INSIGHT/7

Insight1: Background to Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Syria; Freedom of Information in Britain; the Grandma Spy; notes from the official archives

Insight2: Dr V G Bull and the Iraqi gun, with acknowledgements to VOMIT (Victims of Masonic Ill Treatment)

Insight3: The Road to Kabul: Summary of India Office document on the background to the first Afghan War

Ever more self destructively, Israel takes on the sinister appearance of its spiritual elders. Its politicians and spokesmen address the world with the assurance of the patriarchs of the Torah, if not of the God of fire and brimstone who stalked the insular world of primordial Zion.

Politicians of present-day Israel show distinct signs of believing the myths of their ancestors' making. The 'chosen people' claim a biblical right to be where they are and if need be to keep others in submission.

Israel in never wrong. In it own astigmatic view it has a presumptive right to the land it tried at first to buy, and then, less than a century ago, to wrest by force from its legitimate inhabitants.

Israel may take whatever measures it deems necessary to protect itself from the people it has dispossessed. Others, with the same sovereign right to self determination in the eyes of uncommitted, may

not defend themselves or even protest at the insolence and violence they are compelled to suffer. Perhaps the greatest danger, however, is the assumption by much of the 'programmed' world, led by the USA and Britain, its religions and cultures consumed by the same mystical beliefs and superstitions, that Israel is preternaturally right. And it must not be forgotten that even Islam inherits the same cultural baggage. The Koran, like the Bible, is basically indebted to the tenets of the Hebrew faith.

The very term Semite has been misappropriated by the Jews. Arabs are as much Semites as are their Hebrew neighbours. Historical untruths and contemporary injustices are alike born of cultural confusion.

Is it not time for some of the leading Arab nations on the world scene to declare their secular nature; and to make it clear that even within Islam religion is a matter of individual choice?