The failing Presidency of Barak Obama: America comes to its senses sooner than expected

We all remember where we were the night of Obamas spectacular landslide victory. And we all remember the images of frenzied crowds in celebration from Chicago to Bangkok that were flashed across our screens, when the celebrity of Barak Obama outstripped that of even Madonna. Not since Mao's cultural revolution have masses been seen chanting the name of a politician with such genuine enthusiasm. Yet looking back it seems that those revelling in America knew almost as little about what Obama had in store for them as those inexplicably elated Thais did. And it has been the people of America rather than the people of Thailand who have felt the brunt of the Obama presidency. Perhaps they should have been suspicious even then, when crowds in far off countries who knew next to nothing about American politics were joining them in the almost messianic spectacle.

It is safe to say that for most Americans Barak Obama, now on his 42% approval rating, has proven to be one disappointment after another. For many it was the point at which the Democrats forced through a radically unpopular and unamerican bill of health care reform that made them stop and rethink. For others it was the growing realisation that Obama was inflating the size and influence of the State beyond proportions ever thought acceptable by American standards while this along with the failed stimulus plan saw the nation slip into ever more alarming levels of debt. Meanwhile in the minds of many American's there was a dim sense that Obama lacked their appreciation of their nation's greatness or understood the threat that radical Islam posed to this, while his diplomatic bumblings on the world stage were the cause of growing embarrassment. The charismatic leadership that had initially drawn so many in now seems to be failing Obama and giving way to an image of inexperience, weakness and even a lackluster attitude tinged with just enough arrogance to make it truly too unpalatable to watch.

And in the background of all of this has been stifling unemployment and ongoing bad news about the state of an economy that seems to refuse to recover. Not surprisingly then Democrats are starting to panic about the approaching November mid-terms in which many commentators are seriously discussing the possibility of Obama's party losing control of both Houses.

This weekend over 300,000 conservatives descended on Washington for a rally to demonstrate the nation's support for its Service Men and Women but also, and perhaps more significantly, to call for America to return to its founding values and principles. Heavily present throughout the ranks of this self-confident gathering of the Right were members of the avowedly anti-big State Tea Party movement, whose emergence is a sign of just how far the Obama presidency has pushed certain sections of the American public. And yet dissatisfaction with the reign of Obama is by no means the exclusive territory of fringe groups, indeed no doubt to Obama's dismay Martin Luther King's daughter even agreed to speak at the rally. Today you don't have to speak to many Americans before you come across those who optimistically, if a little naively, gave Obama their vote in 2008 and have no intention of repeating the same mistake this time around.

UCL and Radical Islam: sleepwalking towards apocalypse

UCL in the heart of the salubrious Bloomsbury was founded by the 18th century thinker Jeremy Bentham as a beacon of academic and religious tolerance. Yet surely even for an institution whose genesis is found in the principle of freedom of conscience and expression there comes a point where the question must be asked whether a fundamentalist approach to this matter will not ultimately bring about its own demise and the demise of freedom and tolerance itself? How much intolerance can be tolerated before this noble goal has canceled itself out? How much freedom of expression can you allow to those who agitate against freedom of expression before one day you find those very same voices silencing yourself? Enter Malcolm Grant, Provost of UCL.

Grant is a man for whom there seem to be no limits on what can be said. Such is his die hard devotion to freedom of speech that if assassins were outside his office plotting how to kill him it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to picture Grant asking them if they'd like to sit down and have something to drink while they discuss.


For although UCL's Provost has washed his hands of all responsibility of that minor Umar Farouk Abdulmatalab affair (the former president of UCL's Islamic society who attempted to blowup himself and a passenger jet over the skies of Detroit one Christmas day) the fact is UCL has been playing host to some of the most serious pro-Jihad Islamists that modern Britain has to offer. And as has now become all too apparent; when it comes to Islamic radicals the British are starting to look like connoisseurs.


And while Abdulmatalab may be the most high profile of UCL's Jihadi alumni he is far from the only young Muslim to have been radicalised in the walls of this hallowed institution. As a report released earlier this year by the Centre of Social Cohesion revealed in recent years UCL's Islamic society has invited an entourage of some of the most extreme and bigoted clerics they could get to come and preach to Muslim students on campus.


This is a phenomenon that UCL's authorities have shown themselves to be utterly complicit in. Later this month UCL will be playing host to the National Ramadan Conference, which judging by those invited to speak will be nowhere near as a prestigious event as its title might imply. However if raving anti-Semitism, Homophobia and anti-Westernism is your thing then this conference will be one not to be missed.


