The world will shortly be discovering whether the Iranian regime takes decisions based on a rational calculus of events and forces, or on the contrary according to messianic and apocalyptic beliefs of its own. Hezbollah is only an external arm of Iran’s and the Israeli campaign in southern Lebanon is slowly but surely grinding it  down. This obliges Tehran to reveal its true character.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and some of his senior officials and military, are stepping up their genocidal threats to exterminate Israel. Promises to resort to longer range and more powerful weapons to destroy Israel fill the air-waves. In language as menacing as it is vague, Ahmadinejad calls on Arabs to join in a regional war or jihad, and condemns as traitors all Muslims who hold back. Hezbollah is a presence in some twenty countries, including the United States, and all these cells are presumably capable of acts of terror.

Iranian assessment of Ahmadinejad — as far as I can judge from exiles in the West – is divided.  Some think he is in fact rational, a clever calculator that war with Israel and the West is a paying proposition in the Islamic world, and his murderous bigotry is nothing but bluff and rhetoric for the benefit of the uneducated masses.  But others say that he believes every word he utters, and as a faithful Shia Muslim further believes in the return of the hidden Imam and the End of Days, which he has a duty to hurry along.

At the end of June, the Western powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program offered a deal, failing which sanctions would follow.  Tehran replied that its answer had to wait until August 22. This was playing for time, sure, but the date also has its religious significance. In the Muslim calendar, and specially venerated by the Shia, it is Lailat al-Israa, the evening when the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have ascended to heaven to receive the five obligatory daily prayers.  If really Ahmadinejad and the elite around him conflate religion and politics, and imagine themselves under holy obligation to wage war, then their decisions will be based on irrationality, and they will indeed sacrifice Lebanese, Israelis, and anyone else — including of course themselves, as might be perfectly plain about three weeks from now.

The current attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah repeat an essential misperception shared by the Arabo-Iranian elites : that Israel is not a country in its own right with citizens willing to die for it. So they keep on making the same mistake of using force which brings counterforce down with interest on their own heads. Why don’t they learn from experience ?  Essentially this is a cultural matter. They have grown up and been educated to despise Jews; and to be resisted and even defeated by these despicable creatures is a shame not to be borne, again and again demanding to be wiped out, whatever the cost. Down the ages, Muslim authorities all agree that Jews are by nature cowardly and ignominious, and therefore their present military successes cannot be what they seem.  Somebody has to be empowering them, and that somebody is the United States. Shame is this engine of these fantasies.

The Iranian leadership believes that jihad against the United States will absolve shame, and jihad begins with Israel on the grounds that it is nothing but an American tool. They are Shias, and further fortified in their jihad by expectation of the return of the hidden Imam, who is the messiah and herald of the end of days. Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, are all Sunnis, but they too believe that jihad is the right response to shame.

What we are witnessing is a convergence of jihadis, Shias and Sunnis alike. The culture is proving stronger than doctrinal differences.  Al Qaeda leaders are known to be sheltering in Iran. The Alawis (heretical Shias) ruling Damascus push jihadis to join the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.  Zarqawi was a Sunni who denounced and murdered Shia.  How old-fashioned!  By the look of it, someone with a belief in the new-style  jihad common  to both wings of Islam must have denounced him.

Calling up ground forces, the Israelis appear to be resolved to eliminate the Hezbollah threat in southern Lebanon. This would produce another gusher of shame. President Ahmadinejad is already talking the talk :  “If this volcano [of Muslim pride] erupts – and we are on the brink of eruption …and if this ocean rages, its waves will not be limited to the region.”

Perhaps Iran is incapable of mounting a Shia equivalent of the Sunni coup of 9/11, but it seems obvious that a major set-back for Hezbollah would prompt them to do their worst.  The Iranian leadership can call on inventive people well able to spring unpleasant surprises. They have the United States in their sights and a culture that distorts the real balance of forces.

George Orwell taught the world that it was as right to oppose Communism as Nazism. Both, in his immortal words, were “smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls.”  His influence on the age has been unique. In his lifetime, however, he often found that publishers were so politicized or so craven that they rejected his books. The exception was Fred Warburg, a member of the great banking family. His firm, Secker & Warburg, published Orwell’s books, including Animal Farm and 1984. When Orwell died, he left his literary estate to his widow Sonia, and she once told me that she received royalties of half a million pounds a year. Think what Secker & Warburg must have earned  — deservedly.

