Social media last night was a joy to behold – not a phrase that is uttered very often. My timeline was full of clips of Jews and Iranians dancing and singing together in the street, in north London. Two communities with historic ties who both understand the evil of the Iranian regime and are both now full of joy and hope for the future.
But there was one chant being sung which was not about joy, or hope. Its words were, rather, an expression of contempt for our prime minister, a man whose pusillanimous inability to rise to the moment said far more about who he really is than any spin doctor’s attempt to pretend that there is, as the phrase has it, any there there. “Keir Starmer is a w****r”, the crowds sang.
Under Starmer and his henchman, Lord Hermer KC, Britain has become a spineless irrelevance, even when confronted with sheer evil and the opportunity to stand up for freedom. The prime minister began his statement yesterday by informing the world that, “The United Kingdom played no role in these strikes,” as if this was something to be proud of rather than yet another dark stain on our nation.
But in the Starmer-Hermer mindset, nothing matters more than their particular, specific interpretation of international law – a doctrine that places adherence to the Matrix Chambers worldview above anything else – including the mass slaughter of civilians, global terror and international piracy.
No matter that, as the doyen of military historians, Robert Lyman, has pointed out, they are “conveniently ignoring the long held legal justification for intervention that has underpinned operations since Bosnia, and the rationale for British foreign policy thereafter, that intervention is justified by the indiscriminate murder by a regime of its own people, not to mention its sponsorship of terrorism regionally”.
The point is not, and has never been for the likes of Starmer and Hermer, the international law they claim to adhere to, but rather about how and when force is used, and by whom.
On the face of it, Starmer’s welcome support for Ukraine contradicts this. But when you look deeper, you see that there is no substantial difference. Starmer’s position has always been that others should do the fighting. Even when he says British troops will be made available, that would only be to uphold a putative peace deal. And even then, the sums do not add up. Where are these mythical troops to come from? On Ukraine, Starmer talks a good game, but there are no plans to raise defence spending even to a paltry 3 per cent of GDP for many years.
So it is entirely in keeping with his position on Ukraine that Starmer should block the use of British air bases for the US and Israel’s action against Iran – even though we gain nothing by such a refusal. As he himself has pointed out, Iran already targets British citizens for assassination, and on British soil. Barring US use of our bases does not in any way lessen our status as an Iranian target. All it does is anger the Americans for no good reason. But heh, Matrix Chambers and their fellow travellers will be happy, and that is – almost literally – all Starmer truly cares about.
There is, though, a deeper truth about the Starmer-Hermer axis that has been emphasised in the past 24 hours.
Both in his Downing Street statement and his joint message with the German chancellor and French president, Starmer once again confirmed how his entire approach to global affairs is wrong-headed.
The three leaders called for no further escalation and a return to negotiations – pure appeasement. This is the same approach that gave us the disastrous JCPOA Iran nuclear deal in 2015, allowing Iran to build up not only its cash reserves, which it then used to finance its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, but also to further develop in secret its nuclear programme.
It's clear that like many in the West, Starmer has no real understanding of the nature of the Iranian regime – its religious fervour and an outlook that not only embraces death as martyrdom but which sees its purpose on earth as being the destruction of the infidels – of which Israel, the US and, yes, the UK, are the leading examples.
The notion that you can reach a lasting and secure accommodation with such a regime through diplomacy is risible – but it is the basic position of Starmer et al.
Now is not time to de-escalate but the exact opposite - with the regime’s leadership removed, the US and its allies should step up action until the regime is destroyed. It is to our lasting shame that, under Starmer, we have chosen to play no part in this.
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