MELANIE PHILLIPS TWOFER ON UK AMBASSADORS’ GUSHING ADMIRATION FOR HEZBOLLAH
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6131084/britains-ambassador-gushes-admiration-for-a-godfather-of-terror.thtml
Lifting a stone at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Friday, 9th July 2010
No sooner does one scuttle back into its hole than another one crawls out from under a stone. The gushing effusions by Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, about the spiritual godfather of Hezbollah which, as I wrote below, she posted on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office site, have been excised from that site. But now it turns out that Britain’s ambassador to Jordan, James Watt is even worse, as ‘Bialik’ — a reader on the Harry’s Place blog — has pointed out.
For on his own FCO blog, Watt makes it clear he doesn’t think Israel has an overwhelming historic claim to its own existence, thinks the Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the land and that the idea that Israel was the Jews’ national home thousands of years ago is fanciful.
Here he denies Jewish national self-determination:
No one outside Israel is prepared – or very few – to take Zionist arguments at their face value any longer.
Here he denies Jewish and Middle Eastern history:
Completely non-factual assertions – for example that a Jewish people was building Jerusalem 5,000 years ago – only serve to emphasise the absence of real content or reasoning. The strange thing is how long Western audiences tolerated such claims without challenging them: I think because they were hoping that a reasonable settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population would emerge in the course of things (and with some diplomatic heavy lifting).
Here he denies Jewish history and national self-determination and descends into rank bigotry:
The origin of the problem – the arrival of the Zionists in Palestine, with their commitment to avoiding any kind of integration into existing society, and their policy of importing their co-religionists from cultural and social backgrounds alien to Palestine, changed everything.
Here he is peddling the Big Lie by Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO that misrepresents Israeli defence as aggression and describes all Arabs killed by Israel as civilians — whereas in fact most are terrorists:
Few observers would disagree with Hirst that Israel has long committed itself to a policy of massive military deterrence, which is now becoming progressively more violent – and, by the account of its own officials, more ready to inflict civilian casualties on a large scale in pursuit of its political goals. Gaza showed that progression: more remote shelling and rocketing by the Israeli forces, with minimum risk to its own soldiers: ten lost their lives, and three Israeli civilians, while 1,330 Gazans (most of them civilians and 410 of them children) lost theirs. Compare that to the 43 Israeli civilians who died under Hizbullah rocket fire in July-August 2006, and 119 Israeli soldiers in the fighting, against over a thousand Lebanese civilians (one third of them children) and an unknown number of Lebanese combatants.
Here he is sympathising with the Turkish terrorists who were killed on the Mavi Marmara when they tried to lynch the Israeli soldiers who boarded the Gaza flotilla, and also claiming that Israel’s reason for restricting the flow of goods into Gaza — that it is to prevent arms smuggling and weaken the grip of Hamas — is a lie:
I offer my condolences to the families of those who were killed, in what should have been an entirely avoidable tragedy… the entire world has had enough of the blockade of Gaza – a blockade which Israel should have long ago lifted under the terms of UN Security Resolution 1801, as well as other international law. And the world has had enough of the pretexts Israel uses to continue it.
It is an old cliché that diplomats are sent abroad to lie for their country. But one inevitable effect of Watt’s demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel through such distortions and bigotry is to whip up yet more genocidal hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
The British Government says it is committed to a two-state solution. Why is its Ambassador to Jordan suggesting that the state that already exists is illegitimate? Is this the British Government’s position? If not, why is it allowing its Ambassador to Jordan to represent such an obnoxious view? Are Watt’s comments also — as the FCO said about Frances Guy’s blog post — merely a ‘personal view’? If so, why are they on the FCO website — where Guy’s remained until they attracted the embarrassing attention of the blogosphere? Will Foreign Secretary William Hague repudiate these distortions and the venomous hostility Watt displays towards Britain’s ally? Or are we to conclude that these are beliefs that he himself shares?
Frances Guy is the British ambassador to Lebanon. On her blog on the website of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she wrote this about Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon who died of old age a few days ago (hat tip: Elder of Ziyon):
One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious. People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most. It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own. I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most. Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world. When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith. Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday. Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon’s shores. I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right. If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples’ lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.
Sheikh Fadlallah was a wicked enemy of civilisation, life and liberty. He was the ‘spiritual’ leader of the genocidal terrorist organisation Hezbollah, and was classified by the US State Department as a terrorist. As Con Coughlin wrote in the Daily Telegraph:
One of Fadlallah’s last acts before he died was to issue a fatwa authorising the use of suicide bomb attacks. The mystery here is why he waited so long. For as a founder member of Hizbollah – he sat on the organisation’s ruling council – Fadlallah gave his personal approval to the massive suicide truck bomb attacks that levelled the American Embassy and Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing more than 300 people, including the then CIA station chief. Fadlallah gave his personal blessing to the suicide bombers before they left for their deadly mission.
Hezbollah constitute Iran’s unofficial terror army around the world. Thousands of its rockets are pointed at Israel, against whose citizens and soldiers it has mounted countless rocket assaults, bombing and kidnap attacks. Its operatives are positioned around the world in ‘sleeper’ cells, waiting for a future signal from Iran to attack American, Jewish and other western interests.
CNN have just sacked their Middle East editor Octavia Nasr after she tweeted that she ‘respected’ Fadlallah. Idiots and moral cretins may have written up Fadlallah as ‘progressive’ or (my favourite) ‘complex’, for heaven’s sake, because he supported Muslim women’s rights and abortion. But how can Britain employ an ambassador to Lebanon who gushes her devotion to a spiritual godfather of global terror, jihad and Jew-hatred?
For good measure, here is Guy — formerly head of the Engaging with the Islamic World Department at the FCO — blaming Israel’s behaviour as a ‘real grievance’ which helped provoke British Muslims to carry out the 2005 London tube and bus bombings (approx 43 minutes in); taking the side of the Arab and Muslim world over ‘Palestine’ against Israel; justifying HMG’s policy of talking to fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood such as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who endorses the murder of Israelis and the killing of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; and regretting that Britain is not talking to Hamas and Hezbollah, while stating that it is ‘looking for a way to formalise’ the contact made by HMG with Hamas over the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnson in Gaza because ‘it was recognised there were benefits to that exchange’.
Just whose side is Britain now on in the war to defend civilisation?
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