Author: Alexander Boot

Upon mature deliberation, doubtless helped along by the TV footage of the Middle Eastern massacres, Donald Rumsfeld has finally admitted that the idea of carrying democracy to the region was somewhat flawed.

Well, better late than never and all that, but one wishes he had reached such clarity of vision before engineering the criminally stupid (stupidly criminal?) invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Modesty prevents me from mentioning any names, but even without the benefit of hindsight any commentator with half a brain knew then how it would come out. Actually, judging by Mr Rumsfeld’s remarks, even with the aforementioned benefit he still hasn’t quite grasped the true nature of the problem.

He generously admits that the American “template of democracy” may not be “appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories”. The implication seems to be that, had the Americans caught Iraq at a better moment, that template would have worked just fine.

One has to observe with mortification that somehow, in the 1,400-odd years that Islam has graced the world with its presence, such a propitious moment has so far failed to arrive. The length of this period seems to be sufficient to lead to the conclusion that its arrival isn’t going to happen in the future either.

In other words, Mr Rumsfeld is your typical ideological American in the grip of messianic fervour. He has seen the light shining out of the burning bush of American democracy, and he has heard the booming voice telling him to go forth and proselytise, temporary setbacks notwithstanding.

He doesn’t seem to realise that, in the language I facetiously ascribed to Prince William the other day, most of the world doesn’t give a flying Donald for the American or any other template of democracy. (In the spirit of crass commercialism I may commend to your attention my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, in which this subject is covered in detail.)

Nor does Mr Rumsfeld understand the true nature of the problem, which he identifies as ‘Islamism’. Actually no such thing exists. What exists is Islam, a militant cult that has been waging war on the West for 1,400 years, off and on.

When used this way, the suffix –ism suggests that the idea expressed in the word’s root is being perverted or at least not applied fully. Hence, the word ‘Christianism’ is often used to describe the pernicious belief that, though Christianity is manifestly untrue, it’s helpful in the role of social adhesive.

Adherents of Islam, however, don’t talk about the social utility of their religion. They are prepared to die and, which is worse, kill for it. Those who don’t feel that way aren’t vacillating Muslims, secular Muslims or moderate Muslims. They are no Muslims at all.

This may seem to be pedantic quibbling, but in fact such basic understanding is as essential to solving the problem of ISIS as the correct diagnosis is to treating a disease.

Identifying Islam qua Islam as a hostile force would naturally lead to a correct strategy not only in foreign policy but also in domestic affairs, specifically in the area of immigration. Alas, “the template of American democracy” and the tyranny of political correctness it has spawned throughout the Western world make reaching such understanding impossible.

The diktats of multi-culti diversity are such that all religions must be regarded as equal. Depending on one’s taste, they may be considered equally good or equally bad, but equal in any case.

Hence Mr Rumsfeld’s former boss Dubya declaring the day after 9/11 that “Islam is a religion of peace”, an idiotically ignorant statement that our own PM Dave saw fit to repeat recently. Hence also the fake bogeymen of ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamofascism’ neocons use as euphemisms for Islam. And hence also the West’s pathetic inability to solve the problem of ISIS, which Mr Rumsfeld finds so vexing.

Rather than juggling the figures of Western defence budgets, he’d do much better to look into his own neocon heart in search of the real problem. The solutions will then offer themselves, for no sane government would fail to spend what’s required, or do what it takes, to repel a lethal threat.

It’s only when the threat isn’t perceived as lethal that foreign aid seems to be a more urgent item of expenditure than defence of the realm. The necessary treatment may be physical, but the diagnostic techniques are metaphysical. And it’s in this area that the West is being caught with its intellectual trousers down – largely due to “the American template of democracy”.

Rather than acting in the capacity of braces, I’m afraid the likes of Mr Rumsfeld are the dead weight exerting the downward pressure on that garment.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

As the trailblazer and flag-bearer of modernity, the USA leads the way in advancing every modern perversion, including political correctness, fast food, baseball caps worn backwards and verbs made out of nouns.

This time it’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who helpfully reminded me why thinking about the kind of people who govern Western countries gives me Kafkaesque nightmares.

Receiving her richly deserved award from the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund (victory over whom, one wonders), Nancy explained that same-sex ‘marriage’ is “perfectly consistent with Catholic Christianity”.

