Thursday, 18th March 2010
He gets it
As Robertson so aptly reminds us, in 1940 Hitler very nearly won the war because the British were similarly gripped by demoralisation and defeatism. It was only because Churchill rallied the country to the belief that it had no alternative but to win that it did in fact go on to to do so. It was only because the...
A premature case of grief and joy
In fact, according to the uniquely estimable Joshua Rozenberg* on his Standpoint blog, none of this is true. Not one scintilla. Catholic Care has notbeen given permission to discriminate against gay couples. There is no loophole in the law allowing this to be done. All that has happened is that the court has given Catholic Care a second chance to make its case to the Charity Commission — which may well turn it down on ‘human rights’ (sic) grounds.
Both the rejoicing and the mourning are thus distinctly premature.
*Author’s husband
America locks its own chains
To read the British media on the Obama/Israel crisis is to enter a different moral universe and sphere of reality. In the US, as I wrote yesterday, there has been enormous upset over the fight that Obama so egregiously picked with Israel over the supreme non-event of continuing to build in an orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of east Jerusalem. Even the Washington Post questioned Obama’s
quickness to bludgeon the Israeli government.
On Politico, Ben Smith noted the cross party nature of the uproar:
Democratic critics have begun to question the White House's public pressure on Netanyahu to reverse plans for controversial new housing and make other, unspecified concessions... Pennsylvania Rep. Christopher Carney, a Democrat, and Illinois Republican Rep. Mark Kirk are sending a letter this morning to President Obama asking the administration to climb down.
Wednesday, 17th March 2010
All this whelan 'n' dealin' gives Labour a sinkin' feelin'
Looks like the threatened British Airways strike is paying unforseen dividends to the Tories by focusing attention on the degree to which the Labour party is in hock to its Unite paymasters. Even Labour circles are said to be concerned. NowJoe Murphy of the Evening Standard reveals this gem:
One of Gordon Brown's senior officials at No 10 is entirely paid by the Unite trade union, the Standard reveals today. Clare Moody, a national officer for the trade union behind the British Airways cabin crew strike, has been given a desk in the Prime Minister’s political office that deals with policy development and government relations. Although she works in the heart of Downing Street, her salary and pension are ‘100 per cent’ met
Israel alone
The ever-sagacious John Bolton understands this very well, and more importantly understands where it is leading. In the Wall Street Journal today, he says Netanyahu’s strategy of trying to accommodate Obama – ‘America’s first post-American President’ -- has now been shown to be fatally flawed. The real issue is, of course, Iran; and the brutal and chilling message from this week’s brouhaha is that when it comes to stopping Iran from getting the bomb, Israel really is on its own.
Jewish Chronicle, 18 March 2010
The Obama administration’s fury at Israel over the ‘insult to the US’ of building more homes in east Jerusalem has provoked what is described as the worst crisis in US-Israel relations for more than three decades.
Leave aside, for the moment, the notable absence of ‘insult to the US’ caused by the Palestinian Authority a day or so later, when it named a square after a terrorist ‘martyr’ who not only slaughtered dozens of Israelis, but also in 1978 murdered the American niece of a US Democratic senator.
Leave aside also the fact that the US had previously expressly agreed with Israel that it would continue building in east Jerusalem while stopping building in the West Bank, an agreement for which it was warmly praised by Hillary Clinton.
Let us instead stand back and look at the underlying premise of what the US and the rest of the West are saying to Israel. For the most astonishing thing is how Israel meekly plays along with a vicious and quite hallucinatory farce.
Consider: Israel is the victim of six decades of uninterrupted aggression from its Arab neighbours. Yet, unlike in any other conflict on the planet, it is required to make territorial concessions to its attackers, even as they continue to attack it.
Anywhere else, this would be seen as forcing a victim to surrender. Anywhere else, the claims of aggressors are deemed to be forfeit through their behaviour. So why does Israel go along with these unique demands that it should reward its enemies?
It is Israel alone that has ever made territorial concessions to those enemies. Yet it is Israel alone that the US and the rest insist must make still more.
Yet they make no such requirement of the Palestinians who repeat they will never accept the existence of a Jewish state. So why does Israel go along with this appeasement process?
The US and the rest blame Israel for thwarting a two-state solution. But the reason the two-state solution has not been achieved is that, from the beginning, this was a two-stateproblem.
Two states were indeed provided in 1920 when Churchill split land already promised to the Jews by giving three quarters of Palestine to the Arabs to create Jordan.
The world community ordained that, within the remainder — what is present-day Israel and the West Bank and Gaza — the Jews should be ‘closely settled’ to re-establish their national homeland.
The Arabs refused to accept this two-state solution. When they turned to terrorism to destroy the nascent Jewish state, instead of holding the line for law and justice the British offered them half of what remained of Palestine.
They refused it then and have done so ever since, because their real aim remains unchanged: one state of Palestine, with Israel destroyed.
I have a revolutionary suggestion to break the Middle East logjam. It is that Israel stops going along with the diplomatic fictions and starts telling the world some home truths.
Such as that America and Britain are still doing today what the British have done from the start — rewarding the Arabs for their aggression against the Jews and thus providing rich incentives for the terror to continue.
Such as that, if any country has torn up international law in the Middle East it is Britain, which reneged on its legal obligation to settle Jews in Palestine while turning a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration.
Such as that, while America and Britain continue to reward and incentivise Arab aggression against Israel, they are the reason the conflict continues without end.
There can never be peace without justice, and there can never be justice without truth. As the Obama administration throws Israel under the bus, should not Israel finally rip away the camouflage to reveal the true ugliness of its false ‘friends’?
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