Thursday, 4th of May, 2006

Wow. As someone else said recently, Hitchens is an interesting fellow: you can be agreeing with thoroughly, and then suddenly he’ll be off on some warmongering rant… Juan Cole is an interesting fellow, an academic who knows more about the Middle East than most, and in trying to generate rational discourse about the region inevitably falls prey to accusations of anti-Semitism from the more embarrassing members of my hereditary culture (Alan Dershowitz, the Anti-Defamation League etc).

Regarding the article linked above, reader beware: there are some pretty gruesome images if you scroll down. They accompany a very strong anti-war message which I suspect we all need to heed. I suspect there won’t be the same level of protestation as we edge closer to war with Iran, mainly because Ahmadinejad is such a twat, with his Holocaust revisionism and calls for the destruction of Israel. Let’s remember that once again the threat that Iran poses is moot, and hot air, however putrid, isn’t in itself a good enough reason for war. Let’s look at what’s going on in Iraq now and ask ourselves whether it was ever a humanitarian effort on the part of our allies.

It turned out that war was the answer in 1939. I can’t think of any other wars that had anything like the same level of justification. Let’s not sully the memory of the Holocaust by using it to justify wars willy-nilly; and let’s not dilute anti-Semitism so far that the real anti-Semitism can be shrugged off.

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