I must say Nancy’s take on Catholicism is rather different from mine, or any Catholic’s among my friends. In fact, barring human sacrifice, euthanasia, abortion (sorry about being tautological) and the sins mentioned in the Decalogue, one can’t think offhand of a modern practice that contradicts Christian doctrine more than homomarriage.

The Judaeo-Christian approach to marriage and sexuality goes back to Genesis and is grounded in the vision of man and woman coming together “as one flesh”: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And the twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.” (Mark 10: 7-8).

Straight sex in marriage is regarded as normative in both Testaments, and the Old one refers to homosexuality as ‘abomination’. Those who hold the second part of the Bible in greater esteem can find similar views in Romans 1: 26-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 and 1 Timothy 1: 9-10.

Specifically Catholicism regards transmitting life as the only valid justification for having sex, which noble aim is manifestly unachievable in homosexual intercourse – or indeed in heterosexual coupling that uses contraception or orifices free of reproductive organs.

I’m not voicing agreement or disagreement with Christian doctrine in general or Catholic teaching in particular. God knows I’ve done so often enough in other pieces. The purpose of this one is simply to show that Nancy’s statement testifies either to her total ignorance or to her mental retardation or both.

She proceeded to shove her foot even deeper into her mouth. Nancy explained that she had taken her grandchildren to the aforementioned award ceremony because “it’s really important to see what the practice of our faith is.”

But that’s not what the practice is, which Nancy ought to know. I forgot to mention that she describes herself as a “mainstream Catholic”. If so, one wonders what the heretics and atheists are doing these days.

In any case, her grandchildren have already been taught to support homomarriage specifically because “they go to Catholic school”. What are the pupils of American secular schools taught to support? Bestiality? Polygamy? Snuff movies?

Nancy is entitled to her own opinion, but she isn’t entitled to her own facts. She doesn’t seem to realise this, hence her boldfaced lie (or, to be kinder, delusion) that Catholic catechism supports homomarriage:

“The fact is, what we’re taught is to respect people… To say that [homomarriage] endangers mainstream Christian thinking is so completely wrong.”

It’s God’s own truth that Christianity teaches to respect people. But it’s moronic ignorance to infer that it thereby teaches respect for everything people do.

In fact, St Augustine, who conceivably had a firmer grasp of Christian doctrine than Nancy does, put it with his usual precision: “Cum dilectioni hominem et odio vitorium.” Loosely translated, this usually comes across as “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

But never mind Augustine, Catholicism or Christian doctrine. Just stop to ponder the blood-chilling fact that this flaky woman exerts a major influence on American, and therefore world, politics.

Another thing worth pondering is that her drivel just may be self-fulfilling prophecy. For American ideas, both good and bad, tend to make their way to our shores within a few years of their origination.

So one wonders how long before British Catholics begin to interpret doctrine in this perverse way. My guess is that the Anglicans just may beat them to it.   

 

 

As new chairman of the European Council on Toleration and Reconciliation, Tony has been put in charge of combatting anti-Semitism in Europe.

This is like appointing Sepp Blatter to stamp out corruption in sports. For Tony is personally responsible for putting Jews in the greatest peril since 1953, when only Stalin’s death prevented Russia’s own final solution.

In 2003 Tony played top dog in the pack run by Dubya and trained by US neoconservatives. Their criminal invasion of Iraq is directly responsible for jeopardising the survival of Jews in the Middle East.

Mouthing mantras about the Muslims gagging for democracy, the Bush-Blair coalition removed the dictators who, though undemocratic, had kept a lid on the pressure cooker.

As a result, the Middle East has been plunged into blood-soaked chaos, with much of the blood coming out of the veins of Jews and Christians. And ISIS appears to be on the verge of triumph, which will put Israel in mortal danger.

Yet this isn’t the kind of danger the country can’t handle – after all, Israel has had plenty of experience defending herself against wild-eyed fanatics.

The trouble this time, now that the coalition has lost any taste for direct involvement, is that the ayatollahs are seen as the only viable counterforce to ISIS. Hence, to enlist their support, heirs to the coalition have countenanced, in all but name, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and no one doubts the intended target.

Blair was directly involved not only in setting these gruesome events in train. Also, as Middle East peace envoy, he did nothing whatsoever to mitigate the conflict, concentrating instead on securing astronomical fees for his company.

(Incidentally, one must compliment Tony on his fiscal acumen. The fee for this new job will be paid not to him personally, but to his corporation, which is much more tax-efficient.)

To be fair, Tony didn’t just make life harder for Middle Eastern Jews. He did what he could domestically as well.

