It’s reassuring to know that there’s someone in the Conservative Party with a realistic take on foreign affairs. If you haven’t already read Michael Gove’s piece in Friday’s Times (£) “Iran is smiling at the blood spilt in Syria” if you can’t access the Times online it’s also here , read it now.
Here’s a taster:
“For the Iranian regime, the West’s agreement to a nuclear deal was another sign of weakness, irresolution and short-termism. Iran will be free from any constraint after 15 years, and indeed it can prepare for the rapid acquisition of nuclear capability well before then. And all the time it can use, and has used, western danegeld to build up the armed forces now merrily slaughtering Syrian civilians.
I strongly support any action to counter Iran’s advance and help Syria’s innocents but I fear that the moment of greatest opportunity passed in 2013. If Iran now wins its war in Syria it will turn its attentions more widely. It is already supporting the Houthi takeover of Yemen, fomenting unrest in majority-Shia Bahrain, funding Islamic State’s offshoot in the Sinai, extending its hold over Iraq’s political culture and seeking to radicalise Shia minorities in other states such as Saudi Arabia. Iran has rekindled its relationship with Hamas and will deploy Hezbollah to terrorise Israel from the bases that it will shortly control on the Lebanese and Syrian borders.”
A pile of nasty comments have appeared below the line.
Gove was on Dateline today. Craig has blogged it. Today’s elephant in the studio was to do with antisemitism. Lefties have suddenly noticed that a wave of overt antisemitism has been unleashed and, ignoring the jumbo sized reality (that the most consistent antisemitism emanates from Islam and its sycophantic toadies) they accuse the alt-Right. In a massive case of group deflection and denial they have decided that the emergence of the alt-Right (Breitbart and Steve Bannon) has suddenly made it okay to be racist. (Okay, but only for the far / alt-right.)
I don’t know if Steve Bannon is an actual antisemite or not, but the particular examples offered by those making the allegation seem flimsy to me.
It’s almost as if the antisemitic lefties are facing a cognitively dissonant dilemma. They’ve suddenly become aware that their own racist (antisemitic) tendency threatens their occupancy of the moral high ground - (they go lower, we go higher etc) so they flap their arms at the opposition furiously.