Time to Talk Peace
Two days ago, on Friday evening, I took a break from the wettest and most miserable Wimbledon in decades, and went to the theatre with two friends. Once at the West End –- as London’s Broadway is called –- a rather flustered Bobby informed us that theatre lights had been dimmed for the evening and no performances would take place. Two car bombs had been discovered, and were followed the next day with two suicide bombers ramming the Glasgow airport but causing no victims except for the driver, who burned like a candle while screaming that Allah was great.
Be that as it may, Allah’s greatness that is, I wish some of these madmen would address their grievances to those who are responsible for them. The Israelis, the neocons, George W Bush, that Cheney man, Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, and so on. Why should poor Taki be deprived of a civilised night out at the theatre, and end up drunk at Wilton’s, however nice it is to get pissed on a rainy London night at one of the better of the capital’s restaurants (five hundred yards from the place the car bomb was discovered).
And it gets worse. I am pretty certain that this was an Iranian inspired attack. Some crazy Iranian doctor has been arrested—they think he was acting on his own over the Rushdie affair. Three days into his premiership, Gordon Brown is spouting all the usual clichés about vigilance and not giving in to terror. We have heard it all before. While he sits safely in Ten Downing Street protected by hundreds of Special Branch agents, we poor slobs cannot even go to the theatre. And Tony Blair, Bush’s poodle, is now free to pursue further glory while gallivanting around the world in pursuit of peace, whatever that means. Blair followed Bush blindly into Iraq, and now has been named by the Quartet as the man to bring peace among Muslims and the West. It’s like naming Albert Speer ambassador to Israel in 1948.
We have heard so often that Blair’s alliance with Bush made Tony a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda and its affiliates in the UK. That may be true, but only in the sense that everything is a recruiting sergeant for al Qaeda’s case: the removal of the Taliban, the Balfour declaration of 1917, the birth of Israel in 1948, the end of the Muslim caliphate in 1924, and the way women dress in the West. The one thing that Blair will not do, hence his impending failure, is that he will not deal with those who are in the middle of the problem. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and the Taliban. Yet he sat down and talked with the IRA and Sinn Fein, and managed to get a peace process going.
One thing my grandfather taught me very long ago, when as Prime Minister of Greece he talked with the communist rebels in the mountains. Better to talk with your enemies than your friends. It is a long haul but it’s worth it. Sixty years of refusing to talk has made Israel and the United States the two most hated states in the world. Time to start gabbing.
Comments
Taki I love this site and the articles that are written here, however in this instance I have to disagree.
The jihadists are not anyone we can negotiate with unlike other groups in the past.
Islamic terrorism is nothing new, it has just been reborn from the immense wealth of Saudi’s and Iranian regimes.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the biggest threats to the world today, and what fuels this is the blood lust to follow the Prophets commands.
The jihad has been waged on infidels for over 1400 years now, I truly believe we are being pushed towards an all out war with the Islamic world. What is needed is to get rid of the neo cons, get back the real Republicans in Washington and start setting real ultimatums to the Saudi’s first and foremost.
Until someone in the White House wakes up and realizes that you can’t pretend to be serious about terrorism, this mess is only going to get worse. Especially while keeping this twisted relationship with the House of Saud.
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Exactly on point. If the territorial and economic injustices that inflame the Middle East are not addressed matters will only get worse here. The jihadists are bringing the war that the West wages in the East to the West To insist that funding genocide in Palestine is off the table because it is not relevant is daft. The Islamist canard is mostly a smoke screen for Zionist racism. The most rabid defenders of the proposition that Palestine should be only for Jews only voted last week to give the United States to Mexicans. The capitol of the United States should be moved back to Washington from Tel Aviv so that America can talk freely about Muslim grievances. They do exist whatever the Amen Corner says to the contrary.
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I have not heard that anyone involved in this is Iranian, let alone that the attack was Iranian inspired. So far the authorities have been fairly closed mouthed about nationalities of those arrested, but apparently one is Iraqi, another Palestinian, another Indian. Please do not spread rumors which will serve the purposes of those who are seeking any excuse to attack Iran.
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I don’t mean any offense, to their people or their faith, but from the Western perspective, the Muslims have pretty much always been - how can I put this delicately? - a barbaric and aggressive pain in the ass. This has always been true, and likely always will be. And yet, somehow, miraculously, the USA used to not be at war with them. Decadent, spiritually depraved, feminist, and democratic dens of iniquity like Japan and Sweden still, amazingly, are not. Perhaps if we weren’t so firmly on the side of the strong (and quite aruably unjust) Zionists, so utterly against the weak and rather obviously oppressed Palestinians, and weren’t otherwise meddling militarily in the affairs of the region, maybe we could join Brazil, Finland, and New Zealand among the ranks of nations not having to deal with a global Islamist insurgency (while the Muslims could go back to doing what they do best, such as going after Kashmir and Chechnya). The neo-cons would no doubt find some excuse to label that analysis “anti-Semitic” (as well as anti-American, anti-freedom, and probably anti-anti-child molestation, once they really got going), but you know, some things are just freakin’ true, and whether you’re Golda Meir or Julius Streicher, it makes no difference.
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I’m not interested in the nuts and bolts of statesmanship (or the lack), I just want to know what he (Taki) was drinking at the Wilton.
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Interesting piece of curiosity, RW. Considering the circumstances of the evening, I would guess he either drank cognac or a single-malt scotch.
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I just want to say this site has some of the meatiest reading I’ve done in a long time. Hat’s off to Mr. Theodoracopulos.
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another marvellous piece.
and your line about albert speer is well worth remembering
many thanks indeed
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