The following essay, aptly called “Serpent’s Tongue”, was written by Joshua Pundit and posted at his blog earlier this week.
First he reminds the estimable Lady Ashton, the foreign minister of the EU, of some of the history of Hebron’s suffering at the hands of the British. Then he responds to her woman-from-Mars explanation for how things are going in the country the Middle East and its co-dependents would like to see obliterated.
This could serve as a coda to Bat Ye’or’s book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
This book is about the transformation of Europe into “Eurabia,” a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. Eurabia is fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic.The institution that has been responsible for this transformation, and that continues to propagate its ideological message, is the Euro-Arab Dialogue, developed by European and Arab politicians and intellectuals over the past thirty years. [my emphasis —D]
Of course, the Eurabia reality means that Israel must disappear, so Lady Ashton steps up to drop one more rock onto the wall Europe and Arabia are building in an attempt to create this ghetto. For sixty years the Left has been attempting to build these walls, and for sixty years Israel keeps dismantling them.
One advantage of having an established book on Kindle is that individual highlights from the text begin to accumulate and are propagated on the book’s page. This book has a goodly number of such notations, to wit, this one, which six readers highlighted:
“Therefore, collective hostility to Israel became a linchpin of European unity.”
In a larger sense what Bat Ye’or — and Joshua Pundit — are describing in the particulars could be viewed on a meta-level as scapegoating. This dynamic is deeply entrenched on the Left; employed as a deliberate strategy it is only that: strategic maneuvering. The end goal is retention of control.
Enter Stage Right, Lady Ashton, titular minister of a soviet polity, the European Union. From Stage Left, Joshua Pundit, armed with his keyboard and his faculty of discernment. She has spoken and he has read her interpretation of what happened last week. What he has perceived in Lady Ashton’s remarks is another in the endless confabulations of SerpentSpeak that leftist politicians the world over use to discuss Israel. It does indeed take a forked tongue to be able to talk as she does…
The Serpent’s Tongue — An Open Letter To Catherine Ashton, EU Policy Chief
by Joshua Pundit
Dear Lady Ashton,
I noted with interest your remarks and your concerns about what you called “recent events in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, which are not conducive to the climate of trust and cooperation needed for the current peace negotiations to succeed.”
Your remarks were exclusively addressed to Israel. You were ‘concerned’ about Israel declaring something like 2.5 square miles (1 square KM) of vacant land near the Israeli community of Gush Etzion — which you, of course, call a ‘settlement’ — as Israeli state land. You’re also concerned about what you referred to as the authorization of a ‘new settlement’ in Hebron, and you “particularly deplore the recent confiscation of EU Humanitarian Assistance provided to vulnerable civilians in the Jabal Al Baba Community in the E1 area.”
First off, just between us…don’t you think your use of language is somewhat suspect? One might almost think you were biased. You refer to Gush Etzion as a ‘settlement’ when after all, it’s an established Jewish community that dates back to 1924 on land legally purchased by Jews from Arab landowners. Jews continually inhabited it and worked the land except for a 19-year period between 1948 and 1967. And when you speak about vulnerable civilians, may I remind you of how the residents were ethnically cleansed in 1948 by Jordan’s Arab Legion, and that almost 200 able bodied Jewish males were executed in cold blood after they surrendered and were guaranteed safe conduct to the Israeli lines with their women and children? May we recall who commanded the troops who committed that atrocity and who oversaw the ethnic cleansing of all the communities in Judea and Samaria as well as East Jerusalem? It was British officers, Lady Ashton, under your own Colonel John Glubb.
Project much?
Then you say you particularly deplore what you refer to as “confiscation of EU Humanitarian Assistance provided to vulnerable civilians in the Jabal Al Baba community in the E1 area.” That ‘community’, as you call it, refers to a handful of Arab squatters living for a matter of a few weeks in EU-funded caravans in a contested vacant hillside within the city limits of the Israeli city of Maale Adumim, a city that Israel isn’t going to give up in any peace agreement. And as we both know, E-1 is necessary to Israeli security needs in order to connect Maale Adumim to the rest of the Jerusalem area, so it doesn’t become surrounded on all sides by those extraordinarily peaceful Arabs whom call themselves Palestinians.
So in your world, Gush Etzion is a ‘settlement’ after decades of existence on legally purchased land, while a few caravans parked illegally for a matter of weeks on Israeli land with the EU’s connivance that you give the name of ‘Jabal Al Baba’ is a ‘community’? It seems obvious that you have one set of rules for Jews and quite another for everyone else, and there’s a word for that, isn’t there Lady Ashton? And isn’t it more than just a little hypocritical to ‘especially deplore’ the Israelis confiscating what was obviously an attempt by the EU to unlawfully create facts on the ground in what at best can be considered a ‘disputed’ area? If ‘humanitarian aid’ was the purpose, why not put those caravans somewhere in Area A, where the Palestinian Authority controls things? Again, one might almost suspect you of — heaven forbid — bias.
