If you haven't read Jemima Khan's interviews with Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in this week's New Statesman, you really should. The Livingstone interview hasn't attracted the best of headlines for the Labour candidate - "Ken Livingstone in Tory 'riddled with homosexuals' row" - but it is ludicrous to accuse Ken of being homophobic or bigoted on the basis of a single, ill-advised, badly-phrased comment. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that his Tory opponent Johnson has, in the past, referred to black people as "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" and declared, in a discussion on 7/7, that "Islam is the problem".

Boris's interview with Jemima also contained a line that some might say was offensive to London's Irish community:

"I'll tell you what makes me angry - lefty crap," he thunders in response. Like? "Well, like spending £20,000 on a dinner at the Dorchester for Sinn Fein!"

Is the mayor referring to the annual St Patrick's Day Gala Dinner, the £150-per-ticket black tie event that ran between 2002 and 2008 and was, ahem, self-financing? The dinner that Boris cancelled in 2009 to save money despite the fact that it was, um, er, self-financing? The dinner that wasn't held "for Sinn Fein" but at the request, and for the sake, of the Irish community of Kilburn, Cricklewood and other parts of the capital?

Now, you can agree or disagree with the idea of a special, sponsored, annual dinner for London's Irish community but to dismiss it, out of hand, as "lefty crap" and "for Sinn Fein" isn't just wrong but offensive. Irish footballers, television stars, singers and politicians from across the spectrum attended the dinner, including, I'm told, Pauline McLynn (from Father Ted), Dermot O'Leary, Bob Geldof, the mayor of Dublin and the Irish ambassador to the UK.

As a spokesman for Ken Livingstone pointed out, when I mentioned the Boris line to him:

To call the annual, self-financing, St Patrick's Day dinner "lefty crap" is both profoundly ill-informed and also an attack on Irish Londoners and their contribution to this city. Irish Londoners came together to celebrate the part they play in the life of London - and Boris Johnson has slapped them in the face. He is out of touch and ignorant of the facts.

I'm not Irish but I am Muslim. I know what it's like to be casually stereotyped - not every British Muslim is an Islamist and not every person of Irish descent is a Provo. The mayor of this great and diverse city should know better.

www.newstatesman.com - Boris Johnson vs the London Irish

For some in the west, and in particular here in the UK, the murder of 77 people in Norway by Anders Breivik seemed unbelievable and inexplicable. It didn't compute. The moment the news broke, for instance, Labour MP Tom Harris took to Twitter to blame - yep, you guessed it - Muslim extremists for the killings. To be fair to Harris, he was just articulating out loud what others - liberals and conservatives alike - were thinking and assuming in their heads. Even after it became clear that it wasn't a Muslim who had perpetrated this atrocity, some refused to call it an act of terrorism, preferring to refer to the perpetrator of the crime as "mad" and "insane".

As Guy Walters noted at the time:

For some commentators, such as Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, Sam Leith in the Evening Standard, and Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, Breivik's actions are explained by insanity, and there is not much need to study Breivik's 'manifesto'. This, the argument runs, was the work of a lunatic who had built a puerile ideology to accommodate his psychopathy. In essence - the madness comes first, then the political justification, then the slaughter.

But Anders Breivik isn't a madman and his crime wasn't prompted by voices in his head. Just read his detailed, 1500-page manifesto, 2083 A European Declaration of Independence, to see how disturbingly rational, thought-through and politicized his hate-filled views and opinions are.

As Walters argued last year:

The roots of Breivik's actions clearly lie in his politics, and when you read his 'manifesto', it is clear why he decided to act as he did. His argument runs thus: Multiculturalism, 'cultural Marxism' and immigration of Muslims is destroying our way of life. The people responsible for this are the ruling Labour Party. These people are traitors. I have tried to act politically, but that has yielded no reward, and little hope of doing so. Violence is the only solution. Therefore, kill the next generation of political Labour Party leaders. This is a necessary evil, but will save us from the greater murderousness of Islam in the long run. And, in a brutally logical way, that is just what Breivik did.

You can read Walter's excellent blogpost in full here.

