The European Union cares ever so greatly about the well-being of us all, and has passed laws about the obligatory strapping of children into car seats. A kind reader writes in to explain the relevant EU Directive 2003/20/EC, all in its own idiom.

Article 1.3 states : “Child restraints shall be classified in five ‘mass groups’: (a) group O for children of a mass of less than 10kg; (b) group )O+ for children of a mass of less than 13kg; (c) group I for children of a mass of from 9kg to 18kg; (d) group II for children of a mass from 15kg to 25 kg; (e) group III for children of a mass from 22 kg to 36kg.”

Article 2.1. (a) (i) classifies vehicle types as ‘M1, N1, N2, and N3’ and defines the safety system fitted for children less than 150cm in height occupying M1, N1, N2 and N3 vehicles and further clarification is given at (ii) and (iii)  (b,c and d).

It’s hilarious to think of the thousands of bureaucratic man-hours that must have gone into drafting this drivel – hilarious until you realise that this is how the continent expresses its death-wish. 

On October 23, exactly 50 years ago, the Hungarian revolution broke out. Let’s commemorate the brave people who then took to the streets. More than a revolution, it was a fight for freedom. The whole nation took part in it. They wanted to be rid of the Communism that Stalin had imposed on them through the Red Army. Among other symbolic gestures, the Communists had pulled down a famous church and erected a monster statue of Stalin in bronze on the site. The first act of the freedom fighters was to take metal cutters and demolish that statue, leaving nothing but Stalin’s empty boots on a plinth. Similarly in Baghdad in 2003?

Hungarian soldiers were obliged to wear a Red Star cap-badge, and one of the sounds of the time was the tinkle these cap-badges made when whole units threw them off. Hungarian soldiers and policemen joined the freedom fighters, established themselves in a cinema and a barracks, and fought off the Soviet army. More than epic, it was Homeric, something to remind mankind of the heights we can rise to in order to be free. Dragged along by events, the newly installed Prime Minister Imre Nagy did his best, but he had behind him a lifelong career as a Communist, and he made the fatal mistake of trusting the Russians. We know now that Khrushchev and the Politburo in the Kremlin always preferred a military solution to a political compromise with Hungary. They tricked the Hungarians into coming to arrange a treaty, arrested the delegation, sent the tanks in, smashed up everything, judicially murdered Nagy and at least 300 others, imprisoned over 20,000 and drove 200,000 into exile in the West.

“Help Hungary. Help!” was the final appeal on the radio, put out by Gyula Hay, the playwright and in his day a veteran Communist too. In sad fact, the United States did nothing, making it plain that the Soviets could do their worst. On hearing that a revolution had broken out, President Eisenhower limited himself to saying, “The heart of America goes out to the people of Hungary.” Heart is all very well, but what about muscle? Robert Murphy, then undersecretary of state and an experienced trouble-shooter, summed up Washington’s failure: “Perhaps history will demonstrate that the free world could have intervened to give Hungarians the liberty they sought, but none of us in the State Department had the skill or the imagination to devise a way.”

The problem may change geographical location, but not its essence. What’s to be done about tyranny? “Help Iraq. Help!” is the message that Iraqi bloggers are putting out more and more urgently. This time the free world indeed intervened to give people their liberty, and again the State Department seems to lack the skill and imagination needed for devising the way to realize it. The Hungarian revolution marked the moment when the inhumanity of Communism was shown up as unbearable, and its doom therefore certain one day. Events in Iraq mark the moment when the inhumanity of Arab and Muslim political order is shown up as unbearable. A day of reform will come, and then the free world can take pride that it did more than show a well-meaning but futile heart.

Last year I went to listen to a lecture by Ramin Jahanbegloo. A philosopher, he was at ease building on arguments from the great thinkers of the West.  Born in Iran, he studied in the Paris of the 1970s and 1980s, and not the least remarkable thing about him is that he avoided falling for the violent idiocies of men like Sartre and Foucault and Lacan, then fashionable. Instead of revolution, Jahanbegloo believes in change and reform through non-violence. That’s his message, preached with sincerity — and, it may be admitted, a touch of naivety. He wrote one book in praise of Gandhi, and another consisting of interviews with Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher who familiarised the concept of pluralism and its centrality to democracy. The publisher tells me that these conversations with Berlin are about to go into a third printing in China, of all astonishing outcomes.

