This is the first time I have seen the West spectate at a genocide Tim. Apart from personal tragedy, this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life and, had you asked me a year ago, I would have said it wasn’t possible. Biden is culpable, smug Sunak is culpable, that weak idiot Scholz is culpable, even Macron, who I generally admire, has not been as strong as he should have been. It is time to throw Israel out of the club of civilised nations.
Too little, too late…The whole of the IDF should be declared a terrorist organisation.
I guess it depends on how one defines a “generation” as I understood it was a “once in a generation” vote. In geopolitics, 10 years is the mere blink of an eye.
Can we Brits stop frothing about distant things we cannot change and concentrate on British problems? I would start with long overdue major land reform, and undoing the past enclosure acts. First step would be to abolish that constitutional brake against reform, the House of (Land)lords. Nothing will happen if nobody demands it. But people won’t because they don’t realise they are being robbed blind by rich non-taxpayers, and this process is actually accelerating.
It’s not either/or.
We can fight/campaign for or against more than one thing at the same time.
Perhaps start a new thread instead of hijacking one about the ongoing mass slaughter of people?
Just because a genocide is happening in a far away land doesn’t mean we should do or say nothing about it. In fact, I think we need to speak up more about the atrocities happening in Africa that barely hit the news.
"“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” - John Stuart Mill (I think!)
I don’t think we fully understand how lucky we are to have not been born in a place like Palestine or Sudan or Yemen or …
No need to be blind to what’s happening, be it Gaza. Darfur, Tibet or the Amazon. But the British tendency to officious pontificating about distant conflicts does nobody any good, is always highly selective and easily manipulated by shock headlines; whereas the UK’s systemic problems require careful analysis and intelligent action that one day might improve the lives of millions in Britain having to choose between heating and eating. Many of the countries where conflict occurs had their frontiers drawn by HMG back in the colonial times, and we are now seeing the results. It would be more appropriate to adopt a low profile and hope not to be called out.
No it wouldn’t, I wonder if you would have disapproved of the kinder transports in the late '30s. Even if there is nothing physically we can do, expressing an opinion forcefully is something that we definitely should be doing. Very few people are alive today who made and enforced the British empire. That does not make us guilty of it or its effects and should not bar us from taking a stand, however at such a distance, when we see things that are definitely wrong as we see them.