Now, I've written before about the oft-ignored threat from far-right, "white" terrorism - for example, in the New Statesman in July 2009 and in the Guardian in January 2011. In the latter piece, I noted how

FBI figures show between 2002 and 2005 there were 24 acts of terrorism recorded in the US; 23 of those incidents were carried out by non-Muslim,"domestic terrorists".

Often the reaction I get to such pieces amounts to a version of: "You're just saying all this because you're Muslim and you want to deflect attention away from the crimes of your co-religionists." There is an assumption among opinion-formers and decison-makers that the threat from far-right terrorism isn't as serious or worthy of debate and discussion as the threat from Islamist terorrism - despite the killing of 77 people in nearby Norway by a non-Muslim terrorist with extensive links to our own English Defence League (EDL).

Thankfully, the Home Affairs Select Committee, in a new report out today, seems to disagree with the conventional wisdom. MPs on the committee noted that there

appears to be a growth in more extreme and violent forms of far-right ideology. Indeed it is clear that individuals from many different backgrounds are vulnerable, with no typical profile or pathway to radicalisation.

The MPs concluded:

A view was expressed by some of those giving evidence to us, and those to whom we spoke less formally, that the revised Prevent Strategy only pays lip service to the threat from extreme far-right terrorism. We accept that Prevent resources should be allocated proportionately to the terrorist threat, and that to an extent we must rely upon the intelligence and security services to make this judgement. However, we received persuasive evidence about the potential threat from extreme far-right terrorism. The ease of travel and communications between countries in Europe and the growth of far-right organisations, which appear to have good communications with like-minded groups within Europe, suggest that the current lack of firm evidence should not be a reason for neglecting this area of risk. The Prevent Strategy should outline more clearly the actions to be taken to tackle far right radicalisation as well as explicitly acknowledge the potential interplay between different forms of violent extremism, and the potential for measures directed at far-right extremism to have a consequential effect on Islamist extremism, and vice versa.

Will Theresa May and co take notice of the report's conclusions? Will the media start shining a light on the very real threat from far-right terrorism? If not in the interests of fairness and balance, then at least in the interests of safety, security and self-preservation? I have my doubts...

www.newstatesman.com - The threat from far-right terrorism

Matthew D'Ancona, one of the most well-informed commentators on the coalition, makes two important points on the fallout from the Huhne resignation in his Sunday Telegraph column today:

1) He identifies Ed Davey as a future Lib Dem leader, on the basis of the latter's promotion to the Cabinet and closeness to Clegg (a point I made on Andrew Neil's Daily Politics show on Friday):

Meet Ed Davey, our next deputy prime minister. Well, conceivably so. On Friday, Davey was promoted from the junior ranks of the Coalition to take the Cabinet seat vacated by Chris Huhne. In his new, politically prominent role as Energy and Climate Change Secretary, he will almost certainly come to be seen as a potential successor to Nick Clegg, whose so-called "Orange Book" brand of Lib Dem politics he shares. . . it is perfectly conceivable that the burly, smiling, anonymous figure you saw bouncing into high office on Friday will be a mere heartbeat away from the prime ministerial bicycle clips by the end of 2015. Today's political Pooter is tomorrow's dauphin. Of such minor tweaks of fate is history made.

2) He identifies how damaging the Huhne/Pryce trial will be for the Liberal Democrats and how much of a media circus it is bound to become:

The broader question raised by the Huhne saga is: who stands to lose? The former Energy Secretary strongly denies transferring speeding points to his then wife, Vicky Pryce, in March 2003. The trial will have a theatrical character quite distinct from its legal content. As one senior Government source puts it: "It's got the lot, hasn't it? The scorned wife, the ambitious Cabinet minister, a mistress, cloak and dagger with the press... there's nothing missing, really." What the Lib Dems fear is that the whole three-ring circus will revive folk memory of past Liberal scandal: the dark underbelly of the party's public piety.

www.newstatesman.com - More fallout from the Huhne resignation

In all the hype and hyperbole surrounding David Miliband's latest "attack" on Ed Miliband, it is important to remember that the former foreign secretary's headline-grabbing essay in this week's New Statesman was meant, formally at least, to be a response to a long article on social democracy written by Roy Hattersley and academic Kevin Hickson and published in Political Quarterly late last year.

