HOWARD EPSTEIN: NOT KNOWING RIGHT FROM LEFT
Of all the liturgical warnings, prayers, penitentiary apologies and pleas that might have leapt off the page to me over Yom Kippur, what actually hit me between the eyes was God’s rhetorical question, at the end of Haftorah Yonah, to the eponymous prophet:-
And I shall not take pity upon Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right from their left …?
Fast forward some thirteen centuries and pose the question that Hashem might ask today:-
And I shall not take pity upon the USA, that great country, in which there are more than three hundred and twenty million persons who do not know their right from their left …?
So, we may assume, with divine intervention there could be hope for the American people, who could not, given the choice of the main presidential candidates that they have – Trump or Clinton – be expected to know their right from their left.
It is not only the politics of the candidates that confuses, neither of them embracing by now the main tenets of their respective putative political parties. Also, the unappetizing appearance of each – of both – of them is enough to deprive a reasonable, sane and grounded person from access to the reason, discretion and choice mechanisms normally available to them, mentally, intuitively or emotionally.
Of course, by appearance I do not mean the physical attractiveness of either candidate but what each represents. One is a deeply-unpopular, bloated, dissolute and untrustworthy septuagenarian (give or take the odd birthday), standing accused of a level of corruption that ought to be an absolute bar from public service, whilst the other is – absolutely the same.
No wonder then that Americans may not know their right from their left, not to say right as distinguished from wrong, unsuitable, improper or unfit. Nevertheless, God (in the Judeo-Christian tradition) may yet, we pray, be counted on, as in the case of Nineveh (seen as evil yet worthy of salvation), to rescue the great (and rather less evil) country that is the United States. After all, another prophet, Jeremiah (at 32:16-22), understood God’s power when he lauded His supremacy and greatness, thus:
“Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for You”.
Well, America is going to need all the help it can get, not least in regard to reining in the Russians (see also my recent blogs), who have backed up their strategic advantages 
gifted them by Obama-In-Full-Retreat, with tactical assuredness in Syria, and on the cusp of Ukrainian and Baltic territories. One would have thought that a Nobel peace prize-winner would have known an aphorism as fundamental as: Nature Abhors a Vacuum. After all Putin did – and the best he can aspire to is an ignoble prize.
The ignorance of the now lame-duck US president was matched last week by British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson (whose heart is in the right place, bless him). In a House of Commons debate, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or “Bojo”, as he is known to his intimates, urged that Britain and her allies set up a no-fly zone over Syria to prevent further bombing runs by the Russian air force on Aleppo. Ah, those were the days! As in Iraq in 1991, when the western allies ruled the skies. Now, however, has Bojo never heard the term: “S300”? That, Mr Foreign Secretary, is the highly-
advanced Russian missile defence system that gives Putin in the Middle East absolute air supremacy. How many downed Russian jets does Bojo think Putin would tolerate? (Hint: the answer is less than one.) Not that the RAF or the USAF could get anywhere near, thanks to the S300. Given that the residents of St Petersburg have been told their daily bread ration will be 300 grams in the event of a nuclear war with the West, the Russian media talk incessantly of such a war and the Russians have been holding nationwide drills (see:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/ways-russia-telling-people-prepare-war/story?id=42800992)
we may guess which side would blink first.
In my recently-published book on modern America (see the end of this article), I refer to the Soviets as having blinked first 
(pace Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, on October 24, 1962) in the stand-off with JFK during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Here is another fast-forward for you, dear reader. The Russians have just announced that they are about to start building military bases in Cuba. Who will blink first this time? Putin or Trump/Clinton. The US military may out-spend that of the Russians by ten to one, but the USA spends as though it is still the World’s Policeman, whilst Russian military expenditure has been rather more focussed.
General, Ben Hodges, head of the US army in Europe, told the Cheltenham (England) Literary Festival last week that European and US military and political leaders “took their eye off the ball” and were now in a precarious position as regards Russia. His words were said by The Times of London to echo those of:-
General Sir Richard Shirreff, the retired British Army general and Nato’s senior European officer until March 2014, whose book War with Russia: An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command argued that the alliance needed to prepare to repel further Russian aggression
The pity is not only that his words went unheeded but also that playing catch-up is now out of the question. Dislodging Russia from where it sits has become impracticable. 