As a wise precaution, Jahanbegloo took out Canadian citizenship. Some years ago, he felt it was safe to return to Iran, and there he set up his Cultural Research Bureau, a think-tank to promote his ideas of non-violence and pluralism. This April he was arrested and held without charge, accused of “having contacts with foreigners.”  That is enough for arbitrary imprisonment and torture in Ahmedinejad’s messianic and nuclear-bound Iran. In academic and Iranian exile circles, there was great fear about his fate, especially considering the terrible recent precedent of Zahra Kazemi. Born in Iran, she too had acquired Canadian citizenship, but they arrested her and murdered her in prison. As a deputy minister put it at the time, “We still don’t know whether it was the object that hit her head or her head hit the object.”

Some compromise has been reached with Jahanbegloo. He has been released, and apparently will be allowed to leave for India where he researching for a new book. But they have put a bail on the mortgages he has for his house and his mother’s. The Soviets didn’t allow private property, and so the Iranians can certainly take the credit for a new refinement in the persecution of free spirits.

Someone has gunned down Anna Politkovskaya in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow – when I was researching my book on the fall of Communism, my driver and minder insisted on accompanying me even, indeed especially, in the elevator. Anna was someone other commentators met in Moscow. Born in New York as the daughter of Soviet diplomats, she was what Mrs Thatcher liked to call “one of us.” Slight in build, serious, with big spectacles, she was highly intelligent, and a first-class journalist. Russian brutality in the war against the Chechens shocked her, and she was not afraid to write about it. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was the foremost critic of President Putin and his megalomaniac and destructive policies.

A few years back, Galina Staravoitova was similarly shot dead in front of the house where she lived. She was a cheerful plumpish lady, a member of the Duma or Parliament, and a specialist on the many minority peoples in Russia, whose interests mattered to her. Nobody was ever arrested for the killing of Galina, and it is a safe bet that nobody will now be arrested for the murder of Anna. It gets between me and peace of mind that people I have run across can be rubbed out so easily and inconsequentially.

Who profits from such deaths if not the Kremlin ? Who can get away with killing if not the Kremlin or its agents ? Another free-spirited Russian I have come across is Oleg Gordievsky, the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect. When the Kursk submarine was lost with all hands, he was watching out for Putin’s reaction, and immediately commented, Look at the coldness in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, that tells you everything about the man. Oleg defected in the mid-1980s, but he still lives under cover out of a well-founded fear that these never-identified Russian gunmen will come for him too. Over there, they still don’t know what to do with free spirits except shoot them dead.

Kim Philby is a household name as a traitor, while George Blake remains virtually unknown although he did more damage and was responsible for the arrest, torture and execution of an estimated 400 men and women working against Communism and the Soviet Union. His life-story is certainly strange. Half Dutch, half Egyptian, he joined MI 6, the British intelligence service during the world war. The North Koreans captured him in the course of the Korean war, and turned him. Back in Britain, he copied almost 5,000 pages of top-level secret information, so that his Soviet controllers knew pretty much everything that was to be known.  Identified and arrested in 1960, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 42 years in prison, but then in an ingenious plot surely orchestrated by the KGB he was spirited away from his London prison to Moscow. There he lives to this day, untroubled and receiving a pension from Russia for services rendered.

There is worse. In 1990 he wrote his autobiography, for which his British publishers proposed to pay him £60,000, or about $120,000 in today’s values. Mrs Thatcher’s government took legal action to prevent him profiting from his treason. The British courts ruled that this was only right, and the publishers paid the money to charity.  Now the European Court of Human Rights, a European body that sits in Strasbourg and makes up its law as it goes along, has ruled that the Thatcher government breached Blake’s human rights. Disgracefully, this court found no  “causal link” between Blake’s treason and the government’s violation of his human rights. In the opinion of the judges, he had suffered “distress and frustration.” Blake is to receive compensation to the tune of £4,690, including costs. Monetarily, the sum may not be that much, but as the historian Andrew Roberts aptly puts it in the Daily Mail, “This decision means that taxpayers are subsidising treachery.”

