Max Mosley, it may be remembered from previous commentary, is the man who organized a sado-masochist orgy with five call girls in some dungeon in London. One of these five, apparently known as “Mistress Abi,” tipped off a tabloid. The tabloid filmed, and duly published, what had taken place. Mosley and the five had been enacting a fantasy of being German officers and concentration camp inmates. “Mistress Abi,” wore a Luftwaffe uniform, and on film is shown to be shouting orders at Mosley.

Sadism plus pornography equals Nazism. How did Mosley come to be so sick? Almost certainly because his parents were the pre-eminent British Nazis of their day, and he had grown up in their shadow. The scandal now goes further, because it turns out that “Mistress Abi” is the wife of an MI5 officer, that is to say someone engaged in surveillance of al-Qaeda terrorists, and jihadis and spies in general. Jonathan Evans, director of MI5 and therefore intelligence chief, is said to be severely embarrassed. An internal MI5 investigation is trying to establish whether the officer knew about his wife’s prostitution, and was even involved in it. Meantime he has been fired.

This is a very British scandal, and it won’t soon fade away. People still rehearse the saga of Christine Keeler, a high-class hooker who years ago attracted a Soviet defence attaché and at the same time the British minister in charge of defence. And maybe a better precedent is the case of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, traitors and Soviet agents who also years ago ran away to Moscow, proving that the British establishment was rotten to the core, and that those supposed to be in charge hadn’t the faintest idea of what was really going on. Like Jonathan Evans and MI5 now.

The latest National Review cruise took in the Rhone, a great river rightly celebrated. There was time to reflect on the scenic glories of France, with the vineyards and castles of Burgundy, and the architecture of Lyons and Avignon where our journey stopped. Also time to recall the wonderful exactitude and attack of which the French language is capable.

Two examples came to mind, and stay there. “Cet animal est méchant, il se défend quand on l’attaque.” Which being translated is, “This animal is wicked, it defends itself when you attack it.” Which is all we need to take on board about Israel, as it continues to have to defend itself from wanton attack as it celebrates its sixtieth anniversary.

And then, “Je préfère les méchants aux imbeciles, car les méchants se reposent de temps en temps, les imbeciles jamais.” Which being translated is, “I prefer the wicked to the imbeciles, because the wicked take a rest from time to time, but the imbeciles never.” And this is all we need to take on board as advice for life.

I had not heard of the Right Reverend Hassan Dehqani-Tafti until I read his obituary in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Between 1961 and 1990 he had been the Anglican bishop of Iran. Who knew there was such a churchman?  A large photograph revealed a fine strong face.  The more I read the more extraordinary Bishop Hassan became. I learnt that many considered him as 20th-century saint. We should all remember and commemorate this man.

He had been born in 1920 in Taft, a village in the north of Iran, the child of Muslims. Educated at Stuart Memorial College (and who knew about this institution, whose name has a wonderful ring of British imperialism at its best), he converted to Christianity at the age of 18. During the Second World War, he served in the Iranian army. Afterwards he married Margaret, the daughter of Bishop William Thompson, the then Bishop of Iran.  Finally he prepared himself for ordination in England, in a Cambridge college, and he was one day to take over as bishop from his father-in-law. The obituary says he established schools for boys and girls, and particularly worked to help the blind.

When Ayatollah Khomeini staged his successful coup, Bishop Hassan wrote to him to pledge support for building a just, equal and free Iranian society. But an unjust, unequal, and unfree society was in the making. Church hospitals and blind missions were immediately confiscated. Only months after the Islamist revolution, gunmen one night broke into Bishop Hassan’s house, entered the bedroom and fired shots. The heroic Margaret threw herself across her husband’s body, and four shots missed, while the fifth only went through her hand. Some months later, the Bishop’s secretary was shot and badly wounded. Then the Bishop’s son, Bahram, was shot and killed as he was returning from work. Here is the prayer Bishop Hassan wrote for his son:

O God, Bahram’s blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls; So when his murderers stand before Thee on the day of judgement Remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives, And forgive.

It is not for us to forgive, but once again we too should all remember how prejudice and lack of common fellow-feeling have condemned Iranian society to commit evil.

The obituary dryly states that after this violence the bishop was persuaded that it was impossible for him to stay in Iran, and he duly spent the rest of his life in exile in England. Apparently he had a specialist knowledge of Persian mystical poetry, and was himself a poet. The day when a memorial is put up to him in Iran will also be the day that Iran proves it has rejoined the family of nations.

You mightn’t think there is anything much to say by now about Stalin, but this proves not to be the case. A few years ago, the gifted young historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore published a biography with all sorts of revealing details harvested from the ex-Soviet archives. Then he went on to write Young Stalin, an account of the formation of this criminal psychopath. It has always been puzzling that Russians were so terrorized that they never stood up to Stalin, but this book reveals what an unusual character Stalin was from the beginning, so ruthless and so indifferent to others that he had no qualms about killing.

A paperback edition is now out, and the BBC interviewed Sebag about it. (Full disclosure: everyone who knows him calls him Sebag, including me because I am a good friend of his.) He’d learnt Russian and Georgian for his researches, and made a point of visiting every one of the fifteen or so palaces or residences that Stalin has appropriated for himself. Fifteen, and he the leader of a movement renouncing property! Five or six of these were in Abkhazia, a beautiful part of his native Georgia. Sebag made a point of visiting every single one of them. An official, he explained in the interview, told him that nobody had previously ever been so thorough. Oh yes, there was this Arab who had checked all the palaces out, and his name was Saddam Hussein. That’s another truly revealing detail. We know that Saddam revered Stalin, and tried to model himself on the master gangster, even in living conditions, as it turns out. And what a difference it would have made to so many millions of people if Stalin had not died comfortably in his bed in one of the many residences he had purloined from his subjects, but instead been hanged on a scaffold like his Arab pupil.

