SUCH was the panting enthusiasm of unionist politicians for the US bombing of Iran, I got the distinct impression that some of them had been reading their newspapers with one hand, or watching the TV news on their phones in the privacy of their bathrooms.
Let’s face it: Loyal Ulster has never met a war involving the west that it didn’t get off on.
The mere mention of the letters RAF sends them into a Homer Simpson-style drool-moan coma; bunkerbusters, stealth bombers, precision guidance, Massive Ordnance Penetrators – terms like these are guaranteed to empty the payload of every red-white-and-blue-blooded male. Meanwhile, their stay-at-home wives listen to the excited BBC reports of total aerial domination and kill zones on the wireless in the kitchen, rapidly and distractedly fanning their faces with one hand.
The RAF’s not involved directly in the Iran business yet, but no doubt if and when they are, windows will be adorned with a Sun centre-page pull-out of British Typhoons doing their bit in Operation Panther’s Ballbag, or whatever preposterously juvenile moniker they dream up to get the mouthbreathers excited. (Just Typhoons, mind you; not, obvs, Eurofighter Typhoons, as the proper name would only kill the buzz in yer average Brexit boozer).
The RAF is involved in the wider conflict, of course. Their reconnaissance overflights of Gaza, identify prime targets for the Israel Air Force to attack: Hospitals, tent cities, schools, refugee centres, designated safe areas, aid convoys, ambulances, that kind of thing. But the UK media have agreed to keep that on the QT, partly because of operational reasons, but mostly because their audiences don’t want to hear that today’s Ginger and Squiffy, inheritors of the glorious Spitfire tradition, are helping to shred mothers and babies and blow up cancer units.
It's a facile, insulting, lazy and sophomoric insult to say that unionists support Israel because they identify with the narrative of a plucky and put-upon chosen people assailed on all sides in a little and lovely land they carved from nothing. But it also happens to be true. Trouble is, just as unionists have had to paint lipstick on the pig that was 50 years of one-party sectarian misrule that led to 30 years of conflict, so, in more modern times, they’re having to apply a bit of lip-filler and a lot of Botox to the haggard and snarling face of the baby-killing Tel Aviv regime. It’s a tough job convincing people that Protestants had it as hard as Catholics in the good old days, that the B-Specials were misunderstood social workers and everything would have been great if it hadn’t been for those pesky republicans expecting houses and jobs. But it’s a piece of cake compared to the task of defending the most far-right regime on the planet and its fanatical members who celebrate and encourage the slaughter of innocents and openly spout the kind of blatant genocidal rhetoric that would have made the editorial board of Der Stürmer resign in disgust.
The News Letter in a recent editorial bemoaned the “hyper-civilised Jewish state” being equated with “the mass-murdering Islamic extremist barbarians of Hamas” by “international legal activists”. That’s Israeli-Scots for “The Prime Minister of Israel is on the run from the International Criminal Court.” ‘Civilised’ is a word dripping with colonial paternalism, but let’s stick with it as an exercise in unionist empathy and ask, What exactly is a “hyper-civilised” state? The word’s entirely subjective, so it’s hard to say. But away from the daily insult to the concept of humanity that is Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, Israel fails the most basic and inarguable indicators of a civilised society. Since Israel’s spokespersons like to remind us at every turn that the medieval Muslim states surrounding it throw gays off roofs (they don’t), and since Israeli apologists are wont to invite LGBTQ opponents of its genocide to “go to Gaza and see how you get on”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Israel is gayer than Alan Carr in a gladiator movie.
But entirely absent from narrative of Israel as an outpost of ‘western values’ in a hot and hostile desert is the simple fact that Israel bans gay marriage. And while News Letter readers may not be unanimous in identifying gay rights as a sine qua non of a civilised society, human rights groups rate it as a key indicator.
The entire Israeli matrimonial system is subcontracted to religious courts, also known as rabbinical courts, which, rather inconveniently for the News Letter’s hyper-civilised argument, don’t have women about the place. The same female-free rabbinical courts which ban gays from marrying gays in Israel also ban Jews from marrying non-Jews (straight or gay), which I suppose makes Israel a kind of matrimonial Orange Order.
The anti-gay part of the ban is simple medieval homophobia, from which all religions suffer to a greater or lesser extent. The ban on inter-faith marriages, however, is a key part of the scaffolding of every theocratic political structure. What future is there for a Jewish state for a Jewish people (hat tip to our own James Craig) if Jews marry Catholics or Muslims or Baptists? The ban on inter-faith marriages has been an existential imperative of Israel since its inception, but far from being the mark of a hyper-civilised society it’s proof of a deeply regressive one.
MIXED MESSAGES: Israel sells itself as an LGBTQ-friendly tourist destination, but gay marriage is banned there
Citizenship, due process, water, power, food, movement, employment – every aspect of the lives of Palestinians is restricted or disappeared by Israel in a way that Israelis’ lives are not. That’s a simple fact laid in front of us in detail by all the world’s leading human rights groups. You can rationalise them all you like. You can say the 15 per cent of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank deserve 80 per cent of the water because they wash themselves and Arabs don’t. You can say Israelis deserve a modern system of due process because they’re not just chosen for greatness by God, but chosen for justice by Solomon. You can say Palestinians – adult and child – deserve to be tried in military tribunals with a 99 per cent conviction rate because they live under military control anyway. But what you can’t say is that this is civilisation; and what you certainly can’t say is that this is hyper-civilisation.