And that is still not the worst of it. This whole travesty arises because the present Blair government incorporated lock, stock and barrel into British law the European Convention on Human Rights, a monument to political correctness at its zenith. The Strasbourg Court is thus in a position to go against British law, to trump it, dictating to British citizens who have no possible recourse or appeal in their own courts. Folly and injustice of the sort can only breed disrespect for the law, a sense that sane people must take the law into their own hands, and finally – if common-sense continues to be scorned in this way – a national uprising.

Americans, free people everywhere, be warned! Have nothing to do with international courts.

At the age of 84, Mrs. Elfriede Rinkel must have thought she’d got away with it. She built a trim little alibi, living in San Francisco and marrying a German Jewish husband, who has died. But the U.S. Department of Justice was catching up with her, and she has been deported back to the Germany from which she once fled. What she kept secret all these years is that she was a warder at Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Spare a thought for the 90,000 or more who were murdered there, among them Franz Kafka’s fascinating girlfriend, Milena Jesenka. One survivor was Margarete Buber-Neumann, who wrote a magnificent, indeed historic, account of her ordeal as a prisoner in both Soviet and Nazi camps.

Mrs. Rinkel may have seen these great women, but she would not have singled them out from all the others with their striped clothes and shaven heads and potential for typhoid. Her job was to patrol with dogs, for as she puts it, “You have to watch so they don’t run away.”  Absurdly, insultingly, she goes on to claim that she knew nothing about what was going on inside the camp. So why might the women run away ? What need was there for dogs trained to attack and kill?

Back in Germany, she can have a reunion with Günter Grass who kept his SS past a secret. Such veterans of Hitler hope that the rest of us will come to feel sorry for them. But like so much else in life, justice is better late than never.

Opera librettos are hardly the place where you might expect to pick up insight into the human condition, let alone commentary on issues of the day. And yet, and yet. In depressing times like these, I turn to Offenbach, a composer who has in him the crystal pure spirit of comedy. La Périchole is rarely performed, alas. The heroine is a street singer, and she has a wonderful aria with the refrain, “My God, how stupid people are.”

As for Mozart, whose 250th anniversary is now being celebrated, we can recruit him to defend our values. In his opera Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail, a party of Westerners are in the hands of Muslim Turks. In a duet with a startlingly contemporary resonance, Osmin, one of the Turks, thinks he can do as he likes with the marvellously named Blonde, because his master, the Pasha, has given her to him as a slave. Blonde stands up to Osmin with the words, “Girls aren’t goods to be given away, “ and she goes on, “I’m an English woman, and for that reason nobody ever compelled me to do anything against my will.” When she repels Osmin saying, “Don’t you dare touch me,” he replies, “Don’t oblige me to use force.” Finally the indomitable Blonde tells him to shove off – the libretto has a fairly coarse verb – and he shoves off, complaining that the English must be mad to allow their women to have free will. 

Someone ought to present a recording of Entfuehring to the Vatican, since Pope Benedict is only taking Mozart’s point about the use of force in personal relations, and enlarging it.

Literary London is enjoying a belly-laugh at the expense of one A.N.Wilson, a writer of many books and even more newspaper columns. He has just published a biography of John Betjeman, in his day the Poet Laureate and one of the most popular of poets in any age. In this biography is a letter purportedly from Betjeman to the Irish and long dead writer Honor Tracy, and Wilson uses this to improvise about their affair, conjuring up alcohol-fuelled lunches and afternoons in a rented room.

Honor Tracy was a lesbian – but let that pass. The letter is a quite brilliant pastiche of Betjeman, slang and all, and it contains an implanted acrostic – the first letters of its sentences read, “A.N. Wilson is a shit.”  A well-wisher by the name of Eve de Harben had sent Wilson the letter about Honor Tracy, and he had failed to spot either that this name was an anagram of “ever been had” or the lethal acrostic.

The author of the hoax stands revealed as Bevis Hillier, a learned and clever fellow, author of a previous biography of Betjeman in three immense volumes. Wilson had steadily disparaged and ignored this work, creating bad blood.  Detecting grudge and envy, Hillier got his own back with this exposé of Wilson’s carelessness.

