Tag Archives: Saddam Hussein

Feb 21 2013

George Galloway boycotts 6 million Jews

To those who don’t believe that BDS and other forms anti-Zionist agitation often lead to racism, here’s a video posted today at the site of the Oxford University Student Union.

The Respect MP (and ‘Comment is Free’ contributor) had just begun to debate Eylon Aslan-Levy, a student at Brasenose, a constituent college of Oxford, on the motion ‘Israel should withdraw immediately from the West Bank’.

Here’s what transpired next.

 

Galloway had been “misled”.  He wouldn’t have agreed to participate if he knew he was debating an Israeli.  He said:

 “I don’t recognize Israel and I don’t debate with Israelis.

(I guess we can assume his policy of exclusion doesn’t extend to Muslim and Arab citizens of the state.)

So, out of a population of roughly 13.5 million Jews in the world, 6 million live in Israel. 

George Galloway, who has paid homage to Saddam Hussein, “glorified” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and even praised the Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad, doesn’t respect 44% of the world’s Jews.

Whilst there is always the danger of using gratuitous political analogies in even the most sincere attempts to characterize the extreme malevolence of the BDS movement, there is a passage in a book about European Jewish history I read a while back which used a darkly evocative term that seems, at least in this context, historically apt.

The book, ‘The fate of European Jews’, by Leni Yahil, characterized the effects of the Nuremberg Laws and other antisemitic measures enacted by Germany in the 1930s as condemning the nation’s Jews to a “social death” – an idea which resonates at least when contextualizing the political objectives of some of the most extreme anti-Israel activists.

George Galloway, by, in effect, boycotting and refusing to recognize the moral legitimacy of Israelis (and not merely the state or its institutions), is attempting to consign six million Jewish men, women and children to pariah status, and social exclusion from the international community.

This is the hideously racist moral place the malign obsession with the Jewish state – often the sine qua non of the BDS movement – inevitably leads.    

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Sep 16 2012

Glenn Greenwald on Israel’s ‘extreme violence’ against Muslims & US “child-killing” drones

Glenn Greenwald’s latest outrage is inspired by commentary by some in the media – in response to riots and violence in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere – expressing surprise that Muslims in those nations are not grateful to the US for backing Mubarak’s ouster and initiating military action to topple Gaddafi.

Greenwald, in ‘US media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude‘, Sept. 15, cites “decades of arming, funding and general support [for Mubarak] from the US” and the civilian death toll from the Libya operation as reasons why citizens in both countries are rightfully far from grateful to America.

He then lambastes those, such as NBC correspondent Richard Engel, who argue that the “primary reason these Muslims have such animosity toward the US is because their heads have been filled…with crazy conspiracy theories about how the US and Israel are responsible for their woes”.

Greenwald writes:

“…to act as though Muslim anger toward the US and Israel is primarily the by-product of crazy conspiracy theories is itself a crazy conspiracy theory. It’s in the world of reality, not conspiracy, where the US and Israel have continuously brought extreme amounts of violence to the Muslim world, routinely killing their innocent men, women and children.

Listening to Engel, one would never know about tiny little matters like the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, the almost five-decade long oppression of Palestinians, the widely hated, child-killing drone campaign, or the attack on Iraq.” [emphasis added]

While Greenwald’s narrative about U.S. responsibility for Muslim anger is entirely predictably – an expression of American self-flagellation over every conceivable problem afflicting non-Westerners which is popular within a segment of the American left – his implication that Muslim anti-Zionist hatred is justifiable given Israel’s ‘oppression of Muslims’ is ahistorical and morally unserious.

Citing statistics from the book ”Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century,” 2003, Professors Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes note the following:

“deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict [number] 51,000 [since 1950]  in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.

These figures mean that deaths in Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.

In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims. 

(Adding the 11,000 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.)

Examples of Muslim on Muslim violence since 1950 include the Iran-Iraq War, the Algerian Civil War, the Syrian massacre in Hama, Jordan’s killing of Palestinians (Black September ), Saddam Hussein’s mass murder of Shiites, Kurds and others, and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. The list goes on.

Massacres, of course, are still taking place in Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere – “extreme” Muslim on Muslim violence - and yet no citizens, other than Israeli Jews, are routinely called “blood-thirsty“, “genocidal“, “terrorist“, or “Nazi” by Muslim countries. 

