Camels were never this vicious

Melanie Phillips
Spectator
09 July '10

No sooner is one smacked smartly on the butt and disappears into the desert than another one comes ambling across the sand. The gushing effusions by Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, about the spiritual godfather of Hezbollah which as I wrote below she posted on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office site, have been excised from that site. But now it turns out that Britain’s ambassador to Jordan, James Watt is even worse, as ‘Bialik’, a reader on the Harry’s Place blog, has pointed out.

For on his own FCO blog, Watt makes it clear he doesn’t think Israel has an overwhelming historic claim to its existence, thinks the Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the land and that the idea that Israel was the Jews’ national home thousands of years ago is fanciful.

Here he denies Jewish national self-determination:

No one outside Israel is prepared – or very few – to take Zionist arguments at their face value any longer.

Here he denies Jewish and Middle Eastern history:

Completely non-factual assertions - for example that a Jewish people was building Jerusalem 5,000 years ago - only serve to emphasise the absence of real content or reasoning. The strange thing is how long Western audiences tolerated such claims without challenging them: I think because they were hoping that a reasonable settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population would emerge in the course of things (and with some diplomatic heavy lifting).

Here he denies Jewish history and national self-determination and descends into rank bigotry:

The origin of the problem – the arrival of the Zionists in Palestine, with their commitment to avoiding any kind of integration into existing society, and their policy of importing their co-religionists from cultural and social backgrounds alien to Palestine, changed everything.

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