Thursday, June 10, 2010

Last battle of WW2? Is Cameron a second Chamberlain? ...oh where is our Churchill?

From The Spectator, 3rd June 2010, by Melanie Phillips:

For those who still don’t get it, let me spell out just why the response by Cameron, Clegg and Hague to the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident is so despicable and so terrifying.  ...the British government has refused to defend the Israeli target of this appalling reprise of historical infamy and has instead placed itself squarely on the side of this truly diabolical inversion of reality and justice.

The convoluted pieties of Cameron Clegg and Hague, professing to support Israel’s need for security while denouncing it for defending its troops from kidnap and butchery, constitute in fact the most stomach-turning hypocrisy. For these men are not merely condemning Israel for its flotilla interception  ...but are also calling for an end to the blockade of Gaza.

This in itself has two devastating implications. The first is inescapably that Cameron, Clegg and Hague are demanding that Israel stop protecting itself from the import into Gaza of missiles and other weapons with which Hamas and others can murder yet more Israelis. If Cameron Clegg and Hague are thus demanding that Israel can no longer protect itself against forces waging a war of extermination against it, then it follows equally inescapably that Cameron Clegg and Hague no longer wish to support Israel in its six-decade struggle to continue to exist.

The second implication which follows from the first is that, since Israel is the front line of the west’s defence against the Islamic jihad and if Israel were ever to go down the west would in turn also go down, the abandonment of Israel by Cameron Clegg and Hague means they have also abandoned the defence of Britain and the west. For the blockade of Gaza is not just the policy of Israel but one that was agreed by Britain and the west in order to weaken Hamas. That is because a victory for Hamas -- the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood with close ties now to Iran with which they have joined in common cause to achieve regional hegemony for a theocratic, nuclear-armed tyranny which would destroy Israel while the free world stood paralysed until it too went the same way – was considered an unconscionable threat to the west.

Yet now Cameron Clegg and Hague want the blockade to be ended. They thus appear to have reversed the former British position that Hamas was an unconscionable threat to the stability of the region and thus the interests of the free world. What happened? Did Hamas suddenly decide to junk the jihad and sign up to the Human Rights Convention? No, they’re still the same old genocidal religious fanatics. But the British establishment doesn’t buy the idea of religious fanaticism. Holy war? Good heavens, no! Arrogantly (and ignorantly) insisting on viewing the Arab and Muslim world through western eyes, the British establishment persists in the almighty delusion that ultimately self-interest always prevails and there is no group of people, however apparently extreme, who cannot be bought if the offered price is set high enough.

And so now, influential British voices are now calling for Hamas to be brought in from the cold on the grounds that no solution to the Middle East impasse is possible without it. On the contrary – the most important reason for the Middle East impasse is that from the 1920s onwards Britain appeased Islamic fascism and aggression against the Jews, a process which continues to this day (and is now being given extra traction by Obama). Indeed, since Hamas are the direct descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists of 1930s Palestine who formed a strategic alliance with Hitler in the common cause of annihilating the Jews, it might be said that the Arab war against Israel is the last great battle of the Second World War which in the Middle East has not yet ended.

Faced with Islamic aggression, the British ruling class once again rushes to offer the Muslim Brotherhood the western throat to be cut – and because it is conveniently attached to the Israeli body politic, the British think this will sate the Islamists’ blood-lust, just as their forbears thought when they delivered up Czechoslovakia to Hitler. When Sir Jeremy Greenstock et al call for talks to begin with Hamas – whose ‘pragmatic’ wing is no less committed than the rest of it to the annihilation of Israel and the Jewish people -- they walk in a very dark shadow indeed.

But there is also a reason much closer to home why a craven and amoral British government has chosen to toe the Islamists’ line on Israel. In his Telegraph blog today, Douglas Murray reveals in a leaked email that the Cameron/Clegg government is using its denunciation of Israel to buy off the threat of violence by British Islamists towards Britain. Murray reveals that the government’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which is part of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, has circulated to British Muslims the highlights of its verbal onslaught against Israel. As Murray observes:

As it happens, various Muslim groups in Britain wrote to the Government before this communication, calling for it to condemn Israel. Our new Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have taken their hint and issued a set of ignorant and pusillanimous statements attacking Israel’s right to defend herself by preventing the importing of arms into the terrorist-run state of Gaza. Our politicians have decided that instead of condemning terror they will condemn those dealing with terror. Most Orwellian of all, our own Office for Security and Counter Terrorism is being used to boast about this line in an attempt to placate activist Islamic groups.

In my new book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God Truth and Power I discuss at length the way in which the west’s now near-pathological inversion of truth, reality and justice over a wide range of issues finds such an appalling echo in the inversion of truth, reality and justice by the Islamic world – which means that instead of holding the line against radical Islamism and defending its victims against it, the west is itself playing Little Sir Echo to the jihad. The uproar over Israel’s defence against the Turkish terror flotilla is but the latest appalling demonstration of this western death-wish.

This is where, in a few short weeks, the new British government has now taken the country which once stood alone in defence of liberty. But never let it be forgotten that this magnificent display of British grit in the 1940s followed a shameful decade of appeasement and anti-Jewish bullying – which very nearly led to Britain’s defeat by the forces of fascism.

History is now repeating itself almost to the letter. Is Cameron going to go down in history as a second Chamberlain? And where oh where is our Churchill?

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