Blame Game

The vast majority of positions people are taking regarding the conflict in the Middle East are basically silly and unhelpful.

One way I could illustrate this is to take each of them as they come and rework them into interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror.

So, Bono, for example, would be carefully trying to split blame between the bad boys of the Old Regime and the over-enthusiastic and over-committed newcomers.

This might seem like a more moderate and reasonable position than the one typically adopted by those who will instinctively suggest that the toffs had it coming or even ‘what actual evidence is there of guillotine usage?’ 

But historians are unlikely to be much impressed with either approach.

One thing you learn about bloody revolution is that the blame game essentially makes you an armchair participant and hobbles any attempt at serious analysis.

The October 7 pogrom started this new phase of the war just as the stormings of the Bastile and Winter Palace respectively started the two most famous European revolutions. Neither event is a self-contained explanation, but too often today ‘context’ is used more as a tool for suppressing sophisticated understanding rather than furthering it.

Deep-seated conflicts and radical upheavals in state power come about as a consequence of complex interactions between individuals, groups and the ideas which flow between and around them, plus a range of often peculiar, contingent circumstances, political, economic and social, which transcend — and ought to transcend — our ability to simplistically moralise about them.

Sanctimonious Hysteria

I have yet to come across the self-styled Anti-Zionist capable of succinctly explaining to me why their chosen creed is not just another, particularly noxious form of Antisemitism without immediately proceeding to do precisely the opposite.

The reasons for this ought to be obvious. For a start their typically urgent beliefs involve taking a stance on both Jewish civil rights and Islamist totalitarian fascism (and sometimes also on women's rights, minority rights and so on) which is wholly at odds with large sections of their otherwise cherished worldview.

For those for whom all this is little more than a form of socially-charged tribalistic cosplay, this may not matter all that much, but for those who care — genuinely care — the end result is typically a kind of sanctimonious hysteria...for they usually are aware on some levels at least of the cognitive dissonance and its unmistakable inference of bigotry, and this is simultaneously fed and partially disguised by an historical narrative spanning the spectrum from half-truths to outright lies: contortions, distortions, distractions, inversions; all present, along with an unwillingness to engage with alternative perspectives or any process of verification, such that in the end the final incompatibility they find themselves living with is that between the progressive ideal of free expression and their determination to bully all dissent into silence.

How the fire was stoked...

Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 — in a free and fair election according to the UN’s Special Rapporteur (piss taker) Francesca Albanese — vast sums of money have been spaffed by the ‘international community’ on aid and development in Gaza, much of which has either ended up back in Qatari or Iranian bank accounts or has been more domestically invested in the infrastructure of terror and repression…

Qatar ($2.5B), US ($1.5B), Germany ($1.2B), Saudi Arabia ($1B), UK ($800M), Sweden ($600M), Norway ($600M), Japan ($500M), Canada ($400M), Netherlands ($400M), France ($300M), Italy ($200M), Belgium ($200M), Switzerland ($200M), Denmark ($200M), Australia ($200M), Kuwait ($600M), UAE ($500M), Turkey ($400M), Algeria ($300M), and Iran ($1.4B to Hamas). Others: Ireland, Spain, Finland.

And if one were looking to find one specific group to blame for the horrors of this present conflict — conspicuously missing from Bono’s recent, equable dishing out of censure between both Israel and the Palestinians — are all these UN-filtered outsiders who, collectively, for a long period of 16 years, were simultaneously ignoring and stoking this fundamentally unstable, combustible situation.

Holocausts

This word, whole/holos, burnt/kaustos was first coined by the 12th century English chronicler Richard of Devizes to specifically refer to the practice of the deliberate mass slaughter of Jews, in London.

Some 800 years later, should you be strongly inclined to widen its usage to encompass what may appear to be similar phenomena, I would suggest that you are going to need to be 100% sure that your motivation is free of any anti-Israelite bigotry.

Some of the same concerns surround the use of the term genocide in reasoned debate right now, specifically the manner with which it is presently being deployed, libellously, by members of the 'Free Palestine' cult.

Before permitting this extra charge to the discourse, ask yourself why it is seemingly so important in the first place to this cause and its prevailing obsessions.

Three key reasons absolutely stand out for me.

1) It's their calling card for carefree detachment from all forms of strictly fact-based debate.

2) It distracts everyone from the rather blatantly fascistic and genocidal aspects of the Hamas — and wider Islamist — project, as well as from the import of those chants of 'from the river to the sea'.