For example, Miliband writes:

Roy has been pretty consistent in his views over 40 years, even if the framing labels in the party (right, left, new, old, radical, conservative) have swivelled around him. His commentary on politics is born not of self-promotion but out of belief. But that doesn't mean he is right.

In today's Guardian, however, Hattersley responds to Miliband's critique - and he doesn't pull any punches:

Understandably, David bridles at criticism of the governments in which he served. We have no doubt that they did much of which the Labour party can be proud. We said so when we campaigned for its re-election. David makes the tired old jibe about the luxury of "principle without power". But we believe that future office will elude us until we establish a distinctive radical reputation. That requires a leader who has the courage and character to acknowledge the fundamental flaws in New Labour thinking. It is one of the reasons why we voted for Ed Miliband 18 months ago.

You can read Hattersley's full piece here.

Meanwhile, in the Telegraph today, Matthew Norman, in his own inimitable style, lets rip at the elder Miliband:

Little Ed may have lethal presentational problems, but he also has guts. When he wanted the leadership, he rang the doorbell and charged into the house, even though it meant trampling over his poor old mum's heart. David, no lavishly gifted communicator himself, is a castrato. He is the countertenor in the Labour choir, singing a self-pitying requiem to the death of personal ambition at a pitch to shatter glass.

Ouch.

www.newstatesman.com - Roy vs David

So Chris Huhne has gone off to defend his innocence in court. Arise Ed Davey!

If the former Energy and Climate Change Secretary is found innocent, will he become a lightning rod for left-wing, anti-coalition dissent on the Lib Dem backbenches? Much is made, for example, of his SDP past.

I was on BBC2's Daily Politics earlier discussing the fallout from the resignation, and host Andrew Neil made the same point on air that he'd made earlier on Twitter:

Clegg's nightmare: Huhne found innocent and rises from backbenches to lead social democrat wing of Lib Dems

It's a point also made by Benjamin Ramm, editor of the centre-left Liberal magazine:

Chris Huhne should not be underestimated: he remains a key figure in the party. Huhne successfully portrayed himself as an outsider, playing on his SDP background to appeal to the Left of the party - despite being a contributor to the Orange Book - and has made it known that he would have favoured a Lib-Lab coalition.

I'm not sure I buy this. Some points to consider:

1) Huhne, a multimillionaire ex-employee of the ratings agency, Fitch, was a contributor to the notorious Orange Book and is believed to have only adopted a leftist stance to try and justify his "insurgent" campaign for the Lib Dem leadership, up against the "Establishment" and centre-right candidate Nick Clegg, in 2007.

2) Huhne spent a great deal of time in the run-up to the 2010 general election briefing journalists that a deal with the Conservatives - whether confidence-and-supply or full coalition - was not out of the question and something he'd be happy to support.

3) Huhne, as David Cameron acknowledged in his response to the former's resignation letter this morning, was one of the lead negotiators on the Lib Dem side during the coalition negotiations in May 2010 and, thus, one of the architects of the subsequent, right-wing Con-Dem coalition.

4) One of the Labour negotiators told me once that he was "shocked" at how hostile Huhne had seemed towards a coalition deal with the Labour Party and how he'd walked into the negotiating room calling for Tory-style in-year spending cuts - in direct contradiction to the Lib Dems' own pre-election position on the timing of austerity measures.

5) In August 2010, it was Huhne who was put up by the Lib Dems alongside Tory chairman Sayeeda Warsi in the coalition's first, joint, party-political press conference. Huhne (falsely) claimed that Labour overspending, rather than a collapse in taxation, had been the cause of the record budget deficit and then nodded along as Warsi bizarrely accused Labour politicians of "illegal" and "criminal" behaviour over their handling of the economy.

6) Huhne voted for every single one of the coalition's "regressive" cuts to spending on public services, infrastructure and the welfare state over the past 21 months. As Labour peer Helena Kennedy told him on Question Time in June 2010: "You are providing the sheep's clothing for a very rapacious government that is going to cut spending." On the same show, Labour's Peter Hain rightly castigated the then Energy Secretary for trying to draw a (false) comparison between the British and Greek economies: "No serious economic commentator, and you used to be one before you got into government, believes our economy is anything like Greece."

