"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him" - Booker T Washington.

Hate makes me so angry but it doesn't drive me to hate. Hate corrupts those that hate, it consumes and distorts the hater, very much like envy and paranoia.

Very rarely...

"Work without hope draws nector in a sieve, and hope without an objective cannot live." Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Like most parents I worry about what the world will be like for my son when he is older and I am gone. I was reminded of an essay in foreign affairs...

"The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions", said the US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Writing in the Independent yesterday, Avi Shlaim, went a-hunting, and his quarry was the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here is his case. The central thread of Netanyahu's policy,...

Thinking about Syria and reading the commentary about whether anything can be done I am reminded that the biggest lesson I have learnt as an MP and as CEO of BICOM is this: as an international community we constantly overestimate what we can achieve. I have learnt - from the...

It is difficult not to see the looming crisis on Iran through any other optics other than our experience in Iraq. So much of the commentary on the left is falling into this trap. "We got it wrong on WMD in Iraq so we can't and shouldn't believe what we...

Growing up, I was a fan of the sitcom Dad's Army. Set amongst the hapless volunteers of the Home Guard during World War Two, one of my favourite characters was Private Frazer. A depressed undertaker who had grown up on the "wild and lonely" Isle of Barra, Fraser responded to...

Reading David Miliband this week, my mind turned to my grandmother. Let me explain.

She had no expectation that either the state or the local rich mill owner would provide for her and hers, so she banded together with her family and, together, they relied on their own...

The Romans called it panem et circenses, or bread and circuses. Faced with a crumbling economy, growing social divisions, urban riots, and a sharp decline in public-spiritedness, the political elites sought to distract the people by staging spectacles - above all the Games. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman,...

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." C.S. Lewis

Is the Palestinian Islamist organisation Hamas about to give up its...

"An act of deliberate vandalism" was how Nick Clegg described Israeli settlement building on Monday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who was in London, cheered him on; his negotiators having made a full settlement freeze a precondition for the resumption of direct negotiations with Israel.

The deputy...

"I have never been so worried about women's freedom as I am now. The threat is everywhere - on what women wear, how they think. If you are not with them (Islamists), they will insult you, harass you." - Saida Garrach, a lawyer and activist in the Tunisian...

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man", said the 'First American' Benjamin Franklin. The whole world hopes these sentiments spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's envoy, Issac Molho, and chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat, when...

In 1991, 57% of Britons said membership of the EU was a good thing. By 2010 it was only 28%. According to the former Europe Minister Denis Macshane MP it is the same story among opinion-shapers: "the isolationists...have conquered the field [and the] pro-Europeans have shrunk away."

Permanent vigilance about the health of our democracies is the only guarantee of their survival. Across the political spectrum leading Israeli politicians and commentators are expressing concern at controversial Knesset legislation widely seen as illiberal or anti-democratic.

On the right, the leading Likud figure Benny Begin, son of the...

Anti-Semitism is racism plain and simple. There would be outrage, and quite rightly so, if anyone said a British born Muslim could not be trusted to serve loyally as an ambassador to a Muslim country. We did not question Francis Campbell, the first Catholic to be appointed ambassador to the...

"Management is doing a thing right," said the late Peter Drucker, but "leadership is doing the right thing." Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary William Hague did the right thing by announcing to a sober House of Commons that the Iranian Embassy in London would be closed in response to that regime's...

The zero-sum game is a miserable business. One participant's gains are balanced by the losses of the other: a world of conflict, winners and losers. John Forbes Nash won a deserved Nobel prize in 1994 for developing an alternative - in the 'Nash equilibrium' each party must take into account...

There is a link between 9/11 and the events in Egypt at the Israeli embassy: years of unchallenged propaganda about Jews and Israelis.

When I was the Labour MP for Rochdale many of my Muslim constituents thought 9/11 was an Israeli/Jewish conspiracy to start a war...

Never underestimate the power of people to stand up and make a difference in their society.

This message, which was carried around the streets of Cairo, Benghazi and Algiers, has found an echo in tens of thousands of young Israelis in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Be'er Sheva....