How the media hated Mrs. Thatcher! A very British snobbery was the basic impulse. The op-eds used to make sure to remind readers that her views about politics and economics derived from her upbringing as the daughter of a grocer. A blue-stocking by the name of Lady Warnock, foremost among the great and the good, once said seriously that Mrs. Thatcher couldn’t be up to much because she bought her clothes at popular stores like Marks and Spencer, while others accused her of wearing a hat and a brooch as though imitating the Queen. And her accent was much mocked. Why, she took elocution lessons. I well remember the disdain with which fellow Conservatives up to the level of her Cabinet ministers used to speak about her. In the end, they contrived to get her out, and in the process wrecked their party.
Mrs. Thatcher has been out of office for years now. A widow, whenever she appears in public she looks frail and vulnerable. Roman emperors used to have a slave behind them whispering, “Remember you must die.” That is the spirit infusing today’s much-touted docudrama, The Iron Lady. The film opens with Meryl Streep impersonating Mrs. Thatcher as a sad old crone having trouble taking the top off a boiled egg. This is a metaphor for her whole life. Yes, the film-makers allow, she had her triumphs in her day, privatizing state concerns, making Britain competitive, regaining the independence of the Falkland Islands, but all was futile, a waste of energy. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity, this Mrs. Thatcher is at last revealed as someone with no grasp of reality, hallucinating about her dead husband Denis Thatcher. The film reaches some sort of emotional climax when she throws his wardrobe out, a scene surely as fictitious as it is displeasing.
I suppose it makes some people feel better to think that old age has caught up with Mrs. Thatcher and overwhelmed her. The film convinced me that as long as there is any living memory of her, such people will always believe that intelligence and will power were qualities unsuitable in a woman like her.
Thirty years ago, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. At least when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait, there was some reasoning behind his adventure, namely to grab vast oil reserves. The Falklands have nothing but flocks of sheep to offer. The 3,000 inhabitants are all British, unpretentious people not very skilled at speaking up for them. Unanimously they insist on staying British, and so they shall, if self-determination still has any meaning when applied to the British. Taking the Falklands, Argentina would have on its hands a die-hard group unable to accept the cultural change imposed on them. Another classic colonialist confrontation would arise as the police would have to begin arresting recalcitrant natives and deporting them to some gulag in Argentina.
The Prince of Wales is due to be posted in the Falklands. He is a helicopter pilot serving in the Air Force like any other airman. For Cristina de Kirchner, president of Argentina, however, the presence of Pilot Officer Wales is an intolerable insult to national pride. Dispensing with rationality or national interest, she is threatening another invasion.
In 1982 the Foreign Office advised Mrs. Thatcher to hand the Falklands over rather than defend it. And right on cue the second time round, a Foreign Office grandee by the name of Sir Christopher Audland writes to The Times that holding sovereignty over the Falklands brings no benefit but only substantial economic costs and political rows. Britain should negotiate transfer of sovereignty to Argentina. It is a wonderfully pure example of what the great Professor John Kelly called with memorable scorn, “the pre-emptive cringe.”
This Audland has had a long career of handing British sovereignty and self-determination away to others. He was in the team under Edward Heath negotiating entry into the European Union, lying to the public that this meant only joining a single market and there would never be any loss of independence. Whereupon this Audland became an official of the European Union, working to dismantle what was left of Britain’s historic identity. Where do these people come from, and why do they despise their own identity to the point that they must diminish and even vandalize it, institutionalizing “the pre-emptive cringe.”
The story of Omar Othman, known as Abu Qatada, ought to be a cautionary tale. The right hand man of bin Laden in Europe, associated with Muhammad Atta and other murderous Islamists, he has nevertheless contrived to make utter fools of the British. His instrument was the law. It turns out, unbelievably, that the Islamist damage he has done is far outstripped by the damage inflicted by lawyers.
Abu Qatada and his wife and children entered Britain in 1993 on forged United Emirate passports — reason enough, you might think, to deport them. A skilled claimant of every available welfare, he lived at a high standard off the British tax-payer. When arrested, he had a six figure account of money due to be remitted to al-Qaeda. Jordan was pursuing him on a murder charge. He claimed that one of the witnesses against him had been tortured. There appears to be no independent corroboration of this, only his say so. The deportation order worked its way for years through the appeal courts, until the Supreme Court finally came to the conclusion to return him to his home country.