Hebron? Ah yes, another one of those awful ‘settlements’. This one amounts to Jews being allowed to move into a property they legally purchased, one four story house. Although to be honest, it could probably be more accurately described as a ‘repurchase’. You see, Hebron had a sizable Jewish community that lived there for centuries until 1929, when the Arab residents of the town turned on their neighbors on orders of the British appointed Grand Mufti and began raping and murdering them — while the British troops who were supposed to be keeping order did absolutely nothing to stop them.
Even if Hebron were entirely given to Israel, it would not compensate for the blood of the men, women and children murdered there. And you have a problem with Jews moving into one house? Is there anywhere in the world, let alone the Middle East you don’t mind them living, Lady Ashton?
You devoted one sentence in your remarks to “the recent killing of an Israeli man in the West Bank” and called for “an immediate end to all acts of violence.”
Once again, I must admit I find your use of language interesting. Let’s look at what actually happened to Baruch Mizrachi (HY”D) and his pregnant wife and children and see if we can’t find a more appropriate word than ‘killing’, shall we?
The Mizrachi family was driving from the Israeli town Modi’in to Kiryat Arba and was ambushed by a Palestinian terrorist who had situated himself by the roadside and deliberately fired on a car filled with a man, his pregnant wife and five children. The other members of the family survived by sheer chance. They were deliberately targeted, Lady Ashton, and their ‘crime’ was simply driving a car with an Israeli license plate on it. Hadassah Mizrachi, who was wounded in the attack may lose the child she was carrying as well as her life’s companion and will have to raise her children on her own.
A ‘killing’ Lady Ashton? How about using the word murder instead, since that’s exactly what it was? How about calling it terrorism? And would it interest you at all to know that the killer is still at large and that the Palestinians reportedly know his identity and location but refuse to turn him over to Israeli authorities or jail him themselves? When he’s apprehended by the Israelis, tried in an Israeli court and imprisoned, the Palestinians you’re so enamored of will pay him a salary for murdering a Jew that will be funded in part by EU taxpayers, just like hundreds of other sitting in Israeli jails for the same crime. And Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader will insist on him being freed as a ‘holy martyr’ in any peace agreement, to return to a hero’s welcome just like all the other murderers the Israelis have freed,
Does that bother you at all, Lady Ashton, to be a part of providing an incentive for all those murders? In legal terms, Lady Ashton, doesn’t that make you and the EU accessories to those murders? Have you even once forcefully condemned the Palestinian Authority’s practice of rewarding and making heroes out of those who murder innocent men, women and children? Has the EU ever once threatened to end the cash flow unless it stopped?
And to add insult to injury, in your remarks, the murder of Baruch Mizrachi barely rates a sentence, almost an afterthought. And you equivocate by calling for ‘an immediate end to all acts of violence’, as though Israelis were likewise targeting Arab families for murder on the highways. And then you call on Israel and Israel alone to mend its ways and reverse these so-called punitive actions that you deplore so much.
Are you that dead to shame, Lady Ashton? Are you that blind to justice?
Afterword from Dymphna:
Joshua Pundit is an American blogger. When he asked that we mirror his post, I was glad to oblige. Obviously the official language used by the EU foreign minister is particularly disturbing, not to mention odious. There is the sense that we are falling, falling back into the Big Lie of the 20th century. What he presents here is simply one more signpost on the road to Hell.
“2.5 square miles (1 square KM)” Huh?
5 mile = 8 kilometer (approximately)
25 sq mi = 64 sq km (square both sides)
64 sq km = 25 sq mi (restatement, switching sides)
2.56 sq km = 1 sq mi (divide both sides by 25)
2.5 sq km = 1 sq mi (approximately)
— Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Yes Mark, Joshua quite obviously got the metric-imperial area conversion reversed.
Joshua:
However cogent and rational your arguments may be, it is utterly futile to appeal to common sense, humanity, fair-mindedness or moral decency to someone like Catherine Ashton when dealing with the subject of Israel. Her entire political history – see for example the murky beginning of her political life as an executive officer in Britain’s Soviet funded and directed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – is one of blinkered, intellectually bankrupt, extremism, to put it at its most polite.
Catherine Ashton is the absolute epitome of all that has gone wrong in the Western polity in the past half century. I’m sure there are German, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish versions of her – for she is a cardboard cut-out archetype that I have met many of – but I don’t know their names and Ashton is, significantly, the EU’s Foreign Affairs potentate.
