A Rant

This is going to be a departure from my normal blog because I am beginning to feel just a little offended at attacks made on our "white western values" -  presumably our Judeo Christian values - and the suggestion that  these are the cause of the present day unrest in the Middle East,  because they have led to "greedy Western powers dividing up the Middle East for the oil revenues".

Actually - it was the Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 which  divided up the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,  effectively handing over control of Syria, Lebanon and Turkish Cilicia to the French, and Palestine, Jordan and areas around the Persian Gulf and Baghdad to the British,  I don't think it can be denied that after World War I, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a solution for peace in the region had to be found, and I have never heard anyone put forward a better alternative, or in fact any alternative.     So let us be quite clear about this.

The causes of present day tensions in the Middle East can be attributed to many reasons, political and humanitarian, which have arisen over the last hundred years since the Sykes Picot Agreement, one of which has been, and is one of the foremost,  the creation of the state of Israel and this is of far greater significance in current Middle Eastern tensions than greedy western powers with white western values, seizing  oil revenues in Iraq, if in fact this is what they are doing.

To change tack a bit - After the Holocaust of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of persecuted, homeless Jewish refugees flooded into Palestine, creating there a crisis situation which was eventually resolved by the creation of a homeland, the state of Israel, where Jewish people can never again be persecuted for being Jewish.

That this "solution" was at the expense of the millions of Palestinians who then became themselves homeless, dispossessed refugees is grossly, manifestly, UNFAIR to say the least.   But as the first President of Israel said at the time "It is not an issue between right and wrong, but between a greater and a lesser injustice".

This my friends, I would suggest is far more of a contributory factor to Middle Eastern tensions and world peace than our "white western values" and whatever it is that is perceived to be wrong with them.

I would just say in conclusion for those of you who may not know, I am the widow of a Palestinian. For fifty years  I have lived and breathed this conflict which my own children have themselves inherited, and I take exception to the suggestion that has been made that I need to research the issues.