Click image to see video

The Muslim public’s “outrage” over Israel’s treatment of Arabs and Palestinians, as with their extreme antisemitism, is cynically exploited by the Arab media – dangerous propaganda which is often ignored, or even legitimized, by Western media elites. 

While economic under-development and the continued absence of true democratic values represent the Muslim world’s greatest problem, Greenwald would have us believe that the the Muslim world’s malign obsession with Israeli Jews is somehow justified - that 1.6 billion Muslims are being oppressed by 6 millions Jews.

It is a pernicious lie.

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Jul 31 2012

The top 10 illiberal, uninformed and racist comments of the Guardian’s latest star, Juan Cole

Juan Cole, an American academic and blogger, characterizes Israel as fascist state whose behavior was at least partly responsible for the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks against the U.S. on  9/11. He also has advanced antisemitic narratives about dual loyalty, and is quite vigilant in warning his followers about the dangers of ‘Jewish power’.

Juan Cole

So, obviously, he was recently welcomed by Guardian editors to offer his analysis on Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel at ‘Comment is Free’.

While you can read a superb critique of Cole’s CiF essay by the CST’s Mark Gardner (cross posted at CiF Watch), I thought it would be helpful to also provide a little background on Cole, whose blog is called ‘Informed Comment‘.

Here are some samples of Juan Cole’s malign and supremely uniformed fixation, in own words:

Many Zionist organizations are fascist and exert undue influence on the media and US Congress

“[The] fascist point of view is privately shared by many of the strident Zionist organizations that are so influential with the press and the US Congress in the United States.” – Informed Comment, June 1, 2005

American Jews with dual loyalties have powerful positions in Bush White House

“I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U.S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party.” – Informed Comment, Sept. 9, 2004

Thinly veiled Nazi Analogy

“[The] wounded romantic nationalism of [Jewish blogger, Jeffrey] Goldberg’s sort is a pathetic remnant of the twentieth century, which polished off tens of millions of human beings over wet dreams about “blood and soil.” There isn’t any “blood” or “pure” “races,” and human groups have no special relationship to territory.” - Informed Comment, March 17, 2010

Fascist Israel is responsible for Muslim rage around the around the world

“No American media will report the demonstrations in Israel as fascist in nature, and no American politicians will dare criticize the Likud. But the fact is that the Israeli predations in the West Bank and Gaza are a key source of rage in the Muslim world against the United States (which toadies unbearably to whatever garbage comes out of Tel Aviv’s political establishment), something that the 9-11 commission report stupidly denies.” Informed Comment, July 26, 2004

Israel ethnically cleansed Lebanese Shiites for the same reasons Saddam Hussein did

“So let’s get this straight. The Israelis warn the small town Shiites of the south to flee their own homes and go hundreds of miles away (and live on what? in what?). But then they intensely bombing them, making it impossible for them to flee. The Lebanese have awoken to find themselves cockroaches.

I repeat, this is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing of the Shiites of southern Lebanon, an assault on an entire civilian population’s way of life. Aside from ecology, it is no different from what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and the Israelis are doing it for exactly the same sorts of reasons that Saddam did.” –  Informed Comment, July 21, 2006

Israeli barbaric behavior threatens U.S. democracy 

“Israeli atrocities in Gaza are endangering American security. If the Israeli operation were something other than a cynical power play that almost wholly disregards civilian welfare, then the US would be right to support it and damn the consequences. But it is a shame to place our land and even our democracy in danger on behalf of a barbaric military operation.” - Informed Comment, Aug. 1, 2009

Twin threats of Fascist Israel and Al-Qaeda

“...our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and, of course, Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist, anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent Al-Qaeda and its offshoots.”Informed Comment, Nov. 26, 2005

Israeli behavior caused 9/11

“We don’t need any more U.S. buildings blown up because our government is coddling cuckoo [Israeli] settlers who are stealing other people’s land to fulfill some weird religious power fantasy.” Informed Comment, Feb. 1, 2004

“It is obvious to me that what September 11 really represented was  a dragooning of the United States into internal Middle East political conflicts. Israel’s aggressive policies in the West Bank and Gaza have poisoned the political atmosphere in the Middle East (and increasingly in the Muslim world) for the United States. It is ridiculous to suggest that radical Islamists don’t care about the Palestine issue.” – Informed Comment, Sept. 9, 2004

Neocon Likudnicks in Bush White House cynically used 9/11 to get U.S. to fight wars for Israel

“It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9-11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel’s Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel’s ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else’s boys did the dying).” - Informed Comment, Aug. 29, 2004

Israel gets the U.S. to fight its wars, on behalf of pro-Israel supporters

“When George W Bush promised his pro-Israel supporters a war on Iraq, it cost the US at least $3 trillion, got hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed…cost over 4,000 American soldiers’ lives…US politicians must say [no] to constant Israeli entreaties that the US continually fight new wars in the Middle East on their behalf.” – Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’, July 30, 2012

As Mark Gardner noted, Cole’s bigotry earned him a coveted spot on veteran Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker’s list of “Best blogs and analysis from the Middle East”.

