Russia, Syria and Regional Instability

Russia is a nation with a long memory of strong rulers.  If unity evaporates a strong leader will be embraced with gratitude and he will likely abolish any institution that stands in the way of reinstating the unity of the fatherland.

Russian was proclaimed an empire in 1721.  It is today, the worlds’ largest nation state. By size it is almost double the size of the Unites States but with less than half the population.  It is almost 80% ethnic Russian and has some 160 additional recognised ethnic groups.

Its ideological imperialism during the communist era spanned the period between 1917 and 1991 and left it destitute.  Oil wealth saved it from collapse and provided Russia with an opportunity to claw back some national honour which it felt it had lost when the USSR collapsed.

But here is the problem. The combination of long history, glorious past, invasion and insecurity makes for a complex narrative that cannot be easily set aside. Russia has never known full democracy and even today its incomplete adherence to the rites of democratic dysfunction is treated with ill concealed disdain, xenophobia and contempt. We still assume Russia to be diminished and therefore somehow geopolitically unimportant.  We have already made the error of thinking that Russia would be unable to either defend its borders or unwilling to challenge its competitors.

A sphere of influence can be geographically at a distance of thousands of miles.  It may be based on military outposts situated in-country or it can be economic support.  Today China is purchasing the strategic support of much of Africa which perhaps because of indifference and racism, the Arab world with its trillions of dollars of oil wealth failed over the past forty years to do. Russia can no longer rely on its communist cadres scattered globally to do its bidding as they did in the past. Its influence is therefore diminished while other nations like China vie to take its place. America erred when it thought it could simple grab Russia’s former Satellite territories.

And a wounded former prize fighter is as dangerous if not more so, than the incumbent. Honour is a terrible thing because it becomes the principle determinant governing behaviour.

A sphere of influence is at its simplest, a buffer zone between enemies (old and new). For Russia, the USA, China, Japan, Germany, Iran and Turkey are its main rivals. The list is large but the memory of conflict is of even greater significance. Russia has been in conflict with all of these nations in the past.  Russia itself has a large Muslim population estimated to be between 6 and 25 million (depending on how the population is counted). Like its European brothers and sisters Russia’s Muslims are sometimes accused of nurturing a characteristic trend towards intolerance and extremism. The question is whether this minority will demand the blood sacrifice it is accustomed to receiving elsewhere?  All these factors make for some difficult decisions on how Russia will relate to regional conflict in the Mediterranean Basin.

Russia’s Syrian naval base at Tartus is capable of taking nuclear armed warships and submarines.  This is a significant and prestigious strategic asset for Russia. If it wants to project its power past its immediate neighbourhood Syria is an essential military asset.

Would it go so far as to incite a hot war between Israel and Iran to protect its Syrian ally?  After all, Haffez al-Assad murdered up to 40,000 of his own countrymen in February 1982 when he flattened the city of Hama in order to destroy the Muslim Brotherhoods opposition to his regime.  The first Western article that discussed this war crime appeared in Time Magazine a full six months after the event.

Public communication via twitter, Face-book and mobile phone may be ubiquitous but it won’t help if the son of the father, Bashar al-Assad decides it is time to crush the opposition to Alawite rule with the same ruthlessness his father employed.  With 12% of the population, supported by Christians who make up a further 9% of Syria’s 22 million people this regime should it fall could witness an unprecedented settling of scores on the scale of the Kampuchean or Rwandan Genocide.

Two old enemies are competing diplomatically on a variety of  fronts: Russia and Iran and Germany and Iran;  Russia and its former colonies, Germany and its new allies.  Germany’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe now stretches across most of the former USSR’s partner states.  Syria is an unwelcome distraction that damages Russian credibility.

 

It is possible that an attack on Israel or an Israeli attack on Iran would precipitate the kind of regional instability that would provide a diversion and therefore the opportunity for Assad to annihilate the opposition to his regime.  Another possibility is that Hezbollah and Hamas, as Iranian proxies could similarly, create a diversion that would allow Syria to again, settle scores.  While both Iran and Syria are competitors for regional influence and therefore power, there is no rule that forbids them from assisting each other against their enemies or opponents.

