POSTSCRIPT (3)

POSTSCRIPT (3)

Global Warming – Global Warning!

          In my last blog I said that I was a member and supporter of the Green Party because I believed that Climate Change (global warming largely due to human activity) was currently the biggest threat facing humankind.  Since then I have had an email from a regular blog reader who points out that global warming is not just a future threat – it is already responsible for most of the political problems that are causing us concern today.  Here is part of that email:

I am beginning to see world events in terms of global warming.  Did you know that the real cause of the “Arab Spring” was the rising price of grain, resulting in people in the Arab countries being unable to afford to eat?  The uprisings coincided with a spike in the price of grain. Then the price subsided a bit, but the trend remained very definitely upwards due to lower crop yields and more of the world’s arable land becoming desert. This was reducing output while the population continued to grow.  The uprisings were a cry for help and a call for an end to dictatorial and corrupt governments.  As things got worse the protestors tried other governing systems.   In that part of the world a liberal parliamentary democracy is not the obvious choice of the reformers - but a more rigorous interpretation of Islam is.  Hence the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood (in Egypt now brutally suppressed) the Taliban, Al Qaida and, most extreme and the most successful of all, the so-called Islamic State.

  The no more than Two Degrees Centigrade rise in world temperature upper limit to which all world leaders have agreed is not an ideal figure. It is the point at which scientists predict the world will no longer be able to feed itself, and there will be widespread famine, riot and war. NASA has said publicly  that today Climate Change represents the greatest threat to world peace

So in the light of that, I think what we are witnessing in the Mediterranean and Calais, is the beginning not the end.   It is fundamentally the impoverished world meeting the rich world, and the rich believing their prosperity would be diminished if they shared it with migrants.  I think the incredible risks which the “economic” migrants are prepared to take is testament to the fact that they are escaping a life of destitution as well as immense danger, and particularly, they can see no future for their children in the country they came from. This is really what has driven all previous mass migrations, like the Irish escaping to the USA from the potato famine.

                In the past Britain has been far more generous. We welcomed Jewish migrants from Nazi Germany, we welcomed the Vietnamese Boat people escaping tyranny there and we welcomed Ugandan Asians escaping Idi Amin. And of course, in each case, the migrant population has not been a burden but has done very well in the UK.  The political tide has really turned since then.

I think that the situation in the Mediterranean, and in Eastern Europe where  almost as many migrants are  coming via land frontiers, is the most significant development.   The total number of migrants has reached 180,000.  By contrast there are “only 4000” in Calais. The rest have gone elsewhere in Europe – mainly Germany and Sweden.   So why the fuss in Calais?  Well this is entirely caused by the UK decision not to be part of Schengen, not to accept any quota of migrants at all, and to relocate the frontier to Calais, instead of it being in Dover. It is NOT the result of the UK Benefits system being too generous (it isn’t actually more generous than France), but it’s a good myth to promote.

If we had no borders – like France / Belgium – there would be none of this.  There are migrants arriving in Italy and wandering all over Europe to other EU  countries all the time, and no  one even knows. If the border was in Dover, as it should be, then people could legally hitch a ride with a lorry driver or car driver, and then apply for asylum as soon as they land. However, by putting the border in Calais, they can never get to English soil in order to apply for asylum, so they have to practically kill themselves in the attempt. Why can we not have an asylum office in Calais as well? Is it because they don’t want them applying and it is likely that too many would be approved? Why does the UK stay in the UN if we aren’t prepared respect international agreements?  

                I agree with my correspondent that those migrants aren’t attracted to the UK by our generous benefits.  Even if it were true that our benefits are more generous than those of other countries, I really don’t think that migrants would risk their lives daily in the hope of acquiring a few extra quid!   Many are attracted to the UK because they have learned a little English at school and think, probably correctly, that they’d speak it fairly fluently after a few months.  English has become a world-wide language – and that has its disadvantages as well as its benefits.