For many years now, Peter Davison has been the editor of a Collected Orwell, put out by Secker and Warburg. After Volume 20 he thought the series was complete. Then he discovered more material, including letters from Eileen, Orwell’s first wife, and Sonia, as well as some Orwell essays he had overlooked. Most fascinating of all are lists of Communists and fellow travellers whom he knew, and on whom he commented sharply for the benefit of a counter-intelligence department. Here’s a window into the Cold War.

This latest volume was published by the Timewell Press, boutique publishers not long in operation.  How had this conceivably come about ? I got the Timewell telephone number and the man who answered was Andreas Campomar.  He’s now in the position Fred Warburg was in all those years ago, but this time because Secker & Warburg had turned the book down on grounds of cost. They’ve made millions out of Orwell, and they do this? It is truly insulting to a great writer, and to the public. More than that, it is evidence of the death throes of our culture.

Secker & Warburg now belongs to Random House. I hope never to buy a Random House book again, and welcome any ideas short of jihad to shame them and their smelly little money-grubbing.  

Hamas and Hezbollah are now trying their very best to kill Jews, and the response of the world is either to advise the Jews to respond with proportion or to condemn them. It is extraordinary that once again so many people are unable to distinguish between the victimiser and the victim. Israelis have been kidnapped from their country. Is it really wrong to take protective  and punitive measures against terror ?

Tehran is responsible for all the violence.  Fascist murderers run Iran, and their intentions are identical to those of Hitler’s Germany.  Even the language, with its creepy metaphors about Jews as insects or bloodsuckers, is a Thirties repeat. They must be calculating that this is the moment to show that God is with them and will ensure victory. President Ahmadinejad loves images about giving the Zionist tree a little shake because that is enough to uproot it.  He and the ayatollahs have wished this violence on the region, absolutely indifferent to the fact that many Muslims – Palestinians and Lebanese – will be killed. That’s fascist murder for you. No doubt they also calculate that the uproar created by the Jews defending themselves will distract everyone’s attention from the Iranian nuclear program.

Israel is not rampaging in Gaza or Lebanon, but pushing back the Iranian front-line.  It may have to go quite deep into Lebanon to clear Hezbollah out, and reestablish a buffer zone, and prove that Iranian fascism has its limits. It may have to deal with Syria, another fascist slum as well as Iran’s second line.

And when, one wonders, will the Muslim populations realize that they can perfectly well live with the Jews, but under their self-appointed fascist masters they have no choice except to submit to a bigoted racist war, and die pointlessly in it.   

In Britain there are probably around two million Muslims, and a poll shows that seven percent think suicide attacks on civilians can be justified — that means 140,000 potential sympathizers of terror. Yet at the same time, there is the example of Jabron Hashmi. He was born in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, a hotbed of political Islam, 45 minutes from the Afghan border. Aged twelve, he came to England with his parents, and apparently always hoped to join the army. Now he is the first British Muslim to be killed by the Taliban on active service in Afghanistan. An uncle called him “a hero of Islam” and one brother said, “he was fiercely proud of his Islamic background and he was equally proud of being British.” One individual step forward, then, against a rather collective step backwards.

Contrasts of the kind exist all over the Muslim world. Women are now preaching in mosques in Egypt, and proving popular. True, the congregations are all female, but the turbaned clerics of Al Azhar, Cairo’s Islamic university, haven’t condemned them to death. In Morocco, a group of 50 women have just graduated from a course qualifying them to preach and be experts in Islamic law.  Professor Amina Wudud, having lead Friday prayers at a mosque in New York, is now out with a book called Inside The Gender Jihad on women and Islam. Yet in Nigeria, a 14-year-old girl walked into a mosque and allegedly left a letter insulting both the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ. She was immediately arrested by vigilantes and handed to the police. When Muslim youths then stormed the station, the police fled, and the teenager was killed. But that’s more than a step backwards, it’s a total failure of the society.

Every four years, with the regularity of American presidential elections, the World Football competition is held (soccer, that is), and once again it is about to come to a climax in Germany, the current host country. It’s a rich field for the sociologist and the anthropologist.
   