And European liberal society will always find an excuse to blame Israel for whatever happens. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes their “morbid fascination with dictatorship and power as a world view animated by a peculiar blend of post-colonial rage against the West and a grievance –driven pseudo-scholarship, cloaked in the language and footnotes of the late Edward Said.”

This period is therefore as dangerous for Israel as any in its history. Pre-Nuclear Iran is an unknown variable in this strategically restless and unpredictable region but we omit Russia from this brew at our peril.

Israel & the Winds of War

The Winds of War blow throughout the Near East and as always many will attempt to entice us into thinking that Israel is somehow to blame.   The New York Times in an editorial a couple of days ago tells its readers that now is not the time for Israel to attack Iran and that sanctions must be given more time.  How convenient it is that we all forget the previous sanctions regime.  The world imposed sanctions on Iraq for a decade leading up to the Second Gulf War in 2003.  Russia and France earned $100 billion by exploiting that sanctions regime. The only effect this embargo had was to ensure the Iraqi people suffered. On the other hand, in Iraq, those in power felt no pain.  The New York Times is militantly assimilationist, at least with reference to Jewish self-identification.  While it has no problem with other nations or other peoples’ self-identification it will always be opposed to Israel’s existence as a Jewish entity.  Therefore, NYT editorial pleas for self-control will always be tainted by self-interest rather than honest analysis.

Leon Panetta is the current US Secretary of Defense.  In comments attributed to him in the Washington Post on the Second of February (which pointedly, he did not deny), it was reported that he believes Israel will attack Iran sometime between April and June 2012.  Israel’s head of military intelligence Aviv Kochavi reported that some 200,000 missiles were aimed at Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran; and Iran's Defense Minister (Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi) claimed that Iran possesses 150,000 missiles ear-marked for destroying the Jewish state. While Europe quivers with fear and despair, it appears to be baffled as to what further it can do to prevent Israel from upsetting the balance of terror.  But what Israel has missed from its so called allies is any publicly demonstrable evidence that they are capable of learning from the Shoah and therefore not standing idly by as Israel’s enemies talk up its downfall.

 

Politics dictates that voting at the UN is always pragmatic and therefore governed by apparent economic self-interest. This has rendered the UN a mouthpiece for global anti Semitic propaganda, to which Europe contributes its cash and its votes. And Europe then queries why Israel is unable to block out the racism and calls for genocide that bombard the Israeli public either from Iran or from any other Islamic leader.

I was recently taken to task for calling some on the Left and in the Islamic world ‘Nazis.’ There are specific traits to Nazism that are shared with other ideologies without labeling them as ‘Nazi’ but perhaps it is the cruelty, brutality and doctrine of extermination at the centre of the ideology that creates the ‘Nazi’ tag.  Most, except the extreme Left, can stomach Jewish self-determination.  Most on the Left have not internalized the deified bigotry of the proto-deity Marx.  But Islam has a problem. Its holy book calls for global conquest and the physical annihilation of all those who stand in their way.

So when ayatollah Mohammad Ali Hoseyn Khamenei, the Iranian clergyman and supreme leader of Islamic Iran describes Israel in terms reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany and the world ignores it, Israel, the physical state and Israel, the people, would be remarkably stupid not to pay attention either to the bile excreted from the lips of the most influential and senior political and religious leader in Iran today just as it would be naïve to not take note of the global lack of any reaction to the Iranian leaders latest speech.   And when the Palestinian Mufti (its senior religious leader), Muhammad Hussein, calls on all Muslims to kill (all) Jews, as he did in Ramallah two weeks ago, it would be suicidal for Israel not to react. His excuse that the quote was taken out of context; that he was quoting the Prophet Mohammad, is unacceptable to all reasonable human beings save those whose agenda cannot be trusted. The Palestinian Minister for Religious Affairs has added that “no man has authority to dispute or alter” the words of the prophet.   That these statements were broadcast on the official Palestinian TV cannot help with peace making.

