Kill! Kill! Kill! For Peace

As some of my readers have observed recently in comments to the blogsite, I've been studiously avoiding making any comments on the Middle East situation. It's not that I don't have any views of course - I'm a member of Labour Friends of Israel, whose constitution touchingly defines the organisation as "friends of... Israel secure and at peace with her neighbours..."

The problem of course is trying to express an opinion while keeping the vegetables in line. It's bad enough when it comes to tower blocks in Dalston and apartment blocks in Cómpeta. But can you imagine the crap I have to go through with a Labour Group that includes Volunteers for a Brighter Kurdistan who think we are mounting a new Crusade, left-wing Socialist Zionists who want to fight for an entirely different Israel to the one that exists and supporters of right-wing Hasidic sects who think that Israel is a blasphemous abomination. And that's before I have to deal with the Catholics and the Buddhists. God!/Adonai!/Allah! I wish I'd read politics at Oxford instead of Bristol.

So - my views. I'll have to get them out quickly because Rafael keeps looking at me and tapping his watch.

As usual in any Middle East crisis there are a queue of worthy figures calling for a ceasefire - undoubtedly for the best humanitarian reasons. The Marxist-dominated BBC today reports a list of them comprising the names of almost everyone on the planet.

As usual what's missing is any empathy with the position Israel finds itself in. If you lived in a country 20 miles wide, much of which could be randomly shelled by artillery fire from neighbours, with a history as victims of genocide, after three wars of national survival and with a recent history of suicide bombings - wouldn't you rush out and carpet bomb everyone around you with phosphorus sticks?

What do the well-meaning ceasefire callers think would be achieved if a ceasefire came before Hezbollah has been disarmed, the kidnapped IDF soldiers returned and the entire population of Southern Lebanon driven into the desert?

A good analogy would be one where a monstrous pretender to the throne of England raised a terrorist army in a weak and defeated Scotland, armed it and preached the genocide of the English and the liquidation of England as a state. Suppose it was armed and financed by neighbouring Catholic countries, one of which subsequently developed independent nuclear weapons and some very unpleasant stinky cheeses. Wouldn't you march on Culloden and massacre the bastards? And wouldn't it be totally unfair if you were subsequently referred to as "the Butcher"?

Dealing effectively with neighbouring terrorists

How lucky we are that we don't have such neighbours or such a history, so our Archbishops and former Ministers can take the moral highground.

Thankfully there are two people on this planet named Tony and George who are standing firm behind Israel and I'm standing firm some distance behind them. If the IDF destroy Lebanon they will have struck a blow for the whole democratic world, not just Israel, as well as encouraging a whole new generation to set up excellent restaurants in the Edgware Road. I'm very content for that to be done "in my name". It's just the rest of Hackney Labour Party I've got a niggling little doubt about.

Bye the way, I expressed my views at a meeting in Stamford Hill recently, after which they confirmed on me the honorary title of "Meshugener of the Borough". I'm not quite sure what it means, but it makes me very proud.