So, all strength to your arm, but expect no positive results. Ms Ashton’s poisonous stupidity, egoism and lastly, assiduously acquired official status, has made her thoroughly immune to self-reflection and any sense of shame.
An appropriate analogy would be to have had a genial sit down with Joseph Goebbels in 1927 and ask, in the vein of a therapist: “Joe, mate, do you really think the Jews are the cause of your lack of success as a playwright and journalist, your personal angst over being a lonely virgin bachelor and ALL of Germany’s problems?”
A diehard Socialist like the Ashton woman who goes by the title of Lady indicates, per se, a decadent society where War Is Peace and Peace — civil peace — Is Racism. It is useless to parse the words or conduct of Socialists for logic, truth or even any demonstrable connection to Reality. BTW the news today is that the French uber-Socialist and ex-consort of Comrade Hollande is now a minister in his cabinet and insists that people stand up when she enters, and shut up and walk on eggshells when she eats.
People like Lady Catherine are the reason why Socialist regimes become murderous; believing in nothing but themselves they begin a dance of death to the tune of a Socialist hymn, when confronted by failure after failure, they get desperate.
Thats when the killing starts.
Because truth is irrelevant, the convenient lie is always at the tip of the toungue, but unfortunately lies have lives of their own, they are unpredictable because they are not part of ‘creation’. Whoever and however this world was created, truth lies in that creation, and a lie defies that creation.
Judeo-Cristianity works because it discourages lies and promotes truth. Truth promotes harmony because all are ‘singing from the same hymnsheet’ whereas lies have an arbitrary and random quality about them which comes undone unless sown by the most devious of hands.
Caroline Ashton does not have the skill or knowledge to be an effective liar, but she obviously also fails to tell the truth. The result is a strange, sort of slimey, wriggling, much like the can of maggots as used for fish bait.
Joshua Pundit’s reference to Ashton’s “serpent’s tongue” echoes that sense of slithering. A truly odious ‘crat.
Catherine Ashton is a contemptible waste of space. I am deeply ashamed that she is a British representative on the EU even though it was Blair’s marxists that put her there. She was made a Baroness and pitchforked into the House of Lords because she didn’t have a snowflakes chance in hell of winning an election. All she has to offer is ineptitude.
I was concerned at Joshua Pundit’s loose description of the leadership of the Arab Legion. It tends to reflect the vehement anti British hate campaign conducted in the American press throughout the period of the Mandate. Yes, Sir John Glub did lead the Arab Legion nominally with a group of British officers but orders came directly from the King of Transjordan and his cabinet.
I am just finishing a project on the Suez Canal Emergency from 1952-56. Much of my initial research was provided by a website called “Britain’s Small Wars” I will be starting a similar project on the so-called Palestinian Mandate later in the year and will again use the website as a start. In the meantime, I would tell you that the Britain’s Small Wars website was put together by the servicemen who were there. Squaddies rather than officers. The ones in the way of the bombs whose colleagues were abducted and mutilated by arab terrorists and israeli gangs like the Hagana and the Stern gang. I urge everyone to have a look.
Whilst I don’t disagree with your last comments re service men being murdered by arab and Jewish gangs for accuracy the Hagganah was not a gang this was the underground Jewish army which became the IDF. the gangs you refer to were the Stern Gang and the Irgun which operated outside the control of the Jewish leadership at the time.
Yes, It was the Irgun
I hope, for the sake of balance you are also going to make mention of British atrocities against Jews during the period, most of all, Bevin’s cynical policy of trying to ensure the further genocide of Jews in Palestine, straight after the holocaust revelations
http://emperor.vwh.net/history/br.htm
This is a reprint of a ‘Nation’ article from 1948.
Also, you might mention that an increasingly desperate British Government resorted to floggings and Judicial Murder of Jews to try and cover-up their cynical and abject failure to carry out their mandated task to create a JEWISH homeland.
In Israeli eyes, the British are the criminals, and US public opinion at the time favoured the Jewish view, maybe because it was the truer picture.
Glubb and his cronies could have stopped the Arab legion’s massacres at Gush Etzion, they did not, Germans were hung for this same crime, and they too “were only doing their duty”
To me, your post is trying to justify acts of gross anti-Semitism There was no “so-called” Palestinian Mandate, it was a real, formal treaty which Britain signed, and then trashed….
Has it ever occurred to you that the so called ‘hate’ campaign in the USA was justified?
I too urge everyone to have a look!
