Spectator, July 22, 2006
I find it hard to write about high life with the Middle East going up in flames. But I find it even harder to accept the fat cats in St Petersburg horsing around in the Konstantinovsky Palace while innocent civilians are being targeted by both sides in Lebanon and Israel. By speaking near an open microphone, Bush gave us an inkling of how the big boys think. (Cynically and with a closed mind.) ‘See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over...I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen,’ says the retard Bush to his poodle Blair.
The mind boggles. How can a man with such a simple mind run the world’s most powerful nation? No wonder the place is in such a mess. Does Bush really believe that a word from Assad will stop Hezbollah retaliating against Israel’s bombing of civilians? Does he really believe that some mad mullah in Tehran will order Hamas to give back the kidnapped Israelis and that it will all be over? The answer is YES. Bush sees the world in simple terms: Iran and Syria are the regional bogeymen, and all Kofi has to do is stop lining his pockets and to ask them to stop shelling Israel. After all, when the neocons and the Zionists told him to get rid of Saddam and terrorism would disappear, Bush liked the description of a slam dunk, and took the troops out of Afghanistan and sent them to Eyraq, as he calls it. He of the verbal virtuosity and epigrammatic wit is not dumb, believe it or not; he is obtuse and ignorant. In Texas, when an animal is sick and threatens to infect the herd, you kill the sick one and everything is hunky-dory. The same applies to the rest of the world.
Let’s take it from the top. Sure, Hamas and Hezbollah get their arms from Iran and Syria, but Uncle Sam does not exactly say ‘no way’ to Israel when it comes to weaponry. This is how the poor man in the Arab souk sees it. Violent resistance is determined by brutal oppression. Occupiers the world over will eventually be resisted by the people whose land they are occupying. You’d think someone in DC would have figured it out by now.
Here’s the way the Athenian sage sees it. In order to mask catastrophic American failures in Eyraq, Uncle Sam has given the green light to Israel to go bananas. All it shows is that decades of misguided policies by Israel and the US have taught nobody nothing. In the meantime, the pundits and their masters — the neocons — have put out the word. It’s Iran and Syria who are responsible for what is happening. This was always the neocon plan. First Saddam, then Assad, and then whoever runs the show in Eyran. Now hundreds are dead, including many children, numbers to be added to the thousands who have died in Palestine in the past six years. I always thought that the Geneva Convention was very clear about occupation. Those under occupation have the right to resist against the military. The latter, however, do not have the right to retaliate against civilians.
Hamas was elected in Gaza because the Palestinian Authority was unable to negotiate the removal of a single Israeli checkpoint. Checkpoints which make life impossible for any Palestinian to live even a less than normal life. If anyone disagrees, and I’m sure there are many, all they have to do is read Mona El-Farra, a Palestinian doctor’s dispassionate account of what it’s like living with fear and resolve. No access to drinking water, 22 hospitals without electricity, no fuel for generators because the borders in Gaza are sealed, children in intensive care and renal dialysis patients dying. Hundreds of operations postponed, absence of refrigeration, 30,000 children suffering from malnutrition. Yet when an Israeli soldier is kidnapped, while several hundred Palestinian women and children are locked up in Israeli jails, it triggers a response which has shocked civilised people everywhere, including, of course, in Israel.
Mind you, what really broke my heart was the lack of hate this brave woman had for the occupiers. She worries about her children, goes about trying to help the best she can without medical supplies, and blames herself for screaming when the bombs start to drop. If only some of those sofa Samurais, the neocons back in Washington, men who would sell their mothers and children to a brothel-keeper rather than serve in the armed forces or go near a war zone, would put themselves in Mona’s place for one day, one hour, even one minute. Not to worry. They are pundits, and they don’t do this sort of thing. God should not bless America for a while.