                When I hear David Cameron saying that migration from France to the UK is a European problem, not just a problem for France and Britain, I am amazed at his temerity.  It would be a European problem if we had signed up to the Schengen Agreement and had abolished our national frontiers – or if we had been prepared to accept a few of the thousands of migrants who have reached Italy, Spain or Greece either across the Mediterranean  or from Turkey.   As it is I think our fellow Europeans could surely quite reasonably say, ‘If those opt-out Brits want to keep their own frontiers and accept no refugees from Africa of Asia – it’s up to them to guard those frontiers and keep the migrants out.  We’ve got plenty of our own problems to solve before we can give thought to those   that the Brits have brought upon themselves!’

                 On the world stage our top politicians diligently pursue what they think of as our national interests. Meanwhile Climate Change waits in the wings with nasty surprises in store for all of them……….and us!

                 

            

Week 36 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

SURELY NOT AGAIN!

Britain’s involvement with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa

          For more than two centuries the United Kingdom has again and again been involved in armed conflict in North Africa and the Middle East. Empire building during the 19^th century we twice tried, and failed, to occupy and subdue Afghanistan by force.  In that same century we were involved with Egypt and the Sudan as well as with southern Africa.  During World War I, since Turkey was an ally of Germany, we were involved with the whole of the Near and Middle East from the Balkans and Egypt to what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq).  Conflict during World War II involved both the whole of the Middle East and the whole of North Africa.  During that war I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery and was in action in the frontier area of Egypt and Libya throughout the winter, spring and early summer of 1941 and 1942.  My active military career came to an abrupt end when Tobruk in Libya fell to Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942!

            In recent years the pace has accelerated.   To our shame the UK and the USA supported the ‘gallant Afghan Mojihadin’ in their armed resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s – thereby financing, training and encouraging the ‘terrorist extremists’, still killing ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan who for the past ten years have been engaged in a mission similar to that of the Soviets in an earlier decade.   All British and other NATO troops are to be withdrawn in the near future.  My guess is that, after an initial blood-bath of Afghans who are considered to have helped the NATO forces, within a year Afghanistan will be as it was before either the Soviet or the NATO interventions.

The Gulf Wars and Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’

            In the meantime the UK has been involved in two Iraq or ‘Gulf’ wars.  We became a combatant in the second bloodier one as a result of false claims that the Iraqi government had been somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and that they possessed concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ threatening the peace of the region and of the whole world.  What nonsense!  And I believe that those who deceived Parliament and much of the Press into supporting the invasion of Iraq were well aware that both claims were nonsense!   On the eve of the invasion millions of Brits protested – in vain!  I am proud of the fact that both my sons and daughters in law, and my grandchildren (by then, children no more!) were among the protesters.

            Could it be said that the end has justified the means?  Our invasion gained hundreds of recruits for El Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who had hardly had a foothold in Iraq prior to our action there! Nowadays scarcely a week goes by without news of a terrorist bomb attack by one or other of the country’s warring factions killing scores of innocent Iraqi civilians.  The Iraqi Christian community, once an influential and tolerated minority, has been subject to constant attacks by Islamist zealots.  Those of them who can get out of the country have done so.   It would surprise me if today there are not thousands of Iraqis who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age!   There’s certainly no sign of any benefit that might have arisen from that ill-considered and illegal invasion.

‘The Arab Spring’ – in Libya and Egypt

            Next came Libya.  Our involvement started innocently enough with the enforcement of a ‘no fly zone’ to prevent Colonel Gaddafi’s forces from bombing innocent civilians.   Soon we were offering every kind of help short of of troops on the ground, to the rebels. Any bombing of innocent civilians was being done by us! The government forces were defeated and Colonel Gaddafi murdered.  At least that prevented him from telling the world at his trial all about Tony Blair and the other dear friends in ‘the west’ who had supported him while it had suited them to do so!

