Confused, Indeed

Michael Weiss is at it again.

What have the Israelis ever done for America? Number of Israeli troops in Korea? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Vietnam? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in the Gulf War? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Afghanistan? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Iraq? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Libya? Nil. Hardly any American Jews have ever moved to Israel. There is little or no economic relationship between America and Israel other than American aid payments, now in excess of one hundred billion dollars.

In return for that largesse, Israel has put Americans’ security and their economic interests at stake by using the American veto on the United Nations Security Council as if she owned it, Israel engages in espionage against the United States on a colossal scale, Israel sells stolen American defence secrets to Russia and China, Israel ordered up the war in Iraq but refused to fight in it, Israel is trying to order up more such wars against Iran and Syria, and Israel poisons American relations with strategically far more important countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and for that matter Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Conflict looms between Israel and Turkey. Two states, both founded on the bloody mass expulsion of the ancient indigenous Christian populations, and both divided between secular ultranationalists and the forces embodied by the AKP in one state's case, Shas in the other’s. But one of those states is an American ally and the other is not. This article comprehensively sets out which is which. Its author is a former senior CIA officer who is a member of the Libertarian Party and who lists his religion on Facebook as “Latin Mass Catholic”. So, of no interest to Telegraph readers, obviously.

In Syria, anyone in opposition to the present government is not going to be in favour of the undisputedly thriving communities of Christians or, based on the amount of government money being spent on their holy sites, what must be the thriving community of Jews.

Bahrain has at least eight indigenous ethnic groups, including a small but very ancient and entrenched Jewish community which maintains the Gulf’s only synagogue and Jewish cemetery, and also including a community of black African descent, part of the East African diaspora in the East hardly known about by those very used to the West African diaspora in the West. Around one fifth of the inhabitants of Bahrain is non-Muslim, and around half of that is Christian. The women’s headscarf is strictly optional. No one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are two-thirds Shi’ite. Correspondingly, no one disputes that Bahraini Muslims are one-third Sunni.

All legislation requires the approval of both Houses of Parliament, and, while one of those Houses is entirely appointed by the monarch (as in Britain or Canada), the other is entirely elected by universal suffrage. The Upper House, to which women are regularly appointed to make up for their dearth in the elected Lower House, includes a Jewish man and a Christian woman; the latter was the first woman ever to chair a Parliament in the Arab world. The Ambassador to the United States is a Jewish woman, the first Jewish ambassador of any modern Arab state, although the third woman to be an Ambassador of Bahrain. She was previously an elected parliamentarian. Notably, she describes her Jewish identity as unconnected, either to the State of Israel, which Bahrain does not recognise, or to the Holocaust, of which she knew nothing until she was 14.

Her British higher education and British husband, as well as the fact that the synagogue brings in its rabbis from Britain, point to the very close ties indeed between that country and this. We installed the Al Khalifa in 1783, and they have done everything to keep up the link ever since. From Bahrain, via Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to Oman is Britain’s natural and longstanding sphere of influence, as their rulers would and do tell you. It is beyond me why they are not in the Commonwealth.

I do not welcome the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, which, as the base of the United States Fifth Fleet, has not been subjected to any such incursion without at least American approval, if not American instruction. I have no wish to see a Wahhabisation of Bahraini Sunnism, since at present all of the above is perfectly acceptable even to the Salafi Members of Parliament. But which part of it do the demonstrators wish to conserve? Do they wish to conserve any of it? Or do they wish to overthrow it in order to replace it with something else entirely? We have not asked. We never do. It is very high time that we did.

As for Russia, the usual Cold War Trotskyist bilge from the neocons. Whom would they have instead? The Chechen Islamist warlords, whom even MI5, via what was previously the extremely bear-baiting Spooks, now admits are the real threat? Or the totally unreconstructed Communist Party of the Russian Federation? Or the National Bolsheviks, with their Nazi flag apart from the black hammer and sickle in place of the swastika? Those are the options, if they can be so described.

When he was not correctly predicting that, when, how and why the Soviet Union would collapse, Enoch Powell was correctly identifying Russia as a natural British ally. It is another matter whether or not she is a natural American ally, or rather whether or not America is a natural Russian ally. After all, Russia has restored the teaching of Christianity in schools, and is providing military backup to those who would defend Levantine Christendom against the forces that we have unleashed against Mesopotamian Christendom.

But the neocons will be having none of that. When they say “the West”, that sort of thing is exactly what they do not mean. So why do supposedly Tory papers insist on lavishing them with attention?