Let’s see, and the way to see is to compare the president’s response to two aerial events yesterday.
In one, the Israeli Air Force struck a Qatar hotel in which a group of Hamas chieftains were holed up. Five terrorists were killed, although apparently the gang leaders escaped with their lives.
In the other, Polish, Dutch and Italian fighter planes were scrambled to shoot down Russian drones invading Poland’s airspace. This was followed by another monstrous Russian attack on Ukrainian cities, including Kiev.
Which of these incidents caused Trump’s fury? To make it easier for you to answer this question, let’s set the contextual scene.
Poland is a NATO country, bound with the US by a mutual defence treaty. She is a staunch ally of the West and has been a fierce opponent of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.
In addition to any altruistic urges, this stance is motivated by self-interest. Polish leaders realise that Putin’s plans go beyond the Ukraine. That understanding sets them apart from Putin’s mouthpiece Peter Hitchens, who wrote a few days ago: “I am still not sure what Putin wanted to achieve [by attacking the Ukraine]…”
This uncertainty is staggering, considering that Putin and his minions never made their aims a secret. At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Putin stated that his objective was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine.
Of course, according to Kremlin propaganda, the Ukraine’s whole government and most of her people are Nazis. Moreover, the country undeniably has an army. Hence, what Putin said was tantamount to a commitment to destroy the Ukraine as a sovereign state and turn her into a Russian colony.
And not just the Ukraine. In his incendiary Munich speech of 2007, Putin spelled out his long-term plan to rebuild the Soviet empire, thereby undoing “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
This ratcheted up spittle-sputtering hysteria, when hardly a day goes by without Putin or his henchmen threatening to annihilate NATO countries with nuclear arms. Putting it in simple terms, Poland is our friend, whereas Russia is a fascist country, our enemy and a source of constant danger.
That’s why the provocative violation of Poland’s, which is to say NATO’s, airspace can be justifiably treated as an act of war, or at least a rehearsal for it. Poland’s Prime Minister was absolutely right when warning that “we are closer to war than any time since World War Two”.
The other incident also involved a clash between our friend, Israel, and our enemies, Hamas and Qatar. Hamas is a diabolical terrorist organisation whose aim in life is to annihilate Israel and murder every Jew living there.
Since in that region Israel is the only reliable ally of the West in general and the US in particular, and Hamas is Israel’s enemy, it’s our enemy as well. And Qatar is the major Sunni supporter of Hamas.
Doha has hospitably housed Hamas’s political office since 2012, and over the years Qatar has financed Hamas to the tune of $1.8 billion. That’s even more than the cost of the airliner the Qataris presciently gave Trump as a gift, which he gratefully accepted.
All this makes the question in the title above almost rhetorical. Did the Poles offer Trump expensive airliners, as the Qataris did? They didn’t. Did their leaders ever describe Trump as a genius, which Putin did many times? Did they hell. Have they been critical about Trump’s kowtowing to Putin, as the Russian juggernaut moves closer to Poland’s border? You bet they have.
There you have, the answer to that question. Trump ignored the provocation against NATO (us) and was furious about Israel’s strike on Hamas (them).
The White House said that Trump felt “very bad” about Israel’s strike on her enemies, and ours. Moreover, by his own admission, Trump tried to sabotage the attack.
He wrote that, on finding out about the raid, “I immediately directed special envoy Steve Witkoff to inform the Qataris of the impending attack, which he did, however, unfortunately, too late to stop the attack.”
Had it not been too late, the Qataris might have been able to thwart the attack and ideally kill some Israeli pilots. Nice. But that’s not all:
“I view Qatar as a strong ally and friend and feel very badly about the location of the attack. I want ALL of the hostages, and bodies of the dead, released, and this War to END, NOW!”
Next time Trump is in Qatar, he ought to peek into the BOOKSHOP WINDOWS there. He’ll find prominently DISPLAYED copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, plus any number of other Nazi and anti-Semitic TITLES.
Nor is it just the Qataris’ reading habits. They also act in the spirit of such literature, supporting by word and deed not just Hamas but also every other anti-Israeli and anti-Western terrorist gang.
If Qatari emirs – and Russian dictators – are Trump’s friends, then who are his enemies? I don’t know, ask him. I can only observe that he and his underlings are more critical of America’s Western allies than they are of the kind of scum one finds in Qatari or Russian government offices.
For example, both Trump and Vance are scathing about Britain’s deficit of free speech. Without in any way disputing such charges, let’s just say that those chaps aren’t similarly critical about the situation with free speech in Russia or for that matter Qatar.
It’s true that Britain’s clamps on free expression ill-behove a civilised Western country. But our sins are minor compared with the fascist oppression in Russia, where critics of the regime are routinely imprisoned or even murdered, or with the Sharia dictatorship in Qatar, where independent political bodies and trade unions are banned (and whose courts treat a woman’s testimony as worth half that of a man).
Beware of Qataris bearing airliners and of Russians promising huge property development concessions, one is tempted to say. But since we know the answer to the question in the title, such advice would fall on deaf, or else deliberately plugged, ears.
P.S. Now I’m in the business of dispensing unsolicited advice, I’d suggest to Hitchens that he try not to be so blatant about his role as Putin’s shill.
If he must regurgitate Russian lies, one trick he may try is at least not using exactly the same language, word for word. Thus the Kremlin line on the on-going war is that it was started by the West using the Ukraine as its proxy.
Here’s Hitchens, impersonating a parrot: “I think the West doesn’t especially want peace. Western policy in this region has the aim of preventing a Russian recovery… It means that the West uses Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.”
Oh, is that why the West transferred untold amounts of capital and technology to a post-perestroika Russia? I get it, that was a ploy to conceal its dastardly ulterior designs.
For the same reason, Europe kept Putin’s economy afloat by getting most of its gas from Russian fields and pipelines, those that wouldn’t have even existed but for American and European exploration and production technology, pipeline equipment and computer knowhow. Really, there’s no limit to the West’s perfidy.
There is one to Hitchens’s own perfidy though: he isn’t smart enough to conceal it.