Then again, having said all of this, I have to also admit that there was no one else in Cabinet who stood up to Cameron and Osborne in the way that Huhne did - over, for example, the negative Tory campaign during the AV referendum and over the Tories' links withe City - which is why the Cameroons won't be sad to see the back of him. Plus, given the size of his ego and his ambition, an innocent, revitalised Huhne could just choose to attack the coalition from the backbenches, and from the left, in order to further his own career, regardless of the fact that his recent record suggests he isn't a lefty. But my own suspicion is that his political career is over.

www.newstatesman.com - Should social democrats mourn the departure of Chris Huhne?

Ed Miliband had a bad, bad January - but ended on a high. Having fallen behind in the polls, been attacked by his guru, got his message mixed up on cuts and gaffed on Twitter, the final few days of the month saw him help force RBS chief executive Stephen Hester turn down his million-pound bonus and put Cameron on the defensive, and then put in a strong performance against the Prime Minister in Tuesday's Commons debate on Europe ("Ed Miliband was very good," admitted the frequently-critical Simon Hoggart) and at PMQs, on the first day of February, on the subjects of bank bonuses and NHS reform .

Attacking the bankers - over excessive bonuses, lack of transparency, failure to lend and the rest - has proved to be a boon for Ed M. Recent polls show Labour has slashed the Tories' 5-point lead and I suspect we'll continue to see a mild uptick in the party's poll rating in the coming days and weeks. Why? Because, in the current climate, left-populism works. The public wants the political elites to take on the financial elites. It's not rocket science - and I'm not sure how many times some of us have to make this rather simple and obvious point to a cautious Labour leadership.

In October 2010, for example, after Ed M failed to make any public comment whatsoever on a 55 per cent jump in pay for FTSE 100 executives, I wrote:

So, Ed, where are you? Still running from the "Red" tag? Let's be clear. There is nothing "red" about objecting to reckless, irresponsible and unfair pay rises and telephone-number salaries. In fact, the public would be on your side if you did - polls show voters support a high pay commission and higher taxes on bonuses and object to the growing gap between rich and poor in modern Britain.

Eighteen months later, Ed M is starting to reap the rewards of "objecting to reckless, irresponsible and unfair pay rises and telephone-number salaries". Here's political editor Joe Murphy in Monday's Evening Standard:

Ed Miliband has scored a big victory that will give his leadership a much-needed boost.

But Ed mustn't lose momentum on this issue - as he did on phone-hacking last summer, where he dropped the baton and allowed Cameron to kick the Murdoch/media reform issue into the long grass. The Labour leader has to own the issue of high pay - and keep banging on about it whenever he gets the chance. It isn't that hard, to be honest. For instance, why doesn't he come out loudly and publicly against the new bonus scheme being demanded by Network Rail chief executive Sir David Higgins, whose taxpayer-funded basic salary is already £560,000? Why doesn't he position himself at the head of a campaign to demand RBS refrains from paying out multi-million-pound, taxpayer-funded bonuses to members of its investment banking division, as is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future?

Then there's the issue of the cuts and Labour's various contortions on the subject. As a must-read, myth-busting Guardian leader points out today:

After just one year of full-blown austerity, marked by student occupations and rioting, it is sobering to be reminded that 94% of Mr Osborne's departmental spending cuts are still to come, along with another 88% of the planned reductions to benefits.

Ed M mustn't panic. The cuts have yet to fully kick in - let's see how popular (and/or effective) austerity measures are in 12 or 18 months time. Now is not the time for mixed-messaging on spending cuts, or cutting and running, otherwise Labour won't be able to reap the electoral rewards of having opposed them once the public turns - and it will turn, mark my words - against slash-and-burn, austerity-obsessed, 1930s-style economics. After all, as David Blanchflower notes in this week's magazine, the "Osborne collapse" has well and truly begun.

