The Prince of Peace

Action Report Entry - May 2002

David Irving

M. gives me a page from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, to which he referred a few days ago; as I have not read that tome, it was unfamiliar to me. Writing in 1923/24, a few years after the Balfour Declaration, Hitler muses on the future state of Israel; If the Jews should ever succeed in setting up their Israel in the state of Palestine, he prophesies, "most of them will not go to live there." No, they will continue in their criminal actions elsewhere, and establish the new homeland as a refuge for all the shady elements forced to flee after their naïve and overweening host peoples have finally rumbled what they are up to.

Pursued by the authorities, predicts Hitler in Mein Kampf, these criminal elements will use Israel only as a safe haven, a habitat of convenience, from which they cannot be extradited: What a novelist might title The Sheinbein Game, I add. I wonder if Hitler will prove to be correct?

After reading the Los Angeles Times over breakfast I leave Costa Mesa around eight a.m. by car. Its standard of reporting is once again superb, enough to put any British newspaper to shame. The Times of the last few days has provided much food for thought about the Israeli siege of Bethlehem, now ended. One would have thought that in a normal world it would be a nightmare public-relations scenario: an armed force illegally invades a neighboring country, in brutal violation of United Nations agreements and resolutions, and sees nothing wrong in bulldozing private homes, with their elderly and infirm residents still inside, or in shooting up the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, randomly killing several Palestinians who have sought sanctuary there, by sniping at them through the church windows.

Several Israeli bullets, according to today's report, have smashed into the statue of the Virgin Mary, severing Her neck and one arm. The Times correspondent Carolyn Cole forces her way into the church -- displaying extraordinary courage, because the troops of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, whom President George Bush has rather excessively called a Prince of Peace -- make no distinction between men and women in shooting them; she reports today that she saw not one shot fired by the Palestinians from inside the church; but she did see one of them shot and killed by a sniper from outside.

Yesterday's LA Times article closed with a paragraph describing how the Israeli troops had all but withdrawn from Manger Square, "leaving only the tower crane with a remote-controlled machine gun" that had been used to snipe at the occupants of the Church of the Nativity, birthplace of Our Lord.

It is not often that you come across a sentence like that in a newspaper of record, and I read it twice to make sure I had not imagined it.

As a Christian, I look forward to the day when the war criminal who ordered this outrage is put on trial by the Belgians -- always assuming that some animal-rights campaigner has not put an end to his despicable existence first.