This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

I AM the opposite of a war junkie. I loathe the sound of fireworks because they remind me of a bloody night in Lithuania in January 1991, where I lay down in dirty snow to save my skin from Soviet bullets. I was also frozen with fright in lawless, gang-ruled Mogadishu in December 1992, waiting for US marines to arrive.

In Bucharest at Christmas 1989, I crawled under the bed as tracer fire whizzed past my hotel-room window, and – because my long-delayed call home came through just then – I dictated my account of events to my wife. No heroics for me, thanks.

I was in all these dreadful places by accident. I never meant to be there. I take great care not to get caught in such things again.

But I learned a bit from it, mostly that the old cliche ‘the first casualty of war is truth’ is absolutely right, and should be displayed in letters of fire over every TV and newspaper report of conflict, for ever.

Almost nothing can be checked. You become totally reliant on the people you are with, and you identify with them.

If you can find a working phone, you will feel justified in shouting whatever you have got into the mouthpiece – as simple and unqualified as possible. And your office will feel justified in putting it on the front page (if you are lucky).

And that is when you are actually there, which is a sort of excuse for bending the rules.

In the past few days we have been bombarded with colourful reports of events in eastern Aleppo, written or transmitted by people in Beirut (180 miles away and in another country), or even London (2,105 miles away and in another world). There have, we are told, been massacres of women and children, people have been burned alive.

The sources for these reports are so-called ‘activists’. Who are they? As far as I know, there was not one single staff reporter for any Western news organisation in eastern Aleppo last week. Not one.

THIS is for the very good reason that they would have been kidnapped and probably murdered. The zone was ruled without mercy by heavily armed Osama Bin Laden sympathisers, who were bombarding the west of the city with powerful artillery (they frequently killed innocent civilians and struck hospitals, since you ask). That is why you never see pictures of armed males in eastern Aleppo, just beautifully composed photographs of handsome young unarmed men lifting wounded children from the rubble, with the light just right.

The women are all but invisible, segregated and shrouded in black, just as in the IS areas, as we saw when they let them out.

For reasons that I find it increasingly hard to understand or excuse, much of the British media refer to these Al Qaeda types coyly as ‘rebels’ (David Cameron used to call them ‘moderates’). But if they were in any other place in the world, including Birmingham or Belmarsh, they would call them extremists, jihadis, terrorists and fanatics. One of them, Abu Sakkar, famously cut out and sank his teeth into the heart of a fallen enemy, while his comrades cheered. This is a checked and verified fact, by the way.

Sakkar later confirmed it to the BBC, when Western journalists still had contact with these people, and there is film of it if you care to watch. There is also film of a Syrian ‘rebel’ group, Nour al-din al Zenki, beheading a 12-year-old boy called Abdullah Issa. They smirk a lot. It is on the behalf of these ‘moderates’ that MPs staged a wholly one-sided debate last week, and on their behalf that so many people have been emoting equally one-sidedly over alleged massacres and supposed war crimes by Syrian and Russian troops – for which I have yet to see a single piece of independent, checkable evidence.

When I used to travel a lot in the communist world, I especially hated the fact that almost every official announcement was a conscious lie, taunting the poor subjugated people with their powerlessness to challenge it.

I would spend ages twiddling dials and shifting aerials to pick up the BBC World Service on my short-wave set – ‘the truth, read by gentlemen’ – because it refreshed the soul just to hear it. These days the state-sponsored lies have spread to my own country, and to the BBC, and I tell the truth as loudly as I can, simply because I cannot hear anyone else speaking it. If these lies go unchallenged, they will be the basis of some grave wrong yet to come.

The one, sorry secret of being 'just like us'

I watched Muslims Like Us on BBC2 with grim fascination. Indeed, they were mostly like us, vaguely but pleasantly charitable, sweary, victims of all kinds of fashions in thought, clothes, language and sex.

And then they were not like us. One had an arranged marriage to a woman he’d never met, as far as I could see. All suddenly slipped into Arabic from time to time. One had attracted the attention of the authorities because of the passion of his views.

I could see his point when he upbraided his temporary housemates for not being very Islamic. They weren’t. He was. And I think most of us probably quietly hope that most British Muslims aren’t very devout.

But what really bothered me was the joke British person, in a bow tie, who was brought in to introduce them to Britishness, whatever that now is. There they were in York, looking at York Minster, one of the most moving and powerful buildings on the planet. I almost stop breathing whenever I visit it (I had the same experience amid the Islamic glories of Isfahan and Samarkand, by the way). But if Mr Bow Tie once mentioned Christianity, or suggested they go inside the great church, I missed it. And the Muslim party seemed wholly unmoved, as if they were being shown a furniture factory.

The sad fact is Muslims are only going to be like us if they sink, along with us, into the same state of ignorance and indifference about the past, and cease to take serious things seriously. Some of them may. But an important number of them (to their credit) never will.

Railways are the skeleton of civilisation. I have always loved them, and can never see why we have made such a mess of them by preferring to pour money into a rival system of nationalised roads which will never work.

So can I just say how pleased I was last week when my home town, Oxford, got a beautiful new rail link to London? It can be done.

Last week I chided the authorities for ignoring the danger of power cuts imposed by mad Green dogma. I was wrong. They have a plan after all – you can pay extra to avoid having to sit in the cold and dark.

Andrew Wright, a senior partner at the regulator Ofgem, says: ‘We are currently all paying broadly the same price but we could be moving away from that, and there will be some new features in the market which may see some choose to pay for a higher level of reliability.

One household may be sitting with their lights on, charging their Tesla electric car, while someone else will be sitting in the dark.’

I am not making this up.

Things we really don’t need include an all-graduate police force, as is now being madly proposed.

Graduates spend the first ten years in any job discovering that they don’t, in fact, know everything, while the non-graduates roll their eyes in despair.

What police officers need is not a certificate, but the common sense that comes from years of friendly contact with the people they serve. A decent pair of walking shoes, or a bicycle, will provide that.

And they must learn to go out on their own again, instead of walking in unapproachable, unobservant pairs, chatting about overtime, while crime and disorder rage within feet of them.

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