Whitaker, for those unaware, previously served as the Guardian’s Middle East editor.

Finally, as Jonathan Chait wrote about Cole, in The New Republic:

“One of the odd things about people with very left-wing views on the Middle East is that they’re obsessed with the political influence of American Jews yet almost completely unfamiliar with the actual beliefs of the subject of their obsession.”

…

“…the general tendency among this ideological clique is to write about American supporters of Israel with almost total ignorance, in a tone of hysteria, and treating their target as a broad, undifferentiated mass.”

A more apt characterization of the Guardian’s narrative about Zionists would be hard to find.

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Apr 4 2012

Perpetrators as victims: Seumas Milne ignores Islamist-inspired antisemitism of Toulouse massacre

Mohammed Merah

As we reported, The Guardian’s two official editorials on the Islamist inspired murders of four innocent Jews in the French city of Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, in over 900 words of text, never once used the word “antisemitism”, nor mentioned the names or Jewish identity of the victims, yet employed the phrase “anti-immigrant rhetoric” three times.

The second editorial, published after Merah’s identity, and Jihadist background, was known, warned not of Islamist inspired Jew hatred, but of the danger of French officials “alienating” the French Muslim community.

An analysis of the shootings by the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, , which attempted to locate root causes for Merah’s rampage, similarly never mentioned the word “antisemitism” yet included this possible explanation for his massacre:

 Merah had self-radicalised in prison, where he spent nearly two years as a teenager after stealing a handbag. Merah’s lawyer said he been a polite and tolerant teenager, but resentful about that prison sentence and angry at being rejected by the army.

And, Chrisais added this:

Merah’s background of petty crime and poor schooling on a housing estate in a drab neighbourhood of Toulouse has catapulted the question of social inequalities and the integration of minorities in France back onto centre stage….Some said the social alienation and discrimination felt by second and third generation, ethnic minority French youths must be addressed...

Not to be outdone, the Guardian’s Associate Editor Seumas Milne, in an essay on April 3 praising the dictator-loving George Galloway (whose political infatuations have included Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh) wrote the following:

Since last month’s atrocities in Toulouse, President Nicolas Sarkozy has improved his poll ratings a bit, pandering to xenophobes and Islamophobes and posturing as a security champion

Yes, clearly: The lesson of the Toulouse massacre is the danger of Islamophobia and xenophobia, but certainly NOT Islamist antisemitism!

Three official editorials, and a prominent feature report by their France correspondent, and not even a cursory attempt to address the disturbing dynamics of a malign Islamist ideology which would prompt a 23-year-old man, raised in France, to murder three innocent Jewish children.

In a refreshing bit of political lucidity French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, commenting on the recent arrests of 30 radical Muslims by French police, who were tracked on Islamist forums preparing to travel to areas including Afghanistan, Pakistan and West Africa to wage Jihad, said the following:

“There will be no respite in France’s pursuit of militants…The pressure on radical Islam and the threats it represents will not stop.”

That such an intuitive understanding of the moral and political lessons of the Toulouse massacre – the need to face the threats posed by radical Islam in Europe, and not the problem of Islamophobia, second generation immigrant “alienation”, poverty or poor schooling – is even remotely controversial at the Guardian is another commentary on their editors’ supreme political pathos.

The Guardian group continues to be defined by this morally perverse and intellectually unintelligible understanding of what a modern liberal political sensibility demands.

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Aug 3 2011

Abdel Atwan’s CiF piece and the Guardian’s role as platform of choice for religious extremists

Abdel al-Bari Atwan is the editor-in chief of the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, and has been named among the 50 ‘most influential Arabs’ by Middle East Magazine.

He’s perhaps best known for his comments during an interview on Lebanese television concerning how he’d react if Iranian missiles hit Israel. Talking about Iran’s nuclear capability on ANB Lebanese television on June 27, Atwan said:

“If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight.” 

