- WanderingKid
- Feb 27, 2005
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lives here...
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Kevin Myers, Irish Independent, June 24 2011 posted:
How can do-gooders possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in Middle East?
What is it about Israel that prompts such a widespread departure from common sense, reason and moral reality? As another insane flotilla prepares to butt across the Mediterranean bringing "aid" to the "beleaguered" people of Gaza, in its midst travelling the MV Saoirse, does it never occur to all the hysterical anti-Israeli activists in Ireland that this is like worrying about the steaks being burnt on the barbecue, as a forest fire sweeps towards your back garden?
I took part in a discussion about the Middle East last weekend in the Dalkey Books Festival. It was surreal. Not merely was I the only pro-Israeli person in the panel of four, but the chairwoman of the session, Olivia O'Leary, also felt obliged to throw in her three-ha'pence worth.
Israeli settlers on the West Bank were on stolen land, she sniffed. Palestinians in their refugee camps had title deeds to the ancient properties. The UN had repeatedly condemned Israel. Brian Keenan, who was held hostage by Arab terrorists for four years, then detailed Israeli human-rights abuses, to loud cheers.
Israel -- and its sole defender on the panel (is mise) -- were then roundly attacked by members of the audience. But what was most striking about the audience's contributions was the raw emotion: they seemed to loathe Israel.
But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.
However, I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?
What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no-one on the MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years, and it also -- a minor point, this, I know -- brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie. Yet no Irish boat to Libya. Only the other way round.
And then there's Iraq. Throughout the decades of Saddam Hussein, whose regime caused the deaths of well over a million people, there wasn't a breath of liberal protest against him. Gassing the Kurds? Not a whimper. Invading Kuwait? Not one single angry placard-bearing European liberal outside an Iraqi embassy.
Destroying the drainage systems of the Marsh Arabs? Silence. Manipulating UN oil-for-food programme so that thousands died? Nothing.
Next, Saudi Arabia, whose revolting practices cannot be called medieval without doing a grave injustice to the Middle Ages. It is led by savages who have studiously turned their backs on knowledge -- even as they sip their Krug and their Bollinger in their €100m apartments in Belgravia. They behead and behand, they torture and they mutilate, and they have spent billions on their foul madrasahs teaching young Muslims right across the world to hate us kaffirs. But what demonstrations are there outside Saudi embassies? What flotillas to defend the human rights of the millions of immigrant serfs, who toil without any rights in Saudi homes and in the oil industry?
There isn't a single Arab country, not one, with the constitutional protection that Israel confers on all its citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation. And no, I don't like the settlements on the West Bank, but really, by any decent measure, it is simply not possible to gaze upon the entire region, reaching from Casablanca to Yemen, and then to point indignantly and say: "Ah yes, Gaza: that's where the one great injustice lies."
The last 'aid flotilla' to Gaza carried a large number of Islamists who wanted to provoke: and aided by some quite astounding Israeli stupidity, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Now another convoy is under way, and again with an utterly disingenuous plan to bring "assistance" to the "beleaguered Gazans", some of who, funnily enough, can now cross into Egypt any time they like, and buy their explosives and their Kalashnikovs in the local arms-bazaar.
And as for human-rights abuses: why, nothing that Israel has done in the 63 years of its existence can possibly compare with the mass-murders of Fatah members by Hamas firing-squads over the past five years.
The colossal western intellectual dissonance between evidence and perception on the subject of Israel at this point in history can perhaps only be explained by anthropologists.
This dissonance is perhaps at its most acute in Ireland, where no empirical proof seems capable of changing people's minds. Israel, just about the only country in the entire region where Arabs are not rising up against their rulers, is also the only country that the Irish chattering classes unite in condemning. Rather pathetic, really.
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Kevin Myers, Irish Independent, May 25 2011 posted:
Strauss-Kahn is one of those politicians who serve only power and their own craving for it.
IS there anyone outside the ruling elite in France who feels a scintilla of sympathy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn? As much of Europe stares glumly into the void, this creature embodies one of the basic divisions in mankind: he is a who, not -- that is, until last week in New York -- a whom. He doeth; others are done unto by such as him. That's it, the story of the human race: Politicians versus The Rest.
"Fling away ambition," croaked a dying Cardinal Wolsey in Shakespeare's 'Henry VIII'. "By that sin, the angels fell."
Quite so. Peasants used to believe that moths were the souls of fallen angels, though in reality it is politicians who are the seraphim whose souls were destroyed by ambition.
But they have their Lepidopteran aspects too. For the pheromones of raw ambition infest their lives, like the molecular musk of distant she-moths in heat upon a summer's night, causing our Fallen Angels to seek out and court princes, parliaments and power.