On December 12, 1947, Foreign Minister Bevin told the House of Commons that the units of the Transjordan Arab Legion would be withdrawn from Palestine. He said:
“I was asked a question about the Arab Legion. I should explain that this is a Force, which owes allegiance to the King of Transjordan, but units of it have, for some time, been serving under the orders of the British G.O.C. in accordance with a long-standing arrangement with King Abdullah. It has been decided that all these units will be withdrawn from Palestine at the same time as the withdrawal of the British Forces. That withdrawal will be completed when the withdrawal of the British Forces is completed.”
This force was never withdrawn;
On March 15, 1948 a new Treaty of Alliance was signed between Transjordan and Great Britain. Under the new Treaty, Britain continues its annual grant for the maintenance of Transjordan’s armed forces. Brigadier John Bagot Glubb, commander of the Transjordan Arab Legion, retains his post under King Abdullah. The British are responsible as well for equipping the Legion, and supply, in addition to Brigadier Glubb, more than 40 British senior officers.
MC I am still collating material for this project and will keep an open mind. My conclusion reached after the Suez Emergency was that a generation of young conscripts was sacrificed to a bunch of slavering Egyptian savages by a cynical bunch of British politicans who under reported casualty numbers and waited for over 60 years before condescending to award a service medal to those who were there. While I reject the politiburo/Arafat/EU narrative on palestine, I will nevertheless read everything I can find particularly those helpful links you have left me. If I err on any side it will be on that of the long suffering British squaddie and for that I make no apology.
Ashton so called success in the name of the EU, the latest update can be seen here:
http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/kosovo-serbs-from-orahovac-sell-their-houses
The Serbs were and still are the “bad guys” for wanting to stay on their own land, now the EU is ratcheting up the same words used in the 90s but specially for Jewish people who too want to stay on their own land. Not to mention the war of words over russian speakers in parts of the Ukraine. Sense of déjà vu.
This is insane! Surely this is cannot be sustainable or productive in the medium and long term?
A correction of fact :
Peter stated ‘she is a British representative on the EU even though it was Blair’s marxists that put her there’
Wrong ! She was originally sent to the EU as EU Trade Commissioner by Gordon Brown. Brown asked the existing Trade Commissioner, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ Lord (Peter) Mandelson to come back to the UK and shore up Brown’s Govt by serving as Secretary of State for Trade/Business. Ashton filled the vacancy caused by Mandelson going back to the UK. A few months later the UK was offered the vacant position of providing a new ‘Foreign Affairs and Security’ Cheif for the EU (the position was a new creation under the Lisbon Treaty). Brown had various options to fill this post, the highly competent Mandelson, his Foreign Secretary the ‘Blairite’ David Miliband or even asking the opposition MP William Hague if he would serve in the new position. Brown, who is of course paranoid, was afraid that if a competent UK politician filled the new post they would have status/respect higher than Brown’s and the entire EU media machine promoting that person who might later return to UK politics and challenge Brown. So to avoid a competent person taking the new post he moved the incompetent Ashton into the new position. He filled the vacancy (yet again) for EU Trade Commissioner with the appointment of Baroness (Valerie) Amos.
Don’t blame Blair for an appointment caused by Brown’s paranoia and fear of competent office holders.
Ivan, I stand corrected. It was Brown and his cultural Marxists that put her forward.
Thank you Ivan for that analysis: it certainly rings true that a mediocrity like Brown would appoint an even greater mediocrity like Ashton in preference to a competent person like Mandelson (whatever one thinks of his ethics and ideology) to plum EU posts, thus simultaneously earning kudos for his EEO/Affirmative Action credentials and reducing the potential for himself looking lacklustre. I have always wondered quite how ,specifically, Ashton came to be propelled into her current position and you have provided the answer.
wasted words trying to get through the social justice fighters screens. Why bother. Go BIG!
MC, I have cut and pasted our exchanges and put them in a file for future action. On re-reading them, I notice how angry my comments have made you. Re-reading them has also been a chastening experience as it has taught me once more to cross and double check my references before responding rather than relying upon an age addled memory to support a knee jerk reaction. Also, I cannot begin to understand how it must feel to be waiting every day for an onslaught of rockets. A palestinian attache in London referred to them contemptuously as “fireworks” when asked about them by the BBC but the BBC let it pass as it did when Abdul Bari stated on the World service yesterday that no palestinian prisoners had been released by Israel. I think we all know the truth about that. Bari is the London editor of Al Quds magazine and is seen by the establishment as a good guy. But he is still a bare faced liar.
While I acknowledge your anger and apologise for my part in that, I, too, am angry. I am 70 years old now and, like most English men my age, I am proud of my country and seethe every time its history is dragged through the mire by people who are deliberately degrading ,debasing and corrupting our people, our culture and our national narrative to pursue an agenda that is far to the left of anything sensible.
Once again, I am sorry for invoking your anger. It was not my intention to do so.