Günter Grass, the Left-wing German author and, at 16 one time SS member, has attacked Israel in a poem, which has lead to him being no longer welcome in Israel. Grass, like many representatives of the Left, seek to make phoney moral comparisons in order to justify any immoral behaviour on behalf of whatever political dictator they support at any given time.
We have had George Galloway presenting Saddam Hussein with a box of Quality Street, and when challenged about the murderous behaviour of his ‘indefatigable’ comrade; (he had brought ruin to the Marsh Arabs and inflicted mass murder on the northern Kurds using poison chemicals) he countered his critics with the ‘moral equivalence’ argument. Which went like this. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children were being reduced to starvation by Western economic sanctions, and thousands more killed by American pilots operating the UN enforced no-fly zone.
Cuba has always been a favourite of the Left, despite Fidel’s treatment of homosexuals and the thousands of Cubans who have risked life and limb to get to Florida; as well as those political prisoners locked up well away from the West’s scrutiny and the Left’s embarrassment. Yet, as usual, the Left will only respond to any criticism of their support for this dictator, by suggesting ‘comparable’ behaviour by the West, going back centuries.
Vietnam was always a particular favourite when combating their critics. The Mai Lie massacre was an outrageous act of murder conducted by the Americans in Vietnam; while the evil of napalm was captured by a press photographer of a naked child with charred skin, peeling from its body. The Vietnam war was filled with such images and stood the Left in good stead for decades afterwards, when in need of moral equivalence arguments(MEA) to justify their support for a particularly nasty regime or revolutionary army they were drawn to ideologogy. Examples of the latter was the civil war in Angola following independence in the 1970s, when the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), competed for control of the country with the anti-communist National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) .
As a member of the Left myself at the time. I often used the MEA to justify any outrage committed by the MPLA. My equivalence was of course Vietnam as well as that old but particular favourite on the Left, Western colonialism. The West opposed the MPLA and supported UNITA under Joseph Savimbi who was seen as a poodle of imperialism by those like myself at the time.
There was at the time another Portuguese colony in Africa. Mozambique was suffering a similar fate to Angola; where the European Left’s chosen heroes were the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO), a Marxist Leninist revolutionary force that also sought independence from Portugal. In each case the Left used MEA if either the MPLA or FRELIMO overstepped the boundaries of civilised behaviour.
As a one time member of the British Communist Party in the early 1970s, I, like my comrades, stood by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When challenged by our political opponents, the Vietnam War was once more deployed as our MEA.
When it came to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, many on the Left supported the republicanism of Sine Fein; and when an outrage occurred involving civilian deaths, the Left salvaged their consciences by elusions to the British outrages nearly half a century earlier in Ireland. To the Left, British/ Irish history was replete with possible MEAs, to help them justify the actions of the Provos.
The British Left, (here I include the liberal Left) are a self loathing bunch of individuals who take the side of any country other than the one they were born into. I truly believe that the modern Left would have stood full square against a war against German Nazism, as they were against Baathist Iraq.
WHEN GÜNTER GRASS wrote his poem he apparently drew a moral equivalence between Israel and Iran. Like all such similar comparisons by the Left, Günter’s is misjudged. Israel has never admitted her ownership of a nuclear bomb or any other such means of delivery. Yet we all know that she has a nuclear capability.
Iran, however, denies she has any such nuclear weapon, and would, at this time be correct. But we all know that Iran is pretty close to realising her ambition and is in the process of playing for time with the international community.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for several decades, and has had plenty of opportunities to be provoked into using them, surrounded as she is by Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah on her northern border with Lebanon; as well as Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and now Iran. Israel is still at this moment, despite the so-called Arab Spring, the only democratic state within the region.
Can Günter guarantee that Iran, once she has her own nuclear deterrent; would be less likely to use it than Israel would hers? I think not. Iran is an Islamist society where not party politics or political ideology rules, as it once did in the old Soviet Union - but religion. But no ordinary religion; but one still fuelled by medieval beliefs, customs and practices that treat death as a mere passage to elsewhere.