The only relevance that the authority of these words may have is to strengthen the hand of those who say that the difference between Mein Kampf and the Koran is authorship, not intent. What both books do share is the desire for global domination by one nation or one people, the expression of racial purity by its adherents, justification for genocide as a means to furthering their ends and, the achievement of an end by absolute submission to the worship of a human being. This is why Germany today bans cults (the logic could extend to banning any faith based on such an ideology).

Israel must not display tolerance towards Islamic Nazism.  The bigots may quote who they will but Israel must act against them to hold them and their evil theology to account.  The reaction of Israel’s allies when they justify evil pronounced or committed against her can only be interpreted as giving comfort to Israel’s and to the Jewish peoples existential enemies.

Israel neither has another decade to appease the New York Times nor the patience to listen to the platitudes of European appeasement.

Ethical Business and the Failure of Unionism

Why should we seek out a more ethical business / worker relationship? The interplay between participants in any relationship, either commercial or personal, is concerned with achieving an end goal; all relationships are in their essence, a negotiation. We seek to dominate nature, we endeavour to gain advantage for ourselves and our family over others; this striving is a natural survival strategy. Channelled positively it benefits the individual, the family and society. But its abuse has been a salient feature of human interaction for all of recorded history.

If we commodify everything, this philosophy of objectification taken to its logical extreme, enabled the Romans to view slaves as property, not dissimilar to any other object in the home. Thus one patrician punished his family by depriving them of their inheritance. He ordered the deaths of all 255 of his slaves.  If people are no more than commodities to be traded, it isn’t murder. This is why Nazi ideology revered ancient Rome.  We glorify Rome for its aesthetic while conveniently forgetting the overwhelming evil by which it survived and prospered.

Rome and Germany were extremes. So was the old Soviet empire. In between them, regimes of the Left and the Right use legislation or regulation to gain an advantage for their supporters or to scale back the advantage that their rivals enjoy.  Perhaps therefore the greatest failure of modern capitalism is that negotiation between parties is no more than a cease fire between hostilities.  A peace treaty should set out an achievable, realistic vision. That means workers having a say in the remuneration package of the main board. A partnership that not only engages but also embraces both sides without either one endeavouring to undermine the other also acts as a restraint on mutual manoeuvrability, power without leverage becomes a negotiation.

The abuse of power precludes it and therefore ‘the city’ would not be impressed. Business, we are told, must have flexibility.  So all salaries should be part tied to overall company performance and part fixed. Lower paid employees will have a greater percentage fixed and higher paid employees a higher percentage variable.   The maximum remuneration package of the highest paid should also be restricted because the distance between the Chief Executive and the cleaner has grown to a degree that one is no longer responsible for the other.   Society is not charity, nor is it unbridled greed.  If a company profits from society it has an obligation towards it.

Society is either the Roman vision or the biblical one.  In the Jewish bible land owners were instructed to leave barley (Deuteronomy 24:19) in their fields for the poor.  A strong society is a healthy society and only one that cares (for whatever reason) can continuously optimise the creative stimulus to uninterrupted growth.

At the same time, altruism is over-rated. We can want to benefit ourselves as well as to create a benefit for others but the degree to which we encourage the stranger to participate in our success voluntarily and without desiring to hurt them, this is the mark of our humanity and not our success at their expense.

This realisation is central to the failure of the union movement and the business community today.  Personal ambition and tribal greed has become the raison d’être for both.

The Middle Classes in Crisis

One English national paper screamed from its front page “Cameron war on scroungers”. The government declared its intent to legislate to make it easier to ‘get rid of workers who failed to make the grade’.

I will declare my interest from the beginning. I am in my mid 50’s and with huge relief I recently volunteered to be made redundant, after 23 years of tireless dedication to a toxic employer. Most of that time I worked at the centre of the management structure although in terms of ambition I never rose above the ideal of doing what was right and therefore had no time for the networking that is essential for progression in the corporate world.  In BT PLC one was always on the look out for the next job. It was part of ‘strategic thinking.’  So I understand the hidden meaning behind the quotes.  It has never been about laziness.  In its misguided attempt to retain voters it is returning us to the politics of ‘us and them.’

