Reading Brendan O'Neill

What happens when you just make it up as you go along? Well, chances are that what you write will end up looking something like an opinion piece by Brendan O'Neill - half-baked, propagandist. 

O'Neill, editor of Spiked, is often recycled in Murdoch's Australian, and it's easy to see why:

"[F]ocus too much on Islamist terrorism these days and you risk being accused of Islamophobia. 'Christians used to do this kind of thing,' they will say, inaccurately, to deflect attention from their own unwillingness to take a strong moral stance on Islamist extreme violence. Or they will point out that the US and Britain and other nations are still engaged in violent conflicts in the Middle East... even though they must know, somewhere inside their moral universe, that there is an immeasurable difference between America's military campaigns in the Middle East (which are wrong)... " (Islamist barbarism thrives on West's weak response, 26/4/19)

"Which are wrong"? Why the brackets, Brendan? Why the dropped voice? Why not say it loud and clear: AMERICA'S MILITARY CAMPAIGNS IN THE MIDDLE EAST ARE WRONG? And why not say why? Because Islamist terrorism has been the result of such campaigns - from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and to Syria.

"... and the wilful slaughter of children queuing for sweets..."

Of course, our USraeli friends are never "wilful" when they slaughter children queuing for sweets:

"Witnesses to Sunday's incident said a missile that appeared to be a rocket hit an area just outside the gates of the Rafah Preparatory, a boys school where children were queuing to buy sweets and biscuits from stalls. The school had been providing shelter to more than 3,000 people - the same number that had been seeking refuge at a girls school in Jabaliya last Wednesday when it came under attack from a hail of Israeli shells. In contrast to that strike, which wrecked a classroom full of sleeping woman and children, the physical destruction this time appeared minimal: just a small but deep hole in the road where the missile had landed. But that clinical effect masked a devastating human cost. Pools of blood... were seen inside and outside the school, demonstrating how the blast's powerful impact had wished inside the grounds of what was supposed to be a safe haven." (Gaza school attacked as children queue for sweets, Robert Tait, telegraph.co.uk, 3/8/14)

Nothing personal there, of course, just good, clean collateral damage, right? Sorry about that, kids.

"Whether it is their accusations of Islamophobia or their morally relativistic comparison of today's new barbarism with the behaviour of Western armies, the liberal elites key aim seems to be to avoid having to take a strong position on this new, strange, spectacularly anti-human violence."

And, Brendan, what precisely do you mean by "liberal elites"? Do you mean someone like Obama's Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton? 

Was her position on "today's new barbarism" not "strong"? Didn't she propose defeating ISIS "on the battlefield" and working "with our allies to dismantle global terror networks"? (See Combating terrorism & keeping the homeland safe, hillaryclinton.com)

And yet you've already said, "America's military campaigns in the Middle East are wrong." So cut the crap and tell us what you mean by "a strong position."

The trouble with Clinton is that she doesn't seem at all interested in taking on certain regimes who inspire and stoke Islamist terrorism, and for obvious reasons:

"On the contributions given by state actors to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was US Secretary of State, Assange discusses one email in particular: 'There's an early 2014 email from Hilary Clinton... to her campaign manager, that states that ISIS is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.' He states, 'Actually, I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection, perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the place including into many media institutions. Analysts know, even the US government has mentioned, or agreed with, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS, funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it's just some rogue princes using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like but actually the government disapproves, but that email says that no, it's the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have been funding ISIS." (Never forget: the towering exposure of Hillary Clinton by Assange and WikiLeaks, Clinton Emerald, 21stcenturywire.com, 13/11/16)

Nor, for that matter, does the other side of the US coin, non-liberal, populist Donald Trump.

"A weak and morally disoriented West that will not strongly condemn the nihilistic ideology behind the slaughter of Christians in Sri Lanka..."

Now that "nihilistic ideology" wouldn't be Saudi Wahhabism, would it, Brendan?

 "... is a West that cannot feign surprise when such violence continues. It is no longer enough to say 'that's awful' and then move on; we need a serious reckoning with the war on Christians, the rise of seventh-century barbarism and the collapse of any semblance of moral restraint among the new terrorists."

And Brendan, isn't your phrase, "the rise of seventh-century barbarism," just a sneaky euphemism for Islam? Please explain why this isn't Islamophobia.

Bet you'd never conflate the barbarity of the Crusades with Christianity, or for that matter "America's military campaigns" - which you admit are ("wrong").