As a matter of fact, Wilson is prone to pratfalls. He cultivates a side-line in pro-fascist, anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli propaganda. In that spirit he trumpeted the Palestinian lie that an operation in 2002 killing some fifty terrorists in the West Bank town of Jenin was “a massacre, and cover-up for genocide.” He talks about the “Zionist SS” and how Israel poisons the wells, and indeed has no right to exist. His master-stroke was to publish a tirade against Israel that had apparently been written by an Israeli overcome with horror at what his country was doing. In fact, this too was a hoax, penned by a notorious neo-Nazi by the name of Michael Hoffman. The London newspaper that had run Wilson’s bloop published a grovelling apology.

Eve de Harben may be a comic turn, but it proves the point all right.  

George Faludy, a voice inside me has been saying for weeks, it’s time to read his book again. Its wonderful title, My Happy Days in Hell, pretty much gives the story away.  A Hungarian poet with a big reputation in his own country, in 1938 he saw the coming of the Germans and Nazism, and fled to France. When the Germans caught up with him there, he fled on to North Africa, and then to the United States where he enlisted in the American army. After the war, he returned to Hungary. Fatal mistake. A classicist quoting Greek and Latin, a linguist, a man of the world and lover of life in all its richness, he could never have been a Communist. Sure enough, they arrested him as an American agent, and he confessed that he had indeed been recruited by Captain Edgar Allen Poe and Major Walt Whitman, both of them reporting to the sinister club-footed chief Z.E. Bubbel, an anagram of Belzebub. So they sent him to the infamous concentration camps of Kistarcsa and Recsk. After the 1956 revolution he escaped again to the United States, only to return home to Hungary after the collapse of Communism.

His memoir spoke to me with the warmth and brilliance I remembered from some forty years ago when it was first published. Why not get in touch with the man in what must be his old age, and tell him so?  I know a good friend and fan of his, who not long ago wrote an admiring article about him. So I sent her an email to ask how to get in touch with Faludy. She answered that at the very moment she was hearing from me, she also received the news that Faludy had just died in Budapest.  One of Faludy’s Hungarian friends was Arthur Koestler, someone also with a touch of genius and his own experiences of modern hell; and who firmly believed that inside voices and coincidences such as this are evidence of a reality which physics as yet is unable to bring within the bounds of science.

Many a time over the years I have been to the Gaza Strip. Time was when I stayed in the hotel on the square in Gaza City, and marvelled to find English plumbing.  Once it was possible to explore there, to talk to people and learn from them. No longer. Now every visitor, especially a reporter from the foreign media, is in the hands of a Fatah or a Hamas official who will control what is to be seen and heard.

The kidnapping of the two Fox journalists, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, is a serious warning to the whole press corps that the Palestinians are now determined to allow only their version of events to be published. Every reporter in the Strip will carry a memory of what happened to that pair.

Sure, they weren’t beheaded, but their lives were spared only when they agreed to convert to Islam. In all probability, anyone in those dire circumstances would have behaved as they did, saving their own lives as it must have seemed. The humiliation of the Christians must have seemed to the Muslim captors more rewarding in terms of publicity than murder for the television cameras, Baghdad-style.

However, the Koran explicitly states that, “there is no compulsion in religion.”  What happened to Centanni and Wiig, then, is forbidden. As far as I know, not a single Muslim cleric has denounced these gun-point conversions carried out to make a political point. Christian spokesmen equally have nothing to say on the subject. The men themselves seem to have limited themselves to utterances about the Palestinians being “beautiful and kind-hearted people.”  This whole episode may look small, and to be speedily overlooked, but actually it illuminates a large and lurid reality.

Erwood is a very small village in mid-Wales, where I live. Every year, the surrounding farmers get together at the end of August for a show. They aim to win prizes for their sheep, their dogs, and horses. Immaculately turned-out children trot and canter round the ring on immaculately turned-out ponies.  Everybody seems to know, or at least be able to identify, everybody else.  Men and women here are living as generations before them have lived.  There’s a beer tent of course, and among the many stands is a bookseller. From him I bought for about ten dollars P. G.Wodehouse’s Very Good, Jeeves in its prewar orange binding. Opening the book at random, I found the hero Bertie Wooster describing a girlfriend as “a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rock-bound coast.” What Islamists are really up against, I thought as the sun was sending evening shadow across the Welsh hills, is a show like this, native manners, and humor.