I apologise in advance if anything I am going to say sounds bitter. It isn’t. It is no more than the cynicism born of experience. Something our political leaders know only from the vantage point of power and its abuse.

My reservations serve no political bias. When the Labour Party Prime minister, Gordon Brown accused an elderly (and lifelong) Labour supporter of making a racist statement he had not lived next to a newly refurbished house that was progressively trashed by a refugee family who had used it as a drug den and almost certainly as a whore house. When this family finally left in the middle of the night the local authority were greeted by a building they had no choice but to entirely rebuild from the inside in order to make it once again inhabitable.  The home had been trashed and, infested with rats.  Local authority responsibility began and ended with funding the lifestyle of that family. The neighbours were warned not to leave their babies unsupervised because babies have no protection against being attacked by rats. Children kept away from school were ignored and any cries for help from we, the victims of local authority benevolence was disputed as racially inspired intolerance to the multicultural flower that had blossomed amongst us.

The ethic of protecting the vulnerable should not be at variance with the contract of protection for all of us implicit in the health of any democratic society. But where its universal application clashes with every day practice it is because we have chosen to treat society’s ills by dispensing cash unconditionally.  Unlike in the USA there is no legislation to protect the neighbours of rentees. Associations set up to house the homeless have no incentive other than profitability based on management fees received.  Benefits packages often exceed the after tax wages of the middle classes that fund them.

It should not surprise anyone that the Conservative Party undertakes to protect big business from its own folly in times of austerity by facilitating high unemployment which in its turn minimises pressure on wages. It is not simply a factor of increasing materials costs contributing to inflationary pressures; inflation accelerates when business raises its prices in order to protect its profit margins.  In the UK the ‘Centre’ is theoretically represented by the Liberal Democrats and they aspire to represent the ‘true’ middle classes. The Left attacks the rich and the right attacks the poor – neither engages in serious discussion of the reasons for the increasing disparity between the two. Perhaps this is because both vie for the same voters as the Liberal Democrats. And perhaps it is best to describe the Liberal Democrats as the Party of fashionable prejudice, its ideas and ideals shaped by intellectual currents rather than by ethical principles; this protean political force attempting to transect differences by sanctimonious and tendentious political posturing that leaves them hovering indiscriminately between the two sides.

In the UK today if we exclude sociological factors we can define up to 80% of people as belonging to a ‘middle’ class which no longer is so easily defined or whose loyalties can no longer be attributed to a specific characteristic.

The traditional left wing electorate was the industrial non-management classes. But the boundaries separating the classes have become blurred by the overlapping of salary ranges. A member of the lower classes is as likely to vote Conservative as they are to vote Labour.

If the theory of democracy is correct then happiness should pull more nations into the democratic fold and away from totalitarian regimes. Those countries that are not sufficiently free will experience unrest on a scale that will either create the momentum for positive change or in the pessimistic point of view create the kind of unrest that will destroy these same middle classes. Witness the former Soviet Union and the Arab Spring.  Both have created a window of opportunity for fascism to take power (as has now occurred in Egypt).

The impetus to seek unfettered growth has been given the status of a new religion but a concomitant quality of this ‘ideal’ is the rampant individualism without which the former would not be possible.  It has created the conspicuous wealth which in its turn fosters the destructive avarice and fear that could tip the world over into a maelstrom of revolution and counter revolution. The rise of the anonymous corporatist  and monetary hegemon devoid of altruism or even the parochial will to national improvement is the stuff of nightmares feeding a perceived anti-capitalist rebellion that is itself fuelled by fascism.

Until the middle of the 20th Century a definition of class would rightly have seen the middle classes as being located between the rich and the poor. This defined itself by what we could afford in terms of cultural and educational attainment. But today, income distribution has widened to include people at both ends of society.  We exclude academic definitions and economically throw as wide a net as is practical because sociologically by labelling we create inequality.

Aspirations define us but are less tangible.   Aspirations, fed by global travel, the national loss of identity, cultural confusion and an ever present communications bombardment of ideas and visual temptations inevitably leads not to satisfaction levels that are higher than they are today, but to expectations that are difficult if not impossible for all but the wealthiest to sustain.

