Salah Sovereignty

I was very pleased that Raed Salah was not allowed in my country, although I had to laugh when a certain neoconservative website accused his British supporters of faux academia with dodgy sources of funding.

Still, it is good to see that site coming round on the question of national sovereignty, so flagrantly breached in this case even if Theresa May was blatantly incompetent in making possible that breach. And I wished that I could have said the same about many, many others: that they, too, were not allowed in my country. I still do wish that, just as I wish that I could still say it about Salah.

By all means exclude “foreign preachers of hate” from this country. Including Abu Qatada. Among other Islamists. Such as the black-shirted pimp and heroin-trafficker Hashim Thaçi, who is somehow also both a Wahhabi and a Maoist – he really is what the more hysterical Tea Party attendees imagine Obama to be. Such as the terrorist Akhmed Zakayev, whom this country currently harbours. Such as the recently apprehended terrorist Abdulmalik Rigi. And such as the even more recently arrested war criminal Ejup Ganic. It is quite a list: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Libya (polygamy legalised as the first act of the unelected government) and Tunisia, with Syria to follow, with Iran next on the list after that, and with Chechnya and Xinjiang always bubbling away in the background. Doesn’t it make you proud?

And what about the blood libel that all opposition to the Iraq War was anti-Semitic? That was said routinely at the time, and for a long time thereafter. They all did it. Every one of them. I suspect that certain British sites only stopped when, on this blog and elsewhere, I lately started making a fuss about it. It still crops up from time to time. The people presently loudest in berating Raed Salah put it into print or onto the airwaves every single day for months, and regularly for years. They have never expressed one word of remorse, either for that or for their catastrophic war itself.

In any case, what is Salah fighting for? Be born into certain ethnic minorities within Israel’s 1948 borders, and you are automatically subject to Sharia law. Far more people ought to know that than do. Waving his Menorah passport and with the name of that State in the name of his organisation, Salah obviously knows it very well indeed.

Israel’s Sharia courts are those of the State of Israel. Their rulings in relation to those born under their jurisdiction are the law of the land, and their judges are appointed and paid by that State. By contrast, although Israel treats family law rulings by entirely private Christian religious courts as a fait accompli, that is as far as any relationship goes. No wonder that Salah is such a proud and happy Israeli.

He is not the only one. He was previously the Mayor of Umm al-Fahm, a 100 per cent Arab and 99.7 per cent Muslim city which has been run by his Islamic Movement for many years and where 83 per cent of the population recently voted against transfer to Palestinian jurisdiction. If you want to be the Islamic Movement’s fiefdom, then Israel will let you be it, and will even pay your bills.

The Knesset includes Ibrahim Sarsur, who campaigns for Jerusalem to be made the capital of the Caliphate. His oath of office, an explicit pledge of allegiance to the State of Israel, clearly does not preclude the furtherance of that objective, which is inconceivable on the part of any member of a British, French, Dutch or other Parliament in Europe even now.

But then, look at the governing coalition in Israel. If any other country had a government in which the party of the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister wished to denaturalise both the ancient indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, while others around the Cabinet table held that every ethnic group apart from their own had been created as beasts of burden, then that country would rightly be treated as a pariah.

Somehow, I doubt that Günter Grass (hardly to blame for having been a teenage conscript, although at least, unlike the much-defamed Pope, he was ever in it) had any intention of going there, anyway.

The question is whether Grass will be declared persona non grata from the United States, as the orders of Israel once caused the Head of a friendly State to be, just as those orders also caused a man against whom there was absolutely no evidence to be stripped of his American citizenship and effectively hunted to his death for alleged offences the mere writing out of which on a charge sheet was enough to indicate how absurd they were.

Bringing us back to the question of national sovereignty.