Britain’s unbearable shame

By Stuart Littlewood

Ten years ago Tam Dalyell, the “Father of the House” (i.e. the most senior member of the House of Commons in the British Parliament), sparked a huge row by accusing the then prime minister, Tony Blair, of “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Dalyell named Lord Levy (Blair’s personal envoy on the Middle East), Peter Mandelson (whose father was Jewish) and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary (who has Jewish ancestry), as three of the leading figures who had influenced Blair’s policies on the Middle East.

He told The Telegraph: “If it is a question of launching an assault on Syria or Iran… then one has to be candid.” Blair, he said, was also indirectly influenced by Jewish people in the Bush administration, including Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, and Ari Fleischer, the president’s press secretary.

Dalyell’s remarks were sad and unfounded, said Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust. “Tony Blair is his own man. He will follow advice if he considers it correct and not otherwise. He has been a good friend of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”

Dalyell was misguided, said Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, a spokesman for Britain’s Reform Synagogues. “Concerning Iraq it was crystal clear that Tony Blair was not swayed by popularity or anyone else but by his own deep convictions. It is also obvious that the majority of President Bush’s circle are Christian Evangelicals rather than Jews.”

Ned Temko, the American-born editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: “I just think these sort of comments are offensive and are a profound misunderstanding of the way foreign policy is made in the United States or here.”

Dalyell also told The Scotsman on Sunday:

Blair and Straw have become far too close to these people and Lord Levy, who is an unaccountable ambassador in the Middle East, is part of this group. They are acting on an extremely Zionist, Likud-nik agenda. In particular I am concerned that some of them are pushing for an attack on Syria, for reasons of Israeli security.

MP Louise Ellman, a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism, said: “This absurd proposition implies a Jewish plot in high places…”

Former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a senior member of Scotland’s Jewish community, was rudely dismissive: “We all know that Tam gets bees in his bonnet and eight times out of 10 they are nuts but the other two are brilliant. This is, I’m afraid, one of the nutty ones.”

The next day the Guardian reported that Dalyell could face an investigation for inciting racial hatred. Eric Moonman, President of the Zionist Federation, was seeking advice on whether there was a case for referral. “I believe there is,” he said.

Today it is obvious that old Tam was neither nutty nor misguided. He joined the dots and saw the danger, as did many others.

“So many Jews that the Tory party should be known as the Torah party”

Meanwhile the Jewish cabal flourishes. A week ago Ian Livingston was handpicked by Prime Minister David Cameron for the trade minister job. Cameron, who had previously broken with traditional wisdom and appointed the first Jewish ambassador to Israel, was reported by an ecstatic Times of Israel as having now decided to bring into the government possibly its most committed Jew yet, and certainly its most outspoken supporter of Israel, which Livingston called “the most amazing state in the world”.

Livingston is not elected. He’s appointed – and created a Lord to make it look kosher.

The newspaper went on to name other top Jewish figures in the Conservative party such as co-chairs Lord Feldman and Grant Shapps MP, senior treasurer Howard Leigh, a member of the Jewish Leadership Council; and former party treasurers Richard Harrington MP and Lord Fink, another member of the JLC.

“There are so many Jews at the top of Britain’s Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron once quipped, that it should be known as the Torah party rather than the Tory party,” crowed the paper.

While nobody is suggesting, I hope, that Jews have no place in our law-making, it is not unreasonable to wish the number to reflect their presence in the population.

And to make the prime minister feel thoroughly at home in his Torah party, a Jewish scholar, after tracing Cameron’s ancestry, claimed he could be “a direct descendant of Moses or, at least, a cousin”.

In case our American friends are puzzled by this Torah/Tory business, “Tory” is an old 17th century name for the modern Conservative Party, founded in the 1830s.

While nobody is suggesting, I hope, that Jews have no place in our law-making, it is not unreasonable to wish the number to reflect their presence in the population. Three years ago the Jewish Chronicle published a list of Jewish MPs in Britain’s Parliament, naming 24. The Jewish population in the UK at that time was – and probably still is – around 280,000 or just under 0.5 per cent. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons so, on a proportional basis, Jews could expect three seats. But with 24 they were eight times over-represented. Which meant, of course, that other groups were under-represented.

The UK’s Muslim population is about 2.4 million or nearly 4 per cent. Similarly, their quota would be 25 seats but they had only eight – a serious shortfall. If Muslims were over-represented to the same extent as Jews (i.e. eight times) they’d have 200 seats. Imagine the hullabaloo.

Israeli flag-waving a stepping-stone to high office

Over-representation in the House of Commons is only part of the picture. Many more Jews have been inserted into the House of Lords and other non-elected and unaccountable positions. An even bigger worry is the huge number of non-Jewish Zionists that have infiltrated every level of political and institutional life. They swell the pro-Israel lobby to such an extent that it is believed to account for 80 per cent of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, which now rules with the Liberal Democrats as their junior coalition partner.