There's Jalal Ibn Saeed to look forward to who has described Jews as selfishly only caring about themselves while enslaving non-Jews who they believe to be damned, or there's Zahir Mahmoud who has declared his support for Hamas and martyrdom while courageously voicing his opposition to the British army and the western notion of free speech. But of course the jewel in the crown of this line up of hate has to be Uthman Lateef who is affiliated with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir which the Government is currently looking into having made illegal. Lateef has also preached hatred against Homosexuals and championed the Muslim conquest of Europe. Yet probably the most exciting thing Lateef is ever known to have said in public is his prediction that the Devil will come from the Jews of Isfahan, accompanied by 70,000 of them by all accounts.
These are the kind of views that Malcolm Grant believes should be given a platform at his University.


And while Grant harbours delusions of being a warrior for free speech genuine warriors of Islamic holy war will be coming to recruit at UCL; something that both Boris Johnson and the British Army have been prevented from doing in the resent past. Meanwhile the prospects of an institution happy welcoming those who wish to destroy the values that it stands upon seem about as rosey as a civilization that does the same.

Britain must deal with the Anti-Semitism among its Muslim Community

British politicians are always paying lip service to the urgent need to combat the rise in anti-Semitism, such kitsch events as Holocaust memorial day are often the favourite time wheel out such lackluster calls against that hatred that thankfully still remains so absolutely beyond the pale in western society. Yet if our leaders really cared about turning back the tide of the growth of Jew hatred then they would stop trying to fool themselves and the rest of us about where the problem is really coming from. The truth of the matter is that most Jews in Britain today do not live in fear of attack from members of the BNP or white supremacist groups, but rather from another minority community which itself claims to be suffering persecution - the Muslim community.

Needless to say that coming out with the above statement is almost guaranteed to be met with accusations of Islamophobia. Yet just as Jews can not always be protesting frank conversations about Israel with accusations of anti-Semitism so too it just is not good enough for the Islamic community to hide behind the charge of Islamophobia every time its conduct is up for debate. The facts must be allowed to speak for themselves without any attempt to drown them out with shrieks of feigned offence and false indignation. And as the expert in Modern Anti-Semitism Professor Robert Wistrich points out; the statistical evidence shows that British Muslims commit violent acts anti-Semitism at almost ten times the rate of the non-Muslim population. And after that what more is there to be said?

Of course apologists will argue that it is only to be expected that as Muslims they will show concern for their co-religionists in Gaza and the West Bank and that this naturally expresses itself as an anti-Israel sentiment. But when Muslims are heard chanting Islamic death chants about the Jews and seen carrying placards about the Holocaust at anti-Israel demonstrations in London can it really be denied that there isn't something more sinister at work?

And while these things will inevitably be dismissed as the work of extremists it should be remembered that the work of British Muslim extremists have already had deadly consequences for Jews in recent years. After all in 2003 two British Muslims heeded the call of a third British Muslim ; Abdullah al-Faisal, to go and murder Israelis by blowing themselves up in a Tel Aviv music bar. And indeed it was the British Muslim Omar Sheikh who was the mastermind of the kidnapping and beheading of the Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002.

While these events are of course the work of intensely radicalised extremists it seems that Jew hatred filters down to rather less adventurous sections of Britain's Islamic community also. In recent days the story has come to light of a young man in Walsall who had adopted a Jewish appearance as part of his desire to convert to Judaism but found himself the subject of constant abuse from local Muslim teenagers until finally a group of seven of them set upon him and beat him badly.

If Britain's political leaders truly mean what they say about anti-Semitism then they would confront this issue directly and make clear to the leaders of the British Islamic community that this culture of hate must be brought to an end. No accusations of Islamophobia. No excuses about Israel. No threats about the risk of pushing their youth into the arms of extremists. The virulent anti-Semtism rampant in sections of Britain's Islamic community must end.

The time has come for Obama to admit he has been wrong on Iran

If there was ever a time for the American President to come out and apologise to his people and indeed the world at large for his failings regarding helping to facilitate the emergence a nuclear Iran then this week seemed like a pretty good one. First it was announced by the Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has activated a second centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium and then Iran itself came out boasting to the world that it already had the necessary mass graves for US servicemen freshly dug. Well i think we can safely say that that's well over a years worth of softly softly Obama style appeasement diplomacy exposed for what it really was all along; a farce.

