A man met another, who was handsome, intelligent and elegant: He asked him who he was. The other said: ‘I am the Devil.’
‘But you cannot be,’ said the first man, ‘for the devil is evil and ugly.’
‘My friend,’ said Satan, ‘you have been listening to my detractors.’ Saadi, Bustan (From Shah’s Reflections)
All nations possess the fork tongued humanoid character and not one single community is immune from this type of person regardless of religion, race and culture. So to single out one community would, in theory, be potentially unfair and indeed discriminatory. Yet one is humbly compelled to make a special case for British supposedly pro-Palestinian fork tongued characters, especially as Britain played the leading formative role in establishing the Zionist-colonial settlers in Palestine. These characters, to all appearances, seem to be genuinely horrified by the never-ending Gaza genocide yet paradoxically continue to express support and always champion the British geopolitical roots of the genocide. In this essay I identify some of the leading characters who play this rotten game as well as spelling out the central historical disconnect which characterises their forked-tongue nature.
If there was a doyen of fork tongued characters then one of the most esteemed historians in the western world, William Dalrymple is up there as the greatest contender for this accolade. When the Palestinian resistance carried out the October 7th 2023 military operation, ‘al-Aqsa Flood’, breaking the siege of Gaza and capturing Zionist colonial settlements Dalrymple was quick to condemn on what can be perceived as an act of heroic resistance against occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The Palestinian resistance in the besieged Gaza strip had broken through enemy lines, humiliated the Zionist settler-colonial enemy by occupying military bases and capturing leading settler-colonial military personnel in what in this imperialist era is referred to as “southern Israel” or the “Gaza envelope”. In a statement posted on the social media platform, X, before any of the predictable lurid stories were confirmed or corroborated (and inevitably totally debunked) Dalrymple totally accepted the Zionist tales about how the resistance, specifically HAMAS, had allegedly targeted innocents and supposedly committed heinous crimes:
“I am a life-long supporter of the Palestinian search for freedom and statehood” he hissed, “but this morning am feeling only utter revulsion, horror and depression at the press descriptions of yet more innocents massacred. No one, least of all children, should ever have to endure violence and fear, and the kind of atrocity carried out by Hamas is only going to intensify the ongoing oppression, dispossession and occupation, as well as provoking retaliatory waves of bombings and killings which are already leading to the deaths of countless more innocent children.
Hamas has not only committed a barbaric outrage with its abominable ISIS-like tactics, I fear it has also done incalculable and lasting damage to the just cause of their own people, entrenched the hawks and haters and ethnic cleansers, and made the search for peace, justice and freedom more difficult than ever”
This posting was astoundingly read or seen by over one and half million people. What we learn from it is that he is a “life-long supporter” of the “Palestinian search for freedom and statehood”. Without ever stating how this support ever manifested itself in his life. But he now personally feels let down by the resistance who have invoked in the great historian feelings of “revulsion, horror and depression” because of so-called “press descriptions”. Dalrymple cleverly doesn’t specify what he’s read besides informing the reader that HAMAS had allegedly killed children. One can only assume that the press descriptions he read were those in the pro-Zionist western media about ‘40 beheaded babies’, ‘mass scale rape’, ‘breasts sliced off’, ripping foetus out of a womb and stabbing it and assorted other horrific nonsense that only Zionists could grotesquely conjure and rendered plausible by western media. In other words, in the immediate aftermath of the resistance’s operation against occupation and ethnic cleansing he simply swam with the crowd and believed the propaganda of those who have always supported occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing.
