So, the Palestinians have got their “two state solution”, even if it’s not
quite the thing they, or the rest of the world, envisaged. The homicidal
fundamentalists of Hamas now control the Gaza Strip, while the corrupt and
incompetent Fatah controls the West Bank enclaves of Hebron, Nablus and
Ramallah (although let’s see how long that lasts: I give it three months).
That’s the choice the Palestinians have when they go to the polls:
happy-go-lucky Hamas versus the good old PLO, Fatah - and the people, the
voters, seem to like it.
If a third party came along that was simultaneously corrupt, incompetent,
homicidal and fundamentalist it would probably clean up in Palestine. The
old neocon fallacy, upon which we went to war in Iraq, was that the people
of the Middle East desire nothing more than to be led by decent, secular,
democratically minded politicians who wished ill upon nobody - Menzies
Campbell in a headscarf. And then every time they are given a chance to vote
they go for the likes of Hamas, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. In the case
of Palestine, the election result so appalled Tony Blair that he generously
invited them to have another poll and this time try to get the right result
- a suggestion considered a little cheeky by most Palestinians. Which is
another thing he and George Bush do not understand: the more closely
identified they become with supposedly moderate forces in the Middle East
(such as, laughably, Fatah), the more fervently the mass of people will side
with those Bush and Blair consider extremists. This is part of what has
happened in Gaza and may soon happen on the West Bank. By and large, the
Arabs and the Iranians hate and mistrust us and have no great appetite for
liberal democracy; rather, it seems the people of each benighted satrapy
yearn only for a leader who will exert maximum violence and misery upon
almost everybody else but themselves.
“We want peace, my frent,” ordinary Arabs plead with the western news crews in
front of smashed homes and bombed buildings after each successive spurt of
nihilistic carnage, from Basra to Beirut. And so they do, probably, just as
soon as they’ve exterminated one or another local enemy - Fatah, Hamas,
Sunni, Shi’ite, Kurd, bedouin, Druze and, of course, the Jews.
And the more western politicians treat democracy in each of these countries as
a means to their own strategic ends and refuse to accept election results,
the more democracy will be seen as just another western con trick, never to
be trusted.
As the recriminations begin in Gaza, the Israelis - whom the world knows to be
in the wrong in its occupation of the West Bank - will sit back and say,
“See, told you, that’s what happens when these people are allowed to rule
themselves”.
Both the Israeli deputy defence minister and a bunch of West Bank Jewish
settlers repeatedly told me recently that the Palestinians would turn their
country into “another Somalia”. Being a good western liberal I replied well,
I doubt it, but that’s their right. And so it is.
But the Palestinians would seem to have exceeded even these hawkish
expectations. The Gaza Strip right now makes Mogadishu look like Lucerne.
The Katyusha rockets will soon be raining down on those Israeli citizens
unfortunate enough to be within striking range of Gaza City - and who, then,
will have the nerve to censure Israel for responding with what one imagines
will be insuperable force? They knew it would happen; it did happen.
She cried rape, he must be guilty, right?
A lesbian, Amy Jones, has just been sent to prison for four months for
perverting the course of justice, having told the police that Rod Swainson,
her stepfather, had raped and sexually abused her since she was 12 years
old. He had done no such thing. Mr Swainson was arrested, spent a week in
jail on remand and was awaiting trial. He is free not because justice took
its natural course, but because Ms Jones ’fessed up to the fuzz that she had
lied about everything: he had done nothing, she admitted. If she had stuck
to her lie Mr Swainson would most likely have been convicted. It would have
been his word against hers and as both the government and nongovernmental
organisations continually tell us, women must be believed when they howl
“rape”. There is enormous pressure on our courts to convict and so the
balance is now horribly skewed against the defendant. One reason for this is
the myth that the number of convictions for rape has decreased in recent
years. It hasn’t: the number has stayed pretty much the same. The percentage
of allegations resulting in conviction has decreased, which is a very
different thing. The suspicion remains that there are not more rapes than
once was the case, but a large increase in spurious allegations instead -
encouraged by a political climate which insists that women must be believed
and there’s an end to it.
Imogen’s rather sniffy about men
One young woman missing out on the sexual frenzy gripping our nation is Imogen
Lloyd Webber, who has not dated a man for 18 months, or so she told the
Daily Mail. Imogen, 30, will not date men who use “the illegal class A drug
cocaine”, as she puts it. Apparently they all do. Imogen makes a point of
asking men about their drug use the first time they have dinner together and
when - as is always the case - they reply in the affirmative, she skedaddles
without finishing her soup. Two thoughts immediately occur. First, it is
inconceivable that one could contemplate having sex with a member of the
Lloyd Webber family without first ingesting industrial quantities of class A
drugs or, if none are to hand, eating shoe polish or snorting glue. Second,
it may be that midway through the first course Imogen’s dates suddenly
realise what an appalling mistake they’ve made and take the very convenient
escape route offered by Ms Lloyd Webber. “Oops, yep, sorry, I am a bit of a
coke head, now you mention it. Never mind, nice meeting you. ’Bye.” I can’t
think of much to commend cocaine, but preventing the possibly accidental
coupling with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s daughter is definitely one such.
- Another dispiriting report about Britain’s young people: they are apparently
in the grip of a sexual health crisis, fuelled by alcohol and illegal drugs
and encouraged in their behaviour by the actions of chavvy celebrities. The
other thing is that our teenagers are also growing fatter by the minute and
will soon be so hideously obese that nobody would want to have sex with
them. That’s what we have to look forward to: a young nation of spaced-out,
paralytic 18 stone mingers, lying on their sofas in front of the TV with a
party-size bucket of KFC, forlornly yearning for a shag. This latest
shock-horror indication that the world is turning on its axis (“teenagers
like sex, drugs and alcohol and often have inappropriate role models”) comes
to us from the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV (IAG).
Aside from attacking young people for their hedonistic behaviour, it laments
that there is no “joined up government approach” to the problem.
So perhaps there is a future role for John Prescott - as a bluff, nononsense,
sex czar, one hand up the skirt of his secretary, the other firmly gripping
his croquet mallet. This is the problem - it is not just TV and pop stars
who have uncontrollable libidos these days. It is all of us - including,
I’ll bet, one or two members of the IAG. There are no suitable role models
any more.
- An organisation called the Cornwall National Liberation Army has promised
violence against the Padstow restaurateur Rick Stein and indeed his
customers. The CNLA did the trendy thing in wacko terrorist circles by
posting its threats on an Arabic website. Soon, perhaps, Al-Jazeera will
receive a badly shot video showing English people who’ve just enjoyed a nice
lobster bisque about to be decapitated by deranged, scimitar-wielding
yokels, angry that the economy west of the Tamar depends entirely upon the
beneficence of the rest of us. An offshoot of the CNLA once reportedly
placed broken glass beneath the sand on a Cornish beach, so that imperialist
English holidaymakers and fascist crabs might be maimed. Perhaps Stein
should mumble, in Cornish, a swift apology for two thousand years of
oppression and relocate to Devon.
