SOCIALIST UNITY

Ponder at your leisure the following and decide which is the more dangerous.

1. Covering up the BAE-Saudi affair. That a “cover up” occurred is the least of it.  

(Incidentally, when this sordid story is commented upon, the liberals “mugged by reality” only vent their anger at the judicial shenanigans that come with this: the rule of law has been compromised by halting the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery and kick-backs. The real crime – arming and bolstering the most repressive and monstrous regime on the planet – is conveniently ignored.)

2. A police investigation into a Channel 4 documentary which investigated “extremist Mosques”.

What say you, dear reader? As for me, must I even declare my option for the first? Oh very well, then, it is the first.

But for Nick Cohen, another liberal “mugged by reality”, the latter option is the more dangerous: “in the long run, what is being done to Channel 4 is more significant than the nobbling of the Serious Fraud Office,” he wrote in the Observer. To be fair to Cohen, his conclusion is based on ignoring the blinding fact (how does he do it?) that the arms sales are of any use to a theocratic despotism. No, his interests go no further than the Blair government’s outrageous intervention into a perfectly legitimate investigation.

Yup, that’s gliberalism for you. Concentrate your attention on minor issues that trouble legal niceties. No doubt the millions of liberals and democrats in the Arab world Cohen alludes to at every opportunity think this is all marvellous and send him letters telling him to keep up the good work. The fact that the Arab world’s liberals detest Cohen and his chums should not be dwelled upon - it ruins an otherwise noble argument. This cannot be said enough, and so I say it at every opportunity.

The only possible letters of gratitude are from the likes of Kanan Makiya, an unbelievably ludicrous figure whose immediate plan for the war-torn Baghdad is “to create, in the heart of the city, a pedestrians-only green space”. Having built Baath Party HQ and the Ceremonial Parade Grounds in Tikrit, something that is hushed up by his many admirers, and not having any regret for living it up on Saddam’s blood money (”somebody had to do it, and it might as well have been done well,” whimpered Makiya, echoing the similar refrain of the greedy, the amoral and the coward), it says a great deal about those who champion Makiya as a moral human being.

Best not ask Cohen to explain this slightly minor lapse in Blairite interventionism (intervening to arm Saudi barbarism, just like he personally intervened to arm Indonesia in its last hurrah in East Timor) for the sake of world peace. It ruins the otherwise comforting fairy tale of how lucky we were to have such a farsighted and good man at the helm when we were confronted by heavily-bearded “fascists” armed with plastic knives, box cutters, chapati flour and non-existent castor beans. But I digress.

Armed with foodstuffs, picnic cutlery and maintenance tools, such “fascists” only understand one thing: invading, as well as planning a generations-long war against, countries that had nothing to do with this “blowback” from the Western powers former chums. Lest we forget, the 7/7 terrorists were the unintended consequence of the Balkans jihadi nexus that the Western powers engineered to destabilise Yugoslavia. But I digress. Unimportant stuff this.

So gliberalism sets its sight, yet again, on some Mosques, with ranting, half-witted Imams. We must overlook the inconvenient fact that many Muslims who attended the “extremist Mosques” made complaints to the police and the security services. They were ignored because many of the Imams were MI5 “assets”, having been recruiters of British Muslims for the Balkans jihad. But I digress. Very unimportant stuff this.

Actually, you’d think a good liberal would uphold the right of free speech, or campaign for the law against incitement to hatred to be dropped, no matter how warped and depraved the words uttered. You’d also think that given they are Islamic chauvinism’s greatest asset that they would have the decency to desist from increasing the mayhem. But no. The more wrong the gliberalistas are, the more they huff and puff that they are right. Funny lot.