As his eminence grise Peter Mandelson has admitted, Blair’s government deliberately imported hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants, whom Labour correctly saw as their potential voters.

This brings us to the article in today’s Times, which Blair co-wrote with the iffy Russian ‘businessman’ Moshe Kantor, now residing in Israel. (All Russian ‘businessmen’ who enriched themselves in the ‘90s are iffy.)

Among other things, the article shows that Blair has learned nothing from the Middle Eastern disaster he perpetrated. Instead he still draws inspiration from his accomplice Bush, who declared that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

Hence Blair: “It is our firm belief that it is not religion or faith per se that causes or foments conflicts. It’s the abuse of religion…”

You decide whether this statement is ignorant or mendacious. I’d suggest both.

First, no ‘religion per se’ exists. What exists is Islam per se, and the Koran contains 107 verses unequivocally calling for violence against Jews, Christians and other infidels.

Unlike most Christians and Jews, Muslims tend to obey their scripture. Thus it’s European Muslims who are mostly responsible for the sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks that Blair-Kantor pledge to reverse.

(This isn’t to say that the indigenous non-Muslim population contains no anti-Semites. It’s just that, unlike the Muslims, they aren’t radicalised at present.)

The countermeasure Blair-Kantor suggest, criminalising Holocaust denial, is not only useless but actually harmful, in that the only tangible result of this attack on free speech will be a further increase in state power.

Rather than shutting up assorted idiots, the co-authors should look for ways to reduce the Muslim presence in Europe. They’d be amazed how precipitously the number of anti-Semitic attacks would drop.

Alas, neither Blair-Kantor nor, more important, Western governments have the brains and courage to identify the aetiology of the problem, as it exists in Europe today.  

Diagnosing the principal cause of a disease is the first step towards treating it. Yet we’re offered neither a correct diagnosis nor effective treatments, which is a guarantee that the problem will only get worse.

Instead we get Tony Blair, in yet another self-serving quango, acquiring yet another platform for assaulting us with bien pensant waffle.  

 

 

 

 

Writing for The Times, Angela Merkel has kindly explained what the G7 is actually for. An explanation was sorely needed because some cynics have expressed doubts that these occasional get-togethers actually serve a useful purpose.

Turns out they do, and Angie explained what’s what with her usual, and usually earnest, lucidity. The mission the G7 has undertaken is to make sure that every woman in the world is in gainful and equitable employment.

One would think it’s not immediately clear how, say, Germany and France or even the almighty United States can ensure that every wife of some aboriginal sultan goes to an office every morning, rather than serving her lord and master. Or, if she does go to the office, that she is treated as fairly as her male colleagues.

Come to think of it, her hubby-wubby the sultan could possibly achieve this end more quickly and effectively, if ever so slightly more violently.

But Angie’s faith in the omnipotence of international organisations is boundless, and she knows what she’s talking about. So I’ll let her speak for herself, with my comments enclosed in square brackets.

“In talking about work, we also need to talk about the possibilities open to women around the world to establish their independence and ensure their advancement through safe and skilled labour.”

[By way of illustration here’s one hypothetical example of a woman who did just that. At first her ‘safe and skilled labour’ was vouchsafed to the East German Young Communist League, in which she advanced to a nomenklatura position. That involved working hand in glove with Stasi, but that was the way of opening the possibilities.

Then, when neither East Germany nor Stasi was any more, the hypothetical woman’s safe and skilled labour was rerouted into West German, and eventually international, politics. In that arena she advanced as far as it’s possible to go without an unstoppable panzer force.

Of course, family life had to be sacrificed to the safe and skilled labour. Our hypothetical woman was rather tasty, as anyone who has seen her youthful nude shots on the net can testify. Hence she had no difficulty attracting men, with or without the benefit of marriage. But in both her marriages she clearly couldn’t find time to produce children. After all, birth labour is neither safe nor skilled.]

“All the statistics show a reduction in poverty and inequality when more women play an active part in economic life.”

[No doubt. But do the statistics also show who brings up the children of, say, a successful woman lawyer working 90-hour weeks, when she’s not particularly busy? How much moral, spiritual and cultural guidance is she able to offer her offspring?

Statistics, you see, show all sorts of things. For example, in Western countries, where most women work, over six million abortions have been performed since 2008. This stands to reason: children tend to make safe and skilled labour a bit more difficult.]

“However, only about 50 per cent of all women are currently in gainful employment.”