More so, what is also equally disturbing is that Dalrymple endorsed the ‘HAMAS equates ISIS’ comparison which helped to lay the foundations for the current Gaza genocide. He claims that HAMAS employed ISIS tactics without cleverly specifying which ones. Obviously, by not being specific he could not be held to account why he believed these accounts. For the last 400 years stories of “barbaric outrage” myths have always been stamped on indigenous populations every time they resisted the European occupier. Dalrymple may have drawn on his experience and knowledge and informed his audience that whenever the occupied, oppressed and dispossessed revolt they have always been branded and accused of some variety of “barbaric outrage” by the imperialist-colonialist and their supporters. Specifically, as a historian of India he may have instinctively and appropriately recognised that these “outrage” stories in the pro-Zionist media’s “press descriptions” were the same old, same old, atrocity propaganda of all colonialist occupiers and usurpers. Instead, his immediate recourse to understand the Palestinian resistance’s operation was to “press descriptions” not his own learning.
For someone who is internationally renowned for continuously carping about India under British rule Dalrymple may have paid attention to myths such as the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ whereby British women and children were slaughtered which paved the way for the British occupation of the Bengal in the 1750s or once again gruesome stories of white women and children being slaughtered in the 1850s during the so-called “Indian Mutiny” which allowed Britain to consolidate its rapacious grip on India to bleed it dry for another 100 years. He may have then put two and two together and come to the enlightened and moral conclusion that the “press descriptions” he immediately spoke of are nothing short of contemporaneous Zionist versions of British imperialist propaganda during its rapacious subjugation of India. There was no greater moment in recent history for a person of reputed and proven historical learning, especially a professional world-famous historian, should have immediately and instinctively put his or her acquaintance with the imperialist and colonialist historical record into play than the Palestinian resistance operation on October 7th 2023. Instead of noting that this operation is part and parcel of indigenous populations resisting dispossession Dalrymple chose to denounce them and then compare the operation to a terrorist organisation, ISIS born out of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and Western support for regime change in Syria. His immediate acceptance of the Zionist horror narrative strongly indicates that by instinct he is bereft of a historical or moral compass and his learning is about personal posturing rather than enlightening and expanding our understanding of the world.
Not content with accepting “press descriptions” at face value and then making an erroneous comparison with ISIS, in the responses to his social media post Dalrymple also assures his followers that he is fully committed to “Israel”. As he writes, he supports “a free and secure Israel.” Needless to say, this “free and secure” Zionist state is a product of British imperialist policy rooted, as he knows, in the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration of 1917. When this declaration was issued the population of Palestine was 700,000 Arab and about 60,000 Jewish. Without the British Empire, the Zionist colonial-settler project simply would not exist. Between 1920 and 1948 the British Empire laid the strong foundations for the original Zionist occupation and ethnic cleansing in 1947-8. The most consequential foundation the British laid for the Zionist colonial-settlers was the crushing of the Palestinian resistance in the late 1930s.
So there we have it. Dalrymple regurgitates and legitimises Zionist propaganda, “press accounts” about October 7th, erroneously compares HAMAS to ISIS and on top this he supports the creation of Britain’s Zionist colonial-settler project in Palestine, i.e “secure and safe Israel”. For good measure in the responses to his post he treats us to a disingenuous piece of historical illiteracy when he compares the violence of HAMAS which is rooted in national liberation against colonialism, to the violence of British trained Zionist colonial gangs rooted in the implementation of the colonial, Balfour Declaration. With the other side of his tongue we are invited to believe he charmingly opposes the current Gaza genocide, ethnic cleansing and he, of course, is magnanimously a “life-long supporter of the Palestinian search…” blah, blah, blah.
Needless to say Dalrymple is not the only British fork-tongued snake who plays this game. That is, to oppose the current genocide but to paradoxically support the geopolitical roots of the genocide, that is the creation of Britain’s Zionist colonial-settler project in Palestine. The head of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CABU) Mr. Chris Doyle is another who purportedly claims to oppose the Gaza Genocide. He has posted many a heroic tweet about Palestinians for many years while at the same time he supported the British led regime change operation in Libya and the $1 billion CIA ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ in Syria. However, on the 13th March 2025 he inadvertently laid claim to the greatest fork tongued accolade. He shared a photograph of Winston Churchill’s grandson, a certain Nicholas Soames (a.k.a Baron Soames of Fletching) addressing an organisation called, “Britain Palestine Project”, (whatever that is) with the added comment,
“Wonderful to hear [Nicholas Soames] introducing the Britain Palestine Project. Churchill’s grandson is adamant that Britain must recognise Palestine. To be debated tomorrow in the Lords.”
