Systemic weakness of mind

Back in the early noughties an organisation with which I was working secured a contract with a Saudi firm, one of the leading corporations in the Kingdom.

When the account team flew out to Riyadh,their first meeting began with  'the client' delivering an extended one way lecture on why 9-11 had been such an important achievement for his nation and the Arab world in general.

In that same period I had a friend and former colleague who was touting the theory that 9-11 had been an inside job with likely involvement of Israel. 

At the time I put this down to a fairly harmless and forgivable intellectual weakness (like lunar landing denial), but twenty years on and he's still at it, and that particular derangement has since become far more systemic and wide-ranging and seems altogether more sinister, especially when it hides behind a veneer of righteousness.

Is there any limit to the anti-western terrorist atrocity that can be apologised for? The recent Letter to America TikTok phenomenon suggests that there may not be. 

As I have mentioned previously, the Nuremberg trials may have been the justice of the victors, but this is the justice that established international Human Rights law as we now understand it, yet the very global organisations responsible for upholding it seem to be losing sight of the key distinctions, such as the difference between indiscriminate collateral injury and death of civilians and extremely discriminate and barbaric slaughter of the same. 

It’s saying something that in a conflict featuring Hamas and Netanyahu the most reprehensible participants right now appear to be the ‘internationals’. This doesn’t surprise me all that much as I had some direct and rather depressing experience of the UN NGO department in New York in the 80s. Egotistical interference rather than objectivity was their primary impulse.

 

This week has given me reason to recall an excellent novel by Christian Jungersen — The Exception — set in the 'Danish Department of Genocide* Studies', which satirises the milieu and its all too familiar occupants very effectively. 

 

* Genocide is not a word that iOS will suggest automatically even if you have already tapped ‘genocid’. Missing a trick there.