Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

of the Arab world. It is, after all, we who are
allowed to draw “lines in the sand” or “red
lines”. It is we Europeans who decide where
civilisations begin and end. It is the Prime
Minister of Hungary who decides exactly
where he will draw up his forces to defend
“Christian civilisation”. It is we Westerners
who have the moral probity to decide
whether national sovereignty in the Middle
East should be obeyed or abused.
But when the Arabs themselves decide to
dispense with the whole fandango and seek
their future in “our” lands rather than “their”
lands, this policy breaks down. Indeed, it
is extraordinary how easily we forget that
the greatest frontier-breaker of modern
times was himself a European, who wanted
to destroy the Jews of Europe but who
might well – given his racist remark about
Muslims in Mein Kampf – have continued
his holocaust to include the Arabs. We even
have the nerve to call the murderers of Paris
“fascislamists”, as the great French pseudophilosopher
Bernard-Henri Levy has just
written in the press. Nazis Isis undoubtedly
are – but the moment we utilise the word
“Islam” in this context, we are painting
the swastika across the Middle East. Levy
demands more assistance to “our Kurdish
allies” because the alternative is that “no
boots on their ground means more blood
on ours”.
But that’s what George W Bush and Tony
Blair told us before marching into the
graveyard of Iraq in 2003. We are always
declaring ourselves “at war”. We are told
to be merciless. We must invade “their”
territory to stop them invading ours. But
the days are long gone when we can have
foreign adventures and expect to be safe
at home. New York, Washington, Madrid,
London, Paris all tell us that. Perhaps
if we spoke more of “justice” – courts,
legal process for killers, however morally
repugnant they may be, sentences, prisons,
redemption for those who may retrieve their
lost souls from the Isis midden – we would
be a little safer in our sceptered continent.
There should be justice not just for ourselves
or our enemies, but for the peoples of the
Middle East who have suffered this past
century from the theatre of dictatorships and
cardboard institutions we created for them –
and which have helped Isis to thrive.
9
June 2016