Challenging the One-Horse Race 8
There is a stereotype at my University with whom I often talk. He wears a kaffiyeh; loose-fitting clothes with ‘Free Palestine’ badges attached; a low-slung woollen hat at the obligatorily jaunty angle; a pair of dangling, white, silent earphones that rhythmically swing from their pivot at the neck of his shirt; and various modish accessories representing figures such as Guevara, Chavez, Stalin and Castro. He is the son of an infamous champagne socialist.
Now compare him with Osama Bin Laden.
This is an odd instruction, but it is a useful comparison. Like our stereotype, we have another educated, middle-class iconoclast; but unlike our stereotype, we have a man whose enmity towards the West facilitates the deliberate negation of morality in order to carry out the most cruel and unspeakable of crimes.
Our stereotype once told me, ‘I always support the underdog. Even when I watch a football match, no matter who is playing, I’ll support the weaker side.’
Compare this with Bin Laden’s adage: ‘When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.’
The first statement is indicative of the culturally relativist, self-destructive side of Left-liberalism. It is a statement that is also of great worth to Islamist groups all over the World who use Bin Laden’s statement to attack the West, while using our stereotype’s statement to watch the West undermine itself from within.
All concession and appeasement has strengthened Islamist movements in the Islamic World. After Hezbollah bombed the Marines barracks in Lebanon, Reagan withdrew from the region, and Hezbollah became inspirations and heroes of the Islamist world. After the second Intifada and the murder of thousands of Israelis, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, and a year later Hamas was elected into power. In the 1980s the Iranian leadership sent hundreds of assassins to murder scores of human rights activists and opposition figures through Europe. The ease with which this was done, as the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman has written, ‘while local police failed to stop them and intelligence agencies looked the other way, is reminiscent of the heyday of the Mafia in Prohibition-era Chicago.’
The European Union decided that while the blood of the Iranian regime’s victims still stained the streets of Paris, Rome and London, policy towards Iran should be one of ‘critical dialogue’. It was believed that – despite the French judicial investigations that undoubtedly proved the assassinations originated from the upper echelons of the Iranian government – this ‘critical dialogue’ was best, so that European countries might influence Tehran.
Europe has chosen to be the weak horse for decades, and it seems extraordinary that European governments still fail to understand why they are losing to a stronger horse in a race for survival. The most obvious manifestation of such a sorry state of affairs is Iran’s designs for nuclear weapons, a desire that is indisputable to any rational observer.
The new student-run pressure group ‘Stop the Bomb UK’ will challenge such sickliness and enfeeblement. Political and economic sanctions must be implemented and the Iranian regime must be weakened.
British companies continue to trade with the regime – whether they are the supplier of parts for military or nuclear purposes, or financial institutions laundering money, all such support must be exposed and challenged. Those who trade with the unpredictable Iranian regime are supporting the oppression of the Iranian people (especially the Baha’i community), international terrorism, the nuclear armament of Iran, and anti-Semitic hate crimes such as Holocaust denial.
During the Iran-Contra affair, a secret meeting purportedly took place in Tehran between American and Iranian representatives. Dr. Hasan Rohani surprised American officials when he told them, ‘Khomeini demanded that all the people who do not take a strong line against the United States should be broken and chopped into littlie pieces… If someone strong faces up to [Khomeini], he takes a hundred paces back. But if he’s strong and someone weak is facing him, he takes a hundred paces forward. You are taking an incorrect position… Show that you are strong, and you will see results.’
In the face of a tyrannical regime responsible for the murder of British hostages in Lebanon and British soldiers in Iraq, a regime that executes children and homosexuals, a regime that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state and the Western World, it is imperative that we show strength and the will to survive.
– Sam Westrop
Stop the Bomb – UK