It is now over a year since Gaddafi was overthrown and the elected government hasn’t yet managed to rule and control the country effectively.  Corruption is rife.  Benghazi, where the rebellion against Gaddafi began, is said to be ruled by armed militia and militant Islamists.  Cemeteries of our dead from World War II have been vandalised and desecrated, and Libya isn’t considered to be a safe destination for British travellers.  It is hardly the outcome for which Cameron, Haig and Co did battle from their comfortable Whitehall armchairs!

Then there’s Egypt.   There, many people in Britain who wished the Egyptians well had high hopes.   A bloodless revolution of ordinary people overthrew an unpopular autocratic President and democratic elections were held. The new elected President represented the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest single political party but by no means representative of the majority of the Egyptian people.  A great many Egyptians  (in particular Egypt’s Coptic Christians, long established - longer than Islam in fact - and ten percent of the total population) feared the outcome.

They did so with good reason. Just like Hitler (who also was democratically elected in the first instance) Morsi, the new President, began to appoint members of his own party, the Muslim Brotherhood, into positions of power and influence and to transform Egypt from a tolerant liberal multi-faith democracy into an Islamic State, introducing the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Sharia law.  Attacks on Christian Churches and individuals increased, though the British Church Times records that other Muslims, not members or supporters of the Brotherhood, attempted to defend their Christian neighbours against these attacks.

This was emphatically not what those tens of thousands of Egyptians who had toppled the Mubarak regime had wanted.  They gathered once again in their thousands to protest at the democratically elected President whom they believed was abusing his position of power.  At the same time there were mass demonstrations supporting President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Egyptian Army came down on the side of those opposing a Muslim Brotherhood takeover.  They arrested President Morsi and created a new interim Government.  Demonstration sit-downs by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters threatened to bring life in Cairo to a stand-still..  The army claims, probably truthfully, that they tried to persuade the demonstrators to disperse peacefully – and failed.  They then resorted to what armies are best at – the use of force! They opened fire on the demonstrators, killing or wounding hundreds of them.  The demonstrators were dispersed.  They had achieved their objectives though.  Scores – perhaps hundreds – of innocent victims were proclaimed to be ‘martyrs’. The Muslim Brotherhood gained the sympathy and verbal support of the Western World.

And that’s where the situation remains today. I can’t see any solution.  I am sure that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood will refuse to accept the result of any new election producing a non-Brotherhood President, and they are sufficiently numerous and resolute to sabotage any attempt to liberalise Egypt into a freedom-loving parliamentary democracy.  Fortunately there has so far been no suggestion that the UK, the USA, or NATO should intervene in this conflict.

SYRIA

I am delighted that Britain will not now be joining the USA and France in bringing even more death and destruction to unhappy Syria in the guise of ‘punishing a war crime’.   Thursday 29^th August 2013 will surely go into the history books as the day when, through their elected MPs in the House of Commons, the British public made it clear that the UK had meddled militarily in Middle East politics long enough.  Since the beginning of the armed rebellion against the Syrian government our government has been giving moral and practical support to the rebels, despite the fact that among them are committed terrorists including members of El Qaeda. Would the revelation, on our tv screens, of a particularly horrifying incident in which scores of civilians – men, women and little children - had died in agony as a result of what appeared to be a ‘chemical weapons attack’ provide justification for British military intervention together with the USA and France?.

The Prime Minister recalled MPs from their summer holidays to consider the issue. At first he had hoped to get, on 29^th August, approval from parliament for immediate military action.  That was modified so as to delay a final decision until after the report of the United Nations’ Inspectors, currently investigating the incident, had been received.  Our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were quite sure that a chemical attack had taken place and that the Assad government was responsible.  Many others were far less certain.  Yet others believed that, even if all the allegations were true, our military intervention would be more likely to add to the toll of slaughtered innocent civilians than to stop the killing.

Was the Syrian government responsible for that particular atrocity?  I don’t know.  It is difficult to believe though that, at the precise moment when UN weapons inspectors had arrived in Damascus to investigate alleged chemical attacks, the Syrian Government would launch a very conspicuous and well-publicised attack of the very kind the inspectors were investigating.  As George Galloway, Respect MP, said at the debate – President Assad may be bad but he’s surely not mad! Even if the Syrian government was wicked enough to launch such an attack upon civilians, can they possibly have been so stupid as to provoke the righteous anger of the whole world without gaining any discernible military advantage?