3) It represents an attempt to downplay and ultimately delegitimise two millennia of Jewish historical experience, quite unique in terms of repetitive 'Holocaust' events. 

Fun at the Fringes

You won't ever catch the Guardian describing the Temple Mount as the ancient synagogue-turned-mosque, will you?

Cordoba's wondrous Mezquita, medieval not ancient*, has an even more convoluted history, as construction began during the Emirate in the late 780s, making use of the site and partial ruins of the christian Basilica de San Vicente.

From what I can gather from today's more informative news stories (not including the Grauniad) is that the fire and subsequent roof collapse took place in an area which reveals how the building was not simply repurposed like Hagia Sofia over in Constantinople — though there was a lapse of around 300 years before the new owners went full Trump on the old mosque, adding a cross-shaped baroque chapel of comparative gaudiness and vulgarity, smack in the middle of the combo-structure, which quite shocked us when we came across it during our visit in the early noughties.

Yesterday's incident has of course set off all the usual suspects in Spain. Like the 'How dare you refer to this building as a Mezquita and not La Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción' types. (Some may be suspecting that the see-saw cycle at this location is as yet incomplete.)

There is an abiding myth that Islamic Andalucía was an unlikely paradise of tolerance, diversity and cultural exchange. The reality was somewhat different.

Christians who did not immediately convert became dhimmis, sub-citizens who paid a special tax called the jizya. Those who switched to Islam were referred to within the hegemonic culture as muwalladun (or muladi in Spanish), a word derived from the language of cattle breeders, meaning “cross breed”.

Though some dhimmis, Christians and Jews, rose to prominence in the bureaucracy (largely because they were naturally detached from the existing pattern of loyalties in the regime) the majority were treated as inferiors and subjected to periodic oppression, executions and so on.

Yet what is really fascinating here is that while neither of the two competing blocks could in any way be described as broad-minded melting pots, some seriously interesting and important cross-cultural transfers were taking place as a result of MIGRATION.

For the people doing all the fleeing across the civilisational borders — such as the dhimmis who ended up as 'Mozarabs' in Spain or the Muslims who had lived under Christian rule and then made a beeline back to the Emirate — were escaping the constraints of forced social inequality and opened up new opportunities, not just for themselves, but also for their host societies.

* It's tempting to believe that this little slip was very deliberate on the part of the newspaper.

Immoral Asymmetries

One of the greater mysteries of Arab Palestinian grievance is what its adherents hope to achieve by continuously peddling their almost absurdly asymmetrical narrative. 

Do they imagine, for example, that their relentless demonisation of the Jewish state will reach some sort of tipping point that it will suddenly go 'poof' and vanish forever with no further unpleasant consequences for the region?

All the fundamental problems with the standard Arab Palestinian tale for global consumption were on display in Columbia agitator and former-detainee Mahmoud Khalil's recent interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein.

Khalil talks about the lack of legal rights enjoyed by Palestinians Arabs in Syria today and how his grandma's family were forced to depart a township called Tiveria, now situated within Israel. 

But he does not expand at all on the underlying circumstances. Indeed, he very specifically fails to mention the bloodthirsty pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of that same town in 1938, which you'd think might have played some role in his family's ultimate departure from it. 

Like a lot of those who identify as Palestinian Arabs, he focuses exclusively on his own sense of loss, but at no point recognises any of the following: 

1. That the original UN partition plan envisaged no major displacement of populations in situ.
2. That many of the Arabs who were eventually forced to move because of the war they had started were shifted out of the way not by Israelis, but in reality by other Arabs.
3. That many of those who ended up as hereditary refugees after the '48 war were not even long-term Palestinians proper, but trapped migrants that the other Arab states wished to use as political pawns. 

And most crucially, when we consider the strange yet relevant symmetries of grievance, that more Jews were displaced from around the Middle East as a result of this conflict they did not choose, than Arabs after the so called 'Nakba'. 

Khalil describes the October 7 atrocity to Klein as a 'desperate attempt to break the cycle', when what it surely more obviously represented was a desperate attempt by Hamas and its Iranian sponsors to head off the imminent threat of diplomatic normalisation: in other words, to continue the cycle at all costs. 

For peace to now have a chance, everyone in the region needs to able to anticipate an existence with a significant measure of security from ethno-religious aggression, having put away the various custom-made historical axes that they have been attempting to grind for over a century.  

