography of another Welshman, Raymond Williams (no relation!). He speaks of this other Williams as a “moral touchstone” of the British Left, engaged in “passionate struggles” and concluding “More to come, I hope.”

In simple fact Raymond Williams was a stale old Marxist who never freed his mind. Not even the Nazi-Soviet Pact could shake him. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland in 1940 Raymond Williams collaborated with another veteran Communist, E.J.Hobsbawm, to write a defence of this aggression. Neither of them ever recanted.

If the man supposed to be guarding our faith is actually engaged in apologetics on behalf of Muslims and Communists, how are the rest of us to guard ourselves?

Paul Goble is one of those ex-CIA men with an academic bent. He made a reputation commenting on religious and ethnic matters in the old Soviet Union, mostly in the excellent bulletin published by Radio Free Europe. Undoubtedly a serious guy, otherwise a scoop he’s put out on his blog might be too good to be true. It appears that the Saudi King Abdullah is offering to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center in Moscow. As it is, four mosques already serve the city’s Muslims, said to number two million. Russian Orthodox spokesmen have responded : the Saudis can have their mosque on condition that Christians build a church in Mecca. Mecca! Where infidel feet are not permitted to tread. And in a country where Christians accused of too much zeal — for instance, trying to convert people or to say their prayers openly — risk having their head sliced off. The city fathers of Geneva once made the same request for a church in Riyadh when the Saudi king asked for another mosque on the shore of their lake. No deal. Reciprocity evidently works.

Successive American presidents have tried for almost twenty years to give Somalia a government. Neither force nor aid worked. Not really a country any longer, Somalia is a free-for-all for men with guns, for warlords, tribes, and Islamists including al-Qaeda. They’ve taken to piracy for a living, and they have a thousand miles of the African coast to provide shelter and to hide in. In the Gulf of Aden this year, Somali pirates have captured some 90 ships, for which they have obtained ransom estimated at around $30 million dollars. The Sirius Star, a gigantic tanker with a cargo of oil taken on in Saudi Arabia and worth $100 million, is only one of at least a dozen ships recently hijacked and held in Somali harbours. Pirates have seized ships from many countries including Ukraine, Denmark, and France. Owners and insurers have so far chosen to pay up, which of course has meant that piracy is a successful money-making operation. Since 9/11, however, piracy has increasingly been seen more as a sub-division of terrorism than a threat to trade. Well-armed and equipped with modern technology, pirates operate from a “mother ship” and an Indian warship recently engaged and sank one of these. The hijacking of the Sirius Star may lead to more positive armed responses of the kind. Combined Task Force 150 already patrols the Gulf with ships of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and some from other countries too. Two centuries ago, Lord Exmouth led a British fleet to shell and destroy the raiders’ base in Algiers. The civilized world had agreed to put piracy down, and it looks like having to repeat the performance.

The attack on Bombay seems to have much in common with 9/11. Another group of young men have been prepared to kill and to die.  On both occasions, the intention was to leave as many victims as possible. The captured terrorist says that in Bombay they intended to kill 5,000, which would have been an atrocity on a wartime scale.

A lot of planning and premeditation went into the attack. The terrorists had been trained professionally. They had also prepared the ground. The targets were carefully selected. In the big hotels and the café they could be sure to kill infidel Westerners. In the station they knew they would find local Hindus to murder. In Nariman House, the Jewish center, they captured, tortured and shot Jewish hostages. The New York Times suggests that this last outrage was an “accidental hostage scene.”  The thinking behind that phrase is as bad as the grammar, but then the New York Times is more often ridiculous in its commentary than not. The terrorists were out to make a clean sweep of Christians, Hindus and Jews, and they succeeded in that.

Islamists are out to confront the whole world. Iran believes it will master and subdue the United States. Al-Qaeda believes likewise. Hamas and Hezbollah aim to destroy Israel. Assorted Islamists seek bases in Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, here, there, and everywhere They are in the grip of fantasy, of course, and therefore it is pointless to argue with them about the nature of reality. The Muslim world is sinking in distress and failure, taking with it as many as it can.