The UN security council may well have forbade Iran's continued enrichment of uranium but as usual the rulings issued by the UN have been taken about as seriously as the latest Katie Price autobiography. By putting a second centrifuge into service Iran has been able to dramatically increase the efficiency with which it can enrich uranium so speeding it towards attaining levels of enrichment that would produce weapons grade materials. As of the beginning of this week we all just moved dangerously closer to living in a world in which Iran has the nuclear capabilities for dominating the region, holding the world to ransom and erasing those of its neighbours that it took a disliking to. Indeed this would be no cold war scenario, given the Islamist mentality that the Iranian regime operates under the prospect of doomsday visions are no deterrent for Iran's leaders. Should Iran achieve nuclear capabilities then the best possible scenario we could hope for would be a nuclear arms race across the Middle East, a situation in which the likes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria would all be pointing nuclear weapons at one another.

But have no fear, in response to all of this the US military has revealed that it does indeed have a contingency plan for a military strike on Iran after all. The only issue is, as the chairman on the US Joint Chief of Staffs Adm. Mullen explained; the US military thinks a strike would 'probably be a bad idea'. Oh well in that case we'll all just sit around and wait for Ahmadinejad to go off the idea of nuclear weapons then shall we? Either that or try another round of appeasement; perhaps if we all offered to convert to Shia Islam.......

Ahmedinejad clearly isn't about to experience some sudden change of heart, indeed in response to the idea of a US military strike Iran promised that it would retaliate with attacks on US bases across the Gulf. Clearly those terribly tough economic sanctions that Obama was holding back as a last resort if his policy of talking nicely somehow failed to bare fruit have left the Iranians completely undeterred. What should really by now be obvious to all those concerned is that the Iranian problem is one that only gets worse the longer it is left. There is no point putting off the inevitable, especially when the inevitable intervention is going to become increasingly ever more perilous the longer it is delayed.

Now is the time for the Obama administration to admit that its policy on Iran was ill conceived from the start and that the time has come, and indeed came some time ago, for a new more proactive approach.

Cameron wouldn't have blundered over Israel in Turkey if he had have been in touch with his true values

It doesn't really matter whether the British Prime Minister made his ill judged comments concerning Israel during his visit to Turkey because he believed they would win favour with easily appeased hosts or impress a morally outraged electorate back home or even, heaven forbid, because he actually believed what he was saying to be true. What matters is that in saying what he did Cameron demonstrated one of two things; that either he really doesn't understand Israel or that he has completely lost touch with the values that he and his party purport to stand for.

The modern British Conservative Party has always stood on such principles as freedom of the individual, enterprise, democracy, the importance of the nation state maintaining a strong military for the defence of its citizens and the illegitimacy of terrorism. And if David Cameron knew anything about Israel and the values that its government and society cling to so resolutely then he would know that these principles that should be at the core of his conservatism are the very same core principles of the country that he has so flippantly chastised. And as a self professed moderate and liberal within his party David Cameron should find all the more to admire in the open and progressive nature of Israeli culture and society.

Furthermore before deriding Israel's attempts to defend its civilians from rocket fire by Islamist terror groups he might care to remember how he defends the presence of his own troops in Afghanistan - to keep the streets of Britain safe we are told. Indeed there is a strong case to be made for the link between terror training in Afghanistan and the threat of attacks on British soil, but in comparison to thousands of kasaam rockets being fired in the direction of the homes of over one million Israelis the link seems at best tenuous. Yet if Cameron seems convinced that the Afghan civilian lives lost are a justifiable price worth paying for keeping Britain safe then how can he describe Israel's blockade of Hamas controlled Gaza as unacceptable.

In calling Gaza a 'prison camp' and Israel's attempts to prevent weapons infiltrating the strip as piracy David Cameron is not only making claims that are patently false but he is also further contributing to the problem that he professes a desire to counteract. Such language only emboldens the stubbornness of those who are still holding out against all pressure to try and encourage them to negotiate and cooperate with Israel's efforts for the conflict's resolution. Indeed if demanding Israel abandon its security concerns for the whims of good publicity was not irresponsible enough then the total lack of consideration for the impact of such inflammatory statements in a volatile region is truly concerning.

If Cameron took the time to understand what Israel stands for in the world and the terrible dilemmas it faces, and if he took the time to hold this up against the values that he himself stands for then he would no doubt come to realise that far from talking Israel down he should be doing everything possible to help strengthen her ever precarious position and support the Netanyahu government in its attempts to find a viable way to coexist with its undeniably hostile neighbours.