And the various other big players, inside and outside the region, really need to stop making use of this conflict as a tool for the expression and even management of their own domestic social and political issues. (This is by no means limited to Arab nations any more.) 

It might seem 'fair' to compensate for the seemingly monstrous asymmetry in military might with a fabricated and also quite monstrous asymmetry in how the past is chronicled, pro-actively remembered and then disseminated, but this attempt at rebalancing has only served to add spin to the cycle and undermines the cause of peace overall. 

This means that right now, Palestinian Arabs in particular, ought to let go of their own exclusive, 'cosmic' sense of loss in how this has all played out. 

The long history of Islamic colonialism and oppression in this area cannot be made to simply vanish from the record by convincing a load of unlettered, radicalised-lite Americans that everybody else is the coloniser, the occupier, the would be genocidal maniac...never the poor, misunderstood Islamist. 

On some level every single Palestinian Arab in the Levant is descended from a conqueror — rather like white South Africans — and whatever their inferred rights may now be, they surely also have a certain obligation to play a tempered role in discovering a post-colonial solution which ultimately works for all the regional communities, especially those who were there before the Mohammedans came charging in. 

And beyond a subset of gullible nitwits, nobody is really buying their inverted narrative of occupation and loss, which is rather plainly geared towards a form of exclusively Jihadist RE-colonisation. 

Right now what is happening is terrible. It will end, as the last World War ended, when the bad guys are defeated and their system fully dismantled. Their bomb-blasted territory will almost certainly then be occupied by the victors, while a plan for the post-fascist, de-militarised future is then mooted, and, one supposes, funded. 

This is how these things nearly always go, certainly that's how it went for the Germans and the Japanese.

All discourse which aims to delay, distract, even deny this outcome, no matter how well it apes the language of humanitarian concern or righteous anger, strikes me as fundamentally immoral, because it will only function to extend the evolving calamity, and then 'the cycle'. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

You might say that Gareth Edwards was born to direct a Jurassic reboot (...or rebirth). 

His contributions, mainly in the extraordinary action sequences, are what makes this addition to the franchise so much fun, perhaps papering over the problems with plot and character, both in the main underdeveloped and under-utilised, even in the case of chuchitosaurus ('Dolores').

It's absurdly simple to predict precisely the munching order for the 'expendable' members of the ensemble.

A couple of smallish complaints that I'd level at Edwards are that he seems a bit better at composing mobile CGI beasties than static landscapes, and that in key moments his dinos seem rather sluggish and hesitant, as if they too have been handed the munch list and know who's on it and in which order they are to be snarfled.

Provocative Incitements

To the historically and culturally illiterate nitwits at this rag, praying at the most important site in Judaism is the equivalent of punctuating 'my heart goes out to you' with a straight-armed salute at a celebratory rally.

Unmentioned in this article, yesterday saw Jews worldwide marking Tisha B'Av, a solemn festival of mourning which commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples...and the ruins of the latter would be where, exactly?

There's a bit more to this 'provocative incitement' than a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed. Maybe now would be the time for one of those periodic reminders of how the Al-Aqsa mosque got there in the first place...

For it was plonked on top of Judaism’s most holy site, deliberately, not because the location was somehow especially sacred for Muslims, but as an act of calculated colonialist trespass and affront, a 'provocative incitement' no less, along the lines of what the Spanish elected to do to the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán/Mexico City and elsewhere. (Sure enough today one often sees individuals dressed as 'Aztecs' conducting rituals around the Catholic Cathedral which could best be described as non-canonical.)

Whilst besieging Jerusalem, Caliph Omar conceived the plan of demolishing the christian holiest of holies, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and building his triumphal mosque at that sacred location.

But the church survived, for the time being being at least — one of the Caliph's successors was less given to the path of compromise — as the Patriarch of now conquered Jerusalem, a wily Greek, 'persuaded' Omar that what he really wanted to do was humiliate the Jews, not the Christians.

All this is recorded historical fact.

I know that the Guardian doesn't seem to be much interested in facts any more, but anything else you might have picked up about this 'controversial' site and the origins and sacred significance of the structure on top are part of a mythological morass of self-serving fantasies that the Arabs and their all-encompassing political-religious ideology have woven around their presence in Jerusalem.

Should Jews be wont to cause offence by praying at this spot, good on them. It's what Guardian lefties often refer to as 'resistance'.