Yet Günter believes that Israel and only Israel will be responsible for the apocalypse he believes will come to the region. As he has written in his poem; "Why only now, grown old, and with what ink remains, do I say: Israel's atomic power endangers an already fragile world peace?".
‘…grown old, and with what ink remains…’ This is a sad old man appealing for pity. If he believes Israel’s nuclear capacity is the one and only source of destruction for the region, then he is behaving like the short-sighted Leftie, once fascist, that he is. Throughout her various conflicts with her Arab neighbours, Israel has never mentioned, let alone threatened her neighbours with annihilation; unlike Iran.
Israel wants to live in peace, but it will not be allowed to do so for as long as the Jewish people seek to, as they should, remain as much a part of the region as they have for 3000 years. The Jews have, since 1948, turned a dessert region into an arable pasture where various crops can be grown and the sands driven back. Their achievements since 1948 were never mastered by any Arab occupancy of the land now covering the modern state of Israel.
Fertile soil has replaced barren sand. Israel is a modern nation; it elects its government and learns to put up with it until the opportunity is given the people to vote in another. My one and only criticism of the Israeli voting system is comparable to my distrust of the European model.
First Past the Post gives strong governance and leadership. It is a system best suited to argumentative Jews and Israel should adopt it. For Jews may turn out to be their own worst enemy, and not the Arabs, if they remain tied to their present voting system.
THE LEFT I ONCE KNEW and belonged to were anti-fascist. This anti-fascism encompassed a dislike of racism including anti-Semitism. But the more I study the internet, the more I feel that the differences between the great polar opposites of the political Left and Right are drawing closer together.
The Left is in a quandary. Driven as they are by a liberal conscience, they cannot bare to be seen as anti-Semites. Yet they are driven by a wish to see the Jews removed from the land known as Israel and the Palestinians left occupying the land.
The Left are part of the new Right as far as the state of Israel is concerned. It is the Left who conjured up the latest formula for ridding the Middle East of Jewry. Instead of a Two State Solution that has been the preferred option for decades; the Western Left have come up with not a Two State Solution but a One State Solution. This requires that all Palestinians should have an automatic right to citizenship within the territories of the state of Israel, including all those Palestinians throughout the world.
This would tip the demographic balance in favour of the Palestinians within a Jewish state and against the Jews which would ultimately lead to a referendum that was certain to hand the lands of Israel over to the Palestinians. How the Left seeks to bring such a catastrophe about for the Jews without human conflict, remains to be seen. But already the Left are preparing the ground by seeking to persuade the world that Israel is an apartheid state.
BOTH FAR RIGHT AND LEFT can now find common ground over the issue of the Jews and the state of Israel. The extreme Right calls a spade a spade and is openly and proudly anti-Semitic. The far Left however quibbles over terms. They see themselves as anti-Zionists and believe the term not to be anti-Semitic, which, of course it is.
The dictionary definition of Zionism is, ‘a movement of world Jewry that arose late in the 19th century with the aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine’. This definition is the raw bones of the matter. The Jews right to return to the land of ancient Judea from which they were driven is long overdue; and if anyone questions such a right to reclaim such a past, then they must face the consequences.
Israel is not and never has been an apartheid state, as those on the Left who seek to lay the charge already know. Because of the suicide bombers from Gaza finding easy access into Israel to kill hundreds of Jews; the state of Israel built a wall to prevent such horrific intrusions.
Now, because of this wall, the European Left are interpreting its existence as a part of an apartheid Jewish state.
Günter Grass , like other leftists throughout Europe, are romantically drawn to the Palestinian plight. To such people the Palestinian predicament touches all of their liberal buttons, as well as, in a minority of cases, their anti-Semitic ones.
But the Jews are here to stay, and now live in a land fully prepared to defend itself if pushed to do so; for Israel has never sought any kind of imperial conquest of its neighbour’s territory; only the survival of the one it has mapped out for itself based upon ancient and incontestable boundaries whatever the politically correct so easily discard.
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