Britannia Radio

The Joys of Selective Outrage

Modern Leftism takes a high moral tone about many subjects, which these days often leads it into supporting allegedly noble wars, in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan (though funnily enough it used to mean opposing wars under almost all circumstances).

The interesting thing is that its outrage is so selective and inconsistent. This has long been so, and arises from the fact that the Left still hasn't worked out how to replace the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and so makes its ideas of good and evil up as it goes along.

This leads to some enjoyable inconsistencies. One of my favourites lies in the past. The old USSR was one of the most racially bigoted societies in existence. Ask anyone from the Caucasus who lived and worked in Moscow, let alone any Black African students who attended the Lumumba University, in Soviet Days. Yet it used (quite rightly) to denounce racial bigotry in the Southern States of the USA. 

You still meet veteran American Communists who boast (truthfully) that they were among the early campaigners for civil rights in the South. Good for them. Alas, they were also defending or ignoring Stalin's racialist mass deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans (and indeed his anti-Jewish frenzy after World War Two). So I tend to dismiss their concerns as selective, self-serving, opportunist and without moral force.

Another of my favourite Leftist inconsistencies is the tangle they get themselves in over Islam and Israel. In their universe Islam is good where it challenges the conservative Christian monoculture of Britain and the USA. Islam is bad when it denounces homosexuality and demands the veiling of women, and generally opposes the sexual revolution which is the main concern and aim of the modern left. Islam is good when it pursues its unrelenting war against Israel. It's bad when, in the mythical form of 'Al Qaeda' or the more tangible form of the Taliban, it 'hates our way of life' and opposes the education of women, etc etc.

Islam's attack on Israel (in the Islamic world) often takes rather unpleasant forms. Muslim clerics say things there that would get them drummed out of civilised society here. But Israel is the country everyone in Europe loves to hate - while making it clear that this loathing has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. Good heavens no. The very idea. How could you even think such a thing? Anti-Semite? Me? Etc etc. Well, no doubt these protestations are true, which is why I try to popularise the word 'Judophobic' instead. Call someone an anti-Semite and he will instantly and huffily say that he's of course not Adolf Eichmann or that bad man in 'Schindler's List'. So he can't be against Jews, let alone an anti-Semite. The very idea.

And yet, and yet, the persistent question buzzes round my head, why is it that other countries can and constantly do horrible things, and there's not one tenth of the fuss there is if Israel does the same? And that Arabs can be massacred, tortured , imprisoned, you name it, and if it's done by other Arabs, nobody seems to mind. But if Israelis do it, it's all over the bulletins and the front pages.  Why would that be? Well, it could have something to do with the fact that Israel has no oil, and the Arabs have lots, a huge influence on the British foreign Office and the BBC for many decades.

But it's also because that oil also finances some very slick PR, the kind nobody notices *is* PR, a skill Israel has lost - it is in the disastrous position of having everyone know that its propaganda (and it works hard at it) *is* propaganda, its lobbying *is* lobbying etc, whereas Arab lobbying doesn't get noticed and its propaganda is reported as news, which is the real aim of all such operations. When did you last hear anyone talking about the 'Arab Lobby' in Washington, or in London for that matter? And yet there are such things, though they have nicer names.

But is there another reason?

Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I'll give you another example to ponder. After the convoy's ships came to shore, those on board were offered the choice (as I understand it) between immediate deportation in return for signing a declaration that they had entered the country illegally, or being held in prison. Since they had intended to effect an illegal entry into Israeli territory, which is quite closely guarded against unwanted visitors, this doesn't seem wholly unreasonable.

And then, I was told by some TV station or other, those who refused to sign these 'confessions' were taken to the Prison at Beersheba, allegedly in the Negev Desert.

Well, I've been to Beersheba, (in the course of preparing an article on the plight of the Bedouin Arabs, Israeli citizens scandalously mistreated, who live near there). And while it's on the northern fringes of the Negev it's worth pointing out that it's a substantial modern city of nearly 200,000 people, the nearest major city to the Gaza strip, less than 50 miles from Ashdod. Israel is very small, and few distances are great. The impression that they've been taken to some remote sandy Zionist Gulag is rather misleading.