And, in theory at least, a variety of such in which no real hurt is done, except to feelings — it's just religious idiots doing what religious idiots do, and if some of these idiots choose to adopt a posture of intemperate, vindictive umbrage, that would be revealing, wouldn't it?

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.

Might almost certainly won't make right...

Indeed, it’s not nuclear projectile science, so to speak.

The region has become locked in a loop where the violence is either enacted to forestall further, greater violence or worse, entirely pathological.

Adding to this violence will never unlock a new level, featuring a possible conclusion to it all.

This would require one side to renounce violence, and in a sense I do really mean ONE side, because from the outset only the Islamists have shown absolutely no willingness to relent, to forge a stable, shared future.

Right now one side is suffering terrible violence largely owing to their continued obstinate determination to perpetrate it or at least project it onto the other.

The moment they declare an intention to stop, it all stops. 

This war is grounded, has always been grounded, in their refusal to settle for anything less than everything. Compromise, and a form of peace will almost certainly ensue quite rapidly.

One can all too easily become distracted by all the piled on complications (and commentary and politicised confabulations therewith) from appreciating that it really is that simple.

 

Can decisive action wait?

There surely cannot be any semblance of peace in the Near East until those who live and die for the dream of eradicating Jewish civilisation in the Levant have either sufficiently softened their perspective to the point of functional cohabitation or have been effectively contained by the combined actions of the majority of the interested nations around them.

All other scenarios are essentially heinous and present with the danger of further international contamination.

Some progress towards rapprochement/containment had been made prior to October 2023, but then the Iranian theocracy activated its assorted crazed clients around the region (and within the sometimes equally uncompromising and deranged western Left) — arguably quite seriously overplaying its hand…out of an apparent desperation to prevent a new detente — yet unquestionably also fostering a new level of intense and inhumane conflict which has already de-localised and could potentially drag on and lead to further chain reactions.

All any outside parties need to consider right now is what kind of decisive action (or credible threat of such) might be available to force a reset, putting the all or nothing obsessives back in their box.

Regime decapitation is the responsibility of relevant citizens, not outside parties.

Mountainhead (2025)

Is it me or are they really making movies these days in such a way that audiences are going to really struggle to decide whether they’ve seen something half decent or utterly dreadful?

Before watching this I’d seen a fragment of a review that described the dialogue as a ‘barrage’, and that’s basically all you need to know here. Like a game of buzzword bingo set to the pace of a bid caller at a Sotheby’s auction.

At times the words seem to detach themselves from the characters, leaving one with the sense that a familiar actor has been left stranded in the scene, his artificial soul having abandoned him.

There are a few laughs. The amoral tech bro caricatures are done well enough, but the drama feels superficial and forced.

Maybe it didn’t help that I live with someone who cannot abide scenes with loads of food and everyone appears too busy talking to eat, or indeed chopping away at an orange, but whenever the camera looks down, it’s still only in two pieces. 

The Surfer (2024)

 

In spite of what this publicity still might suggest, this is neither a Christmas movie nor indeed a surfing movie. It's very much a Nicholas Cage movie, and a psych-Aussies movie, but it also belongs to that noirish genre (does it have a name?) in which a male character arrives in an enigmatically detached and latently hostile location where his life starts to unravel at quite a lick.

If you liked Oliver Stone's U-Turn (1997) or Scorsese's After Hours (1985), then you will probably enjoy this, though as a caveat I would say there seems to me to be considerably more unrealised potential in this scenario, particularly in the final act.

 

 

The Wrong Candidate

 You can often identify an extremist simply by spotting how bad they are at affecting to be reasonable.

​This week I came across one of those diversionary, bad-at-being-reasonable posts which in essence claimed that Sharia courts in the UK are no different from Jewish and Catholic equivalents, the inference being that if you specifically take issue with Muslim community tribunals, you are basically a xenophobe or a racist.

This one of those false-analogy / hidden straw man arguments so beloved of contemporary 'progressives', grounded in a misrepresentation of both the underlying situation and any apparent concern being voiced about it.

To illustrate how this is really an anxiety about potential variations of culture and not about religious affiliation or indeed the nature of such institutions, I will relate a story from the Maldives in the fifteenth century.

These islands in the Indian Ocean were then governed under an Islamic political entity which could broadly be described as colourful. A vibrant society to be sure.