The heads of all the states in the European Union have signed up to the Lisbon Treaty. Once this treaty is finally ratified, the EU acquires a constitution and becomes a legal entity, in effect the United States of Europe. Politicians and their bureaucrats in Brussels have settled the matter behind closed doors. None of the 27 countries involved was allowed to hold an election to say whether or not their people approved of the surrender of national sovereignty that is at the core of this unprecedented political experiment. Several countries, Britain among them, had promised to hold a referendum, but all, again led by Britain, found some crafty way to cheat on their promise.

Except Ireland, which is indeed due to hold a referendum next month. Ireland has profited enormously from its membership in the EU, and presumably those who agreed to the referendum thought its result was a foregone conclusion. Bertie Ahern has been Irish prime minister since 1997, and without warning he resigned a couple of weeks ago. A tribunal has long been enquiring into the corruption that plagues Ireland, and into his financial affairs in particular. He is accused of accepting money from businessmen in return for favors. He admits receiving such funds but denies doing the favors. A secretary of his broke down in front of the tribunal when she was unable to explain depositing the sterling equivalent of about thirty thousand dollars in cash into his account. Ahern’s resignation immediately followed. “Some aspects of my finances are unusual,” is how Ahern himself puts it.

We all took it for granted that Ahern had resigned so dramatically out of fear that the Irish might mistake the EU referendum as a vote of no confidence in him, and reject the Lisbon Treaty accordingly. That would scupper the whole project, which in turn might mean that Ahern could not fulfil his ambition of becoming the first president under the new dispensation.

Now we learn from leaked memos that the Irish government and Brussels are going to great lengths to suppress bad news that might encourage a No vote, and “to tone down or delay messages that might be unhelpful.” In the words of one of the top fixers in Brussels, “politically sensitive” aspects of the treaty should not be discussed until it is in operation. Proposals are afoot for tax harmonization, which would greatly hurt Ireland, where business has tax incentives more alluring than elsewhere in the EU.

Robert Mugabe puts his coup into practice by lying, cheating, and sending out the goons. He really should take a leaf out of the Brussels book, which also puts its coup into practice by lying and cheating, but so secretively that nobody need notice. And it’s much more sophisticated, altogether more European, to be depositing bagfuls of cash than to go out burning down and looting farms.

My good friend Christopher Booker writes a column in the Sunday Telegraph, specializing in exposing the folly and corruption of the EU. His latest bulletin concerns a Dr Gottfried Heinrich, an Austrian, who in 2005 boarded a flight in Vienna carrying two tennis racquets. He was ordered off the plane because the EU has passed a regulation that tennis racquets are “prohibited items,” while at the same time ruling that this fact was not to be published. An outraged Dr Heinrich went to the courts, to ask why he was obliged to be penalized by a ruling about which he and everybody else had never been informed. The court dug up some obscure part of some obscure document, and found against him. It is a splendid monument to the bureaucratic spirit to build an issue of the kind on tennis racquets, and Booker sees here a blend of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t it more in keeping with George Orwell’s 1984 to punish people for something they had no knowledge of? It’s also pure Orwell to impose major political arrangements on people without first ensuring their consent. At least Mugabe does his filthy work openly.

A small, brave band of commentators (commanding officer : Mark Steyn) argue that Europe has lost the will to survive, that its contribution to civilisation lies only in the past, and so the more vital and assertive Muslims are bound one day to take over the continent. The story of Abu Qatada gives credence to this dark prospect.  The way that Britain has handled this man is not just incompetent, or a revelation of bureaucratic flaws, but a cautionary tale about a nation losing control of its fate.

Abu Qatada is Jordanian by birth, and now aged 44. An Islamist, he committed acts of terror in his own country, where a warrant is out for his arrest on charges of murder. In 1993 he arrived in Britain on a forged passport of the United Arab Emirates.  Claiming asylum, he was soon granted refugee status. Mistake number one. Next he claimed and was granted welfare benefits amounting to $2,000 a month. Mistake number two.

Mistake number three was not to identify Abu Qatada and his role. He was Osama bin Laden’s liaison in Europe, properly described as his “ambassador.”  He had proven links to all the top al Qaeda terrorists. He raised funds, he gave inflammatory sermons. After 9/11 he went on the run. Finally arrested, he has been held in a top security prison for some three years, contrary to the ancient practice of habeas corpus – mistake number four. Instead of bringing him to trial, the government was all the time trying to deport him to answer the warrant out for him in Jordan. This proved impossible. In 1998 the government incorporated into British law the European Convention of Human Rights, one article of which states that nobody can be deported to a country where torture or other degrading treatment is likely. This was mistake number five, and the biggest of all.  Jordan gave guarantees that Abu Qatada would be treated lawfully. Nonetheless, in mistake number six, appeal judges sitting on the case have decided that he cannot be returned to his own country. There is now no justification for holding him in prison, and  in mistake number seven, Abu Qatada will soon be free to live in Britain once more at taxpayer’s expense, a living proof of Islamist power and victory over others.

