# 181 – The Leftists

May 3, 2011

Where was I?

I have been aiming to write about ‘the Left Wing Revolution’, yet every day’s events keep on clouding my thoughts:

Syria – Assad said ‘it won’t happen here’ and it is. A reminder that his father oppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1985 – the worst massacre the Middle East has seen in recent history. But the Islamists are still there, and now they are coming out of the woodwork.

There will be more massacres. And whoever wins, there will be not yet be a solution. The World must sit and watch (what is the pathetic UN supposed to do?) – and Israel will still be ‘strongly advised’ to give the Golan Heights back…(Btw, Syrian is still officially trying to get on to the UN Human Rights Council).

• Egypt – Obviously their problems are over, for they are the force behind Hamas and Fatah getting together. Israel can stop worrying. (Remember what someone clever once said: If the Palestinians would lay down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel were to do the same, there would be a massacre. Have I got that wrong?).

• Libya, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Yemen – do I need to go on?

One of my first letters stated: if/when the Israeli/Palestinian problem is solved, it’ll only be to prove that that’s not the problem. The left wing really does believe that if Israel stops its ‘aggression’, there will be peace. Do they have an ounce of proof of this? Where do these people get their ideas? And they include ‘intelligentsia’….

In amongst all this horror (that bus in Morocco), the subject that seems to rile the lefties the most is ‘the settlements’. I’m surprised they don’t shake at the thought of the city of Tel Aviv/Jaffa, which is in many ways a clearer case of settlement than most about which they complain.

Gaza is currently a lost cause. It used to be a place with the ‘hated settlements’. It was cleared of every single Jew. And now?

The 300,000 Jews in the West Bank will not so easily retreat. That chance has gone. There is no confidence that a Jew-free West Bank will be anything but another Gaza, and far less defendable.

But today’s West Bank IS a far better place – for the Palestinians – than it was 5 years ago. The atmosphere IS improving. There are so many irrefutable signs of that, including one of the World’s leading GDPs.

How to solve the problem, someone asks of me. They (the leftists) HAVE made suggestions, which I think are mostly suicidal.. What do I suggest?

• Hope that the gradual improvements in the West Bank will show that there are other paths to follow than their version of peaceful resistance (which I call violence). That’s worth waiting for. Leave the status quo. Call the security fence what you like – it has reduced violence to a trickle, and there are signs of prosperity in the region.

• Hope that the ‘Arab Spring’ will have some positive results. Whatever happens, it will take generations for the ‘tribal mentality’ (I’m sorry, it’s the best description I can think of) to be replaced by what the West likes to call democracy. I call this the Facebook revolution.

Although much of what can be seen on the internet is not exactly pretty or intelligent, it IS communication, and its common denominator is far closer to peaceful co-habitation than anything else that exists in ‘the Third World’. It is a fact that Palestinians and Israelis are Twittering, Facebooking, Skyping etc. across those slowly disappearing borders.

I used to say that what ‘they’ need is an Islamic Mandela, a leader who will change their basic instincts of revenge and tribal values. Well maybe the internet is just that.

I do NOT believe that a handshake in Egypt between the Palestinian factions is a reason for Israel to drop all defences and give in to UN-backed pressure. The peace signed with Egypt, back in 1979 was far simpler to accept.

Sadat was the single leader of the country. Yet, all we got was a cold peace. (I don’t think I have EVER sighted an Egyptian tourist in Israel in all that time). And now? Today’s Egypt is quite likely to rescind any agreement with Israel – to cut off the gas and oil supply which was then part of the treaty. I think Israel has every right to ‘sit on its hands’ and wait till better signs of a peace-loving Palestinian partner before removing its defences.

By the way, years ago, I wrote about Melanie Griffiths’ book ‘Londonistan’, which caused so much controversy at the time. It exposed the fact that London was the nerve centre of most of the extreme Islamic organisations. Recent investigations have shown that she was right. Stephen Glover, in May 2’s Independent, has eaten humble pie.

Admitting that he disagrees with Melanie ‘about many things – Iraq, Israel and the extent of the Islamist threat in Britain, to name a few’, he ends his piece with ‘On this issue, Melanie was closer to the truth than any journalist, and much braver than her detractors’.

Also in the same issue, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (great name….in London yesterday, I entered the ‘Hotel Chocolat’ and was served by Marybeth Ali = another great name) spent half a page twisting and turning…’Stop Blaming Israel for Every Grievance in the Middle East’ was the heading. Instead of pulling back a bit from her constant anti-Israel stance, she joined the many who say ‘you’re all as bad as each other’. So Israel is still wrong, but so are many of the countries around Israel.

2 steps in the right direction.

So, my next and final (for today) solution to the problem would be for the World’s press, the UN, the academics, THE LEFTISTS, to wake up and see what’s right in front of their faces. Israel started off as a perfectly decent country. Since its birth, with hardly a day’s rest, it is has been poked in the eye by an incredible array of friends, and threatened with annihilation by an incredible array of enemies.

Its survival has been based on guts, ingenuity, aggression, support from USA (but no more support than many of its enemies have also received from the USA), and, if you believe in them, a couple of miracles. (Pope Paul will be sanctified by means of a miracle, so why not Israel’s survival).

Every time an enemy has started a war and lost, it has then complained about the consequences. Arafat and Mourinho must have gone to the same schools. Bad losers. At least, in Mourinho’s case, his team basically stuck to the rules of the game.

As we know, when faced with opponents such as Arafat (Saddam, Bin Laden, Ghaddafi etc.) who do NOT play by the same rules, it makes it just that little bit harder to do the right thing. (Bin Laden being buried at sea has already brought criticism. Should have taken him alive, many say. And it appears he was buried ‘as a Muslim’. As a Muslim? Those who aspire to a religion that takes a Bin Laden to its bosom – like the Gazans, Israel’s peace partners – have got to be kidding).

Enough rambling.

I’m about to land in Iceland – going to try to retrieve some of the UK banks’ money.

Stephen