While the increasing size of the wealth gaps in the West made the élites and the establishments of the USA and Europe sybaritic (and inward-looking), Putin has been running an ersatz economy for the Russian people, all the time planning for pay-back time in regard to the humiliation heaped on Russia by the West after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Of course, MAD means that actually fighting a nuclear war – with total global destruction guaranteed – is unlikely but, just as the North Koreans have developed nuclear blackmail over the past twenty years, wait for Putin to start making his demands. First to 
go will be the sanctions that the West has imposed on him. But his shopping list will be longer than that and, whilst he can put Russia on a war-footing overnight to back up his demands, the Americans will just have elected an unpopular leader with a following of rather less than 50% of the nation. Hardly a mandate for putting America on a war-footing. Initially, it will be Wall Street that suffers. After that, all bets are off for the cushy and cushioned life-style which Americans and Europeans have come to regard as their God-given right. Soon, it will be a question of what Putin is prepared to let them have.
Meanwhile, back in Great Britain (a title which I typed with only a hint of irony), politicians and journalists alike fret about how Aleppo is the new Guernica, with proxy bombing runs by Putin’s Russia to do Assad’s dirty work for him (as did Hitler’s Germany for Franco’s Spain in June 1937) by levelling the eastern half of Aleppo, regardless of casualty figures. Wrong comparison! Rather, read “Grozny”, for it was there that in 1999 then-rookie Russian President Putin put an end to the Chechen uprising, by turning Grozny into what was called, by the United Nations in 2003, “the most destroyed city on earth”. (See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6414603.stm)
Given what is happening in Aleppo today, Grozny’s reputation may have passed its sell-by date.
It is to be regretted that the West failed to get real about Russia, as did Israel’s Prime Minister (whatever his faults). I for one sleep better because Bibi cared less about Obama’s sensitivities than those of Vladimir Putin. The former is getting on his bike while the latter is settling into his dug-out.
Talking of getting real, it is right to give a pat on the back to UNESCO, who last week corrected the arrant and patent nonsense that the Jews had any connection to Haram al-Sharif in Al Quds – which they call Temple Mount in Jerusalem (laughable, is it not?). UNESCO have made it clear that there was never any such connection, despite all evidence to the contrary, not excluding that which originates from some twelve centuries, and onwards, before the birth of Mohammed, and the total absence of any reference to Jerusalem (or even al Quds) in the Koran.
As is well known, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is headquartered in the United Nations, the home of which has been, since its formation after the Second World War, in Al Spuds. The city was named for the practise of the local precursive Mohammaden tribe, the Delaware Indians, of growing potatoes on Al Spuds island. Mistakenly known as Manhattan for over four hundred years, by a long-overdue decision of UNESCO last week, Al Spuds has at last reverted to its proper title.
These are not the only achievements of UNESCO, for the following further corrections, in the interests of truth and accuracy, have also been declared:-
- the weak-minded assertion that the home of the so-called Yankees was properly-named Yankee Stadium has been corrected to Al-Spuds Stadium, thus paying tribute to the originators of the game later known as baseball, that originated from Mecca more than two thousand years ago;
- the slanderous suggestion that the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team has more than a passing and highly-contemporary connection to the Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, has been put right. The truth is that a group of basket-weavers from Medina staked their claim to the site one thousand years before the birth of The Prophet;
- the just plain wrong idea that the recently-named (in 1877) Lord’s Cricket Ground in London – actually, since time immemorial, The Sacred Ground of The Chosen One – had any connection at all, until modern times, with the English and their obsession with dressing and parading in white, whilst not at the Haj, is now expunged; and
- any suggestion that Old Trafford was originally the home of Manchester United Football Club has been corrected, for football is globally-recognised as a misnomer for foot-fall, a reference to the thousands of anticipatory Muslims who foregathered in the damp north-west of England just after the Druids left, before themselves heading for the Haj.
Getting into the zeitgeist, Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out that there has also never been any connection between Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jello or, for that matter, rock and roll.
At last the scales have been lifted from our eyes.
© Howard Epstein, October 2016
~~~~~
As usual, I have borrowed from my recently-published book for the allusions to America and its disappointing political leaders.
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