Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Words of Robin Shepherd

In The Guardian:

...we must be clear about who our enemies are in the world and who are our friends. And yes, such categories do exist. No dictatorship should be treated as a friend. This does not mean that we should not deal with them, or that our relationships with them should be defined by bellicosity. But they should be aware that we regard them as second-class citizens in the global community, just as they treat their own people as second-class citizens at home.

In practical terms, the most obvious shift that this would entail in our foreign policy would be with Israel and the states of the Middle East. The Arab states do not share our values; Israel does. We should stop appeasing them, and we should put an end to the abominable spectacle of British diplomats snuggling up with dictatorships at the United Nations to make a whipping boy out of the world's only Jewish state. We must put the Foreign Office on a shorter leash. London, partnering with Berlin, should also be leading Europe against an antisemitic tidal wave in the Arab and Muslim world that has no parallel outside Germany in the 1930s.

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