The Gaza Syndrome

Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician, in a recent address to the Dutch parliament, claimed that Europe was falling victim to the Stockholm Syndrome, where a grateful captive identifies with the captors. He illustrated this by the case of a left-wing Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, who in November 2008 was abducted by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. She was held captive, raped repeatedly, and released after six days for a ransom of 100,000 euros. After her ordeal, she acknowledged that her captors “did horrible things to me,” but added in several media interviews “They also respected me,” and emphasized “They are not monsters.” The efforts made by European leftist elites to “understand” Islamists – in spite of atrocities committed in cities from London to Madrid, seems to Wilders to be symptomatic of a sort of pan-national Stockholm Syndrome. Effectively, the Islamists can do no wrong; this is their culture, this is how they are.

Much as a paedophile grooms his victim, so have many media in Europe groomed their audiences towards a type of inverse phenomenon, a notable example being the BBC during the recent Gaza campaign, in which the Israelis can do no right. We might call this the Gaza Syndrome. For example, we read during that campaign that the Israelis were allowing only “minimal” amounts of aid into Gaza, instead of wondering why an army should be supplying its enemy during a war. And complaints about injured Gazans (even combatants) having to queue at the border to be allowed to enter Israel for hospital treatment; instead of wonderment that an enemy power was putting its medical facilities at the disposal of its adversaries.

The recent Amnesty Report on Gaza – equating the IDF actions in defence of its citizens with the Hamas aggression - was only too predictable. Now we will shortly have a further opportunity to see the Gaza Syndrome in action with the forthcoming Goldstone report, which Alan Dershowitz has sceptically described as a Kangaroo Investigation.

And so it goes on.

Lessons from Japan and Costa Rica

What connects Japan and Costa Rica? Apart from the fact that Japan has been one of the most successful economies in the World, and that of Costa Rica one of the most successful in Latin America?

Here is a clue: excerpts from the Constitutions of these two countries:

Constitution of Japan.
ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Constitution of Costa Rica
ARTICLE 12. The Army as a permanent institution is abolished. There shall be the necessary police forces for surveillance and the preservation of the public order.
Military forces may only be organized under a continental agreement or for the national defense; in either case, they shall always be subordinate to the civil power: they may not deliberate or make statements or representations individually or collectively.

So -these two successful states are essentially demilitarized. Now let us turn to Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt,who will take over the EU presidency in July. This representative of what is arguably one of the most anti-Semitic* and anti-Israel states in the EU, in a predictably hostile reaction to Netanyahu's proposal for a demilitarized Palestinian state [Bar-Ilan speech, 14 June 2009] said "The fact that he uttered the word state is a small step forward," but added "whether what he mentioned can be defined as a state is a subject of some debate."

Well, Mr. Bildt, do you have doubts that Japan and Costa Rica are "states"?

If not, then why does the absence of an army destroy the legitimacy of a putative Palestinian state in your eyes?

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*Zvi Mazel, who served in Sweden as Israel's ambassador in 2004, told a Swedish newspaper that "Sweden is among the most severely anti-Semitic places" with "daily agitations in the media to kill Jews."

A Modest Proposal….

with Apologies to Jonathan Swift

Some 280 years ago, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift offered what he termed a modest proposal for the alleviation of the plight of the poor of Ireland ¹. Noting that the children of these impoverished classes were an embarrassment due to their number, taking up both space and consuming food, he proposed that the parents should simply eat their children.

Having returned to their ancestral historic homelands of Judea and Samaria after 2000 years, the Jews have once again settled the land, creating fertile soil where there was wilderness, and towns where there was empty desert.

However U.S. Secretary of State Clinton has demanded that these settlements stop “natural growth”.

Clearly as far as she is concerned, the children of the settlers are, in Swift’s terms, a burden to the country – in this case the “country” presumably being the United States. Arresting natural growth seems a difficult feat to achieve, but perhaps not impossible, if one follows Dean Swift’s advice. Why is what superficially appears a drastic proposal necessary? Perhaps the Jews of these areas should cease to procreate? But as Tacitus, the Roman historian writing about the Jews of Judea some 1900 years ago, noted: “as a nation, they are singularly prone to lust”, such a proposal would seem unlikely to be greeted with universal approbation. And for the orthodox settlers, birth control and universal abortion would also appear to be unacceptable.

