Yasser Arafat, who gave blood for the victims of 11th September 2001 (whereas the pictures of rejoicing Palestinians were of questionable provenance, a suspicion greatly heightened by their popularity with the American media and the BBC), was utterly scornful of the idea that Osama Bin Laden and his mostly Saudi, in no case Palestinian proxies were in any sense motivated by the Palestinian cause, in which they had never shown the slightest previous interest.
Arabs from the Peninsula in any case do not regard people from the Levant as the real thing, since they only adopted Arabic after the Islamic Conquest and huge numbers of them have never given up their ancestral Christianity; Christians have reserved representation both in the Jordanian Parliament and on the Palestinian Authority, not something with any parallel in the rest of what was once British Palestine.
The 11th September hijackers were motivated by the presence of American troops in the Saudi Arabia from which most of them hailed. George W Bush, to give him his due, withdrew those troops, in consequence of which there has been no further attack on American soil.
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Same old Durham. Port swilling, black tie clad Arabist, isolationist spooks from central casting. The place never changes, I see.
ReplyDeleteAll Hail the Mossad Martyr of the Daily Telavivagraph! Middle Eastern Christianity's surest British friend, our defender in his last book. Our defender in his next book?
ReplyDeleteDepend on it.
ReplyDeleteDurham is also the only university that could have produced David's remarkable post on Mary and the genealogy at the start of Matthew's Gospel. A chapter of Essays Radical and Orthodox is about the reconciliation between Evangelicalism and Catholicism, David is doing his bit specifically between those who believe that the Tetragram is RWLM and those who believe that it is CTRH. If memory serves, he has sat at the feet of both. And yes, as he will give you chapter and verse if you are brave enough to ask, this comment is very much on topic.
ReplyDeleteSon of an old army hand in Egypt and "Palestine", admitted to an Anglo-Catholic college that hosts Palestine Solidarity Campaign conferences as official college events, there under a Senior Tutor who had served with said father and had every George Smiley connection you could ever dream of, complete with a Lebanese flag on his office wall. There's more, much more. No wonder your back is so well covered at Durham, spook-ridden repository of Iranian and Emirati cash and centre of Roman and Anglo-Catholic traditionalism.
ReplyDeleteThe forces protecting and promoting The Great David Lindsay are many and various. Anyone else would have been sunk by that Palatinate story, but because it was about him it was dismissed as a tissue of lies by everyone who mattered, and to hell with the reputations of the student journalists who wrote and published it. Students are only here for a few years. Even many academics are. But "glittering ornaments" like Mr Lindsay are for ever. I long ago gave up trying to understand it, although the previous comments do give a partial insight. Durham is the strangest university in the world.
ReplyDeleteEnvy is not a good look.
ReplyDeleteOn topic, please.
Nobody, but nobody, could ever be sunk by a Palatinate story.
ReplyDeleteQuite.
ReplyDeleteBut on topic, please.
It got you an SCR presidency with a seat on the governing body, indicating exactly what this university's grown ups think of that rag. Sorry, off-topic. But too good to keep from pointing out. Whereas what this university's grown ups did to the impudent pups while you were in hospital is far too good to mention on the Internet. You have never been short of very loyal friends, and you never will be.
ReplyDeleteHow much do you know about that? You were very ill at the time. I can only hope that you would have had nothing to do with it if you had been inside the loop. Your friends might be loyal but there is more than one way of expressing that. Using the full force of the state to put people who are essentially children in fear of their lives is not a way that you, the saintly David Lindsay, should approve of. I can only assume that you were unaware.
ReplyDeleteI am closing this thread.
ReplyDelete