Will the West Survive its Left?

Keeping an eye on who was linking to one of my recent posts, i came across a young British Muslim man with a "dislike for injustice and oppression" from whom I discovered that:

the British government helped Israel build the atom bomb! USA can use nuclear warfare in destroying Hiroshima, invading Vietnam and devastating Iraq, while Iran cannot have nuclear energy.

His link sent me to this interview of the British Labour politician Tony Benn - who broke with Blair on the Iraq war, due to Benn's queer mix of pacifism and Saddamism.

Benn who was the British Minister of Technology in the 1960s is claiming that he knew, at the time, nothing about the secret assistance Britian is now alleged - by the BBC tv programme Newsnight - to have given the Israeli nuclear program in the 1960s. Benn says, in an interview laced with conspiratorial innuendo:

Well, it wasn't put to me at all. It wasn’t put to ministers. I mean, this is the trouble with the nuclear industry, I came not to believe what I was told, and that throws a doubt on more than nuclear power: the question of democracy, if officials can operate as a state within a state. Where is the democratic control of policy? So it was a very, very serious thing to happen. And, of course, it also comes up at a time when, as you've been pointing out, there's a lot of pressure now on Iran not to develop nuclear technology in any form.

So much for Benn's responsibility to the good name of a system of responsible government from which he has made his long career, albeit as the angry leftist with a dislike for injustice and oppression, critical of the national democracy in which he took part and prospered.

So, I turned, as I often do, to Melanie Phillips to learn what is going on in Blighty. She reports that:

Last Thursday, BBC TV Newsnight transmitted an item which, even by the standards of today’s poisonous climate, left an extraordinarily bad taste in the mouth -- to put it mildly. The item by reporter Michael Crick and producer Meirion Jones, which was tied to a report in the New Statesman, excitedly claimed a sensational exclusive – the discovery that British civil servants had secretly colluded with a Middle Eastern country to enable it to develop nuclear weapons, in flagrant contradiction of UK government policy.
...
It was to make the point that, at a time when the ‘Bush-poodle’ in 10 Downing Street is telling us that a nuclear-armed Iran is a danger to the world which cannot be allowed to develop, Britain itself is guilty of having started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The true guilty party in the world today, therefore, is not Iran but Britain – and the true danger to the world is Israel. For the item not only blamed Israel for starting the arms race, but equated its development of a nuclear weapon with the behaviour of Iran.
...
the real purpose of this item was to deny that Israel was the potential target for genocide that it is, and blame it instead for being the root cause of Iran’s desire to get the bomb -- and thus, by extension, the root cause of the danger in which we have all now been placed.
...
And now we got to the real rotten nub of this ‘exclusive’. For what Newsnight alleged was that Michaels had behaved in this treacherous way because he was a Jew who was a keen supporter of Israel. ‘Indeed’, Crick reported breathlessly, ‘his middle name was actually Israel’.
...
Why did Kelly think that Michaels had gone along with Israel’s deception, asked Crick. ‘Well his middle name was Israel’, Kelly replied. ‘You think there was an element of dual loyalties here?’ pressed Crick. ‘Yes’, said Kelly. And what had this Jew, thus posthumously smeared by the accusation of treachery, actually done? According to Crick, he had not only borne false witness but had secured the provision of plutonium for Israel which had helped it make the bomb, in contravention of British government policy and in the teeth of opposition by the Foreign Office.

Let’s look at all this a little more closely. The first point is that the claim that Britain’s plutonium helped make Israel’s bomb is absurdly over the top. As Crick himself acknowledged en passant, the amount Israel asked for was 10 mg, whereas 4 kg of plutonium would have been needed to make a bomb. The second point is that the story does not add up. It is extremely implausible that a middle ranking official such as Michaels would have had the power to reverse government policy in this way. Indeed, as Crick mentioned even more en passant, the Foreign Office – which we were told was originally dead against the deal – eventually agreed. There would almost certainly have been other, more significant actors playing a role in this drama. Indeed, since the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a very strong supporter of Israel, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he himself pursued a policy which was not declared in public. Who knows? All we have to go on is the connection made in the mind of one retired former defence intelligence analyst between his perception of a colleague’s behaviour and the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’.

In another context, the suggestion that a middle-ranking official could reverse policy by himself would be ludicrous... To hear the BBC single out, as the clinching proof of a perfidious disloyalty to the state by a British citizen, the fact that ‘his middle name was Israel’ is to strike a chill to the very bone. For of course the unspoken implication here goes far beyond this particular civil servant. The real message of that Newsnight item was surely this: forget Iran; forget the worry over thousands of Islamist terror supporters in Britain; the real danger to the world is Israel, and the real British fifth columnists are those Jews who support it.

BTW, in an earlier post Phillips reported how it is now socially acceptable to engage in antisemitic tyrades in polite company in Britain.

The left operates from a default position of some vague faith in some future egalitarian perfection and Utopia. Anything, including the country on which one depends for security, wealth and health, can be torn down, criticized, found wanting, in relation to the implicit Utopian standard. And if you can point your finger at a nasty conspirator, preferably a Jew, American, or Brit, as a way of implying why humanity are not yet all equal and in peace, so much the better. This game is a simple denial of the realities of the human condition, for example the reality that certain social and national differences are necessary for (because a result of) human freedom. The fact that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by people who want the nation eliminated, is not enough to justify its difference, its modernity, its freedom. The left talks up democracy and freedom but supports their enemies. In order to do this, they must consciously avoid - banning them as politically incorrect - certain questions about the nature of humanity, an honest answer to which would bring the left's game into question.

Perhaps the more we recognize and debate - as part of the free debate of competing ideas - ideas that are just crazy that we nonetheless engage because they are the official position of the left, or of globally authoritative institutions like the BBC (not that it should be considered authoritative), the closer we are getting either to the eventual collapse and disintegration of the left, or the collapse and disintegration of the west itself. See, for example, Lawrence Auster's recent notes on The ever-more destructive left.

BTW, chasing down links I also discovered an interesting blog from the land of Elbonia where Flares (YARGB) is blogrolled. Oh well, Elbonia sounds real enough. Sometimes I wonder if I am on the same planet as some of these Jew haters. Of course, I am. I am and they are.