What ought to happen now is a reaction on the part of those Muslims who realise what is happening, and do not wish to be taken down by fellow Muslims. Repudiation of Islamism is requisite on the part of the Kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the ever-voluble Tariq Ramadan and Sheikh Qaradawi, anyone and everyone with a voice in the Muslim world. As it is, President Asif Zardari of Pakistan is pleading with India not to go to war. The Bombay killers wanted such a war in the evident belief that Allah is with them and they would win it. Intelligence services are warning of other similar attacks in the offing. If Muslims themselves do not manage to control and contain Islamists, there is bound to be a great deal of reality enforcement, and very tragic that will be.

Good news from Iraq!  Mithal al-Alusi has won a case which is a landmark of sorts. He’s the leader of the small (all too small) Democratic party, and a member of Parliament. Some years ago, he went to Israel, and there he proclaimed to the world that he couldn’t see occupation, only liberalism. All hell broke out in Iraq. And what did he do in the face of the storm? Why,he went back to Israel again to attend a conference, very publicly. The members of parliament voted to strip him of his parliamentary immunity, and the government brought a case against him. His lawyers argued that there is no law to forbid visiting Israel, and the judge duly acquitted him and restored all his rights. So he’ll be back in parliament.

If all Iraqis were like Mithal al-Alusi, Iraq would at last come into its own. Born in 1954, the son of an eminent professor, he was a determined opponent of Saddam Hussein, and therefore spent more than twenty years in exile in Germany. A Sunni, he nevertheless was an associate of Ahmed Chalabi’s and the Shia intellectuals around him. Returning to free Iraq, he has paid a terrible price. Terrorists murdered his two sons, and also burnt out his house. These outrages only harden his determination to do the right thing by his country. Supporting him through these atrocities, his wife is as admirable as he is. And we salute the judge who was not afraid to give the correct legal verdict in Mithal al-Alusi’s case. These are all extraordinary people, and they give real cause for hope.

Footnote to the long-drawn saga of General Sikorski’s death, and now the exhumation of his remains. At the time, the governor of Gibraltar was General Sir Frank Noel Mason-Macfarlane, known far and wide as Mason-Mac. A brilliant soldier of the old imperial type, he had been military attaché in Berlin, and in that capacity was often in the presence of Hitler. In the Public Record Office is the memorandum he wrote in 1938 proposing to shoot Hitler. It would be worth killing Hitler, as he saw it, if the coming world war was thereby averted.  He offered four scenarios, in all of which he was to be the man with the gun. Three of these proposals, he thought, would give him the chance to escape. The fourth proposal would entail his capture and certain death, but he was willing to sacrifice himself if his superiors decided that this was the course of action most likely to succeed.

The margins of this memorandum are covered with the horrified comments in red ink of the British officials who read it, up to and including Lord Halifax, the foreign minister. Appeasement was then at its height, and Halifax was a leading proponent of it. One and all thought that Mason-Mac had gone mad, and he was duly removed from his post, landing up in Gibraltar. Mason-Mac knew and admired Sikorski, and was appalled by his death.

In Cracow the body of General Wladyslaw Sikorski has been removed from its monumental marble tomb in the cathedral, and taken for forensic examination. The Poles, from the President and the government down, hope that the remains of this great man may shed light on what happened on July 4 1943, when the general died in a plane crash just after taking off in Gibraltar. It is virtually certain that the crash was a genuine accident. The sole survivor was the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Edward Prchal, a Czech, who eventually emigrated to the United States. Until his dying day some years ago, he maintained that the crash occurred because his controls had jammed, probably through overloading or shifting mailbags.

But Sikorski’s death had a huge bearing on the course of the war, and the subsequent fate of Poland. Leader of the Polish government in exile, Sikorski was already indignant about Stalin’s evident ambition to take over Poland and make a communist satellite of it. That April, the Stalinist murder of the Polish elite at Katyn had been revealed unmistakeably. Had Stalin arranged the plane crash to smooth the way for the communists? It so happens that Kim Philby was head of the MI6 section with responsibility for Gibraltar. Was sabotage by Soviet agents feasible?

Conspiracy theories go much further. Sikorski was pressing Churchill to stand up to Stalin on the question of Polish independence, and as Yalta was to prove, this was something that could have been handled differently and better. Some Poles, and the Soviets, have accused Churchill of arranging the crash to be rid of someone who threatened the wartime alliance. In that case, really unthinkably, Churchill would have had to betray Sikorski with whom he got on well, and also to consent to the death of the liaison officer on the plane, Colonel Victor Cazalet, a well-known Conservative M.P. and a close personal friend of his.

