Taking Note

Melanie Philips has written an absolutely cracking article in the Wall Street Journal today. After all the blog posts on here covering the Gaza crisis and Miliband's comments last week, this article just sums it all up fantastically.

Well worth a read: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123240733254895655.html

My favourite parts are undoubtedly these:

Last Thursday, Mr. Miliband wrote in the Guardian that there was no single, unified Islamist threat but merely a set of various local grievances, such as Kashmir or the Golan Heights. Such startling ignorance of the goals and ideological antecedents of the Islamic jihad, from Hamas to Hezbollah to Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba, is of a piece with the British government's stubborn refusal to accept that the West is under assault from a war of religion.

"startling ignorance" is exactly right - could not have put it better myself (in fact, I didn't put it better myself). This apparent policy shift by Miliband isn't just a moment of stupidity, and it is more than just an opportunistic piece of foreign policy, it constitutes a grave threat to the future of global security as a whole.

She also wrote:

"middle Britain" is beginning to grasp that the Islamists in Gaza are the same as those rampaging through the streets of London

This time, I can only hope she is right. As I wrote in my earlier post ("engines of anarchy"), the riots seen on London's streets over the last weeks are not the boiling-over protests of your average angry citizen. They are intentional, anarchical and dangerous displays of extremist politics and allowing theses individuals and groups to vent their fury unchecked on our capital's streets will set an all too dangerous precedent.

I'm not always her biggest fan, I'm certainly no fan of the "newspaper" she usually writes for, but let's hope, for all our sakes, that someone other than me is taking note.