First of all the rituals of the players. Every one of them, from all competing countries, spits whenever he fails to score a goal or suffers some major disappointment of the kind, and television cameras revel in showing this incivility. The player who does score first pulls at his shirt to reveal his midriff, then races to some corner of the field and throws himself face-down on the ground, whereupon his team-mates all pile on top. Sportsmanlike modesty is nowhere. The losers then weep and the cameras revel in that too.

Then the rituals of the fans. In theory, they come from all over the world, thus representing different countries and cultures. Yet they all behave the same. The rhythmical beating of drums in the stand, and the mass chanting, sound identical. They drape themselves in national flags, and paint national colors on their faces, and wear the same varieties of funny head-gear. What might have been different instead becomes an undifferentiated mass.

William James famously wanted what he called “the moral equivalent of war.” Perhaps this is it. Perhaps it is today’s equivalent of the bread and circuses that Roman emperors used to lay on to divert the masses. Perhaps it is only a clever mass-marketing ploy — one supermarket boasted that it had ordered an extra million bottles of champagne in anticipation of victory. But those strange rituals also suggest that what we have all got to look forward to is a gigantic tribalism that grew out of nowhere.

July 4, 1976, 30 years ago, was a moment of great anxiety. German and Arab terrorists had seized an Air France plane and diverted it to Entebbe, in Uganda. There they separated the Jewish hostages and held them at gunpoint, while releasing the others. Their demand was that Israel should free Palestinian terrorists who had been captured, tried and sentenced to prison. Idi Amin, then the unstable dictator of Uganda, drove to the airport in his armored Mercedes. A sinister smile on his podgy face, he made his hostility to the hostages plain — in the past he had often come out with praise of Hitler. Just when the fate of these unfortunates seemed certain, suddenly, out of the blue sky, came the news that a team of Israeli commandoes had flown in, seized the airport, shot every single one of the terrorists, and flown the hostages home. The day’s anxiety switched into jubilation. That was a day when wrong was righted, something as rare as it is unforgettable.
   
A few years later, researching a book, I attended the trial in Cologne of three SS men, the so-called Paris Gestapo, each one of them playing his part in the mass-murder of Jews in France. In the seat next to me was a friendly man. His name was Michel Goldberg, and he was at the trial because his father, a Frenchman, had been deported and murdered at Auschwitz, and he wanted to see justice done. More than that, staggeringly, Michel had been on the flight hijacked to Entebbe. Because Michel spoke German, he was made the interpreter with the terrorists. He described to me how one of these nazified German terrorists, a woman, was actually shouting at him when he heard orders to throw himself on the ground, the Israeli commandoes burst in and bullets went over his head to cut the female terrorist down. Namesake, published in 1982, is Michel’s poignant autobiography.
   
And now, once again, terrorists have seized someone Jewish and are demanding the release of prisoners who have been brought to justice. Once again, Israeli forces are poised to free their man; they have the strength to do so, they may have the intelligence too, and Gaza is a great deal closer than Entebbe. The days are passing, and military measures are beginning to look like a posture. Nothing seems changed down those 30 years, except the resolve that went into the Entebbe rescue, and which now has a question mark over it. 

The Palestinians took several months to dig that tunnel running from under the Gaza Strip into Israel. The intention to attack, then, has been present all that time. And in an authoritarian society of the kind, this could not have happened without approval from the top. There are of course competing tops, Mahmud Abbas and his Fatah, and Ismail Haniya and his Hamas. Things aren’t quite as clear-cut as that, because several powerful Fatah members challenge Abbas, and several powerful Hamas members challenge Haniya. About the only thing they can agree on is to attack Israel. Not so long ago, Israel warned Abbas of a Hamas plot to assassinate him.  In return, he did not warn Israel of the tunnel and the impending kidnap of Gilad Shalit, or come to that, the abduction and murder of another teenager, Eliyahu Asheri, on the West Bank. Yet another Israeli, 62-year-old Mr. Noam Moskovitz, has just been taken hostage. The Palestinian leadership wants a trial of strength, and is having it.

The Palestinian argument, endlessly rehearsed,  is that Israel is an occupying power, and must evacuate — the world has come to parrot it.  But the question not asked is: Why is Israel an occupying power?  Simply because it has been invaded by one or another Arab army, and ceaselessly attacked by Arab terrorists, from these very territories.  No aggressions of the sort, no occupation, QED.