Almost certainly, exhumation and DNA tests and scans will reveal nothing. However, the whole process does underline the power of the past, especially in a country like Poland, so badly treated for so long. And it was blisteringly symbolic – or should that be prophetic? – that the day before the exhumation Polish President Lech Kaczynski was travelling in a car in Georgia with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili when Russian troops close to them opened fire.

Today General Faisal Alvi is being buried with full honours in the military cemetery in Islamabad. He lately commanded the Pakistani Special Services Group, or SSG, that spearheads the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He was loyal to then-President Pervez Musharraf, refusing to take notice of the damaging politics of the military in Pakistan. After a career like this, I suppose he was a marked man. Although retired, he had a security escort, but the government had just withdrawn it for no very obvious reason. The gunmen, presumably from al-Qaeda and the Taliban, must have seen their chance. They ambushed his car, and shot him and the driver dead. Now they are gloating.

Not so long ago Faisal was sitting in my house. We spoke about the sad state of the Muslim world where violence rules and reforms seem impossible. Gunmen had previously shot and killed Shabbir Bokhari, his own brother-in-law and head of the Pakistani electoral commission. Youthful in his early fifties, Faisal made a formidable impression, a man with information, a practical intelligence, and a cosmopolitan outlook. Tall and handsome, he was also every inch a soldier. He spoke about his time in Waziristan, and described scenes of combat in Wana in the tribal areas. In his eyes, terrorists are cowards who don’t dare face you out in the open. He had nothing but contempt for them, and was himself evidently without fear. But now, alas, they are gloating.

We owe more than we know to General Faisal for fighting the good fight. Men like him are rare and his murder diminishes everyone.

The world needs men like Ali Salem. He’s one of Egypt’s most distinguished writers, aged 72, with a long list of books and plays behind him. In every way, intellectually and physically, he’s very big. There is tremendous humour in his face. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks, being an outspoken critic of Islamism and an active campaigner for a real peace with Israel. In 1994 he first visited Israel, and the book he wrote about it was a runaway best-seller. Since then, he’s been to Israel many times, and has received an honorary doctorate there. He keeps saying that Arabs have nothing to fear from Jews, that there’s no place for hate, and that peace is better than war. Back home in Cairo, the elite boycott him and his writings, and those on the street can kill anyone who talks and acts as he does. 

Yesterday he was awarded the Civil Courage Prize which comes with a handsome check. This is given annually by a foundation set up by John Train of New York, a financier and a genuine all-round intellectual as well. The ceremony took place in the residence of the American ambassador in London, a magnificent house once built by Barbara Hutton and sold by her to the U.S. government for just one dollar.

What an occasion! Ali Salem’s humour came out the moment he started his acceptance speech. He quoted the scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when a citizen attacks Cinna the poet, shouting, “Tear him for his bad verses.” He also gave a great and apposite example of an Egyptian joke, told about a man going home one evening, only to find himself surrounded by an armed mob who demand “Are you with Us or The Others?” With Us, he replies, whereupon they shoot him dead declaring that they are The Others.

I for one went home thinking that the right man had been recognised, and that hope really does spring eternal.

Nobody seems to have known that a woman called Cynthia Roberts was a Soviet agent in the Cold War, and she herself must have thought she’d got away with it. In 1985 she and her husband defected to Prague, where they are living in an apartment (provided by the Communist authorities of those days, one supposes) in one of those estates whose grimness tells you all you need to know about the Soviet view of people. And there a popular newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, traced her and put the scoop on its front page, without revealing its sources or how it had access to her files in the Czech security services. Apparently quite a few of these files have been destroyed but those remaining have a story to tell.

A veteran Scottish Labour Member of Parliament called William McKelvey is thought to have set her up with a pass and an office in the House of Commons. There she was the secretary of Labour Action for Peace, a rather prominent Soviet front for attacking the nuclear weapons of the West on the pretence of opposing all nuclear weapons (as it continues to do to this day). Through this group, Mrs Roberts came to know influential socialist politicians including future cabinet ministers. In the 1970s she stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate, and in 1983 she accompanied Robin Cook, Mr Blair’s future foreign secretary, on a trip to Moscow. Her codename in the Czech security files is Agent Hammer, and her handlers recorded that her self-proclaimed role was “to contribute towards the downfall of capitalism.”  After defection, she provided them with character sketches of Mrs Thatcher and other Conservative politicians.  She also targeted visiting Westerners, such as diplomats or NATO officials.