 Certainly it is the rebels who have benefited from the attack.  It seems probable that the USA and France – even without the UK – will launch punishing blows on their enemies, possibly altering the course of the war and bringing defeat on the Syrian government..  It has been said that it couldn’t possibly have been the rebels who used the lethal substances because they don’t possess the capability of manufacturing or buying them and, in any case, they would surely not use them against civilians who may have been their supporters.

Perhaps they couldn’t have bought or manufactured those materials themselves, but they undoubtedly have powerful and wealthy friends and allies (Saudi Arabia for instance and other of the Gulf States) who could have obtained them and smuggled them into Syria.  I don’t think they’d have been deterred by the thought of causing a few score – or even a few hundred – civilian deaths.  They would be just collateral damage on the way to final victory – and in any case, they’d all be martyrs and, as such, assured of a place in Heaven.

Much has been made of the claim that prior to the latest most serious attack there had been 14 other incidents in which chemical weapons had been used by government forces.  Did those alleged incidents occur before or after President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron had publicly declared that the use of chemical weapons would change their whole attitude towards the conflict?   If after then the rebels are clearly suspect.

  In the end the debate back-fired spectacularly onto the government. Parliament didn’t decide to postpone a final decision until the weapons inspectors had made their report.  They made a decision there and then that they didn’t want military action – and the Prime Minister, however reluctantly, has accepted that decision.

Will the UKs decision not to join with the USA in a punitive action against the Syrian government reduce Britain’s status in the world and harm the ‘special relationship’.  It is surely more important to do what is right – and refrain from doing what is clearly wrong, than to gain international popularity. As for the ‘special relationship’ it has always surely been understood that the USA and the UK do not necessarily always have identical objectives and priorities.

 Despite the ‘special relationship’ Britain did not join with the USA in its campaign in Vietnam.  In Harold Wilson we had a Prime Minister with sufficient strength of character to refuse Britain’s support for what proved to be a disastrous American adventure. Neither did the USA support Britain in the Falklands.  In October 1983 (almost exactly twenty years ago) the USA led an unprovoked invasion of the Caribbean island state of Grenada to unseat an elected socialist government that was in danger of setting a good/bad (delete as preferred) example to its south and central American neighbours.  The USA President (Ronald Regan) didn’t even bother to notify Grenada’s Head of State of his intention to invade that island and enforce a ‘regime change’. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth and its Head of State was our Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  Mrs Thatcher was her Prime Minister.  She seems to have been more of a ’tinfoil’ than an ‘iron lady’ on that occasion!

Since those incidents don’t appear to have damaged transatlantic friendship I  don’t see why our present disinclination to join with the USA in its ‘punishment’ of the Syrian Government should do so.

  

           

           

 

Week 9 2113

Tendring Topics......on line

‘Arms and the Man’

            That is the title of one of George Bernard Shaw’s more light-hearted plays, but ‘the arms’ that I have in mind are the weapons of death that, even as I write, are killing men, women and children in Syria and elsewhere and during the past century have killed millions of men, women and children world-wide.  ‘The man’ is our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

            He has recently been in India, furthering trade with that rapidly growing potential consumer of the products of British industry.  It was his second visit there in the past three years, his earlier one having been in July 2010.  Since then he has paid similar visits to Egypt and Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (on two occasions), Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

            Furthering British trade relations is obviously a very worthy activity though some may wonder if affairs at home in Britain are really running so smoothly that our Prime Minister can afford frequent absences on trade missions.  What is concerning is the fact that much of the commercial activity that he is so eager to promote is that of the arms trade – a trade that many of us regard as being as undesirable as the slave trade and that, like the slave trade, is destined to become  one of the darker aspects of our nation’s history.  This interest of the Prime Minister was noted particularly during the ‘Arab spring’ when he toured the Middle East in the company of arms salesmen who regarded the turmoil in the region as a unique sales opportunity.  How those salesmen must have rejoiced earlier at the bloody break-up of the former Jugoslavia.  Quite apart from the deadly weapons required at the time, its outcome was the creation of five potential customers instead of just one!