Not that our Precious Union’s work is done when it steps up to the plate for Israel – far from it. Uncompromising and robust support must also be forthcoming for the Commander-in-Chief of this latest round of Middle East housekeeping. Loyal Ulster’s not naïve enough to think that Iran can ever become hyper-civilised (Ts&Cs apply) like Israel, but the tantalising prospect of the US kicking on from the bombing to bring back the Shah has put regime change on the table, with the bright promise of MAGA giving birth to MIGA. And who better to free the women of Iran from the tyranny of the veil and domestic subservience than an adjudicated rapist who recommends grabbing women by the genitals, talks dirty about his own daughter and boasted of creeping the dressing rooms of Miss Teen USA?
Who better to bring democracy to Iran than the man who’s sending anonymous, masked gangs into American homes and businesses so that those who displease the Grand Wotsit can be kidnapped and disappeared? Who better to free Iran from the Mullahs and bring justice to the people than the man who packed the Supreme Court with fundamentalist whackjobs and compromised careerists? Who better to remind Iran of the grim but vital lessons of history than the man who said Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and openly fantasised about having US Army generals of the calibre of the Nazis?
DOUBLE STANDARDS: If you're concerned about the safety of women and girls and you support Donald Trump you've a problem with consistency
The defence rests. Or, since unionist support for Israel and Trump is on trial here, the prosecution rests. Just as BBCNI had a list of witnesses the length of their arm lining up to tell a jury that Gerry Adams is a nasty bit of work, so there’s an infinite litany of further charges to be levelled against Tel Aviv and Washington. But having run this Netflix trailer past you, I urge you to go online and bingewatch the whole series.
Not that the resulting boost to your knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs will enable you to win many converts to the concept of Zionist fallibility. I don’t expect rose petals to be scattered in my path or babes-in-arms to be offered to me for kisses by swooning mothers when I say I am serially on record as being under no illusion about the Middle East and democracy. In the full knowledge that some Arab politicians, Muslim scholars and Levantine historians will rightly deride my Lawrence of Arabia paternalistic pretensions, I wish women and gays were treated better in Islamic republics and Sharia-based polities. I remain as disgusted by the October 7 atrocities of Hamas as I was when in the days after the invasion of Israel I wrote an editorial accusing Hamas of war crimes and added: “…make no mistake, the murder of innocents and the appalling images that followed the startling offensive by Hamas on Saturday can only have sickened those – this newspaper group included – who have been unswerving in their support for justice for Palestine and an end to the atrocity that is the illegal occupation.
"There is a moral imperative to call out all the appalling excesses that have filled the airwaves and newspaper pages for five days now – and there is a particular dignity in having the courage to stand up and say something is wrong, even when you are four-square behind the cause in whose name it has been done.”
The ghastly stain that Israel has left on the planet in the 20 months since October 7 has not changed my mind on the Hamas atrocities of that day, but more to the point, it hasn’t moved the dial a centimetre on the unionist conviction that Israel is not only more sinned against that sinning, but that it is entirely sinned against while not having sinned at all.
I pay attention to things, partly because it’s my job, partly because I just pay attention to things. And I can tell you that the most sickening atrocities of the Israeli assault on Gaza have occasioned not a scintilla or empathy or sympathy from senior unionist figures. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Israel is right and families have died in their thousands because they were all gathered round Hamas fighters. Let’s just concentrate on the things that Israel has owned up to: The slaughter of 15 medics and their burial in a shallow grave; the World Central Kitchen massacre; the execution of half-naked, white-flag-waving Israeli hostages. Not even these gulp-inducing atrocities have moved Loyal Ulster enough to warrant a seat-shift of discomfort or a cough of uncertainty, much less a rethink of what Israel is doing in Gaza. In other words, unionism is all-in, it’s beyond persuasion.
The main reason that migrants were burned out of their homes a fortnight ago was the ‘protection of women and girls’. After two foreign national youths were alleged to have been involved in a sexual assault on a juvenile, the North Antrim swatch catalogue was consulted and anyone not possessed of the requisite skin hue was either attacked or forced to put up a union jack sign begging not be attacked. The safeguarding of women and girls is important, nowhere more so than in Our Wee Country, which is the most dangerous place in Europe to be a woman. But after they’d either burned out a brown person or explained why those who burned out brown people had ‘legitimate concerns’, they went home and cheered as Israel continued its slaughter in Gaza and the US made a balls of obliterating Iran’s nuclear programme. The man responsible for ordering the Iran bombing, the man responsible for bankrolling Israel’s war machine and providing the weapons to shred Gazan babies, has an interesting way of displaying his concern for the safety of women and girls.
Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist. He recommends grabbing women by the p***y. He talks dirty about his own daughter. He has admitted to creeping the dressing rooms at Miss Teen USA (“I’m the owner of the pageant,” he told radio host Howard Stern, “they’re sort of standing there with no clothes on,” he confided, “I sort of get away with things like that.”) How it’s possible to be concerned about the safety of women and girls in Ballymena and be a cheerleader for a man who’s a self-confessed danger to women and girls everywhere is a question that only true-blue MAGAs answer.
“When the facts change, I change my mind,” said John Maynard Keynes, before asking, “What do you do, sir?” Gaza hasn’t changed, it’s disappeared, and up until the weekend I’d have said that unionism proposed to do nothing about the levelling of Gaza. But before the stealth bombers that attacked Iran had landed it became clear that unionism is not merely doing nothing – it’s demanding more of the same from the United States, more of the same from Israel. Just as in the past it demanded more of the B-Specials, of the UDR, of the RUC, of the British army and its proxies.
Question: How’d that work out for yiz, lads?
