Nationally Humiliating, Lawless and Limitlessly Dangerous

Peter Hitchens writes:

What is the difference between extradition and kidnapping? I used to know, but I am no longer sure. Because an emotional spasm about ‘terrorism’ caused us to take leave of our senses, we are all now at the mercy of foreign governments that take a dislike to us. In some cases we can be snatched from our homes and families because we are charged with actions which are not even crimes here. In some cases we can be hauled away in manacles on the demand of some politically driven American prosecutor. I used to admire American justice, but since the state-sponsored panic under George W. Bush, I am sadly disillusioned.

The penalty for daring to plead not guilty – certain financial ruin and a possible 35-year sentence – is so savage that the presumption of innocence, and jury trial itself, have been to all intents and purposes abolished. This means that the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution – which guarantees the right to a fair trial, and is one of the glories of America – has been violated and destroyed. That is bad enough, but we shouldn’t forget our other, equally unforgivable surrender of national independence, the EU arrest warrant. Bulgarian justice, anyone? Both the new US-UK extradition treaty and the EU arrest warrant were rammed through Parliament on the basis that they would fight ‘terror’.

Wise and far-sighted questions were raised about this enormous change when it was first proposed. The heartbreaking case of Christopher Tappin, the British businessman extradited to America last week, against whom there seems to be nothing resembling evidence of wrongdoing or guilty intent, is exactly what its critics feared. This episode is so unfair that any proper British patriot must surely be moved to cold fury by it.

What is interesting is that while the problem has been obvious for years, nothing has been done about it. Worse, authority has pretended that there is nothing to worry about. Sir Scott Baker’s recent report into extradition said complacently that there was ‘no significant difference’ between what the US needs to do to extradite one of ours, and what we need to do to extradite one of theirs. Is that so?

It was not always the official position. Baroness Scotland, Home Office Minister of State, speaking in the House of Lords on the afternoon of December 16, 2003, made it quite clear that if we tried to extradite an American citizen we would in future be required to meet ‘a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that’. In short, this is an unequal treaty, of the sort made between colonial powers and their powerless vassals, or between conquerors and their victims.

Now, whenever the United States mounts its very high horse on the subject of terrorism, I think we must recall that it was the US that compelled this country to surrender to the terrorist murderers of the IRA. It was President Bill Clinton who laundered the grisly and sinister Godfather Gerry Adams, giving him a visa and allowing him to spread his soapy propaganda and raise funds across the United States. President George W. Bush, Mr Anti-Terrorism himself, actually altered his schedule to fit in Mr Adams (who was too busy to make the original time) for a jolly St Patrick’s Day chinwag in the White House. So put that in your Guinness and drink it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If it’s terror you’re against, you know where to look for its supporters and sponsors.

Britain should – tonight if possible – withdraw from these unequal treaties, which are nationally humiliating, lawless and limitlessly dangerous.

Peter goes on to berate Adele Adkins for using the American one-fingered salute rather than the British two-fingered one employed by Baroness Trumpington. But, alas, he then has a go at David Cameron for standing down as a Patron of the Jewish National Fund, rightly pointing out how very close to the Saudis this Government is and how that closesness is the reason for our potentially catastrophic sabre-rattling against Iran. The truly patriotic approach would be neither pro-Israeli (and the JNF is a very extreme Zionist organisation, heavily implicated in burning out and otherwise forcibly clearing Christian as well as Muslim Israeli citizens), nor pro-Saudi, but strictly pro-British, which for the most part would mean strictly noninterventionist.

The only exception relates to Britain’s historic responsibilities within the pre-1967 Israeli borders. “The civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” were “not to be prejudiced”, according to the Balfour Declaration. The burning of the mosque at Tuba Zangaria, the inhabitants of which are Israeli citizens, certainly looks like the prejudicing of their civil and religious rights to me. As does the demolition of the villages of the Bedouin, the most ancient inhabitants, in the Negev, by the Israeli Defence Force, acting as an agency of the highly controversial Jewish National Fund. Not only is that demolition an act of State violence, but that burning, undoubtedly, was by supporters of parties within the present governing coalition. Is it conceivable that the arsonists acted without the approval, if not on the direct instruction, of senior figures within one or more governing parties?

The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and for that matter the East Bank, are all one or more other stories. But when it comes to Israel proper, why did we not do for those “existing non-Jewish communities” what we later did for the East African Asians? Is it still too late to do that, not with a view to flying them over here, but in order to create that possibility while making it clear that, while they remained where they were, then they enjoyed the full undertaking that we gave to them?

An undertaking given when they legally owned most of the land, rather than when their villages appeared on no official map, therefore enjoyed no amenities, and could look forward, either to being demolished by the State as such, or at the very least to having their places of worship and de facto community centres (churches as well as mosques) burnt down by the strongest supporters of the Government, if not by actual agents of the parties of government. We promised them that nothing like that would happen. We owe them. We owe them a very great deal. This would be just that: a very great deal. If the Arab labouring class ever were to be evacuated to Britain or anywhere else, then the Israeli economy would simply collapse, as the South African one did when the black working class just stopped working. Let that possibility exist on a permanent basis.

If the Balfour Declaration gave us legal or moral obligations to the Jews in respect of Palestine, then it also gave us legal and moral obligations to the other inhabitants of that Mandated Territory. Those obligations still obtain. And if we are finally to make good Balfour’s promise to defend “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, then are we also finally to make good his promise to defend “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”? That status is now and increasingly no less “prejudiced”, and for the same reason.

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