One is compelled to ask why does Doyle think Churchill’s name will add allure and credibitlity to a British pressure group campaigning for Britain to supposedly recognise the Palestinian state? More specifically, Doyle must surely know that Churchill was an unabashed pro-Zionist racist imperialist whose racial hatred was not limited to Palestinians. Churchill was an early trailblazer when it came to the occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He was one of the first advocates of the Balfour Declaration and when the British Empire was crushing the aforementioned Palestinian resistance in the 1930s, Churchill was at hand to condemn the indigenous Palestinian resistance as akin to the “Red Indian of Americans [and] the black people of Australia”. Churchill had strongly implied that like the Red Indians and black people of Australia, the Palestinians lacked “power” therefore they were destined for extermination. During this period, Britain was teaching its Zionist colonial-settler proteges the ropes of conquest by introducing many of the strategies and tactics of conquest and oppression into Palestine. Specifically, Dr. Matthew Hughes has written on how Britain introduced many of the tactics we now associate with the Zionist colonial-genocidists such as the use of human shields which had been employed in Peshawar, India and then incorporated by the British in Palestine. More often than not, when an operation was finished the British patrol in the vehicle would sharply break, for the Palestinian to fall off the bonnet and then be deliberately run over. British officers destroyed, vandalised and looted villages. At times, British troops burned Palestinian villages and made a mockery of their hoarded food stuffs. Waterboarding was introduced, blowing up a bus full of Arab detainees in a collective punishment reprisal and extrajudicial killings. Sexual torture was introduced in Palestine by the British while Churchill was comparing the Palestinians to Red Indians and black people of Australia. All in all, according to Professor Rashid Khalidi there were 100,000 British troops in Palestine in the late 1930s – a British soldier for every four adult Palestinian male to crush the Palestinians and pave the way for Zionist-colonial military takeover. The crushing of the Palestinian resistance was done just in time for British troops “to be redeployed to fight World War 2”. Although Khalidi states these troops were redeployed to fight World War Two, the war that began in Europe in September 1939, as this author has written, was an inter-European white supremacist war. A war between competing western imperialists. The British soldiers stationed in Europe in May 1940 chose to flee and desert their allies instead of fight the Nazi Germany advance across western Europe.
What’s overlooked is, how many of the thousands of British soldiers who crushed the indigenous Palestinian resistance later stationed in western Europe to fight Nazi Germany decided instead to flee the war to Dunkirk. It was clearly one thing to militarily crush the Palestinians but simply another to fight other white supremacists who had similar weapons. There is no greater example of this disconnect than the vaunted war hero, Bernard Montgomery. He was part of the British Army that crushed the Palestinians in the late 1930s, however, in May in 1940 he was just another deserting white supremacist fleeing the Nazi Germany advance. Admittedly, Churchill was ahead of his time when it came to championing the extermination of the Palestinians and it was under Churchill’s watch when the British Army stabbed their European allies in the back and fled from the Nazi Germany Army in 1940. Whether anti-Zionist or pro-Zionist, this disconnect in British military history, to crush indigenous populations like Palestinians but flee from Nazi Germany Army in Europe is a scenario that has never been acknowledged by British historians. Yet Doyle clearly thinks invoking the Churchill’s name will supposedly give credibility to a then forthcoming debate in the British Parliament’s House of Lords on whether the government should recognise the state of Palestine! Whether it did or not, it does give credibility to the notion that Doyle is historically illiterate, possibly comes from an odiously racist-imperialist background and is certainly a fork tongued supporter of Palestine.