A German news agency has reported that Hezbollah men have executed eighteen Lebanese accused of spying for Israel.  Lebanon has a judicial process, but it was not involved.  Hezbollah alone directed and carried out the process of putting these eighteen to death. I have no idea if any of them were spies for Israel, but it seems most unlikely. Eighteen?  All caught at work in the short time-frame of the fighting?  And how come Hezbollah is allowed to take what here is laughably called the law into its own hands? My suspicion is that the eighteen merely expressed what many, even most, Lebanese think but dare not say, that Hizbollah has brought calamity down on the country, and is likely to make matters even worse in the future. But just imagine the scene – those eighteen dragged out to the firing squad with no hope of any fair hearing. And then the gunfire and the blood-stained corpses.

Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terror group paid for by Iran, has copied this example.  In a public square in the West Bank town of Jenin, five of their gunmen brought out for execution a twenty-two-year-old by the name of Bassam Malah, also accused of being an Israeli spy.  Malah is said to have been an Israeli Arab from Umm al-Fahm, the largest Arab town in Israel. Again I have no idea if he was a spy, and there is presumably no means of ever knowing the truth. If he was, who knows what pressures were on him that might cause mitigating circumstances?  Anyhow they shot him dead without a proper trial, effectively an act of plain murder. A crowd said to number several hundred was watching, and they shouted the Islamist war-cry of “Allahu akhbar” or God is the greatest, at the moment of execution. A photograph on the Internet shows the victim dead, face down on some sort of sheeting, hands tied behind his back. At first I felt an overwhelming shock of horror that human beings could believe that barbarity of the kind could possibly be justice. But it is hate that has made them so primitive, and they ought to be pitied for it, because they are destroying themselves. 

Lately I went to a publisher’s party given to launch a book with the title The Silent Steppe, by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov.  Needless to say, I had never heard of him, but here was evidently the autobiography of a Muslim, and reading such books is a key to understanding the inner life of Islam, or so I believe.

Mr Shayakhmetov proved to be a striking figure, strongly built, sober in manner, with deep brown eyes in a face that gave nothing away.  He is a Kazakh, and on this occasion he was surrounded by about a dozen young Kazakhs who treated him with the respect due to a tribal elder.  I gathered from them that he is one of the most eminent of his people.  Duly I asked him to sign my copy of his book, and he chose to do so in Russian, not Kazakh.

Now I have read this astonishing book. Such is the world today that this book will probably pass almost unnoticed, but it has lasting human and historic value. He describes what Soviet Communism did to the Kazakhs.  At the end of the 1920s, they were forced to abandon their herding and nomadic way of life, and driven into agricultural collectives that completed the destruction of their identity. Shayakhmetov’s father, a poor man, was nonetheless considered a kulak, arrested and died in captivity.  He himself was not allowed to attend school and as a boy experienced the great and unnecessary famine of 1932 to 1934 in which millions starved to death to satisfy Stalin’s whim. Yet when the time came, he gladly joined the Red Army, was at Stalingrad and badly wounded.

The book expresses regret for the passing of the traditional ways of Kazakh clans, with their sense of kinship and hospitality, yet in spite of the terrible things Shayakhmetov suffered, he has no trace of self-pity. The Kazakhs are making a go of their post-Soviet independence, and they certainly have a national spokesman of whom to be proud.

Guenther Grass, the German novelist and Nobel prize-winner, has been oh-so-very-keen to moralize all his life.  Everyone must tell the truth, that is his message, and Germans especially must tell the truth because for ever their country will be associated with Auschwitz.  Truth-telling for him meant criticizing the United States at every opportunity, defending the Soviet Union as far as possible, and pointing an accusing finger at fellow Germans for covering up their Hitlerite past.

To be sure, The Tin Drum — the novel that won him the Nobel Prize — always looked more like a cover-up of Nazism than a critique of it. Its line is that Hitler was an evil magician who cast a spell over helpless Germans. In simple reality, Hitler was a politician who told the Germans exactly what they wanted to hear, and they voted him into power, and then fought for him to the bitter end. Germans believed that they were  making a rational choice in backing Hitler, and  to ascribe the compact they made with him to magic is to apologize for it.

