Thursday 10 July 2014

Memory Lapses

The statue of Gandhi in Tavistock Square was unveiled by Harold Wilson as long ago as 1968, also to oil the wheels of trade.

I reckon that Cameron, Osborne and Hague do not know that it is there. Still less that Modi, an RSS member, is a brother-in-arms of Gandhi's assassin.

But who does not get these things in London?

Despite the pronounced scepticism of Lord Carrington and of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (since they saw it as nothing to do with Britain, and as likely to offend key allies and trading partners), Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine allocated Crown property for a National Holocaust Memorial within a few hundred yards of the Cenotaph.

Britain's main contribution to the Holocaust had been Churchill's refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, a refusal which much later moved Menachem Begin to inform Margaret Thatcher that her country and her hero had caused the deaths of two million Jews.

He himself had armed Argentina during the Falklands War, only months before the controversy over this proposed monument ostensibly to one thing but really to another.

However, the promise of it had been made to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in those days a hopeless bunch of zealots, and to the Zealot-in-Chief, the then Labour MP, Greville Janner.

Janner, the second generation MP for the same seat as well as a second generation President of the Board of Deputies, spent many decades screeching "Anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism! Nazi! Nazi!" at anyone who dared to question, for example, how he had made his own considerable pots of money.

Janner was still active in the House of Lords until the very recent Police raids on his office there and on his home, investigating You Know What. Now, apparently, he has dementia. In a way, haven't we all?

For there is no memorial, anywhere on the face of the earth, to those who fell in and for the Palestine that was a country on the map, with the Union Flag in the corner of its own and with red postboxes bearing the crowned letters GR. The answer to the supposedly rhetorical question, "Who was the last King of Palestine?" is "George VI."

That British country was bombed out of existence by the founders of modern terrorism. For example, Menachem Begin. It is a wonder that there is not a statue of him in London. Give it time. Probably not very much more time.

His successors' utter lack of regret about even the most extreme anti-British violence has no mainstream political parallel outside Zimbabwe.

Comments referring to Thatcher's unwillingness to meet Begin when he visited London, and to her ruefulness after she had relented, are deleted from what has turned out to be the ferociously neoconservative Breitbart London.

As are those linking to the world's only memorial to the USS Liberty, which is purely online, or to an article by Ray McGovern, who as a CIA analyst prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. What would he or, say, Philip Giraldi, know, eh?

Israel is the only country in the world that could have attacked an American naval vessel, killed 34 of her 294 crew members, and injured a further 174, all without the slightest consequence.

Just as Israel is the only country in the world, at least outside the United States, that could be let off entirely after the Police, as such, had beaten a 15-year-old American citizen black and blue.

The Iranian and Israeli Embassies in London are both in South Kensington. On the former's property, but visible from the street, a memorial to the USS Liberty might usefully be erected

An annual wreath-laying ceremony would be broadcast on RT, Al Jazeera and Press TV, and on Channel 4 News on a good day. But do not hold your breath for even the slightest coverage anywhere else.

Scandalously, the same would be true of the urgently needed National Memorial to British Palestine. Ideally, one yard closer to Janner's erection.

Or possibly in place of it, should it have to go the way of the extravagant headstone of Jimmy Savile.

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