The human rights crowd, and their apostles in Brussels who impose these rights, the whole legal fraternity who gleefully enforce such measures, are playing with the lives and futures of us all. Derogation from the Human Rights Convention is the only obvious course, but the human rights crowd all say this can’t be done. To protect through the law people like Abu Qatada is to have an absurdly unrealistic view of human nature, and also in the name of doing justice to one person to commit injustice to everyone else. Abu Qatada may be surprised to be allowed the freedom to do his worst, but he cannot really be blamed for taking advantage of it. Observing the run of self-harming mistakes that the British authorities permit and encourage, other terrorists cannot be blamed either if they flock to Britain to help attack and undermine it, and all paid for by the British taxpayer into the bargain.  It’s clear how we got ourselves into this suicidal position, but it is far from clear how we get out of it, or if we ever will.

The News of the World is one of Rupert Murdoch’s many papers, and it has a mass circulation, mostly on account of the smut it likes to publish about people known or unknown. Its reporters do not hesitate to use any underhand method that might bring results, for instance false identities, hidden cameras, the payment of large fees to informers, and so on.

The latest victim of this newspaper and its techniques is one Max Mosley. Presumably as a result of a tip-off, he was filmed secretly taking part in some specially rigged-up dungeon in London in a sado-masochistic orgy with five prostitutes. This little squad were engaged in being guards and victims in a simulated Nazi concentration camp, complete with punishments and humiliation and pain. Some of the recorded conversation was in German, a language Mosley learnt during two years in Germany as a young man.

For Mosley, 67 and a married man these past forty years, the embarrassment is excruciating, privately and publicly. In the world of motor racing, he is an important person, president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the body that governs Formula One and Grand Prix racing. A big race is due to take place soon in Bahrain, and the Crown Prince has told Mosley to stay away as his presence would be “inappropriate.” Apparently Mosley is unwilling to respond to calls for his resignation from the FIA, improbably trumpeting that he will sue the newspaper for invasion of privacy.

Salacious as the story is, its deeper interest is that Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley. In 1931 Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. He took money from Hitler, and saw himself as the Leader of Britain once Hitler had incorporated it into the Nazi empire. In 1936 in Berlin, he married Diana Mitford, with Hitler and Goebbels as witnesses. Early in the war, when their son Max was just born, the Mosleys were imprisoned as a precaution. To the end of their lives, they were unapologetic, always Nazi sympathizers, always rabid Jew-haters who went as far as they dared in denying the Holocaust. In the course of my own researches, I met both Mosleys and saw for myself what ugly bullies they were. If I did not withdraw the book I was then writing about Unity Mitford, Diana’s extreme Nazi sister, they would not be responsible for the consequences. What might that mean? my lawyer asked. Quite simply, fascist violence, some kind of accident to my car or my house.

Commentators have often noted how Nazism attracted followers by means of showy sexual elements in parades and uniforms. The notion that a Nazi concentration camp could provide any such sexual element is in keeping with the doctrine and practice of Nazism, though it has a sinister perversity all its own. But you don’t have to be an expert in psychology to see that a straight line runs from the father’s past fantasies to the son’s enactments of them in the present.

News of Britain’s moral and cultural decline comes pouring in. A friend sends me a passage from the Brussels Journal, which is not as you might expect a pro-European Union hand-out but the publication of the Flemish nationalists in Belgium. Here it is:

A section entitled “British Culture” on the government’s website for the U.S. states that, “Like the U.S., Britain is proud of its multicultural heritage.” And an accompanying section “The History of Multicultural Britain” seems to suggest that ancient Britain was as nearly ethnically diverse as the modern country, or perhaps more so. In this supposed British history, the largest paragraph out of only nine is on the Muslim community, and the word “Muslims” appears four times while “Celts,” “Angles,” “Saxons,” “Norse,” and “Danes” appear only once. “English,” “Irish,” “Scottish,” “Welsh,” and “White” don’t appear at all.

Can this be true ? my friend asked, horror-struck by the travesty of inventing a role for Muslims in fashioning the historic character of Britain, when they have immigrated only in the last generation or two. At the very same moment, the newspapers are carrying the latest attack on Britain by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury – he who recently informed us that Muslim sharia law in Britain is not only unavoidable but also desirable. (Incidentally, several Muslims responded in the media by saying that they had emigrated to Britain precisely to avoid sharia law in their countries.) This time, the Archbishop told us that we are in the grip of “selfish, controlling, greedy habits,” because we are cultivating a fantasy that there will always be “enough oil, enough power, enough territory” for our desires. Our civilization, he concludes, will collapse.

Never mind that this unfortunate priest is himself in the grip of a sub-Marxist fantasy about the inevitably doomed consequences of capitalism and democracy. What is really striking is the lack of self-confidence evidently motivating him and also the bureaucrats who drafted their nonsensical version of the Muslim role in Britain. Some sense of guilt, or inadequacy, or fear, has spread through the upper reaches of the society like a dreadful epidemic. But where did it begin, and why ? It is a central mystery of our times, and will provide the theme of a Gibbonesque Decline and Fall in many volumes by some great historian of the future.

I have just been on a visit to Israel. It was the run-up to Easter week when I reached Jerusalem. There, on the Via Dolorosa, numbers of priests, monks, and nuns and accompanying pilgrims were doing the Stations of the Cross, a penitential walk up a twisty and uneven alley. You see Catholics, Evangelicals, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopians, Armenians, in what looks like a representation of Christianity and its history of splits and dissent. And passing them, jostling, shouting, evidently proving their indifference to this religion and trying to distract, are porters, youths pushing hand-carts, merchants, salesmen, tourist guides, in a vast hubbub that militates against prayer.