And now it emerges that our oh-so-moral Grass was a member of the SS, a fact that he has been carefully concealing since 1945. So much for truth-telling, and forcing his fellow Germans to confront their ugly past.  His biographer, a specially disillusioned man, says that the revelation now “puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us.”  Indeed so. Grass’s constant attacks on the United States and the free world, for instance, turn out to be mere repetitions and embellishments of everything his SS instructors will have taught him about the wickedness of democracy and capitalism. His name will be associated for ever with hypocrisy.

Tens of thousands of travelers in Britain have had their vacations or business trips wrecked today by a security alert at the highest level. Acting on intelligence, the authorities have suspended flights. It seems that plans were about to come to a head to blow up nine aircraft in mid-air from Britain to the United States. The plans are also said to involve sophisticated chemistry with inflammable liquids to be mixed during flight. So far there have been 21 arrests.

I have been listening to BBC reporters interviewing this family and that who won’t now be fulfilling their plans but are caught in frustration and misery at airports. But who are the people causing the chaos and arousing the fear? The home secretary has held a press conference, as grave as he is mysterious on the subject. A police spokesman warns in the same sphinx-like mode of “unimaginable consequences.” BBC newsmen one and all speak of terrorists, plotters, suspects, anything except Muslim. Everyone in Britain that I have heard has been mealy mouthed. The American Michael Chertoff was alone in speculating that the operation bears signs of al-Qaeda.  It will be absolutely amazing if the 21 arrested are anything other than Muslims, and until the public is brought to face reality we are all going to be losers time and again as the war on terror gathers.

A small incident or detail sometimes illuminates the big picture. Here is Mr. Wayne Roylance, described as Adult Selection Coordinator at the Brooklyn Public Library. A reader requested from the library a new book, Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. Mr. Roylance refused to add this book to the library on the grounds that it is “potentially incendiary,” unless a review from “a trusted source” could be found, and he had apparently found none.

It happens that I reviewed this book for NR, and it irks me as a resident of Londonistan and a commentator on things Islamic for about four decades that Mr. Roylance should judge that I am not a trusted source on the matter. In fact Londonistan is a carefully researched and documented exploration of the ways that Islamists have exploited British tolerance and democratic values, undermining that tolerance and those values. To declare an interest, as we Brits like to say, I am published by Encounter Books, as is Melanie Phillips, but it is altogether objectionable that Adult Selection Coordinator proves to be a euphemism for censor. Who is Mr. Roylance to decide what is “potentially incendiary”? But he and his kind are responsible for wishing on the rest of us what Orwell was the first to call group-think, or the political correctness that now corrupts clear thinking.

Stop press. Brooklyn Public Library has in fact taken the fearsome plunge towards open-mindedness and bought a copy of Londonistan.

I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties. How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants against the Jews, and Hitler’s foreign adventures which the democracies did nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight.  One of my heroes is Robert Byron, so passionate an anti-Nazi that in his passport he described his occupation as “warmonger.”  He was to be killed in 1941. My own father, a man of literary and artistic sensitivities, wrote a letter in 1938 to the New Statesman, that perennially weak-kneed leftist publication, to denounce pacifism and appeasement, and to insist on re-arming. Doing other research, I came across this letter quite by chance, and I hope I would have been so minded at that time.

Now Iran is embarked on foreign adventures in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It is engaged on all-out armament programs, and is evidently hard at work developing the nuclear weapon that will give it a dimension of power that Hitler did not have. The latest unpleasant revelation on that front is that some months ago a huge shipment of uranium 238 from the Congo was due to be smuggled to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, but was intercepted in Tanzania. Appeasement is again considered wise. Israel’s attempt to get Iranian Hezbollah off its back is widely criticised as “disproportionate.”  A clamour rises for hostilities to cease even though that means entrenching Hezbollah and allowing it to dictate the future course of events. In Malaysia, President Ahmedinejad informs a gathering of heads of Muslim states that the extermination of Israel is the solution to the crisis. Apparently nobody objected or even demurred: It might have been Goebbels addressing a group of gauleiters.  Propaganda videos show Hezbollah columns goose-stepping in the streets, or else on parade in black uniforms, right arms raised in the Nazi salute.  At least I know now what it was like to live through the Thirties.