The availability of arable land used for growing basic food stuffs is contracting as food prices continue to rise.  The cost of providing a safety net has become prohibitive and an all pervasive feeling of insecurity already infects the no longer comfortable middle classes.  Perhaps it is insecurity and fear itself that makes economics the best determinant for class consciousness today and based on this fear, defines the new lower classes.

I provide BT as a microcosm for what afflicts society.  My first experience of ‘BT Values’ occurred in an ‘away’ training course. We were all warned that as ambassadors for BT we must behave with decorum. The senior manager leading the event had brought his secretary with him and it soon became clear that she provided other services besides typing.  On the final evening during our farewell supper the directors’ wife rang up and asked to speak to the secretary. ‘Discretion’ descended into farce as our distraught secretary drank too much and then argued with her lover in front of the other (non BT) diners. A different standard applied to this senior manager of the company.  During the next couple of decades more than two senior officers were embroiled in scandals that BT successfully hid from the public.

But BT is less generous with its workers. In its hierarchy of greed it provides its employees with a basic wage; its middle and senior management receive compensation packages that increase at an exponential rate even when as a consequence of their personal morality they are incapable of managing even the most basic inter-relational adversity with competence or compassion. The HR function elides comfortably into limiting the damage to brand that dysfunctional indifference and over exuberant mismanagement arbitrarily creates. In the largest of BT’s money earning departments turnover has reduced by 5% every quarter over at least, the last 5 years. The only way that management can increase its profit margins and therefore its payouts to its shareholders, is by reducing staff numbers, (at the same time that it increases the work load of those remaining employed). As a consequence, fear and dishonesty is encouraged rather than being kept at bay.

BT periodically sends out stress surveys. It is not because it cares that it does this but because it must demonstrate its proof of ‘preventative’ initiatives employed in order to keep lawsuits against the company to a minimum.

I am not saying that UK PLC differs in some way from elsewhere on the Globe.  BT PLC like UK PLC (and sadly the entire political spectrum is undifferentiated in this area) is incapable of defining itself in moral terms that consistently and coherently articulate a secure and a just future for all, so it takes sides; it looks after its own while it betrays any trust it is able to successfully betray without consequences to it or its followers.

Symbolism and a new start

Kfar Etzion was the site of the execution style murder of over 100 people, including an Arab family, by the Arab Legion on May 13, 1948.  The Arab Legion was British funded and commanded by British Officers so this massacre carried out the day before Israel declared its independence was a warning to “the Jews” of what awaited them and it embarrassed the British Government. Nevertheless, this momentary diplomatic discomfit failed to prevent the Arab League (on the 28th of May 1948) from ethnically cleansing the Old City of Jerusalem of its Jewish population and subsequently razing to the ground all physical evidence of Jewish life in the Old City.

History is problematic because it is inconvenient. There is very little beauty in the story of human history.  Death and dishonour has accompanied much of what has been accomplished by man. Even our myths are too often immersed in indescribable pain.  Unless that is, we deny everything, absolutely.  Power affords the opportunity to whitewash our past in order to sanitise that which we find inconvenient to remember.

In Israel, the Right will try to legislate as a reaction to this revisionist and revanchist policy. But the Left is no less guilty.   Diffidence is a short term escape from ignorance. It is instructive that the Left is so easily duped into following Arab propaganda even when it is so patently false. I say duped because the alternative is to admit that they readily embrace a lie and that they are all too comfortable with their own prejudices.

So when Arab MK Jamal Zehalke (a member of the Israeli parliament) screams at the Jewish radio host (as occurred in an interview in January 2010) that the first modern Jewish city built from scratch (on sand-dunes) is Arab property (Tel Aviv); or when as frequently occurs, Arab leaders tell us that Jerusalem has no Jewish history, we should all be able to appreciate that the Jewish reaction will be one of suspicion or outright mistrust towards those people or organisations that embrace the pornographic anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish propaganda with which we are intermittently showered.