Someone likely to know told me that there are in fact only 14,000 Christians in Jerusalem, including native Arabs and the international religious community. Not so long ago, there were many more. The Arab Christians are unable to resist Islamism. Muslims are taking over the Christian quarters of East Jerusalem as well as outlying Christian suburbs like Beit Jala and Beit Sahur. One day a Christian Arab cab-driver wanted to take me to Bethlehem. It wasn’t safe. An undercover Israeli squad had just shot dead the four local Islamic Jihad leaders who were in the process of calling on town notables and intimidating them. 250,000 people are supposed to have turned out at the funeral of these four – and that in a town once eighty percent Christian, but where Christians are now a disappearing minority.

Have Christians no place in the Muslim world? Islamist radicals talk about Christians as “Crusaders” as though fighting to the death the wars of the Middle Ages. In his latest outburst Osama bin Laden promises to take frightful revenge for the Danish cartoons, and he blackguards the Pope. In Algeria, Monsignor Henri Tessier, Archbishop of Algiers, says that Catholics experience a pressure that borders on persecution. Father Pierre Wellez and a doctor friend of his have just received prison sentences in Algeria for praying openly outside a prayer hall. One of the most frightening moments of my life was in Cherchell on the Algerian coast when I went to look at what I thought was a French colonial church, but in fact had been converted to a mosque. Out poured the worshippers to fling stones, and my daughter and I had to run for it. Two Austrians have been taken hostage in Tunisia supposedly to pressure their government to withhold aid to the coalition in Afghanistan.  In Iraq, Paulos Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic of Mosul, has just been kidnapped, and his corpse found. In Gaza, the church and the YMCA of the miniscule Greek Orthoxox community have been burnt out. Several churches in Pakistan have been bombed with much loss of life.

Muslim fanaticism and intolerance is not going to succeed even in the medium term. Thanks to the humanity of its founder, Christianity thrives and acquires strength when it is persecuted. Everyone can tell the difference between a martyr unjustly killed for his faith, and a martyr who kills himself and others for his faith.

Meanwhile the newspapers publish photographs of Mikhail Gorbachev flanked by Franciscan friars on their way to the church of Saint Francis of Assisi. The former general secretary of the Soviet Communist party, a party dedicated to stamping out religion as “the opium of the people” in the famous sneer of Karl Marx! Gorbachev a self-declared devout Christian!  What an example of Christianity’s power of regeneration, and in the end, it seems to me, that is what the imams and the mullahs and bin Ladens are really afraid of. 

This very week, the British have been lied to and cheated by their government in a way that is alien to our tradition, and I would previously have thought unimaginable.  The matter may seem to rest on political procedures, involving technicalities that are rather complicated and of no general interest. But this really isn’t so. The nation and its future are at stake.

What happened is that the politicians who run the European Union in Brussels want a constitution to enshrine and extend their centralized powers. Such a constitution would convert the 27 member countries of the EU into a single empire, with foreign and domestic policies homogenized, and all enforceable in a single over-riding legal jurisdiction. Since whole areas of national sovereignty were to be given away, the British Labour government under Tony Blair said that the country would have a referendum on whether to accept this constitution, and the manifesto that the party published before the last election directly and clearly promised to hold one. The issue did not then come to a head because the French and the Dutch voted convincingly to reject this proposed constitution. That should have been that. However, the EU does not operate in an open and democratic way. The Brussels bureaucrats tried another tack, and have now presented their constitution in a virtually identical form, but relabelled as a treaty taking its name from Lisbon. It is just a play with words. Offered a referendum, several countries, perhaps even a majority, would vote as the French and Dutch did, and reject the confidence trick being played on them.

The British would most certainly reject this constitution, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Blair’s heir, knows it. He has therefore pretended that the Lisbon treaty is not the constitution in a disguised form, and so needs only to be voted on in the Westminster parliament where he can be sure of a majority. He has consigned his party’s promise to hold a referendum to the waste-paper basket. He also used all the traditional sticks and carrots to oblige his parliamentarians to vote to accept the treaty.  29 of them chose to defy their leader and party for the sake of upholding the promise of a referendum.  All honor to them, but they were not numerous enough to save the day.  Here is the extraordinary and ominous spectacle of a democratic parliament passing its powers to an undemocratic body without any legitimization from the people.

The last time anything comparable occurred was in July 1940, in the days immediately after the conquest of France by Germany. The French Assembly met in Vichy and voted itself out of existence. A handful of deputies voted against the motion, and one brave man shouted, “Long live the Republic all the same.”

What is hard to understand is the apathy of the British at the enormity of what is being foisted on them without their consent. Evidently they cannot trust a government that so lightly breaks its promises. If the past is any guide, on the shameful day when Brown whipped this treaty through Westminster, huge mobs should have been surging through the streets in protest. Perhaps the British are no longer the people they were, but I believe they are, and that they will rise up when they realise that the lying and cheating really isn’t a matter of political technicalities, but a cover for the surrender of sovereignty. This is a people that down the centuries has fought for its liberties. A historic nation state like Britain does not die easily. The EU, it seems clear to me and many that I talk to, is dooming us to future violence.

The Russian election sends a shudder of foreboding and fear down the spine. President Vladimir Putin has made sure to stage this show, with the appearance of turning to the electorate while making sure that no such thing is possible. He has muzzled free speech, barred opposition candidates from standing, and fixed the actual returns. Dissenters once again risk being condemned to mental asylums or punishment camps in a revised version of Gulag. On election day, Garry Kasparov, one of the forbidden opposition leaders, carried a plastic shopping bag in central Moscow with the words on it, “I am not participating in this farce.” Riot police surrounded him to prevent onlookers from spotting that bag. There could hardly be a more perfect representation of the political illegitimacy that Putin has put in place. Such is the reality of Russia today.

