Robin Shepherd
This week’s anti-Israeli polemic by the widely celebrated British commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is so bizarre that I am not even sure that that headline is quite correct. But as I endlessly repeat, if you subscribe to an agenda which is not only counter-factual but outright irrational as well there can be no surprise if, having said things which are simply nutty, you leave yourself open to misinterpretation. What was that line from Orwell about insincerity as the great enemy of clear writing?
So try this from her piece on Yom Kippur (coincidence?), on Monday, ending an impassioned article about how America must stop grovelling to “fanatic and aggressive” Israel, how there are positive signs in global nuclear disarmament, but how even Iranian oppositionists would rush to their nation’s defence if the evil Israelis attacked.
After some truly weird remarks about Iran’s leaders trying to prove they had “really big willies” by test firing missiles, and the hippie-day rejoinder: “Listen people, we need to talk about Israel. And soon. Like now,” she concluded with the following:
“The Israeli human rights activist Gideon Spiro bravely asks that his country be subject to the same rules as Iran and all others in the Middle East: “Rein in Israel, compel it to accept a regime of nuclear disarmament and oblige it to open all nuclear, biological and chemical facilities and missile sites to international inspection.” The US has leverage because it maintains and funds Israel. If Obama shies away from this, there can be no moral justification to go for Iran or North Korea or any other rogue state. And the leader whose election and dreams gave hope to millions thereby hastens the end of the world.”
Meaning?
Ok. Let’s look at those last three sentences. I suppose it could mean that the Israelis are about to unleash the apocalypse by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. If Barack Obama does not step in to stop it, the entire world, all of it, will come to an end.
But does that mean that Obama will be responsible for “the end of the world” or Israel? Or perhaps there is a shared responsibility. If so, what proportion of responsibility is carried by either side?
Or hold on, given what she has said previously about global disarmament does it mean that if Obama does not force Israel to disarm this will make it impossible for him to effect the disarmament of “other” rogue states and that soon enough all rogue states will have nuclear weapons. This will then lead to a massive nuclear conflagration, “the end of the world”?
I suspect that, if you really wind your way through the hysteria, that is what she meant. But it still does not get her off the hook.
We are still left, are we not, with the nasty smell of something familiar from this article. For which people, in her worldview, truly holds the fate of the world in its hands? Whose behaviour ultimately will decide whether we live or die? When you boil it all down, to whom are we really beholden? Which people now has to be stopped, lest they kill us all?
Familiar?
But make up your own mind about what she is saying and the mentality which drives her. Click here for the full article?
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