Too many pro-Israel MPs speak and act as if they’d rather wave the Israeli flag than the Union Jack. These “Israel-firsters” never condemn the regime’s illegal occupation, apartheid-style policies, war crimes and refusal to sign up to nuclear non-proliferation, inspection and safeguards. They lock Britain (and British foreign policy) into Israel’s sickening ambitions and immorality. Defending the indefensible, as they do, inevitably raises questions for our national security, a deadly serious issue given the sheer number of Zionists now in British public life and the enemies they have made across the world, and continually provoke.

How do these Israeli flag wavers think it looks, standing shoulder to shoulder with religious fanatics and psychopaths who horribly persecute the Christian and Muslim communities of the Holy Land?

The Jewish Chronicle, in a 2006 special report “Team Cameron’s big Jewish backers”, revealed the support that enabled Cameron to suddenly burst into the political limelight, almost unknown, to take the Conservative leadership. With no significant achievement under his belt, he was then able to manoeuvre, with the help of his backers, into Britain’s prime minister slot.

He is also a self-declared Zionist and voted for the war in Iraq, so how trustworthy does that make him? In a speech to Jewish fundraisers in London last year, he declared: “There is no contradiction between being a proud Jew, a committed Zionist and a loyal British citizen.” How can someone who so closely aligns himself with a belligerent foreign military power like Israel hope to convince us that he’s 100 per cent loyal to Britain and its interests, while once again drawing us unwillingly into conflict with Israel’s enemies, this time Iran and Syria, with whom we have no quarrel?

Cameron’s foreign secretary, William Hague, has been a member of Conservative Friends of Israel since he was 15. Hague once said: “The unbroken thread of Conservative Party support for Israel that has run for nearly a century from the Balfour Declaration to the present day will continue.”

Alistair Burt, a former officer of the Parliamentary group of Conservative Friends of Israel, is Foreign Office minister for the Middle East. And David Lidington, who has spoken of being a “staunch defender” of the state of Israel, is Foreign Office minister for Europe.

So the key stooges are safely installed and activated.

Powerless to deliver justice

It is said that becoming a Friend of Israel is a necessary stepping-stone to high office. Consequently, fans of Israel are embedded at all levels in the fabric of British political life and at the heart of the government.

When a group of concerned academics wrote to the Committee on Standards in Public Life complaining about Israel’s “deep penetration”, they were told it was not something the committee could investigate. A closer look revealed that some members of the committee had close links with Friends of Israel.

How do these Israeli flag wavers think it looks, standing shoulder to shoulder with religious fanatics and psychopaths who horribly persecute the Christian and Muslim communities of the Holy Land? It is especially offensive to see them endorsing a pseudo-democracy that dishes out thuggish treatment even to children who, says the UN, are arrested by Israeli military and police and systematically subjected to degrading treatment, and often tortured. Read the report and weep.

Britain could, at a stroke, bring Israel to heel and force the regime to conform to international law or face massive trade penalties. But the prancing posers who pass for our leaders have sold out. Cameron’s “Torah” party rules!

Thanks to its misplaced admiration for Israel, the British government fails to intervene and stand up for justice. The disgrace is unbearable. Here is just one of many appalling examples. Right now Christians in that once beautiful country are under imminent threat of losing their land, their livelihood and their way of life because an emergency law cooked up by the illegal occupier, Israel, and upheld by an Israeli court allows the Israelis to seize territory in the Cremisan Valley near Bethlehem. This brazen land-grab opens the way for the hated separation wall (ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice – ICJ) to be extended across the valley, connecting two Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem.

The onward construction of the barrier will divide a Salesian Catholic monastery from the neighbouring Salesian Catholic convent, confiscate most of the convent’s property and cut off 58 Palestinian families from their agricultural lands – including vineyards, olive groves and pastures. The barrier will also separate families and surround an elementary school on three sides, forcing young children to pass through a checkpoint to go to class.

The ICJ required the wall to be dismantled, not extended. And it reminded all states party to the Fourth Geneva Convention that they are under an obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention”. That was nine years ago. The world is still waiting. The states never act. Compliance never happens. Non-compliance is rife, and highly profitable to Israel.

And Israel’s allies, including Britain, perversely reward its non-compliance. Across the West Bank, continuing restrictions on Palestinian access to agricultural lands have led to the slow abandonment and eventual confiscation of those lands by the Israeli authorities.

As I write, Israel’s Knesset have approved the first reading of the Prawer Plan to remove 40,000 indigenous Bedouin people from their ancestral homeland in the Negev. This evil scheme clears the way for the 4-billion-dollar “Blueprint Negev” project intended to transform the Negev into a majority-Jewish area, even though the Bedouin have lived there for thousands of years.

At the same time one of Israel’s most dangerous lunatics, Avigdor Lieberman (chairman of the foreign affairs and defence committee), is calling for Israel, after imposing a vicious seven-year blockade, to conquer the Gaza Strip and carry out “a thorough cleansing”, just because Hamas still hasn’t succumbed to Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian homeland.

Britain could, at a stroke, bring Israel to heel and force the regime to conform to international law or face massive trade penalties. But the prancing posers who pass for our leaders have sold out.

Cameron’s ‘Torah’ party rules!