[What a tragedy. But how about the children of working women who aren’t successful lawyers and therefore can’t afford nannies? Who’s going to look after them?

Marx, Angie’s countryman, gave an unequivocal, and the only logical, answer: the state. His prescription was that children should be taken away from their mothers and raised as wards of the state. Is this the ideal Angie sees in her mind’s eye? After all, she was intellectually weaned on Marxism.]

“Worse still, in many developing countries the vast majority of those women who do work are employed under precarious or informal arrangements.”

[How about the men in those same countries? Do they all draw their expense accounts in air-conditioned offices? Or do they do the kind of back-breaking, lung-blackening, blood-poisoning jobs that denizens of G7 countries will no longer do? Angie is a great champion of globalisation based on outsourcing, which turns ‘developing countries’ into vast suppliers of cheap, and often slave, labour – not the safe and skilled variety.]

“The G7 therefore wants to aim to give more girls and women in developing countries the chance of vocational training.”

[How? By conquering those countries and replacing their governments? Presumably not. I get it: Angie wants G7 members to spend more on foreign aid, even though most of it is guaranteed to end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the aboriginal sultans.

Never mind that there’s a vast dearth of usable vocational training in the G7 countries themselves, regardless of the sex of those in need of such education. Angie is dead-set on making sure that those developing ‘girls and women’ cherish the myth of safe and skilled labour, while ignoring the reality of their children opting for short but rewarding careers as suicide bombers.]

One hates to generalise, but the propensity to hector others on how they should live isn’t very low on the list of salient German characteristics. Add to this national trait Angie’s personal attainment in bossy demagoguery, and what do you get?

A perfect Times article.

 

 

The first part of the title is a direct quote from Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I’m warming up rapidly.

The second came from my own vituperative heart, with Dave being the object of the vituperation.

My friend Jean-Claude’s detractors cite many of his drawbacks, such as a dearth of any discernible principles, the kind of amorality that’s de rigueur for a committed federast, perfidy, the intellect of a child with special needs and so forth.

All that is true. But, for the sake of balance, one must think of his redeeming qualities too. To wit: Jean-Claude is a hearty drinker, borderline alcoholic. He smokes like a soot-blocked chimney. And he can see right through Dave.

I must stress that regarding heavy consumption of booze and fags as Jean-Claude’s merits reflects my own idiosyncrasies, rather than his own intrinsic goodness. However, his perspicacity, at least in relation to Dave, is objectively laudable.

Dave, said my new friend, doesn’t want any Brexit. He wants to use the referendum “to dock his country permanently to Europe”.

Truer words have seldom been spoken, at least not since Nigel Farage questioned the advisability of spending £25,000 of our money a year to treat a recent immigrant with HIV. Dave wants precisely what Jean-Claude said he does, which is why I’m opposed to the referendum.

Alas, Jean-Claude’s statement that not only Dave but also the British people don’t want Brexit testifies to the fact that his perspicacity doesn’t extend beyond Dave’s character.

Jean-Claude understands Dave perfectly because they are cut from the same spivocratic cloth. Conversely, he doesn’t understand the British because their national character is dramatically different from his own.

Hence he’s wrong about the British not wanting to leave the EU. They do. But I doubt they will feel the same way come referendum day, after having been deluged with bucketfuls of sewage, otherwise known as federalist propaganda.

The British en masse will be deaf to the only absolutely irrefutable argument in favour of getting out: that relinquishing our sovereignty destroys the 1,000-year political tradition of our nation, thereby destroying the nation.

Two generations of oxymoronic ‘comprehensive education’ have rendered our population ignorant of both our political heritage and its key formative influence on the nation at large.

As part of that ‘education’, the nation has been fed the materialist lie, preached by both socialists and libertarians (including, one is sad to say, the sainted Lady Thatcher). Both groups insist that virtue be judged strictly in economic terms, and they differ only on which roads they propose to take to the fiscal Shangri-la.

Hence the whole issue of in or out will be pitched in strictly economic terms. The EU and Dave’s government will spend millions, not to say billions, lying that the country will be prosperous within the EU and pauperised outside it.

Their task won’t be difficult. Economic facts pass the criterion of truthfulness on which logical positivists insist: they are falsifiable. Moreover, they are easily falsifiable.

By the time the British go to the voting booths, they will have been exposed to endless columns of figures proving that Brexit will mean mass unemployment, starvation and their wives leaving them for swarthy foreigners.