It is unfashionable, I know, but I've never bought into the nonsensical line from the right-wing press that Ed Miliband can't win, won't win, will never be prime minister, blah blah blah. It isn't just that, as Lord Ashcroft of all people has pointed out, he coud get "close to 40 per cent of the vote [in 2015] without needing to get out of bed". It's much more than that: Ed, at his best, brightest and boldest, understands the issues that matter to the great British public (see "squeezed middle", high pay, vested interests, etc) and, from time to time, displays excellent political judgement (phone hacking, the Hester bonus, shadow cabinet elections, etc). It's too soon to write him off. Meanwhile, the past few days have shown how unpredictable and capricious modern British politics can be: against the odds, Ed has recovered after his awful start to the year.

So, will big brother David's intervention in this week's New Statesman harm him? It wasn't, as some have claimed, an out-and-out attack on his younger brother. Nonetheless, the elder Miliband clearly isn't happy about the direction of the Ed-led Labour Party, isn't afraid to let people know that he isn't happy and surely must have known how a febrile, splits-obsessed media pack would respond to his detailed, if somewhat dry, critique of the views not so much of Ed himself but one of Ed's chief supporters, Roy Hattersley - and, that too, five months after the latter's original article on social democracy appeared in Political Quarterly. (On a side note, and to be fair, it is worth pointing out that David does volunteer four positive and named references to Ed in his NS piece.)

I'm never quite sure what David's game-plan is; what it is that he wants. The Times's Sam Coates had the best line on Twitter:

All DM's old tricks - setting up straw men (Hattersley) to knock down, loyal and disloyal simultaneously, over-complicated. Why do it?

Indeed. Whatever your view of David's intervention, the timing is bad for Ed, coming as it does after his strong performances at PMQs and in the Commons debate on Europe.

Perhaps Ed Miliband is just an unlucky leader. Not according to Steve Richards, in today's Independent. Steve makes a counter-intuitive but powerful argument in his column:

David Cameron's misguided attempt to secure an easy symbolic hit by removing the knighthood of a single banker shows how rocky the ride will be. As I have argued before, Cameron and George Osborne are not the brilliant tacticians or strategists mythology insists they are. They are middle ranking, and when they try to be too clever by half, they slip towards the relegation zone. Voters do not care a damn about the sensitivities of a greedy, incompetent banker, but they can spot a red herring as big and bright as this one.

The failure of this populist gesture shows that the issue demands more clear thinking than a bit of Bullingdon Club game-playing, and points to massive challenges for both Cameron and Ed Miliband in the coming years. For Cameron, the issue confirms my view that he is an unlucky leader.

Yet, according to Steve:

It might not seem this way to him, or to his taunting critics, but Miliband is a lucky leader. He has made a mark in responding to these events, demanding an inquiry into newspapers, while Cameron has still clung to the idea of protecting the old order, and outlining in general terms the case for a new moral capitalism. In doing so, he has had more practical impact on the course of current tumultuous dramas than any recent leader of the opposition.

He rightly concludes:

Cameron and Osborne are awestruck that in every opinion poll voters placed Tony Blair precisely on the centre ground. They want to be in the same place as their hero at the next election. But what it means to be on the centre ground is changing fast now and will have changed even more by then.

(On a related note, my colleague Rafael Behr makes the opposite case to Steve in this week's New Statesman cover story, entitled "Lucky Dave".)

www.newstatesman.com - Where next for Ed?

Last night, on my way home after doing the late-night paper review on Sky News, I got involved in a minor Twitter spat with Iain Dale over the nature of Iran's nuclear programme. Iain is one of my favourite Tories - intelligent, open-minded, unpredictable, amusing. He's also my publisher - which means, of course, that I'm contractually obliged to say nice things about him.

Iain tweeted:

@ns_mehdihasan on #skypapers "... Iran's nuclear programme, if it exists at all." No, it's clearly a CIA plot [bangs head against wall].

When I pointed out that I had been referring to Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme, not its NPT-approved nuclear energy programme, Iain responded:

@ns_mehdihasan "alleged weapons programme"? Come on. Even the IAEA reckons they're developing such a programme. Not being partisan at all.