1. Why did Hezbollah choose this moment to attack Israel? Perhaps to take the pressure off Iran as it defies the rest of the world over its nuclear program, and to show the tricks up its sleeve in the event of real confrontation. But it must have reasoned that Israel would respond as it has done. The effect is to deepen sectarian splits within Lebanon, as Christians, Druze, Sunnis and even — sometimes especially — fellow Shias are expected to pay for Hezbollah’s strategy. Hezbollah leaders, and some of the Tehran mullahs too, are now openly and angrily threatening to settle scores after the hostilities with everyone who refused to support them in one way or another. No Lebanese force, either the national army or any militia, is in a position to oppose Hezbollah. It is beginning to look as if Hezbollah calculated that the attack on Israel will prove the pretext for a coup d’état in Lebanon.  

2. How did the return to Lebanon of the miniscule area known as Shebaa Farms come to be one of the conditions of an end to the war? According to international treaties, and the ratification of the U.N., this area belongs to Syria. If Hezbollah were to succeed in effecting its transfer to Lebanon, then it would show that it had the power to redraw national boundaries in the Middle East.

3. France started its subterranean war with Hezbollah back in 1983 when a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 58 French soldiers peacekeeping in Beirut. A tit-for-tat sequence of events then began, with French reprisals — most of them bungled — and Hezbollah murders of French diplomats and civilians in France. While authorizing these attacks, Ayatollah Khomeini had the gall to denounce France as “a terrorist state.” Why does France think it can do any better now? For its foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, to describe Iran as a “stabilizing influence” goes beyond mere appeasement and defies reality. No matter what the consequences, once again there is evidently no limit to French ambitions to cut a more important figure in the world than the United States.             

4. “Shock and awe” bombing may look impressive but it did not work in Kosovo or Iraq, and not now in Lebanon, where it has wasted two precious weeks. Hezbollah is not fully vulnerable to techno-warfare, being dug into deep bunkers, dispersed, operating in cells, and using imagination. It is said that since trucks can be spotted from the air, they transport missiles on donkeys. Late in the day, disadvantaged by the adverse propaganda ensuing from bombing, Israel is now sending in ground forces in strength, as the U.S. had to in Iraq. In a war against terrorists of this caliber, why are staff colleges still preparing for the massive set-piece battles of the past?

A piece of mine in the Australian can be read here .

Israel will defeat Hezbollah in the field, but in doing so will almost certainly lose the battle for public opinion. Defending itself against unprovoked aggression, and a daily barrage of missiles, Israel is depicted in almost all the media as something like a war criminal. The inversion of the truth comes straight out of Orwell’s nightmare vision of a world unable any longer to make moral judgements.

The anti-Israeli and anti-American stance of the entire BBC comes as a shock to me, brought up as I was to respect its objectivity. That was then, this is now. BBC editorialists are one and all clear that Bush and Blair and Israel are acting indefensibly. One of the most important talk shows had four guests, all of whom ranted uninterruptedly against Israel, so much so that a columnist in the London Times described the program as “the first to have been edited by the leader of Hezbollah.” BBC reporters have given up on news, preferring to editorialise in their turn, blaming the horrors of Lebanon exclusively on Israel. The appeasement of Hezbollah, and the concomitant Jew-hating, is evidence of moral collapse, and it is going to take the whole of Europe a long time to get out of it – if it ever can.

In the circumstances, it is an act of considerable moral courage for Tony Blair to stand next to President Bush in the White House, and support him in the belief that Israel is doing all of us a service by rolling back Hezbollah. He is separating himself from the Chiracs and the Prodis and the Annans, and the media are priming the public to make him pay for it. Perhaps his premiership has been – how shall we say ? – mixed, but this is his finest hour.

Lebanese television has a star in May Chidiak. Trying to kill her, the Syrians blew up her car, and she lost limbs and the use of one eye. To see her back on the screen, you would never know what she has been through. Blonde, vivacious, hiding her scars, she is modesty itself, claiming to be just a journalist. She travels in a car like the one they tried to kill her in, with the same licence plates. This indomitable woman has the courage to condemn Hezbollah on air, and to state the plain truth that it is responsible for bringing catastrophe to Lebanon. She is magnificent. And the BBC will never devote a program to her.