Look at them. Bush, Blair Brown, Ahern, Sarkozy, Roosevelt, Churchill, Obama. From their early 20s, most of them have never done anything but lust after power. They've never started or run a business or had a separate career. They know nothing of the real world.
They might be called "lawyers", or, like DSK, "un conseil" (surely one of the most sinister words in the entire French language). However, it is not law they practise, but ambition.
Law is merely the means, equipping them with the vocabulary and contacts. And the ambitious who lack the charisma or patience for conventional politics seek power by other, more covert means, hence the likes of Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Cheney and, of course, Strauss-Kahn. They attend their political masters with apparent loyalty: however, they serve not men, but power and their own helpless craving for it.
Political ambition is genetically coded and as compulsive as alcoholism. For a dangerous few, such as Franklin D Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, it is also combined with an addiction to utter recklessness: a truly lethal combination for those under their command.
And when megalomania is combined with no conscience at all, you have a Mao, a Stalin or a Hitler.
The differences between the conduct of the democratically and the despotically ambitious can often blur: the firebombing of German and Japanese cities could only have been authorised by those for whom power was a ruthless repressor of scruple.
There are differences between Auschwitz and Dresden, to be sure: yet not so great as to make the rest of us comfortable. But the only sleep that Churchill ever lost over the tens of thousands of hapless German civilians burnt alive was the damage that such immolations might do to his reputation.
Fallen Angels, whatever their political dispensation, constitute a separate caste in society. A Stalin, a Blair, a Strauss-Kahn and all those communist politicians in the Eastern European bloc who overnight became democratic politicians -- they are merely on different extremes of a single spectrum. They all want power, whereas the rest of us would flee screaming from its responsibilities, like a gay vegan from a piece of raw liver with a vagina.
This is perhaps why it is so unusual for a fine soldier then to succeed as a politician. Wellington and Eisenhower are the exceptions: Churchill, conversely, departed the field of battle for the safety of the Commons at the very first opportunity in 1916.
I am relating the following news story from Georgia, US, because I want to. Headlined "Assailant suffers injuries from fall", it runs: "Orville Smith, a store manager, observed a male customer, later identified as Tyrone Jackson. . . putting a laptop under his jacket. When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, drew a knife and ran for the door.
"Outside. . . were four Marines, collecting for the Toys for Tots programme. They stopped the man, who stabbed one of the Marines, Cpl Philip Duggan, in the back. Cpl Duggan was transported for treatment.
"The subject was also transported to the local hospital for treatment; with two broken arms, a broken ankle, a broken leg, several missing teeth, possible broken ribs, multiple contusions, assorted lacerations, a broken nose and a broken jaw. . . injuries he sustained when he slipped and fell off the curb . . . according to a police report."
Politicians seldom, if ever, freely serve their country like the men and women of the United States Marine Corps. And when they're compelled to do so, as Senator John Kerry was, they usually find a safe billet, and even then are able to secure a grotesquely disproportionate number of decorations, as Kerry duly did. But that is life.
We are governed by our Fallen Angels, who always reward themselves excessively: hence DSK, with four different homes around the world. So, naturally, he was in first-class in his airliner at JFK when he was arrested. How much sweeter would it have been if he had simply fallen off the curb, US Marine-style, upon leaving his hotel in New York.
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This guy is easily one of the worst columnists I have read in recent times. The first is verbose whataboutery. I will never understand how the implication that there are places in the world in greater need of aid (and therefore Gaza doesn't deserve it), can in any way be called an argument. It also implies that as long as a great inequity exists, you shouldn't put time and effort into righting (arguably) lesser inequities.
I think its really despicable to criticize anyone trying to be a positive force for change by saying "you should be a positive force for change somewhere else". Not surprisingly, this columnist got hammered in the letters to the editor section for (amongst other things), getting the UCRC Gaza Delegation Director's name wrong and going a step beyond misquoting her and into the realms of all out character assassination.
The second one is appalling for different reasons. It was so thick with analogy that I lost the point he was trying to make. Then he brings up a completely unrelated example "because I want to". Its a very poorly formed argument and this guy has a history of, pretty much just trolling the poo poo out of readers. I have no idea why he gets published and he reflects badly on the paper as a whole. He has long been a parody of himself and now hes just a professional troll. A bad one too.
He also wrote a flat out racist column entitled (quote) "Africa is giving absolutely nothing to anyone - apart from aids (/quote) which I cannot quote because it has (unsurprisingly) been retracted by the paper and removed from its archive. This article should have ended his career in print media. You can google search the title to read many of the reader responses to it. He also dominates this thread.
WanderingKid fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jun 30, 2011
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Jun 30, 2011 16:21
