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.