Some token concessions that Juncker’s friends will have offered in the nick of time will be presented as real game changers. The overall message will be that, by staying in the EU, we’ll multiply our wealth and keep all our sovereignty.

(This, incidentally, was the message I recently received from a young lady blessed with a philosophy degree from a decent university. If EU propaganda, still in low gear, had such an effect on her, imagine what it’ll do going at full pelt to the masses barely able to sign their names.)

And, once the Yes vote has been cast, there will be no going back – unlike with the barely possible No vote, which, in the good tradition of the EU, will be held invalid.

This is exactly the outcome Dave wants, and Jean-Claude cottoned on to this in one of his rare lucid moments. Immediately thereafter, the booze got the best of my new friend and he began muttering incoherent football analogies of which he’s fond when in his cups.

On the issue of Brexit, he said, “the Commission is neither an attacker nor a defender. It’s the ‘libero’ who distributes the ball… it’s like a training camp, because there are a lot of balls. At the end there is only one ball – and you have to get it into the goal…”

A lot of balls indeed. But I’d suggest, using the same football idiom so beloved of Jean-Claude, that the Commission is none of those things. It’s a crooked bettor slipping a few quid to a team to throw a match and stack the odds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you think it’s time to revive the idea of gassing the Jews? Our Home Secretary and Justice Secretary certainly do. That’s why they advocate Britain’s departure from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Such is the learned judgement of Prof. François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Who am I to argue?

Prof. Crépeau’s list of degrees is longer than mine, and he has been blessed by the laying on of UN hands. Hence he knows how to argue by sticking the thin end of a wedge in and twisting it for maximum effect.

Here’s a sample of his profound thought: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people. I mean, countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don’t stop there.”

They certainly don’t. They go on to build gas chambers and burn corpses in concentration-camp crematoriums. And this, according to Prof. Crépeau, is exactly the slippery slope on which Britain would step – unwittingly or otherwise – if she were to withdraw from the ECHR.

Can you find any flaw in the good professor’s sequential thought? I can’t. It makes perfect sense, at least in some quarters. Such as the UN, the EU, the European Court and your friendly local loony bin.

However, this side of those venerable institutions such moronic, hysterical animadversions are pure Crépeau. One wonders what they teach at McGill and University of Paris, where this savant learned his rhetoric, logic and international law. Do they demand basic literacy before issuing advanced degrees?

The ECHR isn’t about human or any other rights. It’s about transferring legal authority from individual nations to the foul abortion known as the EU, thereby increasing its power and eventually making its supremacy irreversible. C’est tout, as they say at the University of Paris.

It takes a late stage of mental retardation to equate human rights with various international charters bearing that name. Being a UN trouble-shooter, my friend François ought to ponder the fact that the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was signed by such authorities on the subject as Stalin’s Russia.

The EU, along with all the stillborn embryos of its offshoots, isn’t really a European Union. In all but a few technicalities it’s a union between Germany and France.

I hope my French friends, of whom I have many, and German friends, of whom I have none, won’t be offended, but England has nothing to learn about law in general and human rights in particular from either nation.

In my parents’ lifetime, the Germans committed, and the French abetted, the very atrocities that excite François so. Their Eastern European hangers-on were also active perpetrators then, and for the next 50 years or so they continued the fine tradition of concentration camps, this time with a red rather than brown tint.

This isn’t to say that those places haven’t redeemed themselves since then. It’s just that their conversion to the side of the angels is too recent to give them the right to impose their twisted notions of international legality on a country where individual rights have been protected by law for at least a millennium.

Even without resorting to François’s own demagogic trick of dragging the Holocaust in, thereby vulgarising one of the greatest tragedies in history, only an ideologised ignoramus would fail to observe that, at practically any moment in the last several centuries, it’s England that has been in a position to teach the continentals the basics of individual rights, not the other way around.

Repealing the ECHR would mean repatriating the enforcement of human rights to the country where they have traditionally been secure, and away from a legally and morally pernicious supranational organisation within which the Vichy-like Franco-German alliance would subjugate Europe – this time including Britain.

Anyway, François needn’t have bothered his intellectually challenged head with such matters. Dave has just ridden roughshod over our Justice and Home Secretaries by ruling out the very withdrawal that gives my friend François nightmares of gas chambers.

“Withdrawal is not going to happen,” says a Downing Street source. “David Cameron is clear this is off the table… The British bill of rights could mitigate the worst excesses of the Human Rights Act but it won’t change the fundamentals.”