So here's my challenge to Iain: if he can find even a single quote from the IAEA's latest report on Iran in which the UN's nuclear watchdog says, without caveat or qualification, that the self-styled Islamic Republic is building a nuclear bomb, developing nuclear weapons, or working on an active nuclear weapons programme, I will pay him the princely sum of £100. This is the "Iain Dale Iran challenge". In fact, it's open to anyone out there in the blogosphere - not just Iain.

But, before you start Googling and ctrl-F-ing, let me just point out that quoting the bits in the report where it says:

The information indicates that Iran has carried out the following activities that are relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device

or

The information indicates that prior to the end of 2003 the above activities took place under a structured programme. There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing.

or

The Agency has serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme.

. . . will not be accepted. Why? Re-read those tentative sentences again - none of them state or conclude with any certainty or confidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons programme right now, let alone building nuclear bombs. They tend to relate to stuff that allegedly went on in or around 2003. In fact, in the same report, the IAEA admits that it

continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement

And as the BBC's James Reynolds pointed out at the time:

The report says that Iran has carried out activities 'relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device'. But. . . the report does not state that Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon.

Here's Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department intelligence analyst who now works for the Arms Control Association (ACA), commenting on the IAEA's November report:

There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb. . . Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.

Oh, and here's the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, speaking on CBS, in January (that is, two months after the publication of the IAEA's Iran report which, according to Iain Dale, "reckons they're developing such a programme"):

Are [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.

On a side note, I've noticed how people who seem so keen to confront Iran over its nuclear programme tend not to have actually read the IAEA's report, or followed the history of Iran's strained relations with the IAEA. Iain clearly hadn't read it - when I asked him to quote from the report itself, rather than newspaper reports about the report, he responded by citing. . . a newspaper report!

Here's Iain's reasoning:

@ns_mehdihasan How strange. The NYT is the type of lefty liberal paper you normally quote approvingly. Stop being partisan :)

The New York Times is indeed a "lefty liberal paper", by US standards, but it also has an ignominious history of misrepresenting WMD "threats" in the Middle East. In 2004, after the Iraq war, the Times's public editor , Daniel Okrent, issued a now-notorious apology for the paper's failure to challenge the Bush administration's false and exaggerated claims about Iraq's supposed "weapons of mass destruction":

Some of The Times's coverage in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq was credulous; much of it was inappropriately italicized by lavish front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines; and several fine articles by David Johnston, James Risen and others that provided perspective or challenged information in the faulty stories were played as quietly as a lullaby. . .

. . . The Times's flawed journalism continued in the weeks after the war began, when writers might have broken free from the cloaked government sources who had insinuated themselves and their agendas into the prewar coverage. . .

. . . The failure was not individual, but institutional.

I only wish every journalist and blogger writing or tweeting on Iran right now would first have a read of Okrent's piece to avoid making the same mistakes again.

www.newstatesman.com - The Iain Dale Iran challenge

On last night's Question Time, well-known Middle East expert and respected nuclear analyst Melanie Phillips proclaimed:

The IAEA and virtually every western government believes that Iran is racing to develop a nuclear weapon. It is behaving entirely as if it is. It is boasting that it is.

Put aside the nonsensical and deluded claim that Iran has "boasted" it is building nukes (eh? Where? When? That would be big news, wouldn't it? We might even have seen it mentioned on the front page of the Mail...had it happened...).

Instead, focus for a moment on her confident claim regarding the beliefs of the "IAEA and virtually every western government". For a start, the IAEA has said no such thing. Here's the crucial bit from the IAEA's "hawkish" November 2011 report:

[T]he Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities and LOFs declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement

Admittedly, the IAEA does go on to point out that

the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and
therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.

but that isn't the same as saying the IAEA believes Iran is "racing to develop a nuclear weapon", is it? It isn't even close. (Phillips omitted to mention, and none of her fellow panellists seemed aware of, the fact that the IAEA is no longer neutral on this subject: as WikiLeaks revealed, new IAEA boss Yukiya Amano told the Americans in 2009 that "he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program".)

