I have not said much on the Israeli–Gaza war for a few weeks as it is always difficult to know what’s going on. I have been against a siege that involves cutting off food and medical supplies to Gaza from the beginning and remain so, although it should be noted the obligation to feed your enemy in a time of war is a new concept.
The announcement yesterday by British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer KC, threatening to recognise a Palestinian state following France, really sums it up though. My views on this are those that Melanie Phillips expresses: it’s monstrous. But it shouldn’t be surprising.
The fact that either Britain or France would recognise a Palestinian state while Hamas still holds hostages sums up the moral rot at the heart of Europe. I also think it is a form of trolling that Starmer announced this on the anniversary of the Southport massacre. In the days after that monstrous attack on a room full of little girls by a child of the immigration nightmare, the British state launched its own attack on the far-Right thugs — those who said enough, but in a violent manner. They had said enough in every previous election since I moved to London 20 years ago. They were ignored. As a result of the state cracking down on the disordered dissenters from “Diversity is our Strength”, Peter Lynch was “executed” and Lucy Connolly remains in jail to this day for a tweet. Yes, it is all linked.
It makes sense then that Starmer rolled out the lectern one year after Southport to talk about a Palestinian state. As the British state falls apart, it always makes sense to fight for the interests of someone far away. We already know where Starmer stands when it comes to the interests of the British people – he’s against them.
Do not be fooled into thinking this has anything to do with humanitarian concerns for the suffering of innocent children in Gaza. This Palestinian statehood fiction is being pushed at the very same time as the State of Europe is – quite frankly – falling to bits. I am not onboard with any state of Palestine project, the origins of which are questionable to say the least. It is morally wrong to push such a project whose main aim is to wipe out Israel.
This project has gained ground at exactly the same time as the Islamification of Europe. That is not a coincidence. With it has come the spread of a very dangerous antisemitic sentiment. The union of the hard Left – which has long hated Western nations and their “historical crimes of colonialism” – with antisemitic extremism within Islam has been very effective. There can be no surrender to either of these hatreds and bigotries.
But it is particularly galling to see the very same governments who have given their own countries away now talk about a “Palestinian state”. It is also galling that these governments, who have let some areas of their own country be taken over by Islamic extremism, now cloak themselves in the shield of human rights when talking about Israel–Gaza. It is no accident at all that it is Starmer – human rights lawyer par excellence – who has delivered the final blow and threatens to recognise Palestine as a state.
Human rights lawyers have used human rights treaties to hammer Europeans into taking every Tom and Dick and Harry (although they are never called that) from every war-torn country, complete with its own vicious genocide, for at least the last 10 years. We were told we were fascist if we didn’t take what were mostly Muslim refugees from countries to the detriment of our own interests.
And then there was Gaza, a terrible war that Israel had to launch after the well-planned and executed slaughter of at least 1,200 of their own Jews. And have any Muslim countries offered safe passage to the Gazans trapped between Hamas, who use them as human shields, and Israel, carrying out a legitimate war? Of course not. They say that if they did offer refuge or safe passage, then this would be to “collude in a genocide”. Absolute total bullshit piled on utter nonsense, heaped upon self-hatred in the West, which puts no pressure on any Arab country to take in Muslim/Arab refugees. Only the West does that. It is absolutely bizarre.
I cannot figure out why the West and the Arab nations seem content to leave the Gazans in this piece of land while the bombs fall. If Europeans did that to fleeing Ukrainian refugees, condemning them to death and not offering safe passage, it would be non-stop shouts of fascism. While Europeans proclaim “refugees are welcome here,” the Egyptians keep their humongous wall on the border of Gaza firmly shut. Nothing is ever asked of Arab nations to help their fellow Muslims in Gaza. But Europe is always asked to offer safety to whoever turns up at the door or can hop into a boat in Calais. This has been an abject failure by the West, both on humanitarian grounds and on grounds of self-interest.
This war has indeed exposed the abject and total moral depravity in Western governments right now – but not in the way the mainstream media would lead you to believe. First, they have utterly failed to exert any pressure on Hamas or their proxies (mainly Iran) to release the hostages. They are barely mentioned now – clearly their lives don’t matter. They are Jews, so they must do what Jews always do: go off and die quietly.
Secondly, the West has utterly failed to put any pressure on Arab nations to offer safe passage, asylum or refuge to Gazans trapped in the Strip. It probably suits the agenda of many in the West to also have the Palestinians do what Palestinians do best – suffer for the eyes of the Western media.
First, that makes the Jews look bad. Secondly, a lot of people would be out of a job if those Palestinians were moved elsewhere (yes, it happens in history – it’s not ideal, but it’s not new) to live in peace instead of “dying at the hands of the Jews”. If that happened and the Strip was turned into a golf course, etc… then the entire Palestinian Suffering Industrial Complex would fall apart and a lot of people would have to find new jobs elsewhere.
So while everything goes to pieces in Britain, Starmer threatens to recognise Palestine for the Palestinian people. But you cannot have Britain for the British people, or France for the French people, or Ireland for the Irish (the oppression fetish of the Irish is a special, batshit crazy state of mind all of its own). Why is that?
I expect things will only get worse over the summer. Nothing I say or do can stop what seems to be some kind of suicide mission of the West.
Laura Perrins is a conservative commentator and former barrister. Subscribe to her Substack, where this article first appeared.
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(Photograph: Alisdare Hickson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
“The majority of men…are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and …are not accessible to reason, but only to authority” – Arthur Schopenhauer in 1857. (Today we would say people not men.)
That modern authority and sources of belief are the media, still the source of most people’s political awareness, was demonstrated in the week after Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The BBC, Guardian and radio such as LBC (radio is often overlooked) were questionning whether Israel’s response to Hamas was proportionate. I came across many parroting the idea that Israel’s response was not “proportionate”. But, when questionned they could not say what would be a proportionate response shoud be. Presumably, for them, D-Day and the subsequent push into Germany would have been disproportionate. They bombed London so we bombed Dresden, but El Alamein was a step too far?
As with Covid, official narratives are simply absorbed. I was shocked by way goverment ‘nudge’ worked during covid but merely despondent at the way Hamas propganda is reproduced as fact and has dominated the West more or less unchallenged by our media. Hamas propaganda finds particularly fertile ground among Muslims and the left wing middle classes.
We fed Germans only after the Nazis surrendered. By today’s standards we should have had aid convoys going to Germany ahead of the Allied armies. And just as the Japanese army preferred death to surrender so do Hamas. Yet, the bien pensant think you can have a human rights driven war with an enemy ideologically opposed to human rights.
I despair.
In response to the previous comment, we didn’t bomb Dresden because Germany bombed London. The war was effectively over long before Dresden was ever a target, and we had already bombed huge residential areas killing hundreds of thousands of innocent German women and children by then.
We bombed Dresden because we were led by evil murderers who were quite happy to burn women and children alive, so long as they were German.
Moot.
Just suppose for one minute that after they’d raped and slaughtered innocent Jews on 7th October Gaza had held the Israeli IDF retaliatory incursions, subsequently pushed them back out of Gaza and then continued further inroads into Israel murdering and raping as they went. … Do you think the ‘Stop the war coalition’ would have been bleating for peace today?
Pigs might fly.
I should think the word ‘justified’ would have been reached for.