Ah, not so fast. British law is splintering and there are plenty of lawyers willing to finish it off. The European Court of Human Rights, sitting in Strasbourg, was brought in on the case. All but one of them foreign nationals, the judges there also had no evidence that this putative witness in Jordan might have been tortured, but the mere possibility was enough for them. To return Abu Qatada might risk committing an injustice, infringing his rights. The government can appeal, but in the event that the European Court verdict stands, Abu Qatada will have to be set free, in effect having discovered how to make his projected victims complicit in their own destruction, while he remains a well-rewarded and successful criminal.
A country that surrenders its legal persona will not survive long, nor does it deserve to. But who could have imagined that a pack of progressive lawyers could achieve in a few years what Britain’s armed enemies could not over many centuries.
Time was when intelligent men and women in all countries and all walks of life used to write books and articles in praise of Soviet Communism. The phenomenon is well known by now, but it is still an abiding example of how easily wishful thinking triumphs over rationality. Those testimonies are perpetual reminders of the frailty of civilization, and the latest example that I have come across is I Went to Russia, by Liam O’Flaherty, published in 1931. Quite a decent vaguely free-thinking fellow, O’Flaherty had knocked about the world a bit. He didn’t lose all sense of reality in Russia but nonetheless without apparent irony could let drop phrases like “this great headquarters of the world revolution.” The book ends with an account of meeting Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who spouted, “Bolshevism is real religious antidote to the materialism of the twentieth century.” The Five Year Plan was going to make Russia “exceedingly prosperous.” They do not discuss Gulag.
Today, praise for sharia or Islamic law has the same function of surrendering to wishful thinking at the expense of rationality. If only non-Muslims were to allow sharia for Muslims living in their midst, according to this line, all would be well. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the Supreme Court have both recommended sharia. Quite a number of Muslims in European countries have obliged by proclaiming the areas where they live as enclaves under sharia, with punishments for those who infringe the code. So honour killings, female genital mutilation, polygamy, a ban on alcohol, and other dietary taboos are normalized. Extremist Muslims openly proclaim that this is the way to install the rule of Islam, predicting that they will be colonizing non-Muslim countries by the middle of the century.
“Why Sharia deserves a fairer hearing” is the title of an article published on the News page of the London Times by Ziauddin Sardar, a university professor in Britain. Why the newspaper of record should give over this space to a opinion piece is as mysterious as the Archbishop’s endorsement of Islamic law. Sardar takes up what he considers “a captivating book,” by one Sadakat Kadri. In the manner of those who once sympathized with Communism, he glosses over the facts. Sharia law is made to seem universal — the euphemism he uses is “interconnected.” Just as the wrongs committed under Communism had nothing to do with the ideology, so whatever is wrong in Islam has nothing to do with sharia. And just as there were always progressive aspects of Communism to be found somewhere, so Ziauddin Sardar holds up Morocco and Malaysia as countries with “new and exciting” changes in sharia. In Indonesia, he says, “humanistic principles” are replacing the politics of sharia. He does not discuss the regular killings of Christians there, or the firing of churches.
Exam question. Describe in your own words what unites the Liam O’Flahertys and Ziauddin Sardars of this world, and draw your conclusions.
The first time I realised that there is a lot more to the Middle East than meets the eye was in the days of the Arab economic boycott of Israel. The Egyptian cotton crop was threatened by some worm, and Egypt had appealed to Israel to supply the chemical to save it. I heard about this from an Israeli friend, an industrialist, who was ordered to supply the steel barrels required for the shipment. Nor do I forget the Black September moment in Amman when I saw Palestinian women streaming out of a refugee camp to escape Jordanian troops coming for them. “We go to Moshe Dayan,” the women were shouting, perfectly well able to distinguish between potential killers and potential rescuers. Not so long afterwards, in a smart hotel in Tel Aviv I met a Palestinian poet who had become notorious for writing a verse boasting about eating the livers of Jews. Here was the poet socialising and drinking with the Israeli elite. Another friend, a specialist in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, used to tell me how Saudis and Iraqis and even militant PLO members would insist on making difficult trips to have consultations with him.
Aisha Qaddafi, daughter of the late dictator, has the bad record that is only to be expected. Hers was a life of Arab jet set privilege. She was on the defense team of Saddam Hussein, whose daughters are in exile in Jordan. Now she is in exile in Algeria, and hopes to have the International Criminal Court investigate the deaths of her father and brothers. Who is she employing for her lawyer? One Nick Kaufman, an Israeli.
Perhaps there is an echo here of an ancient stereotype that the best doctors and lawyers are Jewish. And perhaps like others, Aisha Qaddafi is a realist for whom results have priority over ideology. Every so often, these intimations of a quite alternative and practical routine of accommodation and co-operation arise in the Middle East — and about which the media, either out of prejudice or ignorance, are silent.