Next question: Why ever do the Palestinian leaders commit the same mistake over and over again, each time failing in their objective and leaving themselves worse off?  Stupidity in Einstein’s definition is repeating something you’ve already done to no good effect in the expectation of getting a different result. That’s what the Palestinian leadership has been doing for almost a century, miring all their people in misery and ruin.

Palestinians aren’t stupid and I suspect that the man on the Gaza street knows that once again the leadership has gone too far, and all because at the top they are fighting to the death for power and money, and laying the blame for their defects on Israel. If the leadership could take the measure of reality they’d hand Gilad Shalit over forthwith. As things stand, 60 Hamas officials have been arrested by Israel, Gaza residents will be without electricity for several sweltering months, and some bridges have been bombed flat. The disappearance or death of Gilad Shalit — and now Mr. Moskovitz — will bring down on Palestinians not just more occupation but something close to war.

The story of Samaira Nazir won’t leave me alone. She lived with her parents and her brother in Southall, a district to the west of London, where many from the Indian subcontinent have settled, both Hindu and Muslim. 25 years old, she had been educated in England — and that settled her fate.

Samaira’s parents had chosen a husband for her in Pakistan, but she had fallen in love with an Afghan.  According to her parents, this man was from a lower caste, and anyhow what did love have to do with it?  The family honor was at stake. “Strong-willed” was the adjective they chose for this young woman who thought to fulfil herself in her own way.  So they took her back to Pakistan, and there her father, her brother, and a cousin used four knives to stab her and cut her throat.  When she fought for her life, her father told anxious neighbors that she was having a fit. Her mother watched and it seems that Samaira’s nieces, aged four and two, were also obliged to witness this murder, to warn them what they could expect one day. As she was dying, Samaira was heard to shout to her mother, “You aren’t my mother any more.”

The pity of it. Such waste of life, such insult to humanity. To believe that barbarity like that has anything to do with honor, you would have to be not just uneducated but unable to comprehend the greater world where other human beings exist and think and feel. 

It so happens that a proposal to criminalize forced marriages was in the air in Britain at this very moment.  To pass this into law might have done some real honor to Samaira. With consummate cowardice — dishonoring in its own way — a government consultation paper has instead backed down on the grounds that the measure might be misinterpreted as an attack on ethnic minorities.

Those who tortured and killed Kristian Menchera and Thomas Tucker also were unable to distinguish between barbarity and honor, equally unable to comprehend the greater world with others in it. Their terrible fate has an echo of Samaira’s. A great deal of law and of force will have to settle what we’re up against. It’s a question of resolve, and that’s a question of civilization.

Maria Altman of Los Angeles is richer today by $135 million. It’s a wonderful story of justice done at last, but she had to wait to be 90 for it.  She sold a picture she had inherited, and Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, has bought it and will give it to the museum he founded in Manhattan. The picture is very famous and much reproduced, a sumptuous portrait done in 1907 in golds and blacks by Gustav Klimt of Adele Bloch-Bauer. A collector, Mr. Bloch-Bauer left this portrait of his wife in his will to his brother’s children, the last survivor of whom is Mrs. Altman.  But the Nazis had stolen it, and after the war the Austrians refused to return it, brazenly hanging the picture (and others belonging to the Bloch-Bauers) for half a century in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, thus showing themselves in their true colors as thieves and war profiteers.    

Mrs. Altman took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that she could sue the Austrian government. Confronted at last with the legal obligation to right a wrong, the Austrian chancellor, a cheapskate by the name of Wolfgang Schuessel, said that Austria could not afford to pay the picture’s valuation — rich enough to steal but too poor to buy, that’s his country and its way of making amends for the crimes of their fathers. Let them choke on the shame of it.

Exception is made for Hubertus Czernin, a count and a true aristocrat. For one thing he exposed the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, who did so much to degrade the United Nations when he was its Secretary-General, and later to degrade Austria as its president.  And for another thing, he campaigned hard for the restitution to the Bloch-Bauer family of all the pictures stolen from them, and forced through the law that made this possible. This April Maria Altman received the pictures, and Czernin traveled to Los Angeles to congratulate her. Unfortunately he had a rare cell disease, and died aged only 50. Had he lived a few more days, he would have been glad to learn that Klimt’s masterpiece has a safe future in a museum. Here is one man who did what he could to rescue his country’s lost honor.