However, America … Britain must leave the European Union 3

Tomorrow Britain holds a referendum on whether to remain a member of the undemocratic and irredeemably corrupt European Union, or leave it.

Those who want to leave it are already calling 23rd. June UK Independence Day.

President Obama went to Britain to tell the British not to leave the EU.

The excellent conservative historian Andrew Roberts comments on this impertinence. He writes at the Wall Street Journal:

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely — surely — this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave. Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line.

Britain is the largest foreign investor in the U.S. — larger even than China— so it makes no economic sense for you to send us to the back of the line. Yet quite apart from your economic or strategic best interests, it also makes no moral sense for America to treat your genuine friends (you also see this phenomenon in the case of Israel, of course) as though they are your enemies, while all too often you treat your rivals and enemies — Cuba, China, Venezuela and others — as though they’re your friends. In what sane world does America put Iran at the front of the line for trade deals, while sending Britain to the back?

President Obama might be very clever intellectually …

Oh? What evidence is there for that? Andrew Roberts is just being kind, we guess.

… but he hasn’t grasped the central essence of American foreign policy over the centuries, which is the honorable one of being a strength and beacon to your allies and a standing reproach and constant source of anxiety to your enemies and to the enemies of freedom.

Fortunately, the best kind of Americans instinctively understand that truth, and outside the Obama administration nobody seems to want to relegate my country to the back of the line. Anglo-American friendship is far stronger than any one administration or government. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read the obituaries of people who have written the obituary of the Special Relationship. It survives because it lives on in the hearts of our two peoples — who have so much more in common than that which separates us — rather than just in the pages of venerable treaties and history books.

The good news is that the British people don’t seem to have taken much notice of President Obama — indeed, on the day he left the U.K., the Leave campaign actually saw a 2% increase in the polls. (As it’s neck and neck at the moment, perhaps we should invite him back?)

The endless threats about trade deals and GDP per capita from the EU and the IMF and the World Bank and the OECD, instead of cowing the British people, seem merely to have excited their bloody-mindedness. They recognize that they might indeed take a short-term financial hit, but there are some things more important than money.

Imagine if a bunch of accountants had turned up at Valley Forge in that brutal winter of 1777 and proved with the aid of pie-charts and financial tables that Americans would be better off if they just gave up the cause of independence. George Washington would have sent them off with a few short, well-chosen words on the subject — probably derived from the Anglo-Saxon.

Winston Churchill was warned repeatedly by the Treasury that it was bankrupting Britain to continue her lonely and seemingly doomed struggle against the power that utterly dominated the entire European Continent in 1940 and 1941, but he treated all such warnings with his characteristically coruscating ire. That is what people do who love their country, and that is what I hope my countrymen will do on June 23.

And if we do vote to leave the EU on Thursday, I hope that Americans with a sense of history, Americans with a sense of tradition who honor friendship past and future, above all Americans who know what self-government means to a free people, will rally to the cause of an independent Britain.

*

In the leftist Guardian, George Soros the Evil – Obama’s friend – has an article desperately trying to stop Britons voting to leave the EU, on the spurious grounds that the country will experience a disastrous economic crash if they succeed. That should be the final signal to Britain that leaving is definitely the right thing to do.

Why Bush invaded Iraq 2

The excellent British historian Andrew Roberts explains, with brilliant clarity, why President George W. Bush led the invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003.

Israel alone 71

The great British historian Andrew Roberts made an illuminating and accurate speech, a speech so good that it is hard to find a word strong enough to praise it as it deserves, to the Anglo-Israel Association on December 8, 2009, the 60th anniversary of its founding. In it he traced the relationship between Britain and Israel from the time a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people was brought into existence by the Balfour Declaration at the end of the First World War, to the present day when Israel is under threat of annihilation by Iran. He laid stress on the consistently hostile attitude of the British Foreign Office to the Jewish State, and its unremitting [and emotionally-charged] support for the Arabs. You can find the whole speech here.

This is how he concluded it, speaking of the danger posed by Iran to Israel’s very existence, and why Israel would be justified in making a pre-emptive strike against the Islamic republic:

None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides pre-emptively to strike against such a threat – in the same way that Nelson pre-emptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill pre-emptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran – then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism, because for all the fine work done by this Association over the past six decades – work that’s clearly needed as much now as ever before – Britain has only ever really been at best a fairweather friend to Israel.

Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:

That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

We hope that his words might encourage Israel – if Israel needs encouragement – to make such a strike in the very near future.