Howard Epstein

Howard Epstein – PREFER MONARCHY to DEMOCRATIC ELECTION?

By Howard Epstein

Posted on August 28, 2016

Howard Epstein – PREFER MONARCHY to DEMOCRATIC ELECTION?

Does anyone still prefer a monarchy over democratic election to high office? Perhaps the correct question is the corollary: should we always prefer democratically-elected leaders – or their appointees – over those born to rule? Is it possible that in 2016 there is clear-cut evidence that the blue-blooded can throw up a non-elected leader, the outcome of several generations of condescension and hubris, disconnected from the reality of lives lived beyond the high-walls of a royal palace, who has more common sense in his little finger than the American Secretary of State apparently harbors in his two meter tall frame? Might it be the case that a monarch could, in our times, express in a nutshell more intelligence about the real world than the appointee of the democratically-elected American president? The answer, as I shall easily demonstrate, is in the affirmative.

John Kerry visited Nigeria last week. He explained the terrorism of Boko Haram to the Nigerians in a display of ignorance so flat-footed in its approach it was a wonder he was able to leave the scene without the assistance of a Zimmer frame. Kerry’s explanation for terrorism was simple: corruption – their corruption, that of the Nigerians of course (and not of the Clintons).

That is no more intelligent, accurate or helpful than Kerry visiting Jerusalem and telling us that the reason for Arab terrorism is the existence of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Kerry’s explanations for terrorism, disparate as they may at first appear, are however inextricably interlinked – just not in a way that Kerry would understand. As explanations for the vicious nihilism that brought the world 67 dead in a Lagos shopping mall rampage in 2013, 300 school-girls abducted in 2014, 13 year old Hallel Yaffa Ariel stabbed to death in her bed near Hebron last June and four upright Israeli citizens enjoying a night out at Sarona market wantonly murdered last July, Kerry’s words are woefully inadequate. His “explanations” are no more than excuses – and vacuous ones at that.

Kerry, not exactly born into poverty, and from his verbal antics when in this region apparently keen to distract attention from the Jewish line of his paternal ancestry, had the good sense to marry someone who had earlier married into and was then widowed out of the Heinz dynasty. For Kerry, everything is a game. His few years as the USA’s top diplomat – like his next gigs, be they corporate appointments, the after-dinner speaking circuit or just golf at clubs with adjoining airfields, whatever a rich man’s diversions may be – are all for him a game, but one is in which he never has any skin. Accordingly, he peddles a different superficial line in each terrorist-plagued environment that he visits, pontificating as though he knows – or cares.

Since no-one could pretend that Israel is as corrupt as Nigeria, not even Kerry ventures to suggest corruption as the cause of the steak-knife Intifada, and the even crueller ones that preceded it. Equally, since there are no “settlements” in any outlying parts of Nigeria, that too would have been a blind alley for the omniscient Kerry when referring to the evil Boko Haram.

For Kerry it is a question of You Pays Your Money; You Takes Your Choice: another flight, another day, another place, another outrage, another dissembling explanation. Nigeria: corruption. Israel: settlements. The lazy man’s explanation is to be found locally and it gives Kerry something to say, incoherent though it is.

Time, Mr Secretary of State, for you to learn a lesson from the non-elected King of Morocco.

On August 20, 2016, King Mohammed VI, during a broadcast by Morocco’s Channel 1, asked a question so simple and so long-overdue, that when it came it was almost breath-taking in its simplicity:

“Can anyone of sound mind believe that the reward for Jihad could be some virgins in Paradise?”

[Read the whole speech and have your faith in humanity restored:

http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=71323]

Here at last is a straight-talking Arab leader. Appropriate and perhaps unsurprising then that he is the titular head of Morocco, a constitutional monarchy with a bi-cameral parliament, a sound economy and welcoming to any Israeli olim, formerly émigrés from Morocco, who would wish to return there. With or without their erstwhile Jews, the prospects for Morocco look sound and certainly its world-standing has not massively deteriorated in the past eight years (unlike that of the USA).

The truth that the Moroccan King was seeking to illustrate is that you can feed any old line of nonsense to the young and the impressionable and they will, given sufficient indignation, radicalization, peer-pressure, drugs and explosives and/or weaponry perpetrate the disgusting, the inhumane and the downright murderous upon the innocent.

The reality about terrorists that has passed Kerry by is that they do not need to be poor, downtrodden, dispossessed, the victims of corruption (which of us, in a world dominated by western bankers, is not?) or resentful of Israeli settlements built on a vanishingly small percentage – actually 1.7% – of Judea and Samaria. If you are adolescent, and fall into the wrong company, you may have your head turned by the outlandish, the outrageous and the outlawed. These murderers by proxy maintain their power (and their corrupt practices that sees them with fat off-shore bank account balances) at a safe distance. They will ply you, the callow and the ingenuous, with promises of unending pleasure in the afterlife from countless virgins becoming available (well, is not 72 effectively the same as countless?) and propaganda about their claimed portion of the global range of resentments at which these groups fulminate.

They will do the same to your colleagues and each member of the group is fated to be the first victim of his very own suicide bombing – the “shahid” or cannon-fodder on whose naiveté they have been working. Then one will be sent off to bomb, maim and murder and, in the fullness of time, they will pressurize you to do the same, in each case almost certainly boosted by both peer pressure and a sample from an assortment of available narcotics.