So we are forced to return to the good Dean’s modest proposal. However there is a problem here too. Following the strictures of Leviticus, while children are clearly animals, and although one may be uncertain as to whether or not they “chew the cud”, I fear that in spite of respectable medieval Christian sources to the contrary, they rarely if ever appear to have cloven hooves. So, with regret, we must abandon the good dean’s undoubtedly well-intentioned helpful suggestion.

Thus we can understand that, notwithstanding Bibi’s wish to acquiesce to Obama and Clinton’s every whim, this is one point on which he must, albeit regretfully, demur.




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¹ A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland
from being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and
For Making Them Beneficial to The Public. By Jonathan Swift (1729)

Our magnificent Boys in Blue….

At last the British Bobby has regained his resolve. Confronted on April 1st by a crowd of G20 protesters, many of whom being desperate pensioners – but some as young as 75 – the British Bobby made up for previous shortcomings. Recall that during the London Islamic riots – er, sorry, peaceful protests about Gaza - of 10th January in Kensington, a cowering phalanx of Boys in Blue retreated before violent Muslim hooligans – er, sorry, justifiably Enraged British Youth – and indeed suffered injuries. Boys in Blue: 3 down. And they watched discretely from the sidelines while a respected member of the British Respect Party urged the mob to trash shops in the High Street – which of course the mob proceeded dutifully to do, without let or hindrance.

But our Guardians of the Peace really did their duty on April 1st. As the Guarniad reported,
“at least 10 protesters sitting down in the street close to the Bank of England were left with bloody head wounds after being charged by officers with batons at around 4.30pm. One woman, said to be an Italian student, was carried off unconscious.” Tally so far for our brave Caribinieri? Blue casualties:0. Red casualties:10. And I am not counting the subsequent toll; “Injured demonstrators with bleeding heads and necks were ushered through the crowd while others handed out milk so that people could wash the pepper spray from their eyes and mouths.”

How’s that for “proportionality”? My mathematician friends tell me that this gives a ratio of – infinity in favour of the Blues! Israel–so-called-Defense Forces, eat your hearts out!

Let this be a warning to future Hunt protesters, unemployed marchers, bankrupt pensioners, indeed any peaceful protest.

But somehow I don’t think our Enraged British Youth have anything to worry about.

It’s all the fault of the physicists..

About 50 years ago, when I was a fresh graduate student, I wrote to the eminent nuclear physicist Amasa S. Bishop , who worked in fusion research, for advice on embarking on a career in nuclear fusion. He told me not to bother “The solution is not for your lifetime”.

Maybe he was right. When he died in 1997, fusion research was in progress, but still as far as ever from accomplishing the holy grail of getting more energy out of controlled fusion than one put in. In the year of his death, the Joint European Torus (JET) produced 16MW output equivalent to 65% of input power for half a second. Recent reports about the ITER
Reactor[1] are more hopeful. It now appears that a working reactor may be on line in 2018.

What has this got to do with the “Jewish Question”?

The reason why I posed my question as a starry-eyed student to Bishop so many years ago was that we had just witnessed the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1956. And even then it was clear to me that if the world had the limitless clean energy promised by fusion power, the trump card for Arab blackmail of the West – oil – would disappear, leaving room for an equitable solution to what subsequently proved to be an ongoing crisis.

To be fair to the physicists, just like space exploration, this is an engineering problem. The physics of fusion is well-established, just as the maths for space travel was solved by Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. So had the United States been as far-sighted as I all these years ago, and put as much effort into the fusion problem as they subsequently did into Space Research, they would have avoided all the problems of the Middle East which have caused so much bloodshed and trauma, not least to the Americans.

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[1] ITER was an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but political correctness concerning the negative connotations of the word "thermonuclear" led officials to change the official provenance of the name, attributing it instead to the Latin word for "the way".