The most important fundamental Dave cherishes is that Britain must become, by hook or by crook, a gau in the Fourth Reich, otherwise known as the EU. Perhaps François Crépeau should apply for the job of gauleiter. He has all the credentials: stupidity, ignorance, immorality and – most important – the talent to express himself at a hysterical pitch.

 

 

 

The other day, when my friend Will and I were having a couple of pints at the King’s Head, I complimented him on his interview with Gary Lineker.

Will succeeded, I said, in sounding as if he had finally divested himself of the stigma of his shamefully high birth. Why, he even refers to beer as ‘pig’.

This is what he told me in response:

“Ta, Alex, me old china.

“You may think I’m well posh, being a prince and all. But when I had that chinwag with me mate Gary, he knew I was a regular bloke who don’t like nothing more than going down the pub with me Brummie mates and watching Villa on the box.

“I even wrote me own Villa song, Claret ‘n Blue, One Loves You. Sang it to me trouble, but she stuck her fingers into her shell-likes.

“Me missus, she’s different, see. Coz she wasn’t brung up posh from birth, like, she has them aspirations, djahmean? Me, I don’t mind coming across like a prole, to make Gary feel at home.

“Sat in the box during the match, like a goodun, but wish I was with me Brummie mates. Villa, see, got a good kick up the bottle, and everyone in the box rooted for Arsenal, so they were well chuffed. Right berks, the lot of them.

“They like looked at me strange when the ref didn’t give us a stonewall pen and I jumped up and screamed ‘Ref is a wan…’ Stopped myself in time though, coz I was on that big screen and any bleedin’ lip reader would know what I was saying, djahmean?

“This etiquette is a load of old Jacksons, if you follow me meaning. I got me Geoff from St Andrew’s so I know how to talk posh when I have to. But me old lady, she now tries to talk all the time like she got an umbrella up her khyber.

“When I met her, she wasn’t like that. She was a good time girl, see. Swore like a trooper, drank pints of pig, shook her bristols down the pub, even talked chitty chitty.

“Now she got a pair of dustbins, she wants to be a proper royal trouble, she says. Me Nan, she always smiles sly when Kate says ‘one’ instead of ‘me’.

“The other day she told me ‘I rather think Katherine overemphasises the royalty bit, Will. One fears people may laugh.’ And I say ‘Cheers Nan. I been telling her that meself.’

“Now I’m so full of this pig, me back teeth are floating. Order us a couple of mahatmas, will you, Al?”

As I was shouldering my way through the crowd at the bar, I reminded myself that in the royal rhyming slang ‘mahatma’ stands for ‘brandy’. These days one has to take a crash course in chitty chitty (the Cockney rhyming slang for Cockney rhyming slang) to be able to understand what some royals are saying.

But then, as my friend Tony Blair once put it to such great political effect, Prince William’s late mother was a ‘people’s princess’. That, one supposes, makes him a people’s prince.

If you’ve led a shamefully sheltered life, you probably don’t realise that the title of this piece is actually a variation on the first line of a popular football chant, used by the fans of a winning team to taunt their opposite numbers.

Decorum prohibits my quoting the second line verbatim, but the gist of it is that those losers have nothing to sing about. However, in Sepp’s case, the answer is a resounding yes.

For Sepp managed to get himself re-elected as head of FIFA, world football’s governing body. This in spite of a whole platoon of his closest associates being indicted in America for various degrees and types of corruption, from bribery to tax evasion.

Moreover, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is confidently predicting that there’s more to follow, for only the surface of the football fraud has been scratched. Since the fraudulent sum already mentioned is $150 million, before long the total amount to have changed hands will approach the combined wealth of all the Russian oligarchs who, like Abramovich, have a direct stake in football.

The Russians have been supporting Blatter unequivocally, bringing to mind the proverb about birds of a feather. With their unerring nose for conspiracies aimed at them (this nasal sensitivity is otherwise known as paranoia), they’ve declared that all the charges have been trumped up specifically for the purpose of taking the 2018 World Cup away from Russia.

According to the Russian media, as part of that incredibly intricate plot, the FBI informer within FIFA not so much blew the whistle on the corruption as organised it himself. As Putin’s RT mouthpiece Soloviov put it, addressing the perfidious Yanks: “If you really installed your mole [into FIFA], this raises the question: Did you investigate the corruption or perpetrate it?” Indeed. No other question could possibly cross anyone’s mind.

