A Tangled Web

The Friday Essay



Tonge tied.



Just how anti-Semitic has the the United Kingdom become? A recent poll has suggested that 18% of Britons are anti-Semites. My response to this is to suggest that the figure seems way too low.



Consider this. Suicide bombers! Can’t live with ‘em – in fact, you definitely can’t live with ‘em. This makes the comments by Lib-Dem sweetheart Jenny Tonge all the more repulsive. The Liberal-Democrat Spokesperson for Children (ironically)showed her tender mercies towards Israeli children when she carefully explained how she may well have chosen to be a Palestinian suicide-bomber. These are the operatives who like to detonate themselves unselfishly at bus-stops, in cafes, at Weddings, anywhere they can slaughter without mercy, in fact.



The much loved Dr Tonge said she understood that her remarks may have upset “some people” but insisted she was not condoning violence. Perish the thought!!!

"I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from," she whined on the BBC (WHERE ELSE) as the full horror of her remarks struck home. I think many of us know exactly where Dr Tonge is coming from.



The question is just how representative is Jenny Tonge of UK political antipathy towards Israel? Judging by other comments coming across the political spectrum, Ms Tonge is no isolated wacko-case.



For example, Conservative MP Quentin Blunt (Rhyming slang anyone?) was quick to rush to the media and proclaim his concern that the right to free speech was being curtailed somewhat by the sacking of Tonge. Michael Howard should have be blunt with Blunt.



Readers will recall the comments made by Cherie Blair not so many moons ago when she expressed her own sincere and deeply held sympathy towards the Palestinian murderers. Speaking to reporters after appearing with Queen Rania of Jordan, she said: "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress." A subsequent grovelling apology does not excuse the blinding stupidity of the comment.



Across the UK political spectrum, there is a dark anti-semitic shadow. It is the same shadow that casts itself across much of Europe. It has been there in the past but was shamed into decades of post-holocaust silence. But it never really went away.



If the UK political elite had any courage, they should come out and categorically condemn the Palestinian homicide bombers and the barbarous regime headed up by arch-terrorist Arafat that incites maniacal hatred towards the Israeli people. Silence indicates something more worrying than indifference.



Maybe Jenny Tonge should use the spare time she will now have on her hands to investigate the premise that for many of the suicide bombers with whom she feels such an affinity, their murderous deaths may in fact be form of Arab honor killing.



Wafa Idris, the first Palestinia suicide bomber, was most likely in clinical depression when she detonated herself. Her husband had divorced her and taken a second wife. She was mocked by family and friends. She was sterile after a still born birth. Her prospects were bleak - thanks to the Islamic/ Palestinian misogyny, and thus she was trapped in redeeming herself by reducing herself to atoms, and taking innocent Israeli lives with her. As Cherie Blair would put it, what choice did she have?



Another such instance of the awful reality behind homicide bombers is the sad tale of Reem Al-Riyashi. This young mother of two children was allegedly “forced to carry out a suicide bombing as her punishment for cheating on her husband (with another Hamas operative”) Tough love, Palestinian style.



Where are the legions of UK feminists on this one? Why are these horrific medieval practices tolerated within what passes for "Palestinian society"? Has Arafat so degraded Palestinians that the moral sewer, supported by the UN and EU, that they inhabit prevents them recognising wrong when they do it? If so, at least they have an excuse. Those in the UK and throughout Europe who knowingly give support to such barbarism cannot say they shame.



Tonge’s tongue may now be tied but it has been a revealing insight into the dark side of the British political establishment.