The Sunday Ishmael: 29/09/2024: The Middle East Edition

 Here, at Ishmael House, the giggling couldn't be suppressed when  Radio 4 announced, with lugubrious solemnity, that the pagers belonging to the leaders of a terrorist organisation had exploded simultaneously. This was up there with Castro's poisoned beard or exploding cigar, definitely a product of the Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And how perfect a strategy - Israel couldn't be accused of targeting innocent civilian populations or infrastructure, as only declared enemy personnel had their heads or hands blown off by their pagers, or, better still, testicles, if the pagers were carried in pockets. Result! No more fathering of 40 sons apiece. Hezbollah had only resorted to the old fashioned pager method of communication as they feared mobile phones were susceptible to interception and were a location device. I mean, they doubtless muttered to each other, in a beardy sort of way, pagers! What could possibly go wrong? 

What a master stroke! The planning it took to put an exploding pager into the hands of enemy terrorist commanders! Synchronised pager explosions! And Hezbollah paid for them! But the cream of the jest was that when they switched to walkie talkies to communicate their war strategies, they exploded, too! What next? Ah, effendi, I will just write down the battle plan - then, whoops! Synchronised Exploding Fountain Pens. Actually, no, they haven't done that. Yet.

And as Hezbollah continued to rain down fairly ineffectual rockets  upon Israeli territory, they found that their own weapons caches they'd carefully hidden in schools and hospitals were also blown up in frighteningly accurate strikes. Of course they complained to the media and anyone else who would listen that Israel was targeting schools and hospitals to kill innocent civilians (are there any? Aren't they all complicit, just as the German population knew damn fine what the Holocaust was up to?), but the clue was in the series of secondary explosions after the bombs fell, as the cached weapons all went off. Saw it on the telly. 

And then, the coup de grâce - or should it be coup de guerre? On Friday, as Benjamin Netanyahu told it as it is to the United Nations,

spitting his defiance and confounding the appeasers, Israeli fighter jets struck the underground base of that dreadful old man, Hassan Nasrallah, who has been the leader of the terrorist organisation for more than 30 years. Nasrallah is now a supreme, sacred and dearest martyr, along with most of Hezbollah's senior commanders - all martyrs, the lot of them. Straight to Paradise.

Nasrallah referred to Israel as "the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs – the Zionist Jews" and condemned them as "the murderers of the prophets."  He called the attacks of Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, a heroic operation, and justified Hezbollah's missile and drone attacks against northern Israel, which began immediately after October 7, as being carried out in solidarity with the Palestinians.  You can't keep insulting people and attempting to bomb them off the face of the earth without expecting them to retaliate.

Netanyahu has a different view of this "heroic operation". As he told the United Nations on Friday: "October 7th. Thousands of Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists from Gaza burst into Israel in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, and they committed unimaginable atrocities. They savagely murdered 1,200 people. They raped and mutilated women. They beheaded men. They burned babies alive. They burned entire families alive—babies, children, parents, grandparents, in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust." Oh yes - that would be the Nazi Holocaust that Nasrallah says either didn't happen or was wildly exaggerated by Jews.

Seems fairly clear-cut to me - terrorist organisations backed by foreign states invade your country, murdering, raping, abducting etc, so you fight back, to prevent said terrorist organisations doing it again. If it is Ukraine invaded by Russia, the Western World goes boo, boo, have some weapons, we'll train your soldiers, sanction the invader, engage in secretive supportive ops. If it is Israel, subject to a long war since the end of the Second World War, a war designed to eradicate Israel, then the Western World is strangely ambivalent. Says its complicated.

Thank god for Kemi Badenoch. I'm a convert. If she gets the Tory Party's Leadership gig, then I might just think about voting Conservative. Might. After all,  Sir Keir and his crew of "lads", however nicely dressed they are, really are just beyond, beyond. Like Rosie Duffield said, as she flounced out of the Party, sleaze, corruption, freebies and being nasty to pensioners are the New Normal. 

Here's Rosie. The little guy in the corner is Pat Bosco McFadden - he's not aged well - only 59 and he looks like a judgemental old tortoise who has smelt something nasty. On the Laura Kuenssberg show today, he was forced to listen in trap-jawed disbelief while Rosie slagged off his boss. McFadden is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an archaic, anachronistic role - the Chancellor is the highest ranking minister in the Cabinet, next to Keir. Basically it is a sinecure, the appointee being a creation of the Prime Minister, creating an additional minister without portfolio. His unenviable job this morning was to respond to Rosie's accusations of the rot within the highest echelons of the Party and that Sir Keir has surrounded himself with a group of lads - sounds fairly menacing - do they have motorbikes and leather jackets?  Pat Bosco said, entirely convincingly, that he is too old to be one of the lads, and less convincingly, that Sir Keir shouldn't have to buy his own clothes during an election campaign as he has to look his best. Or some such bollocks. The David Lammy line. Representing Britain. Don't want him to turn up to international events looking like Jeremy Corbyn.