The same gentleman screamed hysterically: “Corruption in FIFA? And when they talk about it [on Western TV], they show footage of Blatter and Putin chatting. Even though neither one has been implicated!”

Neither one has been arrested, rather. As to not being implicated, this is, how shall I put it kindly, not quite so.

Blatter is implicated by association at least. Just imagine what would happen to the president of, say, BP if seven of his vice presidents were arrested for fraud and seven more were expected to be nabbed within days. He’d be in a mad rush to tender his resignation before being sacked and, most likely, indicted.

As to Putin, while the US action is attracting all the attention, few have noticed an even more important parallel development. For the Swiss Prosecutor’s office has started criminal proceedings against “a group of unspecified persons linked to irregularities in selecting the countries to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.” In other words, Russia and Qatar. Interestingly, in this instance FIFA is mentioned as the victim rather than the perpetrator.

For old times’ sake we must presume that the two countries are innocent until proven guilty. But between us boys, does anyone really think there was nothing untoward about the selection?

One can just see it, the FIFA chaps pondering the possible options in a totally objective and disinterested way. England? No, too misty. France? No, too many temptations for the players to stuff themselves. America? No, what do they know about football?

And suddenly, as if out of the burning bush, comes the epiphany: “I have an idea! Why don’t we award the first one to Russia and the second one to Qatar?”

Everyone gets up, a spontaneous ovation breaks out. Why didn’t they think of that? Russia, with her corruption rating of 156 out of 175 countries, and Qatar, with its summertime temperatures around 50C. Unbeatable choices, both.

As if to prove their sterling credentials to host such events, the Russian Duma is about to pass a law calling for the use of slave labour in the construction of the World Cup sites. And Qatar is already using slaves for the same purpose, de facto, if not yet de jure.

Officially, their construction workers are visitors from India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Unofficially, as if to remind footballers of what can happen when people overexert themselves in extreme heat, they are dying at a rate of one a day. So far the death toll stands at about 1,000, but then it’s early days yet.

As to Russia, the sports establishment in that country is known for its corruption levels far exceeding those considered par for the course in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Thus about $20 billion of the funds raised for the Sochi Olympics was pilfered by Putin’s cronies with hardly an eyebrow raised anywhere.

Anyway, let’s not be churlish about it. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Mr Blatter on his re-election. Well-done and well deserved, Sepp!  

 

 

 

Dave is currently on a trick-or-treat junket to Europe, or rather treat-and-trick. He wants the EU to treat him to a few ploys enabling him to trick us into voting Yes in the referendum.

As any marketing man will tell you, respondents in any survey find it much easier to say Yes than No. Hence, by wording the big question as ‘Do you want to stay in the EU?’, rather than ‘Do you want to get out?’, Dave feels he’s already halfway there to the result he craves.

Now he wants the EU to help him with the other half, by agreeing to seemingly attractive but in fact purely cosmetic changes to the existing arrangement, which changes can at any rate be withdrawn after the referendum.

After all, if the plebiscite returns the desired outcome, we aren’t going to be asked to vote again, are we? It’s only when nations vote wrong that the EU tells them to do it again and get it right this time.

The only problem is that the EU is playing hard to get. Dave may have failed to communicate his real objective lucidly enough, or else the federasts are genuinely afraid of the domino effect. What if, following Britain’s example, others start getting ideas above their station? Das ist ausgeschlossen, in the language of the EU metropolis.

One way or the other, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius explained the facts of life to Dave, choosing the language he felt even un sale Anglo-Saxon could understand:

“Mon petit David,” he said. “Britain joined a football club, but no? Zey cannot now say in ze middle of ze match zat zey want to play rugby. It’s one sing or anozzer. What part of non don’t you understand, mon ami?”

Mr Fabius probably didn’t realise how well his metaphor works. For, if what’s going on is a simulacrum of an international football match, then the EU acts in the capacity of FIFA, with all that this entails.

Specifically, it entails corruption on a Putinesque scale, routine bribery, a phoney democracy that is in fact a crypto-dictatorship, contracts going to the boys willing to play ball, blackmailing recalcitrant members – the lot.

My friend Dave winced at both such an unfortunate turn of phrase and an even more unfortunate failure to understand his true goals. He decided to follow suit and resort to the football idiom too.

“Laurent,” he said. “You are being unreasonable. You must realise that unless the ref’s decisions, the least important ones, go our way, we may have to take an early bath.”