None of that has anything to do with improper sales of Nigerian oil; and the terrorism committed (according to Kerry) as a protest against it is never going to stop that line of business. Nor is that in reality the target or the catalyst. Some people are so evil that, just as for normal people virtue is its own reward, so too for them is bloody malevolence.

The Moroccan King identified the absence of the emperor’s apparel this week and should be bathed in glory for being so direct. Kerry, metaphorically-speaking, is left looking as though he had been dragged through the unintellectual mud backwards, his bouffant hair-do all caked with the stuff.

Whilst we despair of ever seeing the light of reason ever going off in Kerry’s head, there was yet more realism from the Arab world last week. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI):-

Over the past month, the Saudi press has featured a number of highly unusual articles harshly critical of the antisemitic discourse in Arab and Muslim society, and calling to avoid its generalizations regarding the Jews. The articles argued that Koranic passages against the Jews only applied to specific groups during specific time periods, and should not be applied to Jews in general. They added that blind hatred of Jews everywhere has prevented Arabs and Muslims from learning the lessons of Jewish experience and advancement. …. the publication of Saudi articles attacking antisemitic discourse specifically at this time is no coincidence, and is likely meant to lay the groundwork for public acceptance in the country of normalized relations with Israel. (http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9391.htm)

And even this:-

In his column in the Palestinian online daily Dunya Al-Watan (Alwatanvoice.com), Anwar Al-Waridi, a Palestinian poet and author living in Jordan, mocked Muslim clerics who scream about Jews being the descendants of apes and pigs, while Jews control Arab land and have been defeating the Arabs for the past century. According to him, this claim about the Jews is ridiculous, and is indicative of a backwards collective Arab mentality that underestimates the enemy. (http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9381.htm)

John Kerry please note. A community of interest is (slowly) building between former sworn enemies round these parts. The pity is that America will not be in a position to capitalize on it.

As soon as Pax Americana shut its Mid-East shop, Putin was quick to fill the consequent vacuum. Of course, Obama’s departure, swathed in ignominy from the Syrian “red-line” debacle, did not occur before he had set the cat amongst the pigeons with the (dis)ingenuous JCPOA deal which will lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon in less than nine years. If Kim Jong Un of North Korea has not overstepped the mark by then (and his escapade in launching a missile into Japanese controlled waters last week makes that seem unlikely), the USA will be able to worry about both him and whichever ayatollah is in control of Iran’s nuclear missile force by then in tandem. What a glorious outcome for US diplomacy that promises to be!

What speaks volumes as to the Incredible Shrinking Man that Uncle Sam has become under the Obama administration is the prospect that Putin looks likely to host the next Mid-East peace conference (should Abu Mazen ever get around to grasping the nettle). Perhaps there could be a role also for King Mohammed VI, for his common sense, realism and Arab authenticity would be greatly reassuring.

Is there going to be, in the event of a Clinton win in November more of the same – or will things get much worse? According to US actress/comedienne, Roseanne Barr, the former FLOTUS become POTUS “will be the absolute death of Israel” and her so-called body-woman (or PA as we used to say), Huma Abedin, is “a filthy Nazi whore”.

Let us try to unpick the Barriène bons mots. Well, the billionaire Arafat widow – address: The George V Hotel, 31 Avenue George V, 75008, Paris (€1,000 per night before long-stay discount) in case you are minded to pop in to plant a peck on the anti-Semitic cheek – was certainly appealing in that way to Hillary for, after listening to a speech from Suha Arafat about how Israel was poisoning the Palestinians’ wells, FLOTUS→POTUS planted a smacker on Madame’s cheek. And reading that body-woman Abedin was brought up in Saudi Arabia from the age of two (some symmetry there with Obama, who was raised in Indonesia), you cannot dismiss Ms Barr’s allegation with any sense of equanimity, even though the way she expresses herself may not be entirely to your liking. Filthy Nazi whore, indeed. As if any of them were not filthy!

Julian Assange may not be your cup of tea either, but one can try to understand why he wrote: choosing between Trump and Clinton is like picking between cholera and gonorrhoea. Let us see now. From the former you would die a disgusting and painful death whilst from the latter, err …. it would be the other way round. Both unpalatable, as l’Assange was doubtless trying to indicate.

It is the same with world leaders. When you need all the friends you can get, you have to be like the British: stiffen the upper lip, do business with those who behead princesses (Saudi Arabia) and parley with those who harry NATO (Russia), as the new British PM now seeks to do. Putin is clearly a serious player and we dare not kick him out of bed if he wants to cuddle up with us. All the more so in the light of what Roseanne Barr said. The possibility of even a german of truth in her story makes for a poor night’s sleep.

Coda: I repeat what I wrote in concluding the Preface to my book, Guns Traumas and Exceptionalism: America In The Twenty-First Century:-

“Finally, I seek to clarify what I hope is plain in any event: any criticism of American personalities within these pages, express or implied, is borne, not out of antipathy towards errant or inadequate public figures, but out of empathy with the American people, who, in my view, deserved better leadership.”