Back to my new hero, Kemi Badenoch. Asked on Sky News' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips what she would be saying to Israel if she were Tory leader, Ms Badenoch said: 'I would be congratulating Prime Minister Netanyahu. I think what they did was extraordinary. Israel is showing that it has moral clarity in dealing with its enemies and the enemies of the West as well. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation and I think that being able to remove the leader of Hezbollah as they did will create more peace in the Middle East.'

She was similarly forthright on the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg vehicle. But Laura was determined to drive her into admissions that Kemi was equally determined not to make. The BBC political line might have something to do with the new chair, Dr Samir Shah, who replaced the allegedly disgraced former chair, Richard Sharp, over some allegedly sharp practice relating to an £800,000 loan to the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Dr. Shah is a race relations expert, born in India, a former adherent of Jainism and a convert to Islam. Just saying.

Kemi was grilled about an article she wrote for the Sunday  Telegraph, in which she said that: " not all cultures in the UK are “equally valid”. When asked What Cultures, she responded those cultures that endorse child marriage, where when you knock on the door the wife says she can't talk to you, she'll have to get her husband. Kemi doesn't like migrant groups importing their disputes from their countries of origin and playing them out on the streets of Britain. She said: 
“One of the things that I found most upsetting after October 7 was watching people ripping down posters of missing kidnapped children from walls and lampposts in London. We’ve never seen that here before. I think that that is beyond the pale.”

She explained the difference between multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, a concept that Laura found tricky until Kemi explained that Britain is multi-ethnic - she's black, Laura is white, but that there should be one culture, that migrants should come to Britain because they want to live here and share the culture of Britain. We're really not good at that - in fact the liberal left actively opposed assimilation into a host culture, preferring to embrace and give validity to all cultures - even when they are rubbish, cruel, and violent cultures. They promoted multi-culturism because, I think, they are ashamed of our own culture and history. By contrast, the US, which has at least as much to be ashamed of in its own history, is really good at forging a national identity amongst its immigrants and children - from sea to shining sea.
“I know what you’re trying to do, Laura. You want me to say Muslims when it isn’t all Muslims, so I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to play this game. I should be able to say that I have made an observation without you trying to portray it as me attacking a particular group.”

Kuenssberg then hit back: “Kemi Badenoch, I am not trying to portray it in any way. I am asking you on what evidence do you base this claim. Who are you talking about?”

“I have answered the question multiple times, but I know what you are trying to get me to say, and I’m challenging you that we need to be able to have these conversations without being scared, without running away.”

So - my new hero. Kemi Badenoch for Conservative Party Leader. Straight talking. Willing to offend the Liberal Left and the Race Relations industry. Hell - Kemi Badenoch for god. That'll do.

In other news........

• Michael Spit Gove has been appointed Editor of the Spectator, a role he has coveted since a wee boy of 7 in an Aberdeen school.

• Private Eye broke the news of Mohammed Fayed treating Harrod's as his personal brothel back in issue 951, 29th May 1998. That's 26 years ago. This stuff has been known about for 26 years - but its only after the long reach of his wealth, power and position has been shortened by death that mainstream media are reporting it and it is being investigated. Maybe he can't be touched - well, he can't, but his employees who enabled him and pimped for him certainly can be. The Justice for Harrods Survivors group said they have reported Dr Ann Coxon, the doctor who conducted invasive sexual health checks on Fayed's young female employees, who still has a licence to practice and operates out of her Harley Street clinic, to the General Medical Council (GMC).

And what about all those security staff who procured for Fayed? Any still around? I was just carrying out orders?

Here's some of the Private Eye article from 26 years ago: 

"In October 1993 he (Fayed) took four of them (secretaries) to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's villa, gave them £100 each and demanded 'who is going to sleep with me tonight?'........Many other young women - all young and attractive, most of them blonde - have been 'received for interview' at Park Lane. The visitors usually remain closeted away with Fayed for about two hours, after which, if the pharaoh is in a generous mood, security staff are instructed to hand them bundles of money." 

• There's a thing called a liquid Brazilian Butt Lift. Honest, Not Invent. 
  Alice Webb was taken to Gloucestershire Royal hospital on Monday (23 September) after becoming unwell; she died the following morning. According to the Gloucestershire police, she had undergone a “suspected cosmetic procedure” before becoming ill. A quickly deleted fundraising campaign to raise money for Webb’s family stated that she had undergone a non-surgical BBL, which sees fat or dermal filler injected into the buttocks with the aim of adding volume and creating a lifted effect.

Anagram Corner, curtesy of editor mr. verge:-

Bi-dame? Heck, no! 

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

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As a sign-off, you might like to try this from Generation Kill: