Tuesday 16 September 2014

4,000 protest in London to preserve the United Kingdom and 150,000 to protest against Israeli actions in Gaza

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Ben Judah in addition to being a wonderful writer and annoyingly young (25) has tweeted something which deserves to be republished here in its own post.
What does it say about London in the twenty first century that 4k people come out to protest breaking up Union but 150k for support Gaza?
The answer is clear. It says decadence. 

Why do Europeans care about Gaza and not Ukraine? I suspect because Ukrainians and (most) Israelis are white. If Israelis were massacring Yazidis not ISIS we should hear much more about it.

This is the tradition in British politics that wants a moral foreign policy, the people AJP Taylor wrote about in his own favourite of his books, The Dissenters. They were sometimes right as over the Crimean War, the Boer War and the Second Iraq War and sometimes wrong. Whether the Peace Pledge Union was wrong before 1939 depends on whether you think we were right to go to war in 1939. CND was wrong although the arms race was probably unnecessary and perhaps the Cold War was too.

6 comments:

  1. Why are you so obsessed with youth?

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  2. Because scottish nationalists are not killing people and demolishing their homes? Just because they disagree with your personal opinion that peaceful separatism is worse than genocide it doesn't mean that they are decadent.

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    1. Had Israel wanted to commit genocide they would have killed all the people in Gaza and the West Bank. Use words correctly. I think lack of interest in break up of our country is decadent
      So is Western guilt. I sympathise with the Arabs though not with Hamas but Palestine or the Holy Land or Israel or whatever it's called is a far away country of which we know little.

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    2. Just because the Israelis have not killed more Palestinians doesn't mean it isn't a genocide. The definition of genocide is "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". This is what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians for many decades. Keep up.

      Hmm so you quote from the appeaser Chamberlain. (Not such a great guy to quote from if you want to make a point!) But why do you assume that the lack of anti-independence protests is down to "decadence" rather than just a difference of opinion? I'm sure quite a lot of people in England would have preferred to see Scotland secede. Possibly they thought that it was a matter for the Scottish to decide?? The Gaza protests concerned all British people since it is the British government which supports Israel. Ironic that you are sad for Ukraine yet your attitude to Scottish independence is not so different from Putin's view of Ukrainians independence. Ukrainia was part of Russia even longer than Scotland was in the United Kingdom. So you do not think that the Scots should have been granted even some devolution? Why should English people feel threatened if Scottish people have more say in how their country is run, if that is what they want?

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    3. I sympathise very much with the Arabs but if the Jews wanted to destroy the Arabs they have gone a strange way about it since they have ruled the West Bank since 1967 and Gaza for much of that time and have neither sought to kill or drive out large numbers of Arabs. No-one thinks the Israeli invasion of Gaza was motivated by a desire to destroy large numbers of Arabs. The reasons good or bad or indifferent are well known.
      Genocide is exactly what the Arabs of ISIS or IS are trying to commit. Their victims are Yazidis and other Kurds but no one is protesting about this. I don’t know if trying to convert at gunpoint or expel Christians counts as genocide but this is what they are doing.
      Nevile Chamberlain’s stock has risen in my opinion since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Gadaffi.

      But why do you assume that the lack of anti-independence protests is down to "decadence" rather than just a difference of opinion? I'm sure quite a lot of people in England would have preferred to see Scotland secede.

      That’s true and is what I call decadence. But the ones who didn’t didn’t demonstrate.

      ‘Possibly they thought that it was a matter for the Scottish to decide?? ‘

      No one doubts that but it is in my view a sign of decadence that we think Gaza is more important.

      ‘The Gaza protests concerned all British people since it is the British government which supports Israel.’
      The British government supports lots of horrible regimes much nastier than Israel – such as China and Saudi Arabia. But does the UK support Israel?

      ‘Ironic that you are sad for Ukraine yet your attitude to Scottish independence is not so different from Putin's view of Ukrainians independence. Ukrainia was part of Russia even longer than Scotland was in the United Kingdom. So you do not think that the Scots should have been granted even some devolution? Why should English people feel threatened if Scottish people have more say in how their country is run, if that is what they want? ‘

      I don’t think the Scots should have been granted devolution actually but unlike Russia we are allowing a fair referendum - not sending the SAS into a democratic country and then annexing a chunk of it – so I think my attitude towards Scottish independence is very different from Putin’s attitude to Ukraine.

      ‘Why should English people feel threatened if Scottish people have more say in how their country is run, if that is what they want? ‘
      I want British people to love the Union – but if they don’t so be it. It is indifference and preoccupation with a distant country of which we know nothing and onto which we superimpose our own internal anguish – about in this case colonialism – that seem to me decadent. At least the Russians who strongly cheer the annexation of Crimea and back the ‘rebels’ in Donetsk, though mistaken, are not decadent.

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  3. What fun it will be tomorrow to demolish your singularly weak arguments!

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