Bad News from France (??)

One of the hazards of the Electronic Age is the easy propagation of viruses – and more insidiously – of hoaxes. The latter art form has become so prevalent that, as the virus disables your computer, so the hoax email disables one’s ability to trust the content of anything on the web, without undergoing a stringent and time-consuming confirmation procedure. Perhaps this latter is not without its benefits, as of course as far as the print media are concerned one has long since learned not to accept anything on trust.

One hoax-virus which circulates incessantly, seemingly from the United States, is entitled “Bad news from France” (sometimes adding “Real Bad News?”)

This HOAX has been circulating since at least 2002 - when there were serious (but not anti-Jewish) riots in France, but probably before that, since some of the events it details date from much earlier. I have been receiving it for some time and have responded on several occasions. Usually a boycott of French goods is proposed .

The French Bad News Hoax was reported as "current news" by Arutz Sheva in 2005 but when their reporter asked a French Jewish community representative about the accuracy of such "reports" they write

Manek Weintraub, a leader in the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) told the British website TotallyJewish.com, "So far nothing has happened. There was a Molotov cocktail that seems to have been hurled at a small synagogue but nobody really knows about it. It [the riots] will concern the public authorities but Jews are largely absent from the story, which is welcome."

Several attacks worldwide - including France- were reported against Jewish targets in 2002 (this year appears to be a peak for such incidents when some events apparently related to those of the hoax email may have happened) reflecting events in the Middle East and largely instigated by Muslims: the following events appear verbatim in a 2002 Blog

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire.
In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed
Jewish sports club in Toulouse attacked
In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team
A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France.
A Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France.

and so date from at least pre-2002.


But how far do you go back? During World War II there were of course much worse events to report - but this hoax purports to report current events. If you add all the anti-Semitic attacks in any one country over a long enough period you would come up with a horrific catalogue - but France has been extremely good in recent times both at living up to its WWII past, and also for its robust actions against Islamic extremists - unlike, say, the UK or Scandinavian countries.

Arguably one of the most anti-Semitic states in the West today, on a numerical basis, is the United States. Universities all over the US are centres of Jew-baiting and anti-Zionist activity. Charges against Jews are made by "academics" (Walt, Mearsheimer) , even an ex-president (Carter), culminating with the recent near-appointment of Charles Freeman to the Obama administration. Nobody of Jewish origin has ever been or ever could be head of State in the US, unlike France where President Sarkozy loudly proclaimed his Jewish origins before his election – and France has already had one fully-Jewish President (Alexandre Millerand) and several Jewish Prime Ministers. In the United States, for example, Madeleine Albright was confirmed as the 64th Secretary of State, but had concealed the fact that she was Jewish in order to obtain this office (although as a historian she should have known her origins and had stayed with her sister – an Orthodox Jew).

However, as far as I can ascertain, nobody is circulating “Bad news from the U.S.” nor advocating a boycott of American goods.

Diplomats and fonctionnaires

Apparently Rowan Laxton, a senior diplomat at the Foreign Office, has just been arrested for inciting anti-religious hatred. He is alleged to have screamed in a gym

‘F**king Israelis, f**king Jews’. It is alleged he also said Israeli soldiers should be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’. His rant reportedly continued even after he was approached by other gym users.

For more details see Melanie Phillips’ blog.

But one wonders why this man has not yet been sacked from his government job. Civil servants are supposed not to express even rather mild political or other opinions, as their job traditionally requires complete neutrality.

About a year ago, the French media reported that the Sub-Prefect of Saintes (Charente-Maritime) , a certain Monsieur Bruno Guigue, was dismissed from office by the French Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie. His offence? He “criticized, without subtlety, the US and Israel” in an internet publication destined for French-speaking Muslims, a diatribe characterized as being “violently anti-Israeli”.

This is of course not as vile as the anti-Semitic rant of Mr Laxton.

Why is our government so slow to react against civil servants who are racists or, more specifically, anti-Semites? What would the reaction have been had the rant been anti-Islamic?