From the New Yorker in November:

A nuanced assessment of the I.A.E.A. report was published by the Arms Control Association (A.C.A.), a nonprofit whose mission is to encourage public support for effective arms control. The A.C.A. noted that the I.A.E.A. did "reinforce what the nonproliferation community has recognized for some times: that Iran engaged in various nuclear weapons development activities until 2003, then stopped many of them, but continued others." (The American intelligence community reached the same conclusion in a still classified 2007 estimate.) The I.A.E.A.'s report "suggests," the A.C.A. paper said, that Iran "is working to shorten the timeframe to build the bomb once and if it makes that decision. But it remains apparent that a nuclear-armed Iran is still not imminent nor is it inevitable." Greg Thielmann, a former State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the A.C.A. assessment, told me, "There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb." He added, "Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report."

Then there is the official, consensus view of the US government's national intelligence community, which concluded in 2007, with "high confidence", that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform uranium into a nuclear weapon had been shut down since 2003, and also said with high confidence that the halt "was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure". This view, as of 2011, had not changed.

How about the Israeli view? They're all hawks over in Tel Aviv, right? Wrong. From Ha'aretz on 18 January:

The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon - or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

So what on earth was Phillips talking about? And why did the other panellists, or the presenter, not challenge her hyperbole and sabre-rattling? Judging from last night's Question Time, I fear we are in Iraq/2003 territory once more. God help us all...

www.newstatesman.com - Sorry, Melanie, your pants are on fire

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. So I took the opportunity to write a "Thunderer" column (£) for the Times, entitled: "I am shamed by Muslim attitudes to the Holocaust".

If you can't get behind the paywall, here are the crucial paras:

We British Muslims prefer to wallow in vicarious victimhood. Only "our" tragedies matter: Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya roll off our tongues. But none of these surpasses the Holocaust's barbarism. The Nazi genocide cannot be relativised or generalised. It was an unprecedented act of industrial slaughter; a uniquely horrific crime against humanity.

Yet between 2001 and 2007 the Muslim Council of Britain took the morally abhorrent (and strategically stupid) decision to boycott the day, crassly insisting that it be renamed "Genocide Memorial Day". In 2008, the boycott was dropped only to be resumed in 2009 after Israel's assault on Gaza. I yield to no one in my support for the Palestinian cause. But denying or ignoring the Holocaust does nothing to advance that cause. Palestinian suffering is not reduced by belittling the mass murder of Europe's Jews.

As I point out later in the piece, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) have dropped their boycott over the past three years and I'm happy to report that the MCB not only attended one of the main HMD ceremonies in London yesterday evening, but deputy general secretary Dr Shuja Shafi was asked to light one of the candles.

However, as I point out in the piece:

...the whole British Muslim community must do much more to remember the Holocaust -- whether through hosting events at our mosques or sending our children to visit Auschwitz.

www.newstatesman.com - Muslim attitudes and the Holocaust

There's an interesting and provocative letter published in today's Guardian that claims the Leveson inquiry has

so far failed to adequately address unfair media coverage as it relates to less prominent cases, including those relating to Muslims and Islam, focusing as it does on the impact of phone hacking on celebrities and other high-profile individuals.

The letter calls for an "alternative inquiry" to investigate

widespread and systematic discriminatory practices in reporting on Muslims and Islam in the British media.

The signatories include a wide array of British Muslim community leaders, activists and journalists, as well as non-Muslim figures like human-rights campaigner Bianca Jagger, writer Michael Rosen, Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, Lib Dem peer Navnit Dholakia, Conservative member of the London Assembly Andrew Boff, Green Party Assembly member Jenny Jones and former Daily Star reporter Richard Peppiatt.

They point out:

Over the past decade, a number of academic studies have indicated a worrying and disproportionate trend towards negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverage of the Muslim community. Recent research at Cambridge University concludes that "a wider set of representations of Islam would signify a welcome change to reporting practices. Muslims deserve a better press than they have been given in the past decade."

You can read the full letter (and full list of signatories) here.

You can also read my take on the media and Islamophobia, from 2008 (when I worked at Channel 4 and commissioned a Dispatches documentary on the subject), here.

www.newstatesman.com - Islamophobia and the Leveson Inquiry