            Howard Wheeldon, Director of Policy for ADS, a ‘defence’ trade organisation is reported as saying, ‘The PM has done a fantastic job.   He has picked up the value of defence to the national economy.  Other PMs haven’t necessarily’.  No doubt; but the promotion of arms sales surely can’t have a very high priority on the Prime Minister’s ‘job description’.

            In fact, the British arms trade does very well by global standards.  The USA is the world’s biggest arms exporter with 35 percent of the market share.  The UK comes next with a 15 percent share, narrowly in front of both Russia and France. It is not a statistic in which I take any pride.

            It may be argued that every country has a right to self-defence.  Trouble arises only when weapons fall into the wrong hands.  Much the same argument has been put forward in the USA about gun control.  ‘The only way to foil the activities of  bad guys with guns is to make sure that the good guys are well armed’.

 Internationally, how do we tell the ‘good guys’ from the bad?  And how do we ensure that they remain ‘good? I am sure that when the French sold Exocet Missiles to the Argentineans they hadn’t intended them to be used against the British in the Falklands.  When the USA and the UK covertly armed the Mojihadin in Afghanistan to support them in their guerrilla war against the USSR they hadn’t intended to put weapons into the hands of those who, a few decades later, would be using them to kill British and American troops.  It would surprise me if British made weapons are not being used by both sides in the current bloody conflict in Syria.

            I look forward to the day when the success of the arms trade is a distant memory and we are better known for our tractors, our dams, our bridges and our medical and surgical expertise than for our tanks and guns, our bombers, our jet fighters and our death-dealing missiles.

An elderly ‘Essex boy’!

          It might have been thought that someone who had had to serve only nine weeks of a nine months sentence for serious fraud, and had heard that there was to be no further investigation into his expensive activities as former Leader of Essex County Council, would have thanked his lucky stars for his good fortune and have kept a very low profile, at least for a year or two.

           

But that was not Lord Hanningfield’s way.  He sued Essex Police for wrongful arrest and trespass and has been awarded £3,500 in damages. Only a month or two ago we had learned that, as the fraud for which he had been convicted had been much greater than had originally been realized, he would have to pay back a further £37.000 under the Proceeds of Crime Act, or return to gaol for a further term.  We were told at the time that as he was by no means a wealthy man this might compel him  to sell his bungalow and ‘take up the tenancy of a Council House’. (Did he really imagine he'd qualify for one?)   Under the circumstances he might have been expected to add that £3,500 to his meagre savings, but not so.  He is ‘still working to raise that £37,000’ and is donating the £3,500 to a cancer charity!

            Lord Hanningfield (who was plain Paul White, an Essex pig farmer, before Tony Blair arranged for him to be ennobled on Margaret Thatcher’s recommendation) says that one chapter of his life is now over and he wants to get on serving the people of Essex.  ‘I’ll mainly be working in the House of Lords and I’m already taking up some issues’.

            How strange that the government and members of the House of Commons should be so strongly opposed to convicted criminals being permitted to vote in elections for those who make our laws – but are apparently quite happy for a convicted criminal, who has not yet ‘paid his debt to Society’ (he still owes us £37,000 or a further spell in gaol!) and as far as I know has uttered not a single word of apology or contrition, to play a part in the House of Lords in making those laws!

            We used to hear a great deal about ‘Essex girls’ and their characteristics.  Lord Hanningfield is surely an elderly ‘Essex boy’ to match any of them!

           

              The Assassins

          It is said that at the beginning of the Battle of Waterloo it was reported to the Duke of Wellington that the commander of one of the British cannon had Napoleon himself squarely in his sights.   Should he give the order to fire?  ‘Certainly not’, replied Wellington, ‘We are soldiers – not assassins’.  Yet had he given the order to fire it is at least possible that thousands of British and French lives would have been spared.