That incensed Mr Fabius even more because he was unfamiliar with the expression and decided Dave was rudely referring to the recent survey showing that half the French don’t wash regularly. The conversation rapidly went downhill, and both parties felt the final whistle couldn’t come too soon.

Dave missed an open goal yet again because he failed to realise the goalposts are fixed and can’t be moved. Or else he was caught offside yet again – choose your own football jargon.

What I find intriguing is the way Dave explains the situation to the Europeans. Unless we get what he asks for – and God knows he’s not asking much – Britain may have to leave the EU, he keeps repeating.

And there I was, thinking that the whole point of the referendum is letting the people decide. Since our decision hasn’t yet been made public, how does Dave know whether we’ll vote Yes or No, concessions or no concessions?

He can only feel so prescient if he’s certain he can manipulate the referendum to get the result he wants. He probably can, with a little help from his EU friends, and it’s refreshing to hear a politician in general and Dave in particular tell the truth. If only inadvertently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to the whole region. It will henceforth be spared Tony’s malevolent presence to which the Middle East owes much of its present ordeal.

Had Mrs Leo Blair suffered a miscarriage 63 years ago, the Middle East might have been spared the Walpurgisnacht of Isis, while Europe wouldn’t be besieged by swarms of refugees risking watery death to flee from Libya.

Israel would also be safer, although, with the ‘Palestinians’ expertly playing on the West’s post-colonial guilt and perverse attraction to Third World diversity, she wouldn’t be completely safe.

But at least the threat of crazed nuclear-armed ayatollahs would be counterbalanced by Saddam’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, with Assad’s Syria sitting on the fence. Now, with those major players off the field, Iran is emerging as the region’s strongman.

America has withdrawn from the mess, having first started it under Dubya in collusion with our miscarriage manqué. Once bitten by the fiasco of the ill-conceived and illegal invasion, she is now twice shy to do something about Iran’s nuclear threat – other than tacitly encouraging it.

We’ll have to suffer Obama’s sanctimonious waffles for another couple of years, but at least we stand a good chance of not being exposed to the smug noises produced by arguably the most hideous character ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.

Tony had a good thing going while it lasted. First he went along with Dubya on his criminal aggression against Iraq. Then, when that went sour, he asked his American accomplice to put in a good word for him with the self-appointed Quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia (!), which was looking for a front man.

“Yo, Blair,” said Dubya. “You scratched my back, I’ll scratch yours. Count on me, boy. And get me a refill, will ya?”

Bush was as good as his word. Tony ‘Yo’ Blair got the job of peace envoy and made it a resounding success. For himself, that is.

He could now go through the motions of global politics, while focusing his undivided attention on building his business empire, much of it made possible by his contacts with Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and other Emirates, not to mention the Palestinian mobile phone company he got together with another one of his clients, JP Morgan.

As to his supposed day job, he brought to it the defunct notions he shared with the US neoconservatives. According to Tony, all problems in the Middle East spring from the conflict between Israel and the ‘Palestinians’.

As Tony’s sponsor Dubya said, Islam is a religion of peace (Tony’s successor Dave saw fit to repeat this idiocy, but then he’s the self-described ‘heir to Blair’). Let those poor Palestinians, happily displaced for three generations, have their state, and Islam will return to its normal peaceful self.

A worthy goal towards which to strive, or rather it would be if it were true. In fact, the briefest of looks at some of the world’s flashpoints over the last 20 years will show that most of them involved Muslims – and had nothing to do with Israel.

Specifically one could mention the conflicts between Bosnian Muslims and Christians, Côte d’Ivoire Muslims and Christians, Cyprus Muslims and Christians, East Timor Muslims and Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians in Ambon island, Kashmir Muslims and Hindus, Kosovo Muslims and Christians, Macedonian Muslims and Christians, Nigeria Muslims and both Christians and Animists, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims throughout the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, Chechen Muslims and Russians, Azeri Muslims and Armenian Christians, Sri Lanka Tamils and Buddhists, Thailand’s Muslims and Buddhists in the Pattani province, Muslim Bengalis and Buddhists in Bangladesh, Muslims and Protestant, Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Orthodox Christians in Kurdistan.

But moral and intellectual integrity mean nothing to our Tony. What matters is maintaining his image of the global dove of peace, while feathering his nest to the tune of hundreds of millions.

I don’t know the Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi for good riddance to bad rubbish. But whatever it is, the Middle Easterners should be saying it. There’s hope for them yet.