In Dec. 2010, at a speech at the LSE – where he opined about the dangers of the Jewish lobby – Atwan pointed to various [non-Israeli] Jewish students and said: “You bombed Gaza.”

He’s also expressed sympathy with Saddam Hussein’s resistance to the US invasion of Iraq, commenting on the former president’s execution that:

“[Saddam] will go to the gallows with his head held high, because he built a strong united Iraq without sectarianism…The Arab people will remember Saddam Hussein as the only Arab leader who fired 40 missiles at Tel Aviv, stood beside the Palestinian resistance, gave sponsorship to martyrs’ families, and defended Damascus from Israeli tanks heading to occupy it.”

Perhaps most disturbing though was when, in March 2008, Atwan said that the Mercaz HaRav shooting, in which a Palestinian gunmen murdered eight students (aged 15 to 26), “was justified.” He added that the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva is responsible for “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists” and that the celebrations in Gaza following the attack symbolized “the courage of the Palestinian nation.

In response to Atwan’s legitimization of the Mercaz HaRav shooting in March 2008, Lior Ben-Dor, a spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in London, said:

“The problem is that when addressing the British public, he tends to hide his true opinions and ideology – his support for terror, religious extremism and the murder of civilians.”

However, Atwan’s CiF entry on July 31st, The chance of Ramadan, about NATO’s war in Libya, represents an explicit ethical and religious endorsement of Muslims waging war against “infidels.”  He says:

Islamic experts assure me there is no prohibition of warfare during Ramadan. On the contrary, many of Islam’s great conquests occurred during this holy month, including the first clash between Muslims and infidels, which occurred in 624 when Muhammad led his troops to victory in the battle of Badr. War for the furtherance of Islam and against non-believers is considered ethically acceptable by scholars, even during the month of fasting and prayer.

Atwan contrasts this ethical waging of war during Ramadan, with wars waged by non-Muslims:

Islamic clerics concur that it is absolutely prohibited for Muslims to seek the help of non-believers against fellow Muslims.

By continuing to post essays by Atwan, the Guardian editors are making a conscious decision to provide a platform to an anti-Semite who openly supports religious extremism and terrorist attacks against innocent civilians.

Worse, today’s piece by Atwan demonstrates that CiF editors evidently think it’s perfectly acceptable for this same commentator to openly justify war against non-Muslims “in the furtherance of Islam” on the pages of the Guardian.

In the context of the Guardian’s continuing righteous condemnations of right wing political incitement, their decision to sanction an open advocate for violent religious extremism represents yet another example of their appalling moral hypocrisy. 

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Dec 7 2010

The moral half of civil disobedience is that you accept the consequences that come with it.

This essay, by Christopher Hitchens, was posted at SLATE on Dec. 6 (the day before Assange’s arrest in the UK on rape charges in Sweden.)

In my most recent book, I reprint some words from a British Embassy cable, sent from Baghdad to the Foreign Office in 1976. The subject is Iraq’s new leader. His quiet coup d’etat is reassuringly described as “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958.” It is added, as though understatement were an official stylistic requirement in official prose, that although “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.” Admittedly, these words were used before the “smooth transfer” had been extended to include Saddam’s personally supervised execution of half the membership of the Baath Party. But Saddam already had a well-established addiction to violence and repression.

I came across this cable after it had been declassified a few years ago, and I reprinted it because it very accurately reflected the tone of what I’d been told by British diplomats when I was visiting Iraq at the time. And I ask myself: What if I had been able to get my hands on that report when it was first written? Not only would I have had a scoop to my name, but I could have argued that I was exposing a political mentality that—not for the first time in the history of the British Foreign Office—chose to drape tyranny in the language of cliché and euphemism.

But what else, aside from this high-minded ambition (or ambitious high-mindedness), ought I to have considered? A democratically elected British Parliament had enacted an Official Secrets Act, which I could be held to have broken. Would I bravely submit to prosecution for my principles? (I was later threatened with imprisonment for another breach of this repressive law, and it was one of the reasons I decided to emigrate to a country that had a First Amendment.) The moral “other half” of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it.

Read the rest of the essay here.

Dec 5 2010

Exclusive: Teletubbies to write political analysis for CiF

O.K. – that’s not true (as far as I know), but to be frank, were Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky Winky to rise to the challenge, they certainly could not have come up with anything less puerile than the ‘analysis’ of the U.S. Embassy cables  leaked by WikiFlops which appeared on CiF on November 29th.

