Stentorian

Peter Hitchens might have had a point:

Israel is run and populated by fallen human beings, is anything but Paradise upon earth, and does many bad and wrong things, and I have condemned them (notably the foolish, disproportionate attack on Gaza a year ago), and will no doubt condemn them again, while clinging grimly to my view that Israel ought to continue to exist as a specifically Jewish state within secure borders, negotiated if possible, but secure above all. It does many other things that are morally questionable (I suspect the Dubai incident falls more into this category) but can perhaps be defended, on Just War grounds, because of Israel's embattled position. But it often seems to me that Israel's critics are tirelessly selective, highlighting Israeli wrongdoing while generally ignoring the same actions done by other states.

If Seamus Milne did not have a better one:

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost universally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or stolen passports of citizens of four European states, including Britain, with dual Iranian nationality.

You can be sure it would have triggered a major international storm, stentorian declarations about the threat of state-sponsored terrorism, and perhaps a debate at the UN security council, with demands for harsher sanctions against an increasingly dangerous Islamic republic.

Substitute Israel for Iran, and the first part of that scenario is exactly what happened in Dubai last month.

But instead of setting off a diplomatic backlash, the British government sat on its hands for almost a week after it was reportedly first passed details of the passport abuse. And while the Foreign Office finally summoned the Israeli ambassador to "share information", rather than protest, Gordon Brown could yesterday only promise a "full investigation".

Those urging lenience towards Israel in certain fora have not been above urging a nuclear strike against Argentina. Absurd, of course. But useful. Trident not only fails to deter anyone, but it cannot be deployed without the consent of both Israel's and Argentina's closest ally, without whose approval there could not have been an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.