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem celebrates the birth-place of Jesus. The entrance is deliberately narrow and small so that everyone has to stoop in humility. Columns appropriated from Roman temples line the nave. Cramped stairs lead down to a cave. Even if everything here is a matter of tradition and has no historic foundation, the Church has the numinous atmosphere fitting for the essential role it has in Christianity.
In the war of 1967, an Israeli shell came through the roof. A cleric who identified himself as the Archbishop of Pella was standing fully robed in a cloud of dust and smoke as I entered, reporting for the Daily Telegraph. Israeli paratroopers were also present. In later years I often went there, and once saw the novelist Graham Greene with his lady friend crossing Holy Manger Square in front of the church.
Gunmen from the PLO occupied the church for five weeks in the intifada of 2002, defiling and fouling it until the Israelis got them out. A two-state solution is improbable, to say the bare minimum, but if it were to materialize, the church would again be under the PLO, this time by consent.
Bethlehem used to be at least three-quarters Christian, but that figure is down to about a quarter as its inhabitants emigrate to escape the PLO. Christmas is of course the high point of the town’s calendar. Victor Batarseh, the mayor, is a distinguished medical specialist, aged 76, and Roman Catholic. He marked this Christmas with a speech calling for a complete boycott of Israel. This would be suicide. The day the Christians are at the exclusive mercy of the PLO, and never mind their Hamas compatriots, is when this church would become a mosque. An omen: Ayia Sofia, once the Byzantine cathedral of Istanbul, was converted into a mosque, then a museum, and under rising Islamism is now a mosque again.
While the mayor was setting out his proposal, a hundred or so Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks were fighting each other in the body of the church, armed with the broomsticks they were supposed to use for a clean-up. Such disgraces have a history going back a long way. Robert Curzon describes in his classic Monasteries in the Levant a fight he witnessed in the 1830s in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre in which Ottoman soldiers had to intervene to stop Christians killing each other. Once I had cause to go to the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur outside Jerusalem, only to find that a monk of one Christian persuasion had murdered a monk of another persuasion. Rivalry between Christians was one reason why the Holy Land of the Crusaders was lost to Islam. The bigotry remains as primitive and destructive as the Sunni–Shia divide is to Islam, and when there are no more Christians in any Muslim country it will be too late for regrets.
The front page of La Repubblica, the respectable Italian daily, reports a bit of news that it finds as comic and futile as children building a sandcastle. The European Union is proposing to take out a patent for broccoli. Yes, that green vegetable. Aubergines and tomatoes are to follow, but apparently not potatoes. It’s to do with genetic modification. The EU is another arena where rivals who ought to know better go in for this kind of assault under the guise of protection. The British Treasury has let it be known that preparations are in hand to deal with the collapse of the euro. With any luck, plain broccoli will outlive the EU.
Someone I know breeds turkeys on a large scale. The birds have to be fenced behind wire. At any unexpected noise, especially at night, they panic quickly and huddle together in a corner where many of the birds suffocate to death. Music soothes them: A system has been installed and Mozart concertos have been found to be literally life-savers.
It’s much the same story in Birmingham, a pretty rough place. Assorted yobs have been in the habit of congregating in a particular mall there. All sorts of crimes, including murder, then occur. The police decided that broadcasting Mozart would give this crowd something to distract and pacify them. In fact, Mozart has dispersed them, the mall has become safe, the crime rate has dropped.
Jacques Chirac, former French president, has just received a two-year prison sentence for corruption. He wasn’t in court. His lawyers pleaded that he is 79 and a most important person but unfortunately bad at remembering. The prosecution went so far as to ask for his acquittal. The court’s sentence was suspended, so justice has not caught up with Chirac.
French presidents, it is true, have their own standards. Valery Giscard d’Estaing accepted diamonds from the murderous Emperor Bokassa. Francois Mitterand was caught in an illegal deal involving an oil refinery in East Germany. Nicolas Sarkozy is accused of being mixed up in an arms deal with Pakistan, and French voters think he may well have set up the sex scandal that destroyed his political opponent Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Chirac beats them all hands down. He was in the habit of appropriating public money for private or political party ends. Thousands of properties in Paris are unclaimed because in the war their Jewish owners were deported and murdered, and Chirac made sure that selected cronies could live cheaply in these apartments or houses. One day Chirac was discovered at the Gazelle d’Or, a fabulously expensive hotel in Morocco, paying the bill out of a plastic bag containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It then turned out that French presidents were allocated funds for which they do not have to account. Nobody ever quite got to the bottom of how some fields around Chirac’s country house were due to be developed as a holiday site for children but instead were transferred to Chirac. Giscard d’Estaing is on record saying that if Chirac was caught holding a pot of jam and with his mouth full of that jam, he would swear that he had never eaten the stuff. Perhaps Chirac’s greatest coup was to get through a resolution that no president could be prosecuted for anything while in office. Which meant that he would do anything, no matter how cynical or misjudged, to cling to office. It says a lot about the French way of doing things that he’s got away with just two years, suspended.