A gaggle of commentators, including some of the most prominent conspiracy theorists around, produced a collection of absolute comedy gems which the Guardian apparently hopes to pass off as serious political analysis to readers it obviously considers to be both ill-informed and gullible.

Thus we have Seumas Milne trying to persuade us that the Arab leaders whom the leaked cables show as having expressed deep concern regarding the Iranian nuclear program don’t really want to take Tehran to task. According to Milne, they’re only saying so because they get money from America, and even if they do really mean it, they don’t count in his book because they’re lacking in proletariat credentials.

“The relentless global mobilisation of US power against Iran – and of Washington-backed Arab autocracies and dictatorships for an American attack on Tehran – is an ominous thread that runs through thousands of the leaked state department WikiLeaks cables published in the Guardian.”

As familiar as we are with Milne’s monochrome anti-Americanism which taints his view of almost everything going on in the world, even for him it is quite an achievement to reach the conclusion that “the majority of their people support Iran’s nuclear programme and believe it would be “positive” for the region if Iran did develop nuclear weapons” on the basis of one poll and in total ( and apparently willful) ignorance of the limitations of any poll which takes place in societies subject to relentless propaganda, high levels of illiteracy and low levels of freedom of information. Even if the average Egyptian or Saudi Arabian really does believe that the world will be a better place if Iran has nuclear weapons, that hardly seems like a good reason for Western analysts to jump on the bandwagon driven by people who, if asked, would probably also tell Milne that thieves should have their hands chopped off and adulteresses be stoned to death.

Next we have the rather colorful figure of Craig Murray with his contribution to the analysis.

“There is therefore a huge amount about Iran’s putative nuclear arsenal and an exaggeration of Iran’s warhead delivery capability. But there is nothing about Israel’s massive nuclear arsenal. That is not because WikiLeaks has censored criticism of Israel. It is because any US diplomat who made an honest and open assessment of Israeli crimes would very quickly be an unemployed ex-diplomat.”

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Nov 16 2010

What the Guardian won’t report: The inferior status of Christians under Islam

This is a guest post by Bataween of Point of No Return

The atrocity at Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad in which 52 Christians were murdered has set off a flurry of articles about Christians under threat of extinction in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda has declared Arab Christians a legitimate target. Even Robert Fisk of The Independent is sounding the alarm about a flight of Christians of Biblical proportions – and that was before the massacre.

First the Saturday people – now the Sunday people. Jews have been virtually wiped out in Muslim lands.  Now it’s the turn of the ancient Christian communities.  Forty percent of the Assyrian Christian population of Iraq has fled since the fall of Saddam.

“Shhhh! “– whispers Middle East analyst Chris Phiillips on CIF. Reports of the death of the Christian communities of the Middle East are greatly exaggerated: they will only ’ escalate fears of potential persecution’. Let’s not talk about the imminent demise of the Christian minorities,  or radicals will start believing in the ‘clash of civilisations’.

I hate to break it to you, Mr Phillips – but radicals already believe it.  They virtually shout ‘clash of civilisations’ from their mosques and minarets. Their ideology pits Dar-al Islam in a holy war or jihad against the infidels of Dar-al Harb. And in case Philips had not noticed, it is radical Islam which has declared war on non-Muslims, not the other way around. Radical Islamists have been around since the 1930s, burning down Coptic churches and Jewish homes and shops in Egypt. The massacre of Christians is not new either – some 3,000 Assyrian Christians were murdered in Iraq in 1933. Since then the Assyrians have thought only of emigrating.

The gist of Phillips’ argument is that not all Arab countries should be tarred with the brush of intolerance:

“Though anti-Christian feeling may be rising on the extreme radical fringe of sole Arab societies such as Iraq, this should not obscure the harmony that has long been a characteristic of other parts of the Arab world.”

‘Secular’ Arab regimes in particular treat their Christians as well as any totalitarian dictatorships could, it is claimed.  As evidence, Phillips cites the fact that most of Iraq’s displaced Christians have fled not to the West but to Arab states, notably Syria and Jordan. It is true that the ruling Alawite minority – considered heretical by Sunni Muslims – likes to show solidarity with the Christian minority in Syria.  Ten percent of Syria’s population are Christians, religious festivals are observed and the state even gives free electricity and water to churches, Phillips tells us.

