From Balfour to Nakba: How Britain Denied Democracy so Palestinians could be Ethnically Cleansed

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“The British government have promised that what is called the Zionist movement shall have a fair chance in this country, and the British Government will do what is necessary to secure that fair chance…We cannot tolerate the expropriation of one set of people by another or the violent trampling down of one set of national ideals for the sake of erecting another…”

Winston S. Churchill to an Arab delegation, 30 March 1921.[1]

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time…I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.”

Winston S. Churchill to the Peel Commission on Palestine, 12th March 1937.[2]

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By the end of the official British presence inPalestinein mid May 1948, four hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs Continue reading →

Unpacking Imperial Britain’s Islamists.

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Imperial Britain duplicitously completed its control of the Middle East during World War one with the famous ‘Arab Revolt’. Sharif Hussain, the leader of the north-western Hijaz region of Arabian peninsula, was given the strong impression that Britain would support an independent and unified Arab state in exchange for support against the Ottoman Caliphate, which had taken the side of Germany. This strong impression is mainly contained in the Hussain-Macmahon letters.[1] 

Imperial Britain, of course, literally had other ideas. Simultaneously and unbeknown to Sharif Hussain, Britain had also made a commitment with France and Tsarist Russia to jointly carve up the Ottoman Caliphate as well as a commitment to “facilitate” the creation of “Jewish National Home” to a small band of European Zionists in Palestine. Continue reading →

The Rise of North Yemeni Islamism in Birmingham, UK.

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One of the reasons generally given for the rise of extreme Islamism is the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 in the six day war.

It is theorised that, from this defeat (or Naksa as the Arabs refer to it), loomed the beginning of the end of Arab Nationalism and other, largely secular ideologies, which had hitherto led the struggle to liberate the Middle East from western domination and zionist colonialism. This defeat created the vacuum political Islamism has supposedly filled since.

This theory tends to be strongly insinuated at and espoused by British writers such as Seamus Milne, Jason Burke and the late Chris Harman.[1]

The theory overlooks one very important British initiated strategy[2] played out in the Middle East and South East Asia during the Cold War. Continue reading →

The Perfidious Comparison: Why Barack Obama is not another Tony Blair.

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Barack Obama’s election victory was greeted with a sigh of relief by most of the world, glad to see the back of George W. Bush.  In theUnited Kingdom,America’s first African-American president was also heralded in with a good royal dose of cynicism by political commentators.

Whether it be that the honourable political commentator was of right-wing or left-wing persuasion, all agreed, the euphoria which greeted Barack Obama’s victory in November 2008 was comparable to that which greeted United Kingdom’s Tony Blair upon his first election victory in 1997. As such, and imperially armed with this superficial wisdom, they grandly implied that only disillusionment will materialise from the euphoria of Barack Obama’s victory. British commentators as politically diverse as John Pilger, Richard Littlejohn, A.C.Grayling, Marina Hyde, John Rentoul, Charles Moore and others drew this turgid comparison. Yet a close inspection of certain statistical facts and campaigning strategies which brought both candidates to power, could not be further apart. Continue reading →

Denying Democracy

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There is methodical logic in Iran’s supreme Mullah singling out Britain and the British government’s funded BBC Persia as the main foreign culprits in encouraging and fomenting sections of Iranian society to further actively question the outcome of the recent election.Britain’s alleged attitude toIran in the recent crises is no surprise to anyone who has merely glided into the history of theUK’s relationship with the Iranian people and indeed the people of theMiddle East.

A people’s right to question the outcome of strongly perceived electoral irregularities is beyond dispute. Yet what moral right does the British government possess in carrying the beacon of pro-democracy agitation? The answer is a resolute and definite none.

Britain, with all its historical involvement in that part of the world, simply has no record in implementing democracy in theMiddle East.  Indeed, out of the major powers, only Britain had had the political power to impose democracy in the early histories of the modern Middle Eastern states. Continue reading →