            That, I suppose, is always the justification advanced for assassination.  A particular individual is the enemy of the State/the Party/Democracy/the Faith/ the Revolution, or whatever else is considered most important at that time and in that place.  The violent erasure of just one life, it may be claimed, would save thousands of others.  In the nineteenth century a Russian nobleman said of his country that its system of government was ‘despotism tempered by assassination’.

            The present Russian government may well have been responsible for the assassination in London in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of the KGB and of its successor, who had defected to MI6, becoming a double agent working for British Intelligence. It wouldn’t be particularly surprising if he were regarded as a threat to his former employers (much as Burgess and Maclean, who defected to Russia, were regarded in Britain) and orders given for his elimination.  It was an assassination that has soured Anglo-Russian relations to this day.

            British-Israeli relations were similarly soured by the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhooh, a Hamas activist, in Dubai in 2010 by agents of Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.  The assassins used forged British passports to get near to their victim, again provoking British official condemnation.  Such assassinations, we may think, are the sort of conduct that we expect from Russians and folk from the Middle East – but are far below the standard of the United Kingdom and our allies.

            But are they? Whoever murdered Alexander Litvinenko and those who murdered Mahmoud al Mabhooh at least put their own lives at risk and in danger when they carried out their criminal actions.   We can hardly say the same about those in the USA who control drones (unmanned aircraft) to fly over enemy – or sometimes nominally allied – countries, seeking out individuals considered to be a threat to the USA as targets for the launch of their death-dealing missiles.  ‘Smart’ as these drones and their deadly cargo undoubtedly are, they are not quite smart enough to distinguish between individual friends and foes. From 2006 to 2009 between 750 and 1,000 people were assassinated by drones in Pakistan, of whom it is reckoned that 66 to 68 percent were Taliban activists and between 31 and 33 percent innocent civilians.

            I understand that the UK also uses drones but that, at present, their use is restricted to military targets in Afghanistan.  We do, of course, support the activities of our American allies.   There was a time, not so very long ago, when American courts refused to extradite suspected, and in some cases tried and sentenced, IRA murderers to the UK.  There’s no doubt what the American reaction would have been had we then sent drones to pick out and ‘neutralise’ those enemies of our country and its people - especially if a few innocent American civilian deaths occurred as ‘collateral damage!'    Do not do unto others what you would hate them - or anyone else - to do unto you!

           

           

             

            

Week 24 2012 17.6.12

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘When will they ever learn*?

It isn’t very often that I find myself 'on the same side' as a feature writer in the Mail, but I have to admit reluctant agreement with at least some of the sentiments expressed by Peter Hitchins in the Mail on Sunday at Whitsun.

            ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?  Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya?  Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias.

            I had been shocked earlier when I had discovered that Saudi Arabia was among the most fervent supporters of Syria’s ‘freedom fighters’.   Surely we all know that, at least prior to the current uprising, Syria was an oasis of tolerance and liberalism compared with Saudi Arabia, with its subjugation of women, its medieval laws and punishments, and its total prohibition of any kind of religious worship other than its own extreme version of Islam.  Far from supporting ‘freedom fighters’, Saudi Arabia’s ruler had sent troops into neighbouring Bahrain to help the brutal efforts of the government there to suppress its own ‘Arab spring’ of rebellion.

            Had any other two countries been similarly involved in the suppression of popular rebellion, there would have been outrage in London and Washington. Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain though, are not only sources of oil, they are also wealthy and reliable purchasers of armaments.   Plausible excuses can always be found for their excesses and their rulers welcomed as honoured guests when they deign to visit us.                             