More than a travesty of democracy, here is a reenactment of Communist practice, a kind of civilian version of it. In a process that was purely personal and of course invisible even to insiders, Putin picked Dmitri Medvedev to replace him as President, while he simply appoints himself Prime Minister.

Who is this Medvedev? He rose through Gazprom, the state oil and gas giant. Fawning as usual, the Western press generally calls him a “moderniser” and a “liberal” or at least more “moderate” than Putin. Practically the entire world media has shown Putin and Medvedev celebrating pulling off the election by attending a rock concert, both dressed in smart black leather gear. Modern, cool, eh? In just that mode, previous Western journalists used to discover that hard-line general secretaries of the Communist Party were devoted to children and jazz, and drank whisky too.

Oleg Gordievsky, the former KGB colonel who defected to Britain in 1985, tells me that the election was pure falsification. Contacts in Russia inform him that the actual numbers of voters who turned up in the booths are significantly lower than those announced officially. The whole show is a KGB triumph. To him, Medvedev is an “empty space.” Over the next two years, nothing will change in the Putin-Medvedev relationship, he foresees, but then Medvedev is likely to try to establish the control over the armed forces and foreign policy that properly belongs to the presidency. We shall then see if anything has filled the “empty space.”

Actually today is worse than Communism, Gordievsky thinks. Communism at least had an ideology behind it. Now Putin and Medvedev are putting the power of the KGB and the state at the service of nothing but bandit capitalism. And he added the remarkable throwaway line, that Putin is short and ugly, as Stalin was, for which reason both men needed to take it out on the rest of the world.

Out of the blue, the talk shows and blogs have brought the name of Rashid Khalidi into view. He’s the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, and a well-known propagandist of Arab nationalism. At one point towards the end of the 1970s he was director of WAFA, a Palestinian news agency serving the purposes of Yasser Arafat and the PLO. A book of his, Under Siege, in 1986 was a panegyric to the courage and endurance of the PLO as the Israeli army forced it out of Beirut, parts of which the Palestinians had occupied by force of arms, with no legitimacy at all.  And now Khalidi pops up in some sort of relationship with Senator Barack Obama, as a fundraiser and supporter, possibly an advisor.

I have been covering Middle East affairs all my life. The Arab-Israeli clash looks outwardly as if reason could resolve it, but time and again reason is thwarted by Arab violence. Time and again, the Arabs seem to take the same decision to resort to force, but of course this is a clash not open to resolution by force, and so the Arabs are in each round left more desperate than before. Obviously they are as rational as everyone else, so how come they repeat the same mistake rather than draw the logical conclusion that self-injury has to stop?  In 1989, I published a book The Closed Circle to address that vital question. Arabs who have read it often tell me that I say harsh things about them, but as someone who wishes them well and not as an enemy. That’s true.

As part of a book tour at the time of publication, I found myself in Chicago appearing on the Milt Rosenberg talk show. And in the studio there was a guest, lo and behold Rashid Khalidi, transformed into an academic at Chicago University. Lack of democracy, I said, was blocking Arab development. He said furiously that the Arabs were democratic in their fashion, citing Kuwait of all examples, which at that moment was just standing down its vestigial parliament. I said that Arab nationalism had only served to extend despotism. He became even angrier at that, and accused me of writing a hatchet job. Apparently I was a purveyor of essentialism. This is a doctrine, as I understand it, that ascribes fixed characteristics to people, as though they couldn’t change. You talk to me about philosophical terms, I heard myself saying, but I am talking to you about murder and war.

Rashid Khalidi comes from a very well known Palestinian family, and someone in his position commands respect in that society. He is of course safe in the United States, but the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza have to bear the consequences of what the social and intellectual elite to which he belongs are doing and saying. Nationalism of his kind, its deceptions and self-deceptions, conditions the repeated mistake of favouring war over reason. In the first place, he is letting his people down, but then the wider world has to suffer the consequences. If Senator Obama really has friends like this, he – and all of us too – had better beware. 

Kosovo is the world’s newest state, and it is likely to prove a pain in the neck. As in the case of Palestine, two quite different peoples claim it. The huge majority of the two million population are Albanian and Muslim, while one in ten, or even fewer, are Serb and Orthodox. Ethnic and religious differences like these would test the identity of any nation-state.

The Serbs under the late and stupid Slobodan Milosevic made the fatal mistake of using force to incorporate into the rump of Serbia as much as possible of former Yugoslavia. Serbian nationalism proved criminal, taking the form of ethnic cleansing of the neighbouring Croats and Bosnians, massacres, destruction of historic places, and so on. President Clinton eventually did what the supine Europeans couldn’t, and stopped Serbia. Taken over by NATO, probably in defiance of international law, Kosovo became a special sort of protectorate, governed and policed by Westerners. Under this umbrella, or more accurately fig-leaf, the local Albanians have lived a different life, with crime and corruption running more or less untrammelled.

As with an illegitimate and unwanted child, nobody could think what to do with this province. NATO could not be responsible forever. Understandably, the Kosovar Albanians refused to have Serbia back after the Serbs’ abominable use of force and wicked disregard of human rights. But they themselves were, and still are, also incapable of governing fairly or competently. To grant them independence may have been the least bad course, but it is risky at several levels.