MBS's 'Impulsive Intervention Policy'

Must read:

The reverse Midas touch of Saudi Arabia's crown prince is turning the Middle East to dust, Mehdi Hasan, theintercept.com, 14/11/17

"Kudos to Germany's spooks. Back in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence agency, BND, distributed a... memo to various media outlets titled: 'Saudi Arabia - Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation.' The document was pretty astonishing, both in its undiplomatic bluntness and remarkable prescience: 'The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,' the memo warned, focusing on the role of Mohammed bin Salman, who had been appointed as deputy crown prince and defense minister at the age of 30 earlier that year.

"Both MBS, as he has come to be known, and his elderly father King Salman, the BND analysts wrote, want Saudi Arabia to be seen as 'the leader of the Arab world' with a foreign policy built on 'a strong military component.' Yet the memo also pointed out that the consolidation of so much power in a single young prince's hands 'harbours a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father's lifetime, he may overreach,' adding: 'Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.'

"And so it has come to pass. In fact, despite being repudiated at the time by a German government more concerned about diplomatic and commercial relations with Riyadh, the BND warning turned out to be eerily prophetic.

"Consider recent events in the Gulf. Can you get more 'impulsive' than rounding up 11 fellow princes, including one of the world's richest men and the commander of the national guard, and holding them at the Ritz Carlton on charges of corruption? Especially since MBS, who ordered the arrests only a few hours after his father set up an anti-corruption committee and put him in charge of it, isn't exactly a paragon of probity and transparency himself. Where, for example, did the crown prince find more than five hundred million dollars to spend on a luxury yacht while vacationing in the south of France last year?

"Is it anything other than 'interventionist' to force the resignation of the prime minister of Lebanon on a visit to your country and then put him under a form of house arrest (though the hapless Saad Hariri, a long-standing client of Riyadh, publicly claims otherwise and says he is heading back to Beirut this week)? Or to also detain the president of Yemen? According to an investigation by the Associated Press, 'Saudi Arabia has barred Yemen's President, along with his sons, ministers and military officials, from returning home for months.'

"That the crown prince of Saudi Arabia can, essentially, kidnap the elected leaders of not one but two Middle Eastern countries - and, incidentally, put the leading Saudi royal he replaced as crown prince under house arrest - speaks volumes about not just his 'impulsive intervention policy' but the shameless pass he gets from Western governments for such rogue behaviour. Imagine the reaction from the international community if Iran had, say, detained the Iraqi prime minister on Iranian soil after forcing him to resign on Iranian television. Yet President Donald Trump has gone out of his way to tweet his support for the crown prince and his father: 'I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing.'

"The more sober Europeans haven't been much better. President Emmanuel Macron of France, on a surprise visit to Riyadh last week, saluted MBS 'on the opening of his country and support for a moderate Islam.'

"Meanwhile, are we supposed to call the rift between the Gulf countries, instigated by the Saudis, with the support of the Emiratis, anything other than 'overreach,' to quote the BND, on the part of MBS? The crown prince and his cronies had assumed that tiny, defenceless Qatar would be brought to heel within a matter of weeks, if not days. Five months on, however, the Qataris continue to reject the long list of Saudi/UAE demands - including the closure of the Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera media network - and have retreated into the warm embrace of MBS's key regional rivals, Iran and Turkey. Bravo, Crown Prince!

Then there is Yemen. More than two years after the richest country in the Middle East began bombing the poorest country in the Middle East, there is no end in sight. MBS owns this disastrous conflict - he pushed for it, defended it, escalated it. But wasn't the recent Houthi rocket attack on Riyadh - which the crown prince called an act of 'direct military aggression by the Iranian military regime' - evidence of a complete failure of Saudi military strategy? Weren't those pesky Houthi rebels supposed to have been vanquished by the Royal Saudi Air Force by now? Instead, Yemen has become the world's worst humanitarian crisis - which MBS, as defence minister, shamefully intensified with his order last week to blockade all entry points into the country.

"From Lebanon to Qatar to Yemen, the much-lauded MBS has in fact proved to be the reverse Midas - everything he touches turns to dust. Maybe the authors of that scathing BND memo underestimated just how much of a disaster this favoured son of Salman would be both for the kingdom and for the wider region. The inconvenient truth about the crown prince is that he isn't only impulsive, he's incompetent: he isn't only ambitious, he's reckless. He is also a nationalist and a hawk who is bent on turning the longstanding Saudi/Iran cold war into a very hot war - and is even willing to ally with Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel in order to do so."