“I have nothing to say,” was how Mrs Roberts spoke to the Mail reporter who confronted her.  In all probability she was just a useful idiot who never had much to say, and was of little or no real value to the Communists. She would have been really dangerous only in the unlikely event of a Soviet take-over. But what made her do it? Self-importance, venality, credulousness, groupthink, aspiration to power, utopian illusion? She should be brought to account for herself in court, but that will not happen in today’s climate of anything-goes and never-mind. And perhaps it’s some sort of just deserts that she’s 72 now and has to live out her old age in a monstrous Soviet-era block among people whose language seemingly she struggles to speak. 

You thought that Russia must be on its way to becoming a normal country, did you? Well, that was to reckon without Vladimir Putin. Once a KGB officer, always a KGB officer. He’s making sure that the old ways of obtaining and holding power are as applicable as ever they were. He sees to it that stooges are given the important posts. He invades neighbours, and absorbs their territory. It just happens that critics, especially in the media, and even if they are in exile, are murdered. It is commonly said that he is also the richest man in the country, perhaps even in Europe.

The constitution specifies that the President of Russia may serve only two terms of four years. That’s why Putin gave way to a clone, Dmitri Medvedev, and made himself titular Prime Minister while actually keeping control of everything. Only a matter of hours after Barack Obama’s election this team was threatening to place missiles to counter defence plans of the United States. And the wheeze of the moment would make Stalin proud of his successors. Medvedev has submitted a constitutional amendment to the Duma, the Russian parliament, to extend the four-year term of the presidency to six, and further manipulate things so that Putin returns as soon as possible as President for another twelve years. The Duma is rushing the amendment through by voting on all the readings of it in a single day instead of the usual weeks required for legislation. So Putin looks like being in the Kremlin till 2021, well after Obama is otherwise engaged.

I am reminded that when Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator, died, his son Bashar couldn’t succeed him because he was 34 and according to the constitution the President had to be 40. Easy — it was less than a day’s work to change that constitution. But does Russia really want to be Syria with missiles?

The victory of President-Elect Obama has generated public weeping. Lots of people captured on television have had tears running down their cheeks, and sometimes their voices have broken as they try to respond to an interviewer. It is a very disturbing phenomenon. The rational choice of the individual voter is essential to the working of democracy.

Tearfulness signifies instead the emotionalization of politics. Rather than calculate, the weepers have surrendered to feelings. And feelings are catching. A huge literature is devoted to analysing how individuals turn into crowds, and how beliefs and values change in the process, so that the crowd comes to behave collectively in ways that each individual member of it might not. This is not to imply that the tears on this occasion are the prelude to some nasty kind of mob ideology – on the contrary, it is a very human reaction. The weepers had listened to Obama’s promises of change and hope, and their wish to believe in what he was saying overcame any doubts and reservations they might have had, and so the tears flowed as they will do whenever emotions get the better of reason.

The trouble is that reality reasserts itself pretty soon in this world, and emotion is not the tool to deal with it. The return of reason comes at a cost, however. Those who couldn’t help weeping at Obama’s election displayed expectations of a very high order, and if in future they are ever disappointed with him they will also be disappointed with themselves.

The story of Rashana offers a glimpse into the rather invisible depths of Muslim immigration in the West. Of Pakistani origin, she grew up in Oldham, a rough place in the north of England. Something was wrong in the family, the newspaper reports don’t specify exactly what, but as a child Rashana was ceaselessly hit and injured badly enough to need being taken to hospital regularly. “My aunties, uncles and grandparents knew what my mum was doing to me,” Rashana says.  Teachers at school and other English adults reported the girl’s bruises, her unhappiness, her suicide attempt. Social workers came to the house — and here’s the extra horror — the social workers were themselves Muslim, and as Rashana explains, “because of the culture they were always going to side with my parents.”  In that culture, she adds, “the family closes ranks when there is a problem and outsiders are kept out.” At one point in her childhood, she told her teacher that her older brother had raped her. The police and the social services were called in again, but Rashana was forced by them to go back home. Eventually she was placed with a foster family.

Rashana managed to go to university, and graduated with a degree in business. She’s 32 now, and seven years ago she started a legal process to sue Oldham Council for negligence because they had full knowledge of the way she’d been abused. At last, in an out-of-court settlement, she has been awarded about $200,000 compensation, though whether the Council will be able to claim the money from the family is an open question.