The Muslim world is naturally delighted to have a new member country, and one in Europe, what’s more. The United States and NATO are equally pleased to have the Kosovo problem off their hands. So there is a U.S.-Muslim entente, unusual to say the least. The Europeans are too supine to declare openly that they do not relish a Muslim state arising on the continent. But some of them, led by Spain with Romania and Slovakia and Cyprus in tow, are willing to oppose the independence of Kosovo on other grounds, namely that ethnic breakaways of the sort are existential threats to the nation state and its integrity. If Kosovars can do it, so can Basques and Catalans in Spain, Hungarians in Slovakia, Tamils in Sri Lanka – many a nation-state comes into this danger zone, and they are lining up by the dozen against Kosovo. The European Union exists to break up the nation-state, of course, so support for the new nation-state of Kosovo from the likes of Javier Solano, the EU foreign affairs boss, is particularly ironic, indeed rich to the point of absurdity. But that’s Europe for you in this age of political pygmies.

No country is more threatened by ethnic and religious separatist movements than Russia. So Russia is doing what it does best, turning a dangerous weapon away from itself onto others. President Putin is encouraging Abkhazia and South Ossetia to declare independence against Georgia, and he backs Serbia in its refusal to accept what the Serbian prime minister likes to call “the sham state” of Kosovo. If really it is a sham state, where does that leave its Serb minority?  Is the new Kosovo to be a state for all within it, or a state just for the Albanian ethnicity?  In his present mischief-making mood, Putin has an opening here for working against stability on the widest scale, and it will be a matter of luck if he chooses not to provoke another Balkan crisis.

The Times of London carries on the same day the obituaries of four men, all of them highly decorated for conspicuous bravery in the Second World War. Each one deserves to be remembered for the example he set.

Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Newson of the Royal Marines was a Fleet Air Arm pilot in one serious engagement after another, taking part in 1942 in the defense of Malta. The following year, he joined an American air group with the carrier Trumpeter which saw more operational service than any other ship of her class.

Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott worked for the legendary Special Operations Executive. Behind the German lines in Greece in 1943, he led a team of British soldiers to blow a bridge important to the German war effort. Interestingly, the Greek communists refused to help.

A New Zealander, Flight Lieutenant Jack Rae flew a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, also defended Malta, shot down German aircraft over France and Germany, and in 1943 was himself shot down. He was in the camp where there was a mass break-out, an event made famous by the film The Great Escape. The Germans then shot fifty hostages, and Rae would have been among them except for the lucky fact that he was in solitary confinement as a punishment for his previous attempt to escape.

Finally Flight Lieutenant Harry Humphries joined 617 Squadron, led by the heroic Guy Gibson. This most famous of the RAF’s bomber squadrons was known as the Dam Busters after the exploit in destroying a dam in Germany – also commemorated in a memorable film.

Today, another example is set. A sixteen-year-old youth was caught defacing a war memorial by a lady in her sixties. She told the boy off, and cuffed him round the ear. For this, the police arrested her and she is due to appear in court on a charge of assaulting a minor. What would the men who fought and won the war have to say about that?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a man by the name of Rowan Williams, has just told the British that the introduction of Muslim sharia law into the country is not just “unavoidable” but “desirable.” Archbishops of Canterbury head the Anglican church, and it is their role to uphold the established faith. Over the centuries, some of have been odd, but all have been recognizably fulfilling their role as a Christian primate. Britain is a Christian country, and the Anglican church has spread far and wide elsewhere. As a departure from the Christianity that rests in Anglican hands, Williams’ advocacy of sharia law is without precedent. More than that, it is hard to think of any statement more damaging to British identity since pacifists in 1940 advised that there should be no resistance to Hitler’s panzers.

Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Iran, some provinces in Nigeria, have sharia law, and courageous fighters for human rights there are trying to be rid of it. The cruelties of sharia are enormous, especially for women who are treated as they would have been fifteen hundred years ago. Sharia courts survive for domestic issues in some Arab and Muslim countries, and usually conflict with the civil codes imported into those countries from abroad as essential aspects of modernisation. The existence of two systems of law is one reason why these Muslim countries fail to coalesce, and often have no rule of law at all.

Williams went further, saying, “Sharia is not intrinsically to do with any demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims.” Wrong. That is an exact definition of what it is. Just try to imagine a sheikh or an imam in any Muslim country saying that there is a great deal to be learnt from the Christians, and Muslims ought to follow their social and religious practices, and enjoy the diversity.

Perhaps Williams is a clown, after all he likes to describe himself as a Druid, which seems to go beyond anything a satirist could invent. Lately he held a secret rite for gay and lesbian priests, something for which under sharia the whole lot, including him, would be stoned or pushed to death from a high cliff. Perhaps he is that dreadful thing, a learned idiot unable to recognise that he is disintegrating what he supposed to be representing. Apparently there is no recognized process for getting rid of an archbishop. So the noise we will all continue to hear in the background is the death rattle of the Church of England, and who knows what its collapse will bring with it.

News of the Islamization of Britain comes thick and fast. In the last few days, the children’s story of the three little pigs who built a house against the Big Bad Wolf has been forbidden for fear of offending Muslims. I have eaten eggs and bacon with at least as many Muslims as Jews, and in Algeria I once shared a bottle of whiskey with the local imam, a near-alcoholic — but let that pass. According to a government program, British schools are now to be twinned with madrassas in Pakistan, to show how much the children have in common. Bigamy is a crime in Britain, but also this week it has been decided that Muslim husbands with multiple wives are allowed to claim extra welfare benefits. Along that route lies the introduction of sharia law, as demanded already by some Muslims, and which would complete their independence from British law.