In 1460 they had an unexpected visit from the period's most famed scholar-traveller, Tangier-born Ibn Battuta.

To the Maldivians this appeared like an unmissable opportunity. How could they not want this man of almost unparalleled learning and knowledge of the world from the university of medieval life to be their most senior judge in Male?

They hoped to sweeten the offer with gold, assorted jewels, an official horse and litter, high-status wives, even a bevy of young slave girls.

The itinerant Mahgrebi reluctantly accepted...and then the whippings, amputations, dress-code impositions and all-round clamp down on the community's sexual mores commenced.

The problem, if indeed it’s a problem that one divines here, wasn't the court, it was the judge. (Or maybe the human embodiment of certain interpretational tendencies.)

Designated Foreigners

Anti-Colonial theory — which at its most simplistic and fanatical is little more than a binary moral judgment concerning the populations left behind as a legacy of imperialism, with precious little effort at analysis — possesses one really perverse stream whereby an ostensibly indigenous people, often a minority with a peculiar history relative to the previous situation, are assigned the role of foreign colonisers. 

This might be most obvious today in the Middle East, but in fact it has often taken its most toxic forms in Africa. If I had the time I would explain here why the Rwandan genocide could not have occurred without an imposition of some of these often deliberately muddled perceptions (along with essentially bogus ethnic categorisation) but another, easier-to-outline case is that of the Swahili peoples of the East African coastline. 

For hundreds of years before the ‘scramble for Africa’, these Muslim converts had acted as middle men between the trans-oceanic traders to their east (mainly Indians and Arabs, then later on, Portuguese) and the hinterland to their west, with its gold and other desirable commodities which were traded for Asian silks and such like. 

It is this long-term connection with the dreaded C word, commerce, or worse, Capitalism, that can prove deadly to any population once the post-colonial Marxist ideologues show up. The Swahili had emphasised to the Europeans that they were different, and once the Europeans had gone, demagogues from amongst the other Bantu-speakers were more than happy to designate them as foreign settler colonists, worthy of violent expulsion. 

In fairness, the historical choice they had made, avoiding the dangers of actual maritime trade, but exploiting their control of coastal access meant that they were also driven to exploit their pagan neighbours inland simply in order to maintain a certain lifestyle within their wealthy emporia, which included slaves. 

History is necessarily complicated, and it would be a fine thing if we could always so easily decide who the oppressors and the oppressed have been in any given situation, but that is basically the starting point of a certain ideological MO, and the irony is that it often leads to terrible conflicts between the people left behind after the most obvious oppressors have departed the scene.

Enraged vs Deranged

Terrorism is not a euphemism for a non-white person with a grudge. (And this usage, even by inference, should definitely be avoided in the mass media and by government spokespeople.)

Instead it might be said to refer to any individual (or group) that initiates a mass casualty event for reasons decidedly beyond the personal. In this case the Police have insisted that the Liverpool suspect’s actions are ‘not being treated as terrorism’ and yet they have revealed that he gained access to the restricted area by following an emergency vehicle, which does suggest to me a more than basic level of planning and intelligence.

And let’s face it, if he turns out to be an enraged Everton fan, and did this for (albeit disturbed) tribalist reasons, that would still be a form of terrorism, wouldn’t it? The fundamental drive does not need to be a geopolitical obsession.

And we’d then have to confront a further breakdown in the social order, whereby just about any extreme take on identity can lead to this explosive, culturally-absorbed kind of violence, albeit in copycat format.

I think we should be wary now of attempts to put this one down wholly to mental illness. The enraged and deranged parts of this act need to be identified and understood apart.  

This individual drove a large vehicle into a crowd, including children, intent on causing harm indiscriminately, stopping only because of people trapped beneath it, and if there were any motivations for this beyond any private peculiarities of psychology, then the UK authorities really ought to treat it as a watershed, ‘iconic’ moment in the public expression of hatefulness.

But if he really was just a random loon, there still need to be some significant learnings for all future mass gatherings, especially those which are inherently grounded in the expression of tribal identity. (See also Canada’s recent trauma at a Filipino food fair.)

The Myth of Tordesillas

One myth this map reinforces is that these two were global superpowers of the era.

Instead they were relatively impoverished small nations in a relatively impoverished section of western Europe.

 

This was an age of political and economic innovation and around 1494 the most expansive and successful empires in these respects were operating elsewhere: the Ottomans, the Russians even, but most of all the Aztec and Inca plus two in Africa we hardly ever hear about: Mwene Mutapa in the east and the empire of Muhammad Touré in the Niger valley.