The Oldham authorities evidently believed that the cruelty going on before their eyes should not be prevented on the grounds that Muslim culture is like that. That’s a form of racism, as well as a shameful denial of our own culture, indeed of simple human empathy for other people. “All my life I have longed to belong somewhere and I cannot see any kind of future for myself,” is Rashana’s summary of where she is now.

Britain has just accepted officially the institution of sharia courts, where the inequality of women will find Islamic sanction. How are the Rashanas in our midst to be protected from wilful and legal perpetuation of a culture that discriminates against them and must obstruct their hopes of belonging and having a future like other British women? 

Anyone who googles MV Iran Deyant will find hundreds of entries, all more or less identical, and all from hardened bloggers, as far as I can see. They tell the story of a ship purportedly owned by the Iranian government, and sailing with a cargo of radioactive sand that was to be released off the coast of Israel to kill many people.

In August, the Deyant is supposed to have left Nanjing in China, with falsified shipping documents and its containers locked. Rounding the Horn of Africa, the ship was boarded by Somali pirates and escorted to a Somali harbour. When the pirates broke open a container, they found “gritty sand-like contents.”  Health complications followed and within two weeks sixteen pirates died. Negotiations for a ransom with the Iranian authorities came to nothing. American, French and Russian naval units are alleged to have the Deyant under supervision, and from the Russians comes the idea that she is “an enormous dirty floating bomb.” Here in short is the “long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel.”  The details related are so identical, as well as so very circumstantial, that they suggest that there may indeed be a single source.

Only a few years back, of course, the Iranians did send on this route a ship, the Karine B, with a load of arms to be used against Israel by Yasser Arafat’s PLO. The Deyant embroiders that theme.  However, a scientifically minded friend informs me that radioactive sand is not likely in fact to kill a lot of victims, because an inbuilt process of vitrification dispels the toxicity rather fast. The whole story sounds as if it emerged from the imagination of a thriller writer with the plotting skills of a Frederick Forsyth, and who has an interest in depicting the Iranian regime as inhuman and monstrous.

No mainstream media have picked the story up, again as far as I know. If it’s all invention put about for the credulous, as I suspect, it is fascinating that the modern technology of the internet should be the perfect medium for spreading conspiracy theories all over the world, and creating devilish fears that might have come straight out of the Dark Ages.

Boris Johnson is the mayor of London, a former Conservative Member of Parliament, a most intelligent, open-minded and genial man, and incidentally a friend of mine. He writes a very well-received column in the conservative Daily Telegraph, and he is endorsing Barack Obama with enthusiasm. Nor is he alone among Conservatives to be doing so. His colleague Charles Moore, one of the most thoughtful of commentators, is another who wants Obama to win. The Times, the self-styled paper of record, endorses Obama as well. One of its star columnists, William Rees-Mogg, (another highly intelligent man, also a friend of mine), has been an Obamaist since the start of the campaign. 

The Left, and pretty well all the Europeans, hope that the United States elects a president who will be something of a socialist, and this might mean thrillingly that the country falls flat on its face, no longer a super-power but wracked with thoroughly European doubts and confusions. But the Right surely does not want anything like that to happen. Why, then, are the most informed and influential Conservatives with regular media outlets taking a position that contradicts their basic political convictions? 

Boris Johnson’s latest article goes over this ground. He thinks that President Bush rocked democracy and capitalism, “the two great pillars of the American idea.”  He himself supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but now in spite of growing evidence of success condemns it as “catastrophic.”  In subjective mode, he then praises Obama for seeming talented, compassionate and offering hope. And the final kicker for voting for him – “the glaring reason” – is race. If Obama wins, we could see the end of race-based politics, the grievance culture and political correctness. And this is pretty much the main point Charles Moore, William Rees-Mogg and others come up with.

No doubt this is well-meant, but Obama has to win or lose for being the man and the candidate he is, and anything else would be no good. If color were really to play a part in Obama’s election, then it would also influence how people come to judge him in office. Suppose that he were a failure, that he made some domestic or foreign policy choices of the kind he proposes but they proved divisive and indeed made the country fall on its face. Then anyone and everyone who’d supported Obama on grounds of color would be caught in the wake of real and unwelcome race-based politics.