Do you remember the high hopes when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq – and of their outcome?  Saddan Hussein was a cruel and ruthless dictator – but under his dictatorship Iraq was a united country in which terrorist groups like El Qaida scarcely had a foothold and in which there was a degree of religious freedom and tolerance unusual in the Middle East.  There was a thriving Christian community and well-attended Christian churches.  Our ‘victory’ (do you remember George Bush proclaiming it from the bridge of a US Aircraft Carrier?) has produced a divided country with a ruined infrastructure.  Kurds are seeking independence and Sunni and Shia Muslims are at each other’s throats. Christians are under constant attack and are emigrating as quickly as they are able to do so. There is a constant threat of terrorist bombs.

Then there was the Arab Spring first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and finally Libya.  It really seemed that parliamentary democracy would triumph, that these countries would throw off their ancient legacies of autocracy and embrace government of the people, for the people, and by the people.   I did, at the time, suggest in this blog that it was at least equally likely that a militantly Islamic government, comparable with that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would emerge.  Currently the Egyptians have elected an Islamic parliament and are faced with the choice of an Islamic President or a representative, albeit a milder one, of the old regime.  My guess is that the Islamic candidate will win.  The moderate, liberal, secularist, and freedom-seeking Egyptians who had been the backbone of the Arab Spring have disappeared.  Their various factions had varying ultimate aims.  They were divided.  The Islamists and the Traditionalists had clear and understandable objectives and were united. It is they who have triumphed.

I am not surprised that the Coptic Christians, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian faith, established in Egypt long before the arrival of Islam, are full of foreboding.

As for Libya, where ‘the west’ played an active role, having secured a mandate from the United Nations on the dubious grounds of protecting civilians from  air strikes by the Libyan Government.  In Egypt there may have been some doubt, but in Libya we know perfectly well than among the ‘freedom fighters’ we have been supporting are terrorists trained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnia and  Pakistan.   At least some of them have proved themselves to be as competent as Colonel Gaddafi’s minions at torturing and murdering their captured and helpless opponents.

I have no idea when, or even if, a credible government will eventually emerge in Libya but I have little expectation or hope that it will be a freely elected, liberal and tolerant one.

Today (6^th June 2012) has been a bad one for Afghan civilians.  In Kandahar three Taliban suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians.  Elsewhere in that unhappy country, an American air strike (not for the first time) has accidentally managed to slaughter everyone at a wedding reception - collateral damage, innocent victims of our ‘war on terror’.  Can we wonder that ordinary Afghans hate us foreign infidels even more than most of them hate the Taliban?

History (the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s) has shown that foreign intervention has the effect of increasing the bloodiness of civil conflict.   We should, I am quite sure, offer humanitarian aid where we can to alleviate the suffering of civilians on either side of the conflict, and mediate if and when asked to do so.  For God’s sake though (and I mean that reverently not blasphemously!) let us otherwise keep out of other people’s armed conflicts!

*’When will they ever learn?’ was the refrain of a popular protest song of the 1960s entitled ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Secularism

         

          In the United Kingdom those of us who, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘­profess and call ourselves Christians’ have come to take it for granted that the greatest enemy of Christian faith and tradition in this country has been the apparently inexorable advance of secularism.  We no longer have a public holiday at Whitsun.  It has been replaced by a fixed-date secular late spring public holiday.  Christmas, the time at which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, has been systematically secularised.   Happy Christmas! is being replaced on our greetings cards by Season’s Greetings or some such similarly meaningless phrase. Ask at a Post Office for the special stamps issued as Christmas draws near and you’ll be offered secular ones. However, as a rather patronising concession to a minority interest, there will be some ‘religious Christmas stamps’ kept ‘under the counter’ for those who specially ask for them! We are encouraged to speak of ‘the festive season’ or ‘the mid-winter holidays’ rather than of Christmas!   The most popular Christmas images are no longer a baby in a manger, a young mother lovingly holding her new-born child or wise men following a star, but of Santa Claus and his reindeer, holly and ivy, or young children playing in the snow.

            Easter has become a celebration of hot cross buns, cuddly bunnies, chocolate eggs and dancing daffodils, rather than of a suffering man on a cross and his glorious resurrection.