The Ming were nicely consolidated as well.

What distinguishes the Iberians is their sudden and startling global reach, but this exploration was very much needs driven. 

The Portuguese, for instance, were welcomed into the wealthy commercial system of the Indian Ocean at first because they brought extra shipping capacity and were rather desperate and cheap, and it was thought at the time that this would ultimately benefit everyone. The Indian Ocean was a lucrative and predictable, self-contained system. Nobody had much incentive to push out beyond. 

Only later did it become apparent that the newcomers would use their superior ship-borne firepower in order to establish a kind of protection racket.

A word for the watermelon mob…

Please stop comparing Israel to the Nazis. Everybody knows why you do it and it is thoroughly obnoxious and offensive and you cannot pretend otherwise.

Sensible, important, ethical people — like the Pope, say — seem able to refrain from doing it, and that has to tell you something. 

In fact, while you’re at it, stop comparing anybody with the Nazis (unless like Elon, they almost certainly appear to be self-Hitlerising.) 

Any point thus made is inherently trite and it comes with the cost of trivialising history that surely needs to be remembered and understood correctly.

When it comes to Gaza, there is one big fat blockade from WWII that you might just want to latch onto — Leningrad — but even there the scale is quite staggeringly different. (1m dead civilians). I’ve visited the mass graves outside the city and I know that if I had family connections there today, I would not want the experience of any immediate ancestors to be appropriated willy-nilly for someone’s contemporary demonisation project.

That leaves one potentially appropriate modern historical parallel for habitual users and abusers of historical parallels. 

Not Germans…but Brits, in Malaya in the 1950s, where starvation was used cynically, and appallingly, as an almost unconscionable counter-insurgency tactic.

But be warned. Unlike the Nazis, us Brits are not off-the-shelf avatars of cosmic evil — at least not all the time — and if you do adopt this chunk of our history as an alternative ‘never again’ mace to wield against the dastardly Jewish state you will need to look beyond the strategy to the consequences. Nasty it most definitely was, but on some levels it was successful. 

Weaponised Crybullies

Is 'Free Palestine' responsible for the murder of innocents in Manhattan? It kind of depends on how it is conceived and then expressed, and the lines here are not so easy to draw.

It can be the verbal expression of either a political or a trans-political idea. In the latter case the very last thing those who say it are looking for is a conversation. 

In this way it can be one of those almost pure expressions of want, detached from need, and as such reflects a posture which is broadly common on both sides of this divide right now, sometimes formalised into a set of dogmas. 

Those who speak this way are, consciously absolving themselves from having to engage with the achievable.

Yet most have no discernible relationship with the achievable to begin with: they are, in the main, harmless if pushy windbags whose opinions seem not to actually matter, at least in regard to the real world events they ostensibly refer to. Julie Burchill has amusingly characterised this mindset as that of the 'crybully'.

Yet for a minority, this absolute and abstract discourse leads to a far from funny self-weaponisation, which can have genuinely unpleasant real world consequences, and there are two main sub-groups worth mentioning, both of whom appear to discover quite rapidly that the only available outlet for them is viciousness. 

These are, strangely enough, poles apart — those who are in a position to wield power without restraint, and those isolated by a perceived lack of any kind of power at all. 

The lashing out which results can be dressed up as 'self-defence' or 'resistance', and so on, but in this case it is nearly always maniacal and usually also self-defeating, owing to its essential disorder.

I find myself asking if there is something 'in the air' right now feeding these pathologies and certainly the cultural air we breathe these days is irredeemably cybernetic. 

Jean Baudrillard would undoubtedly have seen the problem here quite quickly: technology is making everything seem startlingly up close and personal with all events occurring in 'real time'. 

In such an environment, what he referred to as the 'phantasies' in our heads cannot easily be contained by these heads, they escape out into the immanent technologically-mediated world, where the distinctions between flawed reality and perfectibility have already broken down. 

We'd struggle to keep them in even if we wanted to, because we always have a way to expel them, almost immediately. 

And Baudrillard would have noted, I think, that it is precisely in that technologically-mediated instant when we simultaneously realise that the phantasy cannot remain just as phantasy —  and that it will never fit snugly (and thus peacefully) with the material circumstances outside of our minds — that a usually limited number of us are driven to 'act up'.