Oxford, the famous university city (and where I once studied — but let that pass too) is the latest scene for a test to see how much, and how quickly, the British are prepared to surrender these days. The population is roughly 150,000, with 6,000 Muslims, some say 7,000. A huge mosque has just completed a seven-year building program in a residential part of Oxford some distance from where the Muslims live and where people are pretty well exclusively Christian. The mosque imam proposes to broadcast the call to prayer through loud speakers in the minaret three times a day — though it ought to be five times, and no doubt will be if permission is given. “We live here as British citizens and it is our right,” says the imam who takes it for granted that the city council will agree.

Actually they may be living here nominally as British citizens but Islam is their primary identity. The people of Oxford are making it known that they see the mosque and the call to prayer as alien, “un-English,” a step in the direction of “Islamic dictatorship” and the destruction of Western culture. The Daily Telegraph quotes a member of the Oxford history faculty: “this is a move to torment and torture non-Muslims. It’s not a matter of people’s right to religious freedom, it’s about making Islam the religion of public space…If this is granted it will show that Muslims have the upper hand in a Christian country.” The Church of England, needless to say, has abdicated any defense of its faith. The bishop of Oxford has urged people to “enjoy our community diversity,” and further urges them to be “as respectful to others as you would hope they would be to you.”

It is irresistible to recall one of the most famous and resonant passages in Edward Gibbon’s great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. If Charles Martel and the Franks had not defeated the invading Muslims at the battle of Poitiers in 731 and so turned them back from all of Europe except Spain, he wrote, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” Gibbon considered the clergy of his day to be contemptible and ignorant time-servers. What irony, what mockery, he would heap on a latter day bishop who supports the teaching of Islam, and in Oxford of all places.

The Cold War threw up many challenges, but few so strange as the match between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky to decide which of them was the world’s chess champion. The match was held in July 1972 in Reyjavik, the capital of Iceland — and a dump of a place it is too, to be honest. Everyone wanted to see whether the winner was the United States and the individual, or the Soviet Union and the system. Suddenly chess took on a major political dimension.

I flew there to cover the event for the Sunday Telegraph, and on the same flight was Arthur Koestler, reporting for the Sunday Times. I already knew him, and now we were staying in the same hotel. A Party member of standing in his youth, Koestler could criticize Communism from inside knowledge. In Spain during the civil war on a Communist assignment, he had been captured and sentenced to death, and then he had lived through the fall of France in 1940. His exposure of Communism in his famous novel Darkness at Noon, and in his great autobiographies and essays, had given him an international reputation. Remorselessly, the Soviet press and fellow-travellers in the West attacked him, sometimes calling for him to be murdered. Granted his c.v., this chess match might seem tame, but he was the right companion for it. He was also a good enough chess player himself to be able to analyze the board..

Play took place in a large cheerless hall. Quite often, Fischer’s tantrums meant that there was no play. One mini-crisis succeeded another. Arthur and I would fill in time trying to waylay the champions. We discovered where Spassky had lunch, and almost managed to talk to him in a restaurant. A phalanx of KGB officers simply shut out access by standing shoulder to shoulder in a square surrounding him. Executioners and potential victim had come face to face on neutral ground. Their expressions showed that they knew who Arthur was, and would deal with him if they could. Spassky could do nothing. Pale, he seemed vulnerable to the pressures he was under. Fischer was playing psychological games, and this surely helped him to defeat Spassky.

We got to talk with Fischer and with the grandmasters advising him, one of them a Jesuit. They did not hesitate to call him a genius. You had only to take one look at Fischer to know that this might be true but he was a kook at the same time. His rapid speech, the hunched way he walked as if he had to get that very moment to wherever he was going, were signs of self-obsession so strong that it verged on derangement. The rest of his life, alas, demonstrated it, as he railed whenever he had the chance in stupid and vulgar terms against the United States and against Israel, a self-hating Jew if ever there was one. Somehow it was poetic justice that he finished up a stateless person in dour and uninviting Reyjavik where the air smells either of the fish being processed in the fish factories, or of the sulphurated water piped in from the island’s geysers.

Fischer has just died, and as an epitaph there comes to me the tragic-comic tribute paid to him in his finest hour by Arthur Koestler, uttered in tones of amazement and in Arthur’s Hungarian-accented English too, “Better than anyone who has ever played the game of chess, he has understood the mid-field aura of the queen.”

Andrew Glyn is not a household name, and until I read his obituary yesterday in The Times of London I had never heard of him. But what an illuminating document that obituary proves to be, a perfect little insight into the age.

The opening sentence informs that Glyn “was one of Britain’s most prominent Marxist economists who produced searching critiques of capitalism,” going on to salute him as “one of the finest of Oxford dons.” He was apparently “more likely to be seen on a picket line at an Oxford factory than at the succession of black-tie events that are the circulation of Oxford life.”  Even for a sympathetic fellow-traveller — as the writer of this obituary evidently is — that’s a pretty one-dimensional way of describing what goes on in one of England’s leading universities, but let it pass. No doubt this fellow Glyn was a proletarian stalwart in dungarees, always loyal to his class as he left his college to support whoever might be striking.

Oh dear, no, not at all. Glyn was an aristocrat, with the courtesy title of Honourable, as his father was the sixth Lord Wolverton. He was a descendant of the founders of a bank bearing his name, and as the obituary coyly puts it, “born into considerable banking wealth.”  Educated at Eton, the famously elite school, [full disclosure: I was there too, but before Glyn] he was such a schoolboy success that his master judged “they don’t come better than this.”