Today 28 people are reported in one newspaper to have been shot dead in Syria, thirteen of them in two villages near the Turkish border. Furthermore, the United Nations, a body instinctively pro-Syrian, announces that the death toll has now passed 5,000 — surely an underestimate. One Syrian also describes how he was tortured, and one of his legs is gangrenous. Yet elsewhere, Muhammad Bassam Imadi, a former Syrian ambassador, has given an interview to say that popular anger could have been corrected by reforms but “the Government instead responded with repression and killing.”
Of course it did. Bashar Assad is a one-man ruler who has done great harm to his country for the usual selfish ends of accumulating power and wealth. Challenged, he and anyone in his position is certain to respond with repression and killing. Reform on his part would be interpreted as weakness and readiness to give up. The very idea of reform in these circumstances is either a chimera or the prelude to revolution. Witness the Arab Spring.
David W. Lesch is the author of The New Lion of Damascus, subtitled “Bashar al Asad and Modern Syria,” published in 2005 by Yale University Press. The dust-jacket describes him as a professor in a university in Texas and no doubt he has professional credentials. I have the book in my library, but couldn’t recall what it said so I had another go at reading it. Here is a full-throated hymn of praise to Bashar, modest, studious, good-natured, pushed about by neo-conservatives, et cetera. Lesch’s credulity is impressive. Bashar, he asks us to believe, “is, indeed the hope — and the promise of a better future.” Again, “He has the opportunity to be at the vanguard of change in the Arab world … He has the intellect, the drive, the energy, and the ideas.”
Bashar’s fiefdom of murder is completely unpredictable from this characterization of the man. It is bewildering that events can prove a qualified professor to be so wrong. The axiom of Lord Acton comes to mind: “In the wake of every tyrant comes an apologist with a sponge.” Talk of reform and democracy and hope was drivel put out for Lesch’s benefit. He uses a sponge all right, not in order to defend crime but because the imagination required to understand this very different political order is missing. With academics like that, no wonder the public can’t come to grips with Middle Eastern reality.
The demonstrations in Moscow illuminate a dark sky like a flash of lightning. A storm might be on its way. Vladimir Putin has corrupted the country and thousands of outraged Russians are prepared to take to the streets in protest. More than just a reactionary, Putin is a throwback who in a process as inexorable as it is tragic has built what can only be called the post-modern version of Communism. In the manner of the old Soviet Central Committee, he and his cronies have made sure to monopolize power and wealth, those two engines of the Kremlin.
It is common knowledge that Putin has stolen an immense fortune, and has the state building him palaces and amassing collections of art for him. He has cut down freedom of speech to the point where it is virtually non-existent. It is taken for granted that he authorised the murder of anyone standing in his way, many of them journalists like Anna Politkovskaya or dissident exiles like Alexander Litvinenko. The way he bankrupted, imprisoned and arbitrarily extended the massive sentence of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky is perhaps the greatest running scandal anywhere on the continent. Press-ganged, the judiciary has no independence. Grigory Yavlinsky, a possible future democratic leader, comments bleakly about these demonstrations that in Russia, “There is no rule of law.”
Accustomed to centuries of misrule, Russians know how to steer a course through injustice and make what life for themselves they can. They might have let Putin do his worst, and he must have thought so too. When his presidential term expired according to the constitution, he devised a trick to return to office for another eight years. The result of the presidential election due next year is already known. Now he has been caught rigging the parliamentary elections. People can stand hardship and absence of law, but this open contempt was really too insulting.
Demonstrators turned out in thousands, only to be outnumbered by secret police and riot troops. In Soviet days, live ammunition would have been used. Times have changed in that many more people refuse to be intimidated. So far, about 250 arrests have been made, among them some well-known bloggers and free spirits.
Oleg Gordievsky was the head of the KGB station in Britain until he defected a few years before Communism imploded. He told me that one look into the cold and utterly expressionless eyes of Putin gives away all that anyone needs to know about the man. Should demonstrations recur in the immediate future as planned, Putin is virtually certain to go down the Bashar al-Assad route and order repression. Beggars can’t be choosers, and the same goes for pocket dictators.