If you deny me my past or rewrite it in your image why should I hand over trusteeship of any part of my homeland to you?

But before we become the thing we oppose most we should appreciate that we exhibit many of the traits we fear.

The Neturei Karta is a Jewish religious sect that denies the validity of Jewish statehood.  They believe that Jewish self-determination is a sin against God and that only the Messiah can bring about Jewish national self-governance. A community that actively advises the nation’s enemies in order to undermine what they see as an illegitimate national enterprise offers only contempt and hatred for those that are to them, a constant reminder of the failure of their religious aspirations. Their collaboration with Israel’s enemies (at events in the UK, the USA, in Europe and in Iran) and their contempt for those people less ‘righteous’ than they are makes them as much of a danger to Israel as the nuclear terrorist and their bomb.  Legislate to confiscate their land and property. Excommunicate the community from the Jewish nation.  If they then select to relocate to Western or Eastern Palestine that is their choice.  A nation can only have a relationship based either on fear or on mutual respect. With the Neturei Karta the latter is unrealisable which is why they will dress their children in concentration camp uniforms and call all those people with whom they disagree, Nazis.  They are no different to the Islamist who believes that their god has given them the right to dominate all other nations and will brook no argument to the contrary.  Fundamentalists of all stripes immerse themselves in intolerance and only as an expedient to protect their lifestyle do they conceal their true nature.

Nazi language precludes discussion. It is intended to provoke and to gain publicity.  It works....it is not intended as a means of engaging in dialogue with anyone. Democracy is consensual, mutual and is predicated on an assumption of self-restraint. Those that oppose freedom manipulate this forbearance by the threat of violence.

In a number of western countries Holocaust denial is a criminal offence as is wearing clothing or displaying paraphernalia associated with the Nazis.  It is punishable by the loss of liberty.

Language and behaviour are symbols of attitude and it is how we react to it that creates the dialogue between segments of society.

So Israel can make holocaust denial a criminal offence as well as the wearing of the paraphernalia associated with the era. There should be no immunity from prosecution for Members of parliament calling their colleague a fascist because violence begins with language. The same should apply to clergymen (of any faith) who think their beliefs give them the right to assault others either verbally or physically and justify it by reference to past prophets or holy books. Clergymen given diplomatic status that abuse it by minimising the shoah or taking the side of the enemy should have their diplomatic status revoked.  Democracy is restraint even when you disagree with me. No wonder the followers of the Arab world have such contempt for democracy.  We fear their violence. To them, the ends have not only justified the means but proven their value.

Respect can only be achieved if we agree that in spite of the hostility inherent within disparate theological positions there is never an excuse in the twenty first century for bigots to use ancient texts to justify modern discrimination. We choose the battles we wish to fight.  The parlous state of western philosophy is based on too many accommodations with those to whom we can never agree.

Israel needs a constitution and a preamble that defines the Jewish foundation and Israeli character of the State. At the same time it should formally separate religion and state.

The Gettysburg Address was given by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War in 1863. I would like to borrow liberally from it, as follows below:

“The right to self determination for the Jewish people of this land has been denied to us for many centuries.  Our persecution has been a consequence of this bigotry and we have had no safe house anywhere because of it.  There are too many, to this very day, incapable theologically or politically, of accepting our equal rights here, or anywhere else.

Three score and four years ago our fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

Even before this beginning we were engaged in a great struggle against tyranny, and it continues to test whether this nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are compelled here to be dedicated to the great tasks remaining before us – to honour our dead and take from their sacrifice increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their lives. We here resolve that our dead shall not have died in vain- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.

Respect is not an option, it is a human right. We recognise that this state, forged in a time of great darkness and ignorance shall strive for justice for all and for peace for all people.”

Human Malice and Ethics

In the late 1980’s I rented accommodation in the same house as two women from Zimbabwe. It came as a surprise to me and my politically correct friends that these ladies were not only jingoistic but profoundly racist.  In retrospect it was illogical, an act of unintended ignorance that we could consider ethnicity, religious affiliation or historical experience as being a bar to prejudice.  Being ‘Black’ and having successfully overthrown the ‘White’ devil regime (Rhodesia) these women knew that because they had suffered only they had the right to judge what was ethical and what was not; only they could define racism.