What made him a Marxist? Some streak of rebellion, perhaps, if we are to be charitable about him. More likely, he imagined that Marxism would allow him to go on ordering other people about. Most likely of all motivations, he felt guilt about being so well-connected and rich, and wanted to build a fictional persona to avoid reality.   

Think of the abuse of privilege. Think of the false pretences. Think of the damage he did spouting rubbish year after year to students who would be expected to parrot it back to him. To one student, he is supposed to have said, “the three greatest men who ever lived were Lenin, Trotsky and Charlie Parker,” – a sentence that the obituary writer hilariously links to “his depth of knowledge.” Some of the unfortunate students will have recovered freedom to think for themselves, but some will be permanently damaged. The obituary writer does in the end concede that Glyn “will to some extent be deemed to have backed the wrong ideological horse” — that “to some extent” is a qualification that goes so far beyond hilarious that it is almost majestic.

First, people bamboozle themselves, and then they bamboozle others, and who knows where that finishes ultimately. Glyn may not have been personally responsible for murder like his heroes Lenin and Trotsky, but he did his bit to create a climate of opinion favourable to it. His obituary, and in The Times that vaunts itself as the paper of record, shows how manipulation of this sort continues to misinform and deceive. 

 The United States and Britain had both been pushing for the return of Benazir Bhutto to her native Pakistan.  The assumption in both capitals was that she would introduce democracy. After all, she emphasised in the many interviews and speeches she made in her enforced exile that she stood for democracy, and that she was a liberal-minded, secular, Western-educated person exactly fitted to lead her country out of military dictatorship and into the bright new democratic dawn, scotching the Taliban at the same time.

President Musharraf, the actual military dictator, was sceptical. He warned that Pakistan is not ready for such an experiment, which would only destabilise his and other countries. It is not hard to imagine the messages he must have been receiving from Washington and London, telling him in ever more insistent tones what to do, or else prepare to face the dire consequences. A dictator he may be, but he is not a cruel or inflexible man, if anything too much of a worrier. Against his instincts, he cut a deal. Corruption charges were outstanding against Benazir, and they were to be dropped in return for which she would cooperate politically, and together the two of them would form a base that could be described with only a small ladling of falsehood as democratic.

Corruption charges against the white hope of democracy and the necessary ally of the West in the fight against Islamism? Unfortunately yes. The Bhuttos are a family from Sind, with large land-holdings and the sort of influence that comes with feudal power. To promote themselves, they founded the Pakistan Peoples Party, outwardly a mass movement but actually a private vehicle for the family. In the 1970s Zulfikar Bhutto became prime minister and PPP leader, but he and his two sons came to violent ends because they themselves resorted to extortionate and thuggish means. In doing so, they made their fortunes. Swiss banks and other sources have provided irrefutable evidence that successive generations of the Bhutto family have abused their powers to salt away huge illegal funds. Benazir’s husband, Asif Zardari, is known as Mr Ten Percent for very good reasons. Pakistani friends tell me that the real motive behind Benazir’s return may have been to obtain signatures from family members and others permitting the release of blocked millions of dollars.

Over the last twenty two years, there has been no process of election for leadership of the PPP. The Bhuttos have simply appointed one among themselves to party leadership according to seniority or wealth or power within the family circle, in what amounts to a civil parody of military dictatorship. Benazir liked to trumpet that “Democracy is the best revenge,” but what this actually meant is that democracy is the best ladder available for Bhutto advancement.

In fact, the PPP really does stand for a liberal and secular state and would probably be the best political option in the future. But first, the party must hold a genuine primary election to determine who is its legitimate leader. The omens are not good. Asif Zardari has already staked out a position as leader, thus continuing the old assumption that the party is nothing more than a Bhutto fiefdom. Promotion to party chairmanship of the 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto, a first year Oxford undergraduate who cannot even speak Urdu properly, bodes ill for him and for many others.  

Democracy is surely the only viable alternative to the twin horrors of dictatorship and Islamism, and one day the country will enjoy it. The murder of Benazir and the PPP’s lack of legitimacy typify the obstacles blocking progress towards the desired goal. Washington and London made the elementary mistake of thinking that their recommendations would be enough to re-order reality. Now Musharraf stands between Pakistan and disaster.

Saddam Hussein once made the unforgettable observation that law was two lines above his signature. One illustration of this has just occurred in Saudi Arabia. A nineteen year old woman from the town of al-Qatif was abducted and gang-raped by seven men. This November, she – the victim – was then punished for being in the company of men not members of her family. The sentence was six months in prison, and forty lashes, enough to kill a strong man, never mind her. She lost her appeal, and the clerics in charge of the court raised the punishment to 200 lashes. What kind of human beings can such clerics be? What kind of clerics?

This monstrous injustice raised a huge uproar of protest all round the globe. It is now the Muslim festival of Eid, and to mark the occasion the King of Saudi Arabia has the absolute prerogative to pardon criminals, and he has exercised it on behalf of the unfortunate woman who of course is no criminal. She appears to be free.

A second illustration of Saddam Hussein’s dictum comes from Dubai. There, a fifteen year old Swiss boy was abducted by some men, and raped. When the injured boy went to the police to report this crime, he – again, the victim – was arrested for homosexuality, a punishable offence in Dubai. The boy’s mother is a well-known Swiss journalist, and she at once began a press campaign, publicising another monstrous injustice. In the end, the ruling authority has discharged the boy, and the rapists have received lengthy prison sentences. 

The ruler has only to sign under a couple of lines, and hey presto, that’s law, that’s how to right a wrong. If we in the West protest loudly enough, then, we can shame cruel and unjust men into behaving in a civilised manner – sometimes, at least. That is worth bearing in mind.