Other notable and honorable mentions in the British fork tongued support for Palestine include the left-wing Guardian writer Owen Jones and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. To his credit, Jones has come against the current genocide in Gaza, however, in his latest book, This Land, about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Jones legitimises the creation of Britain’s settler-colonial project in Palestine by virtue of not even acknowledging its origins in the British Empire’s Balfour Declaration. Instead he holocaust washes the creation of the Zionist entity in Palestine by claiming that after the European holocaust, “there appeared to be an incontestable need for a Jewish homeland…” and then claims that, “Israel” is simply a country “founded in part by Holocaust survivors”. For those acquainted with the British imperialist roots of actual and consequential Zionist-colonial settlement these statements are profoundly erroneous. He simply provides a flawed historical apologia to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-8 by invoking the European holocaust.
Actually, Jones only acknowledged the Balfour Declaration in March 2024, 106 years after it was issued. He was prompted to acknowledge the Declaration after a portrait of Arthur Balfour was defaced by activist group, Palestine Action. So, the question is why does Jones justify the original ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-8 but has come out against the current genocide? There’re probably many reasons, including he may lose credibility if he came out in support of the current Gaza genocide especially as social media platforms are showing the reality of the Zionist colonial genocide more so than establishment journals like the Guardian, but one reason is that he’s a fork tongued snake. Especially, as its recently uncovered he has spent evening social time cavorting with Zionists while supposedly condemning them on his social media platforms by day.
Corbyn revealed his actual colours on the Palestine issue when he was leader of the Labour Party. On the centenary of the British government issuing the Balfour Declaration in 2017, Corbyn sent a recorded message to a commemorative rally in central London. He mumbled that the main flaw with the Declaration was that it was not fully implemented or as he claimed:
“The second part of Britain’s pledge has still not been fulfilled and Britain’s historic role means we have a special responsibility to the Palestinian people, who are still denied their basic rights.”
In other words, Corbyn has no issues with the brutal thirty-year British occupation which paved the way for the Zionist colonial-setter to plant themselves in Palestine and then ethnic cleanse Palestine in 1947-48. The Declaration’s only flaw is that it didn’t also lead to a Palestinian state the way it led to the Zionist colonial state in Palestine. As anyone who’s spared a couple of minutes to read the Declaration there is no mention of a “Palestinian national home”, the manner it mentions a “Jewish National Home”. So instead of denouncing the imperialist white supremacist Declaration, Corbyn proffers a delusional and deceptive interpretation of the Declaration’s pledge and then claims this delusion is unfulfilled! Historically speaking Corbyn shows he lives in cloud cuckoo land as far the origins of the Gaza genocide are concerned.
Obviously, one could go on and on because many, if not most of the British pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide crowd play this fork-tongued game. The most-high profile among them inadvertently perform a ‘Pretorian Guard’ to maintain complete ignorance on how over a period of thirty years Britain established the architecture of the current genocide in Gaza. As Zionist colonial-genocidists aim to eradicate Palestinians out of existence, the British fork-tongue “solidarity” activist eradicates Britain’s role as the imperial midwife and nurturer of Zionist occupation, colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. These solidarity activists are assumptively insistent that the Israel-Palestine issue begins in May 1948 when the British Empire left the country and not in 1917. On this basis, we need to be honest and ask why do Britons condemn the Zionist-colonialist for the very genocidal policies that the British Empire initiated in Palestine? It is only by asking this question that one potentially and ultimately entertains the notion that maybe, it is the British reader of this essay who is the greatest fork-tongue advocate for Palestine by virtue of indulging the above fork tongue snakes with credibility because they reflect our own bad faith.
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©Nu’man Abd al-Wahid
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Nu’man Abd al-Wahid is the author of “Debunking the Myth of America’s Poodle” which conclusively shows that British militaristic foreign policy during the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is rooted in the history of British imperialism’s own militarism and not because of any subservience or kowtowing to United States’s foreign policy. His X account is @NumanAbdalWahid
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Churchill's Colonial Karma 