I then met two ‘doctors’ who had escaped from Poland in the 1970’s and pursued careers in computing science in the UK. They were Catholics.  As was I suppose inevitable, one day they were talking about their homeland. They referred to The Poles and The Jews of Poland.  I naively corrected their ethnic subversion by clarifying that they meant Polish Catholics and Polish Jews. These computer scientists looked at me with pained confusion. Poles were Poles and Jews were Jews. Aryan ideology saw both Slavs and Jews as racially inferior and as being unworthy of existence. A thousand years of national co-existence and the annihilation of three million Polish Catholics and three million Polish Jews meant nothing to this son and daughter of Poland.  Though both Jews and Catholics had suffered Nazi purification my Polish Catholic acquaintances were intellectually incapable of internalising either a shared humanity or, a shared national identity.

But before we condemn either Africa or Europe for this shared racism I recall my discussions with our Arab and non-Arab but Muslim brethren. And they were no different. Edward Said, a towering intelligence and distinguished professor of Harvard University was responsible for much of the moral relativism (different cultures have different standards) and moral equivalence (it is considered acceptable to murder babies because asymmetrical warfare creates the necessity that justifies the action) the Left uses to validate atrocity and genocide in the Islamic world.  Professor Said admitted that even as a Christian, he was sorely jealous of his Muslim brothers because, to be a true Arab one needed the ‘superior’ historic attachment to Muhammad that only a ‘believer’ could genuinely possess.

The universalism of the Left failed to challenge this hypocrisy or perhaps it was simply a fact that the Left was always ethically insipient.

Dozens of racial groups survive in the Near East and all of them have been persecuted by the Arab Conquerors. The dream of global conquest and control has rarely diminished since Muhammad burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the Seventh Century CE (AD). But that conquest has meant cultural colonisation and theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Animists, Black Christians, Jews, Marsh Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians (the massacre of Assyrians in Northern Iraq in 1933 inspired Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide”).  The Left says nothing but then, rarely either, does the right.

 

The UN was created out of the ashes of world war two to facilitate dialogue and by multilateral interaction to foreclose on human conflict.  Instead, it remains, like its League of Nations predecessor an Orwellian gaggle of politically promiscuous purveyors of propaganda and elegantly concocted malice. Perhaps that is unfair, a prostitute, by professional design, is indiscriminate while the UN is very discriminating in its targeting of lies.

Here in the UK from time to time we hear that a right wing extremist has been found to be working for some government department or a privatised utility and that we must all be protected from their pernicious and evil influence by their immediate exclusion from the workplace.  But members of the Socialist Workers Party and their Islamic Fundamentalist co-conspirators are permitted to roam freely our corridors even though the threat from them is no less and perhaps even greater.  I have discussed calmly and with careful consideration for the sensitivity of my Muslim acquaintances feelings, their perceptions and desires.  What has most surprised me is the disconnect between the suit and tie, the honeyed words flowing from flawless and refined English mouths and their insistence that human slavery is a natural state of existence. They would never publicly demand a Black racial return to forced indenture but tell the rest of us infidels that we should all choose to live under slavery’s benign Islamic mantle.

So when people tell me that I should be less fearful and more trusting of others intentions, I am unable to make of the enlightenment, my teacher.  I have no desire to pour over the history books for examples of beacons of tolerance and love. All I need is to examine the manifest hypocrisy of my modern Western masters.  Those who always insist only I must turn the other cheek help me to recognize the intellectual decline of Western thought and its concomitant resurgence of and identifying with an anti-Semitic tradition; the all too common insistence that for the sake of world peace and human justice only I need to fall on my own sword.

David Mamet recently wrote that Israel is the modern embodiment of the latent need for human sacrifice.  Perhaps it is the best explanation we have for how we came to excuse hate, proudly celebrated as the legal expression of a particular illumination.