I also heard one Arab 'activist' refer to this prison as 'notorious'. I've no doubt it's not much fun. Prisons, what can you do? But by comparison with the standard prison in the Arab world, all of which qualify for at least five stars for notoriety (especially the beatings with electric cables in windowless cellars) I would imagine it is pretty soft. What do these people think would happen to a bunch of Israeli activists who turned up in a boat off (say) the Syrian coast, with a cargo of humanitarian aid for the hostage Jews of Damascus (whose passports are stamped helpfully with the word 'Jew' - remind you of anywhere?). My advice? Don't even think about it.

Then there's the general question of Gaza. I was interested to see the Egyptians opening up their border with Gaza, just for a few days. Normally it's rather more officially shut than the border (thorough which much aid does in fact penetrate) with Israel - though there are so many smuggler's tunnels underneath it that weapons and quite large cargoes constantly make it through. Why is this, since the Gazans are the Arab and Muslim brothers of the Egyptians? Surely they should welcome them with open arms and open borders. Yet they don't. And nobody asks why.

Indeed, Egypt (illegally, but to the protests of nobody) annexed Gaza after it captured it in the failed 1948 Arab war on the nascent state of Israel. And it held on to it without anyone much fussing about its squalor and deprivation, until 1967, when Israel captured it and illegally occupied it, a misdeed that (by contrast) the Jewish state has never been allowed to forget. For me, Israel would have been a lot better off if it had withdrawn from Gaza the moment the war ended in 1967. But that's hindsight. It is and always has been an important invasion corridor.

Don't these facts (in fact any factual knowledge at all ) rather undermine the oversimplified myth that all Gaza's problems arise from its being under a wicked Israeli siege?

I have been to Gaza once, long ago, and can confirm that it is pretty grim, and no doubt has grown much worse since. I think the idea that a blockade will persuade the Gazans to throw out their Hamas government is nonsensical and doomed, and I think Israel's recent behaviour towards Gaza has been cruel and stupid. I opposed and still condemn the recent Israeli military attack on Gaza, which failed to meet the criteria for a just war.

But I have a nagging suspicion that those who now adopt the cause of Gaza (and have swallowed whole the propaganda narrative of the 'Aid Convoy' versus the 'Wicked Zionists') are much, much more interested in undermining Israel's long-term right to exist than they are in the undoubted plight of the Gazans. And why, exactly is that? What is the reason for this selective outrage against one nation among dozens, by no means perfect but also by no means the most oppressive or violent or ill-run state in the world, let alone the Middle East? You tell me.

Let's see how many of the responses I get to this are rational, or acknowledge any fault at all in the Arab or Muslim world.

So in the midst of this confusion, we now find ourselves in a huge row over the alleged 'Aid Convoy' manned by alleged 'Humanitarians' which approached the Israeli coast at the weekend and was boarded by Israeli armed forces.

Is this description 'Aid Convoy' (adopted by many media outlets) not itself partial? It most certainly is. The Israeli authorities offered unequivocally to deliver the ships' cargoes to Gaza if they were unloaded at the Israeli port of Ashdod and passed through the normal checks against contraband. The leaders of the 'Aid Convoy' refused this offer. Therefore it is plain that its prime purpose was not to deliver the aid, but to deliver it in a certain way, in defiance of the Israeli blockade of the Gazan ports, an action they knew from the start would bring the Israeli armed forces about their ears.

If you want to be wholly dispassionate, you might call it a 'convoy' without adornment. But to call it an 'Aid Convoy' is itself a departure from neutrality. I myself would call it a propaganda fleet, but then I am openly partisan on this issue. The use of the expression 'humanitarians' is likewise suspect, as is the use of the word 'activists' without saying what sort of activists they are.

