Stelzerland

Poor Irwin Stelzer cannot seem to see that promoting both French interests in Britain and French interests in France is what Nicolas Sarkozy is paid and housed for. Yes, Gordon Brown certainly could take a leaf out of Sarkozy’s book. Barack Obama might yet do so, although I would no longer bet on that.

Stelzer promotes (although he is hardly alone in this) a totally false idea of his own country, which is in fact the land of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

In fact the land that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. And in fact the land that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she “[did] not seek for monsters to destroy”.

Obama, although he has always given grave cause for concern, appeared to be at least more sympathetic to that tradition, which is the Real America, than were either Hillary Clinton or John McCain. But doubts now grow by the day. So perhaps, with the rest of the Henry Jackson Society (and the Euston Manifesto Group), Stelzer is not going to have to move to Israel after 20th January after all.

A pity, because if they don’t, then who will save the secular Ashkenazi elite there from a country inhabited only by Arabs, Sephardim and ultra-Orthodox Jews? There will presumably now be a crackdown on Russians. Or will there? Are even Nazis acceptable, just so long as they are neither Arabs, nor Sephardim, nor ultra-Orthodox Jews?

And if the Henry Jackson Society and the Euston Manifesto Group are not going to move to Israel, then whom are we going to send, to where, and why, in order to make room for Palestinian Christians who, having lived for decades between the pseudo-West and the Dar al-Islam, would serve as such an excellent social, cultural and political leaven against both of them here in the United Kingdom?