The Arab ‘Spring’, the Israeli Winter

Moshe Arens, a former foreign minister under Menachem Begin in analysing the Arab Spring summarised its salient features as encompassing the following: No respect for human rights, oppression of women, contempt for democratic values; a school system that is backward and encourages ignorance (even in its graduates) and a radical religious population which is increasing as a percentage of the whole.  The recent Egyptian election results recorded over 34% voting for the religiously chauvinistic Muslim Brotherhood and 26% voting for the even more violently racist Salafist movement.

The question must be asked, how is the direction in which Israel is headed any different to its Arab protagonists? It is a question being increasingly raised by foreign officials and Israelis alike.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the celebration of ethnicity. We are all born with labels. Some labels we inherit from our parents while others are imposed on us by society. Too often labels serve no more than to impose the values or prejudices of one group onto another, to reinforce our comfortable prejudices.  When society applies different rules to separate groups it is a form of legalised and intermittent apartheid (another label).

Labels make up our identity.

Identity was initially defined by tribe then by religion and then by nationality. For many of us, it still is.  In the Western world ‘nationality’ supplanted religion in self-identification but did not supersede it.  Religion defined groups and helped create unique national identities.  Built upon multiple layers, identity reinforced the primary group collective.  Again, labels: ethnic, cultural, educational and historical define us.

In totalitarian societies labels are used not only to define limits but also to compartmentalise those who are empowered, those who are disenfranchised and the multiplicity of perceived ‘threats’ in between.

All nations are idiosyncratic. By failing to construct a narrative that unites the nation, Israel has created a mishmash of competing communities for whom tribal allegiances are more important than national consensus. 

Contrast this with the Arab 'world' and the difference could easily pose an existential threat not just to Israel but to all humanity. In attempting to unify all people under ‘the’ one god, the Islamic world created a malevolency of violence and benighted prejudice and Israel is now infected by it.  I repeat; by adapting the Arab-Islamic model of intolerance Israel has itself become contaminated. Israel’s political model is one that respects no-one; its most salient feature is its contempt for diversity of opinion.  The sclerotic fiction bound prejudice of the Arab world justifies every betrayal for its race and its god; the Jewish people must not follow their model.

A people incapable of standing as one will fall as one.  We arrived here because we allowed contempt to take the place of honest dissent. Pure proportional representation empowered a political minority with immense influence far in excess of its numeric size.  Xenophobic pronouncements feed fear, not compromise. But also consider how Israel permitted its university professors to demonise the country. Freedom of speech tolerates the urge to self-destruction but why do we pay our teachers to counsel their students on how they may also self-destruct? This masochistic impulse is one chronic symptom of an immature society that is struggling with and neurotically conflicted by its identity.  Fascism of the Left or of the Right, will always exploit self-abuse which is rightly viewed as a sign of inherent weakness. McCarthyism has been a leftist weapon used to intimidate anyone with whom they differed since the 1960’s. The extremists of anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli’ism share a platform with a pride they would be unable to justify were they to apply the same standards to Islam or Europe.  The gauleiters of political correctness reject diversity of thought because it means accepting that there is more than one path to salvation.

If democracy is synonymous with populism then the early twentieth century’s irresponsibility by which the ruling elites dragged the world into two world wars can only be repeated in the twenty-first century because we have renounced responsibility for an ethical domestic or foreign policy.  It is too easy to blame it all on economics.

Gadi Taub in an opinion piece in Israeli newspaper 'Yediot Achranot' commented that the elections in Egypt did not signify a positive change for the people. He said that “liberating the masses may be the dawn of a new oppression”.

This same trend applies across the globe but a nation that has never known freedom has a greater danger of transferring power from one tyranny to another, even more bloody and with less restraint because the escalation in violence is implicit in the mandate. Witness Russia under Communism and Iran under Khomeini'ism.

The internal threat to society is as great as the external threat. Betrayal does not usually come with a tattooed label.  Israel needs national unity; polarisation is an intellectual failure to which all political parties share guilt, equally. And Israeli laws currently being discussed that target specific groups are not just bad laws, they are divisive and anti-democratic laws.