CAABU ahead of its time

Now this is peculiar. I have been sent a link to the CAABU website showing a letter from CAABU, that's the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, to the Jewish Chronicle, complaining of Geoffrey Alderman's call for the annihilation of the Gaza population. The curious thing is that the letter "was" published on 5th October 2007 which hasn't been yet, today being 3rd October 2007. Here it is:

"We would like to express our outrage at Geoffrey Alderman's article (Turn off Gaza's water and fuel, Sept 28). It is a disgrace, essentially a call for collective punishment by depriving an entire civilian population of water. If he was an Iranian and talking about Israelis, his president would be truly proud of him. This is tantamount to incitement to commit a war crime.

Water is essential to life, needed by every one of the 1.5 million men, women and children in Gaza. Gaza's water resources have been massively depleted and polluted to the point of crisis, not least by actions by the Israeli military, damming water streams that should flow into the strip and drilling wells on the east of Gaza which deplete the western-flowing water aquifer from which Gazans are entitled to benefit in part. The point is that there is a clear dependency on water coming via Israel.

The firing of Kassams at innocent Israeli civilians is an atrocity but it does not justify by any measure of civilized values a call effectively to destroy Gaza. Nothing does. Such incitement should not find space in any respectable newspaper."

Chris Doyle
Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding

Perhaps they didn't see Melanie Phillips's demand for the same thing. And they definitely can't have read Emanuel Ottolenghi pouring scorn on the very idea of Israel being capable of an ethnic cleansing campaign when it has been so successful at that very thing in the past:

There was tremendous excitement in Europe in 2002 over the declaration by 99 Israeli academics that their government was planning an imminent “fully fledged ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian people (a charge that was not withdrawn when the atrocity failed to occur)

Alright then I'm sorry. I'm sorry that Israel has not completed its ethnic cleansing campaign just yet. But don't worry Emanuel, you have colleagues at the JC who support such a dastardly thing. So it may well happen. I wonder what he'd say then.

But of course the burning question for the night is how did CAABU get to be published in the JC two days before the JC itself is published?