Commentary magazine on the Islamification of British patriotism

posted at 7:34 pm on November 24, 2006 by Allahpundit
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Krauthammer took Sacha Baron Cohen out to the woodshed today for working so hard to make Americans look like anti-semites when he could have simply donned a yarmulke, strolled through any of the more “diverse” precincts of London — or Paris or Brussels or Berlin — with his cameraman and let us watch the real thing unfold. How bad has it gotten? Spend ten minutes with this long, incisive, and relentlessly depressing essay from Commentary magazine about bipartisan “anti-Zionist” feeling in Britain and see for yourself. Quote:

The loathing of Israel, once confined to oppositional groups, has penetrated to the very core of the British establishment. At the height of the Lebanon war, two peers of the realm reportedly came to blows within the hallowed precincts of the House of Lords. Apparently, Lord Janner, a prominent spokesman for Jewish causes, said something about Israel’s right to self-defense that so enraged the octogenarian Field Marshal Lord Bramall that he was moved to assault his seventy-eight-year-old interlocutor. One might have supposed that, like misogyny, anti-Semitism had ceased to be a characteristic vice of the English upper class; this incident suggests that it is back with a vengeance…

British Jews, themselves overwhelmingly middle-class and educated, are thus faced with a nightmarish choice: to repudiate Israel or to lose their liberal credentials—if not, indeed, their British credentials. The perverted reasoning goes like this: since Israel is at fault for inciting Islamist terrorism in England, those who refuse to dissociate themselves from Israel are acting against the British national interest. This argument can be conveniently adapted to suit leftists or rightists, internationalists or isolationists, the prejudices of the ignorant or the convictions of the sophisticated.

The first political casualty? Tony Blair:

By the time a ceasefire was brokered in Lebanon, leaving Israel frustrated and Hizballah largely intact, most of Blair’s cabinet had concluded that his support for Israel and George Bush—both integral to his neoconservative convictions—had become an electoral liability in a Britain where the Muslim vote might well swing the next general election. And so the stage was set for a very British coup. In the dog days of August, a plot was hatched to force Blair out in favor of his old rival, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. After two weeks of frenzied maneuvering, and facing the prospect of open revolt, Blair finally gave way, announcing that the party’s conference in September would be his last.

The British establishment had suffered a collective nervous breakdown. Unnerved by the threat of internal as well as external terrorism, chafing under the yoke of a strong leader who had forced it to leave its European comfort zone and face up to the clash of civilizations, it panicked. Only a year after Blair had overcome the nation’s doubts about the invasion of Iraq to gain an unprecedented third term for Labor, he was being forced into a humiliating exit. Thus did the response to Israel’s war with Hizballah become the catalyst for the most shameful betrayal of a prime minister since the ouster of Margaret Thatcher by her own party in 1990.

The Guardian published a brief, mild defense of Israel by former Labour MP Lorna Fitzsimmons in today’s issue. E.g.:

We live in dangerous times when, in parts of the left especially, you can’t be a friend to Islam or to Muslims unless you are anti-Israel. That is exactly what al-Qaida wants us to think…

Israel needs a serious interlocutor so that peace can stand a chance. So my question to the left is this: why not concentrate your attention there, rather than on the one player in the region who has always been serious about peace?

Go see the reaction she got in the comments.

If you can stand any further discouragement, The Tyee wonders why Canada’s left has shunned progressive Islamic groups like the Muslim Canadian Congress, which prays for the saftey and success of the country’s soldiers in Afghanistan, in favor of jihadists and their sympathizers. Answer: because when push comes to shove, they don’t give a rat’s knob about progressive values. It’s the adversarial, counterculture posture that they covet. Radical chic, in other words. Or sheikh, as the case may be.

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