Joined Up Thinking?

Former Mi6 boss John Sawers has turned up on CNN where he was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour in a manner that leads one to speculate that he might have been spending some time in Qatar of late.

For he was touting a clumsily westernised version of the Islamist vision for the Middle East, a zone which would be naturally joined up as one big happy Arab Muslim family but for those intrusive, divergent, meddling, alien, Jews in Israel.

I’ve grown used to the likes of CNN and the BBC wallowing in / pandering to ignorance about the Middle East, but there is one moment in this interview which truly blows my mind: Britain’s former spy chief describes the Druze as Arab Muslims.

Beyond the fact that he might thus be confusing them with the Alawites, there are two possible explanations for this ‘slip’, and neither are very encouraging.

Either Sawers is genuinely a rather astonishing ignoramus who should never have risen to the position he held at MI6, or he is cynically spreading misinformation which serves to distract attention from the plight of the Druze (and the reasons for it) and the rationale for their de facto alliance with Israel in opposition to a 'joined up' Syria currently run by former members of Al Qaeda.

It is perhaps true that it suits Israeli strategic interests that Syria remain ‘disjointed’, but some of these fault-lines over the border are ethno-religious and have profound historical roots.

The Druze, along with the Jews, Yazidis and Christians of the region have spent the past millennium actively avoiding being ruthlessly ‘joined up’ at someone else’s convenience, specifically by either expansionist European or Turkic/Arab Muslim imperialists.

Why should the UK sign up now to be part of a lossy de-fragging process?

We played a key role in Jewish post-colonial self-determination (and so now Balfour gets his Oxford portrait slashed by morons), but allowed many of the other minorities in the region to be ruthlessly submerged, perhaps in the optimistic belief that Arab nationalism would end up being inclusive and non-theocratic.

Portraying Israel as the sole 'anti-social' entity in this mix simply bolsters the self-serving Jihadist narrative.

Yes, we can indeed hope that all these peoples will become less disjointed in the sense that they all stop trying to wipe each other off the map, and I am aware that the majority of the most stable and successful multi-ethnic societies have been large territorial empires, but we surely cannot lend our support to a regional vision which treats all minorities and their aspiration to be free from interference by an authoritarian, domineering Islam as an aberration.

And in this case Sawers is telling us that the Druze already are Muslims, so we need not fret ourselves too much about the genocidal violence that has been directed at them. 

And by all accounts, judging by the truly epic absence of relevant campus protests, we have not been.

Wicked Witch Sin Visa

That trip to Disneyland isn’t happening any time soon...

And you’d have to admit this denial of visa is fully deserved. 

Francesca Albanese’s latest ‘report’ was an almost textbook example of partisan bias and anyone who dared to point this out was immediately blocked by her on X, behaviour completely unfitting of anyone operating under the UN banner.

In a document which pointedly highlighted ‘lucrative’ elements of the conflict, she somehow failed to mention, even once, Hamas and its billionaire mobsters, nor Hezbollah, and of course its presentation was greeted by a chimpanzee chorus of screeches from the likes of Iran, Venezuela and Qatar.

I have some direct — inside the Manhattan tower — experience of the UN, from the mid-80s, when its ideological corruption and corruption corruption was already all too obvious to my junior self.

No matter how serious the abuses one is striving to expose, some attempt at balance, at acknowledging the polyvalence of perspectives surrounding these sort of issues, surely ought to be the primary obligation of a multilateral body, such as the UN.

Her even more brazenly antisemitic and terror-touting husband Massimiliano, a World Bank employee in Tunisia, has ties to the PLO which represent a conflict of interest at best. 

Neither of them should be allowed anywhere near international organizations.

And as a trained lawyer Albanese should know just how wrong it is to repeatedly and publicly associate the commission of a crime (genocide, in this instance) with individuals or collectives, when they have never been found guilty of such in a court of law and when the evidence which might be presented therein appears sketchy at best.

Instead this gaslighting ‘rappoteur’ has become one of those legal professionals, rather like our own Rafael Curruchiche — similarly sanctioned by the US State Department — all too obviously dedicating this high viz, profound responsibility stage of their career to blatant distortions or indeed inversions of reality, which the vast majority of us can readily appreciate with or without the Albanese propaganda filter.