            We are encouraged to abandon referring to dates as BC (before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini or ‘Year of our Lord’) but as BCE (before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).  Determined secularists would like to see the abolition of prayers in schools or at public meetings and the departure from radio and tv of such popular religious programmes as Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day and Prayer for the Day.

            Yet, as an article in the Church Times reminded its readers a few weeks ago, while we in the UK deplore the advance of secularism, Christians in Egypt are fervently praying, probably in vain, that they may have a secular government in Cairo!

            I have listed above some of the things that proselytising secularisers have done and are doing.  It is only fair to add some of the things that even the most determined secularists, however misguided we may think them to be, don’t do.  They don’t throw bombs into religious gatherings or explode them fixed to themselves in public places, convinced that – if only they can take a few believers with them – they will be rewarded.   Nor do they persecute, ostracise, punish, or threaten to kill members of their families or communities who convert to one of the religious faiths available, or who marry into a believing family. 

            I am, of course, describing the activities of some Muslims. I know perfectly well that none of those things is compatible with ‘true Islam’ and that Jihad is really all about the struggle between good and evil within oneself.  A great many, probably a large majority, of Muslims in this country find the activities listed above as abhorrent as I do.  But some Muslims do believe they are an essential part of Islam and that jihad doesn’t mean an inner struggle but an outward war against the infidel.  When Britain and the USA covertly funded the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in Afghanistan, they hoped they would use our money to kill Russians, certainly not to conduct a struggle within themselves!  They are now realising that to the mojihadin, one lot of foreign infidels is much the same as another. 

            I am not selecting Muslims for condemnation.  Christians have been as bad, if not worse. I know that the Christian faith is one of love and compassion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.  In the 16^th century though, when Christians were torturing each other and burning each other alive in the name of Christ – who would have believed that?

            Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries pious Puritans in New England as well as in Britain imprisoned, tortured and hanged unfortunate women denounced as witches. They would have quoted Biblical chapter and verse against any who protested.  ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was, so they believed, the Word of the Lord.  Even today there are those who proclaim themselves to be fundamentalist or Bible Christians, who eagerly hunt through obscure passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy to justify their fierce opposition to practices or attitudes with which they disagree

In their enthusiasm for the small print of the Old Testament they seem to have missed the words of Jesus Christ. He told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is encapsulated in just two simple commandments – Love God with all your being and love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.  Jesus clarified that second commandment by explaining that we should treat other people in exactly the same way as we would like them to treat us.  When he reminded his listeners that they should not attempt to pour new wine into old bottles or sew new cloth onto an old garment,  he was surely referring to the many rules and regulations  of the Old Testament

How strange that some Christians prefer to live by the multitudinous prohibitions and demands of the old dispensation rather than by the two straightforward and simple commands of the new!

 Like Egypt’s Coptic Christians, I would not wish to be ruled by an ostentatiously religious government, whether Muslim or Christian (no, not even Quaker!).  I am happier with a secular government, that may well include individual Christians or Muslims;  one that is tolerant of all religions whose followers are prepared to comply with the law of the land; a Government that is always prepared to listen to and take seriously the advice of religious leaders.  Its members, religious, agnostic and atheist, should act in accordance with the reason that God has given them and in the light of the dictates of their conscience, which, as a Quaker, I believe to be inspired and enlightened by the Inward Light of Christ,  God’s gift to every man, woman and child on this earth.

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’

            I am afraid that there has been nothing very cheering or uplifting in anything that I have so far written in this week's blog.  I thought therefore that I would end it with the latest picture of my ‘honorary German niece' Maja.   Isn’t she a truly beautiful child?  Although not yet six years old her eyes seem to be full of intelligence, love and trust.  It was surely such a child as this that Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and told them that this was the example they needed to follow if they wished to enter God's kingdom.

            Maja’s great grandfather was a lieutenant in the German Army in World War II.   He was killed on the Eastern Front at the same time that I and my comrades in the British Eighth Army and his compatriots in the German Afrikakorps were trying to kill each other in Libya.  My greatest hope for the .future is of lasting peace in Europe spreading throughout the world so that such circumstances may never arise again.