Now, I have grown a little frustrated by the rather cliche-ridden coverage of the incident in the British media, who have by and large accepted a narrative of brutal Israelis versus sweetness and light. Personally, I view the Israeli military response as incompetent more than anything else. Their famed intelligence services should have prepared them for the resistance they undoubtedly encountered aboard the Mavi Marmara, so why did they winch lightly-armed soldiers in thick incapacitating gloves, one by one, directly into the hands of a hostile mob? I believe the subsequent deaths are largely the result of this failure of intelligence and planning, leading to panic and wild shooting. Israel had good reason to halt the ships when they ignored the instructions of its Navy, as any sovereign nation would do in parallel circumstances. I'd like to see what the Turkish Navy would do to a pro-Kurdish 'humanitarian convoy' heading for its coast, if they ignored instructions to halt. I suspect it wouldn't be pretty.

Israel should have had effective plans and dispositions to take control of those ships when (as was always likely) the instructions were ignored.

Here are some facts about the convoy (which would have been available to any half-decent intelligence organisation), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute's (MEMRI) ever-useful translations of Arab sources (generally reliable). MEMRI (from whose blog I have taken some of what appears below) is of course an Israeli organisation, often accused of being in some way connected to Israeli military intelligence, and doubtless selective in what it translates, but I have yet to see the accuracy of its translations challenged.

It emerges that these ships were not entirely peopled by pacifist vegetarian idealists from the Isle of Wight.

For instance, one of these 'activists' is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred.

Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza. Hamas hurled their Fatah opponents to their deaths from the tops of high buildings when they took over, and recently imprisoned in disgraceful circumstances a British freelance journalist, Paul Martin (look it up) to a chorus of almost total silence from the British media and left-wing intelligentsia.

Then there were some members of the Egyptian 'parliament', who are supporters of that country's rather unmoderate, and barely-tolerated, Muslim Brotherhood.

One of these legislators is reported to have said at a March 2010 conference, ‘A nation that excels at dying will be blessed by Allah with a life of dignity and with eternal paradise.’ He also said that his movement ‘will never recognize Israel and will never abandon the resistance,’ and that ‘resistance is the only road map that can save Jerusalem, restore the Arab honour, and prevent Palestine from becoming a second Andalusia.’

This is a most interesting statement. Andalusia, as Muslims call Spain, is the only territory Islam has ever permanently lost. The reference underlines the fact that the real issue in this conflict is not what everyone thinks it is. This has nothing to do with the 'rights' or 'freedoms' of the 'Palestinians', who would be oppressed and neglected by whatever Arab state (probably a Greater Syria) that arose on the ruins of Israel (and probably Lebanon and Jordan too). It is the Muslim belief that no territory, however small, should be conceded by Islam to be ruled by non-Muslims.

MEMRI also produce a photograph which purports to show one Yemeni Parliamentarian on the deck of the Mavi Marmara, clutching a rather large curved dagger, doubtless ornamental.

There were also some keen Salafists from Kuwait, not to mention our old, old friend Bishop Hilarion Capucci, whose idea of Christian charity once (in 1974) involved smuggling weapons to the PLO, misusing his diplomatic status to do so. (His release from prison was among the demands of the Entebbe hijackers - you know, the charmers who separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones - back in 1976.) The Bishop (I particularly appreciate this fact) is also said to have appeared on postage stamps in Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, so much is he loved in the Arab world. I'm sure it's his sermons that they like, rather than his smuggling. Sorry to hark back so. I have this thing about history.

Well, that gives you a flavour of the passenger lists. These people weren't neutrals, and they certainly weren't benevolent towards the Jewish state. Sure, loathing Israel is a point of view, and a very common one these days now we've all worked out our post-Holocaust guilt. But supposedly impartial news reports should not ignore the fact that these 'activists' could generally be found among the camp of the Israel-haters.

I'd also point out here in passing, because I haven't time to dwell on this at the moment, the very important point that Turkey, until recently a strong ally of Israel, has recently begun a major and significant foreign-policy shift, and is now growing daily closer to its neighbour Iran - which is of course one of the backers of Hamas in Gaza. The Turkish government needs a pretext to scale down its diplomatic ties with Israel, while remaining in NATO, a candidate for EU membership etc. This event has provided that, very neatly.