In spite of Syrian ‘tolerance’, Philips does recognise that numbers in Syria have been dwindling. But he does not  say that since the late 1960s private Christian schools have been suppressed, nor that the Armenian Christians of Syria are leaving at a particularly high rate: the government has banned their associations, publications, the teaching of their language and their political party.

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Nov 16 2010

Iraq’s disappearing Christians, and the Guardian Left’s disappearing sanity

“When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame United States policies of one hundred years ago. But then they always blame America first.” - Jean Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under Ronald Reagan

The Guardian Left’s propensity to blame the U.S. and Great Britain first – while avoiding expressing such opprobrium for brutal dictators or Islamist terrorists – is truly legion, and was on full display in CiF columnist William Dalrymple’s piece on Nov. 12 entitled “Iraq’s disappearing Christians are Bush and Blair’s legacy.”

He begins:

“When George W Bush sent the US into Iraq in 2003, he believed he would be replacing Saddam Hussein with a peaceful, pro-American Arab democracy that would naturally look to the Christian west for support. In reality, seven years on, it appears that he has instead created a highly radicalised pro-Iranian sectarian killing field, where most of the Iraqi Christian minority has been forced to flee abroad.”

So, George Bush “created” a highly radicalized pro-Iranian…[Christian] killing field.”  Of course, the Islamist terrorists who, you know, actually engaged in the killing seem to bear no responsibility for the brutal murders they committed.

Dalrymple continues:

“Before Bush senior took on Saddam for the first time in 1991, there were more than a million Christians in Iraq. They made up just under 10% of the population, and were a prosperous and prominent minority…Of the 800,000 Christians still in Iraq when Dubya unleashed the US army on Saddam for the second time, two-thirds have fled the country.”

At this point I’m not sure if Mr. Dalrymple is a troll – deployed secretly by conservatives in the UK to discredit the left by advancing arguments which seem to long for the days of the Butcher of Baghdad. (See my post about the “glory days” of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq here)

A CiF commenter summed up Dalrymple’s descent into post-colonial lunacy, and liberal racism, best:

Treat the Arab world like adults?  My guess is that Mr. Dalrymple never thought of such a crazy idea.

Nov 3 2010

The unbearable moral inversion of CiF correspondent, David Wearing

The Islamic State of Iraq, al Qaeda’s front organization, claimed credit for the massacre, on Monday night, at the packed Saint Joseph Chaldean church in the heart of the Karrada district, in Baghdad, that killed 52 Iraqi Christians.

Al Qaeda in Iraq also threatened to carry out attacks against Christian churches across the globe.

“Afterwards, various attacks will be launched against them inside and outside this country, in which their lands will be destroyed, their strength will be undermined, and they will be afflicted by the humiliation that God ordained for them,” al Qaeda said.

Chaldean (pronounced KAL-dee-en) Christians are an ancient ethnic minority of Catholics who make up about 4 percent of Iraq’s population. More than 600,000 of them, half the Chaldean population in Iraq, are thought to have fled the war to neighboring countries over the last several years as Islamic militants have targeted them in viscous campaigns of murder, kidnapping for ransom and forced property expropriations. Chaldean Christians represent about two-thirds of all Iraqi Christians.

Indicative of the Guardian left’s continuing efforts to blame all of the world’s problems on America, the UK (or the West, more broadly), CiF contributor David Wearing tweeted the following in response to the bloody attack in Baghdad on Monday.

David Wearing’s Twitter profile:

First, Wearing is attacking  a straw man.  Nobody with any sense reacted to the Church massacre by asserting that the incident proves Arabs are pathologically inclined to massacre each other.  More importantly, his inference that diverse religious and ethnic groups (including Christians) were living in freedom and harmony in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein is simply breathtaking.

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Aug 12 2010

BBC Series: Useful Idiots, from Walter Duranty to George Galloway (How intellectual curiosity can mutate into active promotion of dangerous lies)

These video clips are from the BBC Documentary: Useful Idiots, hosted by John Sweeny.

In political jargon, the term “useful idiots” was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.

Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and the public of the Utopian (rather than Dystopian) nature of the society.

In part one (the first three clips) John Sweeney looks at Stalin’s Western apologists.

In part two (the last three clips) he explores how present day stories of human rights abuses across the world are still rewritten.

(H/T to MuggedbyReality and Harry’s Place)

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