Praise Jesus, Mary & Joseph, I see Greg Sheridan's finally recovered from his near catatonic state, triggered by Jeremy Corbyn's electoral surge in the recent UK general election.
I can report that his very first post-recovery word was: "Yikes!" (Populism wins in this volatile new world, The Australian, 10/6/17)
Seemingly, back to his former self, he's spluttering in today's Australian over the sheer yuckiness of UK PM Theresa May's new-found political allies, Ulster's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Calling them "the gargoyle party of Northern Island," he writes that "Few people have any idea just how bad the DUP have been and are." (May has bound her future to the gargoyles of Ulster)
The DUP serves, he declares, "as a kind of exotic museum piece in British politics," and "has rightly been described as the political wing of the 18th century."
And then, in darker tones:
"The party's true heritage is of shocking sectarian bigotry, violence, connivance in extra-judicial killing and official discrimination."
Frankly, I can't see what his problem is with the DUP. After all, isn't he the greatest fan in Australian journalism of Israel, the closest thing to Ulster in the Middle East?
If the DUP are 18th century, surely they're positively modern compared to Israel, which has a leader who believes he's the direct descendant of Binyamin, the son of Jacob, who roamed the 'Judean' hills with his daddy 4,000 years ago.
And if "shocking sectarian bigotry," "violence," "extra-judicial killing," "official discrimination," and much, much more, aren't the defining characteristics of the apartheid state Israel, I don't know what are.
And come to think of it, didn't at least one British colonial official once muse, back in the 1920s, that the anti-Palestinian Arab, British-backed project of a 'Jewish national home in Palestine' (as it was coyly described in the Balfour Declaration of 1917) would "form for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism"?
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Sir Ronald Storrs!
"The first of all of us was Ronald Storrs, Oriental Secretary of the Residency, the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture, painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world's fruit... Storrs was always first, and the great man among us". T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
"... he attempted to support Zionism while protecting the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, and thus earned the hostility of both sides."
"
http://military.wikia.com/wiki/Ronald_Storrs
Prof. Motti Golani, University of Haifa, an expert on Palestine and Britain during the Mandate period, pointed out in an article that appeared in Haaretz, "Storrs at first seemed to be a convinced Zionist, and when the Zionist Commission came to Jerusalem, Storrs, equipped with the official status granted him by His Majesty's Government, tried to help Chaim Weizmann and his people to the best of his ability." http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/discerning-conqueror-1.324306
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