Alan Hart

Dear Lord Guthrie,

The gentlemen who are members of Britain’s military elite, its Top Brass, don’t come more distinguished than your good self. You rose to become Chief of the General Staff (Head of the Army) in 1994; from 1997 to 2001 you were Chief of the Defence Staff and the Principal Military Adviser to two prime ministers and three Secretaries of State for Defence; and you are Colonel of The Life Guards, Gold Stick to Her Majesty The Queen and Colonel Commandant of the SAS. (You also find time to be, among other things, a Director of N.M.Rothschild & Sons Limited).

All that and more being so, I was astonished to hear you this morning, on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme shortly after 0835, make (forgive the Americanisation) a colossalally wrong statement … continue reading

In a press release commenting on Israel’s latest declaration of intent to punish collectively the inhabitants of Gaza, Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc, said: “With our own hands we are uniting a million and a half people against us, in bitterness and hatred? The state of Israel is today roughly trampling International Law (so what’s new, I say) in indiscriminate collective punishments of a whole civilian population. We, too, will eventually pay the price.”

The question arising is something like this: Are the Zionist state’s politcal and military leaders merely the victims of their own propaganda (as a former Director of Israeli Military Intelligence once told me they were) and deluded, or do they want and need enemies? … continue reading

Given that it played the leading role in assisting Israel to acquire an atom bomb, I suppose it’s not surprising that France should now be singing from the same hymn sheet as America’s neo-cons and their Zionist allies on the matter of war with Iran.

In his radio and tv statement yesterday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was explicit. “We must prepare for the worst. The worst is war.”

This was completely in tune with the statement made by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his first major foreign policy speech last month. He said that a diplomatic push by the world’s major powers was the only alternative to “an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.”

It’s reasonable to assume that French policy makers are not nearly as ignorant and as stupid as their counterparts in and around the Bush administration in Washington and that they, French leaders, don’t actually want war with Iran. So why, really, are they talking up the possibility of war?

My guess is that they are doing their bit to frighten other governments into going along with tough sanctions against Iran in the hope that the real prospect of tough sanctions will cause the leadership in Iran to back down and agree to suspend uranium enrichment work.

The question arising is something like this. What happens when Iran’s leaders, under threat of tough sanctions or not, don’t back down? … continue reading

Dear Mr. Cameron,

After reading the published text of your answers to questions put to you by Danny Finkelstein at the annual business lunch of the Conservative Friends of Israel, the following question occurred to me:

Would you still declare yourself to be a “Zionist” if you knew what Zionism actually was and is?

I’ll be suggesting, not asserting, that if your answer is “yes”, it would amount to an endorsement by you of Zionism’s crimes, as well as putting you at odds with the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism.

But let’s start with what you actually said … continue reading

I’ve been traveling and have not had the time to service my blog for a while. In Seoul recently I made a short address to a conference organised by the Universal Peace Federation. The following is the text of what I said.

… continue reading