What part does bribery play in politics? The buying and selling of opinions and decisions is almost entirely invisible, and the glimpses we obtain into this murkiness are usually not to be trusted. But it happens. When I was writing about the German occupation of France in the world war, a collaborating editor from that time explained to me how the Germans had secretly subsidised the French press. In France, he said, free speech was always for sale. The Soviets were to pay similar subsidies in the Cold War. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector, revealed for instance that Moscow had given money to the left-wing paper Tribune, (which has just closed after a long and misguided ideological run). An excellent French investigative journalist, Jean Montaldo, one day came across heaps of bank documents that were being discarded in Paris, showing the secret payments that Moscow was making to all sorts of Frenchmen whose Communist affiliations were otherwise unknown. A former member of MI6, the British intelligence service, once told me how his wartime job had been to suborn the government of an important country to keep it from joining the German Axis — I had better not say which country. In detail, he described transporting boxes of gold sovereigns packed in straw, and how he had handed them out. By the end of the war, he said, he had every single member of that government on the take.

A persistent rumour from the world war is that Winston Churchill was bribing the Spanish to stay out and not become allies of Nazi Germany. It makes sense. Had General Franco, the Spanish dictator, allowed the German army into the country, and then to capture Gibraltar, the British could have been shut out of the Mediterranean, losing Egypt and the oil coming through the Suez Canal, and might well have lost the war. In October 1940 Hitler met Franco at Hendaye on the frontier with France in order to pursue this strategy. Franco haggled, and Hitler afterwards said he would rather have teeth pulled out than go through that negotiation again. All Franco would eventually allow was landing rights to Axis aircraft, access to ports for submarines, and spying look-outs near Gibraltar. Most oddly, in the middle of the war Churchill caused a rumpus by telling parliament that Franco was “a gallant Christian gentleman.”

In 2005 the British writer Richard Bassett published a life of Admiral Canaris, Hitler’s spy master, saying that Churchill was paying Franco. Now Pere Ferrer, a Spanish historian, goes further in a biography of a shady Spanish buccaneer by the name of Juan March. It seems that a British officer called Alan Hillgarth advised Churchill that the Spanish generals were so poorly paid that they could be bribed. Among the evidence is a letter from a U.S. agent, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Solberg, to his boss Wild Bill Donovan then in charge of a proto-CIA intelligence outfit, telling him that March had been chosen as the conduit for payment. Ten million dollars were paid into a New York bank, and as many as 30 Spanish generals were approached and received up to half that sum. Just to add to the confusion, Ferrer thinks that March may also have been in the pay of the Germans.

The facts may have been invented to fit the conspiracy, of course, or the conspiracy invented to fit the facts.

We learn from our mistakes, do we not?  We — that is my wife and I — have just had the chance to do so. Due to what Hillary Clinton might call a “misstatement,” we concluded that as from next January British visitors to the United States would no longer enjoy a visa waiver, but would need to have a proper visa in their passports. An embassy official explained that the pressure of applicants was so great that we could have an appointment to see a consul only in four weeks time. And the cost, payable in advance, was $131 per person. We booked a time and paid.

The day duly arrived. We took a cab as parking a car is out of the question in central London. Another $25 (and the same again leaving.) Approach roads to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square have been narrowed, and fortified with bollards, concrete barriers and wire fences reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone.  British policemen were cradling sub-machine guns — not long ago the British were specially proud that their police were unarmed. We queued for almost an hour until reaching the metal detector. Car keys with locking devices were not permitted, but had to be deposited in a pharmacy some hundreds of yards away (and for a fee.)

Eventually we reached the embassy itself, received a number and sat in a vast room with the other visa applicants — they do seven hundred a day, every day. Around me were people speaking Russian, Greek and French, also people from India and Africa speaking languages I couldn’t identify, the old and the young and babies in arms. Several hours later, our number was called, and we received a visa valid for ten years, plus the information — gently delivered — that it was unnecessary. (And we’d have to pay a courier service another $40 to deliver our passports next week.)

And the lessons of this experience, in addition to mortification and the costs of it? That terrorists have contrived to add a new level of ugliness to the surroundings, and much bureaucratic inconvenience, which is a success of sorts for them.  And also that no matter what critics may say, and no matter any crisis, ordinary people from everywhere continue in untold numbers to set their hopes on entering the United States.