HOWARD EPSTEIN: PRAYING FOR THE UNEXPECTED
Those who recall Monty Python’s Flying Circus are unlikely to have forgotten sketches in which cloaked clergymen erupt onto prosaic scenes without warning, exclaiming, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”. So far, so drole, but there are far more important tales of the unexpected to tell.
NSA, CIA, GCHQ, MI5, MOSSAD, 8200: an alphabet soup signifying entities created to enable decision-makers to expect the unexpected; impressively-funded organisations charged by (in pairs) the USA, the UK and Israel to predict global events that could upset the world order.
Well, disappointingly, amongst the events that unexpectedly burst into our lives more recently than the Spanish Inquisition, indeed, within living memory, have been: Pearl Harbor, 1941; the Iranian Revolution, 1979; the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989; the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands Isles, 1982; the Yom Kippur War, 1973; 9/11, 2001; Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014; and the Hamas pogromim, October 2023.
Those acrostic agencies are reputed to be able to pick up on any seditious words uttered in any telephone conversation anywhere in the world; and even before they had such technology they employed some of the best analysts, political and military. Yet the events listed in the previous paragraph went undetected until they erupted with the same element of surprise – or horror – as John Cleese and Michael Palin dressed as cardinals and arriving onto a domestic scene. “Well”, the heads of the most prestigious spy agencies in the West must have thought, on receiving a shock equivalent to that delivered by the device so beloved of the Americans, the electric chair, “Who’d have thunk it?” or, “Well I never!”, or, “Oh, ****!”, followed in each case by, “How many euphemisms can I employ in my resignation letter?”
Two trains of thought follow. The first is as depressing as anything else in the last three months. In the early hours of Shabbat Simchat Torah there was every opportunity to avert a horrific Hamas surprise attack. There had been sufficient by way of warning for two high-level IDF officers to meet close to Gaza at midnight, and again at 04:00 hours, to discuss the possibility of a wide-scale invasion. There was also sufficient, by way of hubris, for them to dismiss the threats, with the consequences we shall never be able to erase from our beings. This was no Monty Python event that no one could have foreseen. It was expected and it was dismissed, because of the conception, as one IDF officer in the weeks before reportedly told a young, female shomeret (watch-tower guard), “Hamas are just punks. Forget about them.”
Only one of the unexpected events listed above can be contemplated with some optimism: the Fall of the Berlin Wall. This beneficent event was utterly unforeseen by those paid to be soothsayers – despite the Reagan/Thatcher policy of breaking the back of the Soviet economy with large scale missile investment and deployment, resultant crippling stagnation in Russia, Glasnost and Perestroika – until some East Berliners started chipping bits off the hated concrete barrier in November 1989.
Is it too much to hope that we might wake up one day to find that the Iranian regime has imploded? Might, wholly-unexpectedly, of course, the largely young, well-educated, West-leaning and aspirational Iranian nation – and especially their girls and women, probably the most oppressed fifty percent of any nation outside North Korea – leading demonstrations all over Iran, most of the time, find a way to overcome their fear of the Basij (the regime’s cruel enforcers)? Could the entity that has been exporting terror world-wide since 1989 and ruining whole states such as Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – not to mention Gaza itself, and potentially Judaea and Samaria given half a chance – actually be swept aside?
Sadly, although there are many straws in the wind blowing towards such an outcome, their flow will have been impeded by the Americans’ massive, liquid-cash gifts to the terror-obsessed mulloracy, thus: CBS News, 6 September 2016: Washington DC: “The Obama administration is acknowledging its transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made entirely in cash, using non-U.S. currency”.
In case you are wondering, that would be the nuclear deal (JCPOA) that came into effect in January 2016, supposedly to delay Iranian nuclear break-out for 15 years. (In reality, you might now expect it by around teatime next Monday.)
Many called the first (and hopefully the only) Biden administration the third Obama term. Here is some corroboration, dateline 15 November 2023, from Iran International: In a controversial move, the Biden administration has granted … the release of billions of dollars to Iran … The decision, coming amid the Gaza war and Iran’s backing for Hamas, would effectively unfreeze an estimated $10 billion (https://www.iranintl.com/en/202311150106):
Having established that you could not slip a wafer between Biden and Obama, let us consider the mindset of the latter – the Svengali – rather than the acolyte bent on continuing his master’s work, irrespective of American interests let alone those of Israel.
To save you the displeasure, I have considered Obama’s attitudes to Israel in his own words (see A Promised Land, chapter 25: “Over the … twenty or so years [following the 1917 Balfour Declaration], Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements”. Given that the British worked assiduously to exclude Jews, not least those fleeing what would become the Shoah, this is just plain nasty. Further, Obama’s “organized highly trained armed forces” of the Yishuv amounted to somewhat less than those the 3-to-1 Arab majority could muster, not to speak of the five Arab armies that would invade the day after the birth of the state.
Worse follows: For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors. Like she had a choice?
There is more – but no space for it this week. Meanwhile, let us hope that Biden unexpectedly realises that a bath chair rather than that behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office would be more appropriate at age 84, as he would be at the start of another term, and wholly-surprisingly, the USA stops propping up the vicious Iranian regime. In the meantime, pray for its unexpected end.
© January 2024 – Howard Epstein www.howard-epstein.com
