Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1141

Loyalist Backlash

The loyalist post Brexit backlash – myth or reality? That’s the crucial question which controversial commentator, Dr John Coulter, explores in his Fearless Flying Column today.
Sometimes comments in private conversations stick in your mind for years. I recall one such conversation during an Ulster Unionist Party coffee morning fund-raiser in North Antrim during my dad’s time in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Devolved government had returned to Stormont and ‘peace’ reigned in Ulster. I got chatting to a senior UUP politician at the event.
During the course of the conversation, the person noted: “You know John, the Troubles will start again in about 15 years’ time!” What a prophet of doom and gloom, I thought at the time. But certain comments made last month by a series of notable politicians have got me pondering on that remark at the UUP coffee morning all those years ago.

In April 2018, only a few weeks ago, the North Down Independent Unionist Westminster MP Lady Sylvia Hermon – widow of former RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon – told the House of Commons a hard border would see a return to violence. That same month, Lord David Trimble, the former UUP Leader, ex-First Minister and former UUP Upper Bann MP, warned that Dublin’s border stance could provoke loyalist paramilitaries.

That same month, two ‘big political guns’ from the republic - former Taoiseach John Bruton (1994-97) and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern (1997-2008) warned of a potential for violence if there is a new border. The main point is that Messrs Trimble, Bruton, Ahern and Lady Hermon are not extremists; they are level-headed, respected political figures who are not prone to sabre-rattling rants.

Had it been someone from the Looney Left or Hard Right banging the violence drum, it could have been dismissed as a bit of a publicity stunt to gain a few headlines. But the fact that such notable people are issuing these warnings is a cause for concern. It also poses a couple of other serious questions – what form would this violence take, and who would indulge in the first strike?

Let’s assume it would be the loyalists who see that the final outcome of Brexit is not the economic capitulation of the republic and Southern politicians clamouring to negotiate a new Anglo-Irish Treaty to bring the Occupied Twenty-Six Counties into not just a closer Union with the United Kingdom, but full membership of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association as first steps to Irexit!

Let’s assume Brexit has brought the island of Ireland several steps closer to the 32-county democratic socialist United Ireland as envisaged by the 1916 Proclamation. Would we be looking at a second Irish Civil War with loyalists fighting for an independent Ulster? Would the loyalist movement become the new ETA, the terrorist group which fought for independence of the Basque region in Spain?

More importantly, does loyalism have the terror capacity to mount a campaign of violence, or would it be merely street riots as witnessed during the Drumcree protest era in the late 1990s, or the Day of Action in March 1986 against the then Anglo-Irish Agreement?

Does the loyalist movement even have the support, the will, or the resources to mount another bombing attack on the republic as happened in 1974 with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings? Are we assuming too much of the loyalist movement that any violence would automatically come from exiting loyalist groups, such as the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando?

Perhaps the reality is that militant loyalism has descended into a turf war over drugs and racketeering, or else is it that one-time paramilitaries now want to re-brand themselves as ‘community group spokespeople’?

The reality could be the changing nature of global terrorism. Gone are the days when paramilitary groups, such as the Provisional IRA and UVF, organised themselves into brigades, companies and platoons. That led to heavy infiltration of those groups by the security services on both sides of the border and the dark humour that for every 10 activists in an organisation, at least seven were touts!

When examining seriously any credible threat of loyalist violence, the ethos of the Walter Mitty characters and fantasists must be taken into consideration. A sinister press release heralding the launch of a new terror gang may well be nothing more than a two-man and a dog outfit.

In 1999, while working on the then latest edition of the Northern Ireland Political Directory with a colleague from Queen’s University, I was sent a statement from an organisation calling itself the ‘Black Friday Brigade Strategic Army Command’. It even had a motto – Vi Et Armis, along with an ‘identification code – 894001’.

The language was sinister with sentences such as: “As from 14th February 1999 we withdraw completely our consent to be government. As from 14th February 1999 the authority of the Assembly has been cancelled.”

It also carried the usual doomsday message:

We warn the Irish Republic that if or when the implementation of Strand 2 occurs, it will be deemed to be an enemy of the state and all Irish citizens will be classified as enemies. Anyone, repeat anyone, implementing in anyway the Good Friday agreement, will be judged guilty of collaborating with the enemy and suffer the same fate as all collaborators in times of war.

Apart from that statement, that was the last I heard of the so-called ‘Black Friday Brigade’! I am not aware of anyone in, or anything which this so-called group actually did. Maybe it was another Monty Python-style group like the Judean People’s Front, or the People’s Front of Judea or the Popular Front of Judea?

A significant shift in terrorist strategies came with the emergence of the dissident republican movement. Rather than one group, it emerged as several different organisations, each with its own separate command structures. So we had the Continuity IRA, Real IRA, New IRA, Republican Action Against Drugs, and Oglaigh na hEireann. During my time at the Irish Daily Star, I had the chance to interview representatives of a number of these factions. These interviews have been published and are in the public domain.

I often posed the question – why so many factions? The answer was tactically simple. Each faction would operate independently of the other making it more difficult to be infiltrated by the security services. While these organisations operated more along the lines of the Maoist cell structures as devised by former Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong during his takeover of the country, terrorist structures have developed even further since the emergence of radicalised Islam, especially the Islamic State group.

This is the concept of the radicalised lone wolf attacks. Ironically, the Far Right has capitalised on this method. For example, in the United States, Timothy McVeigh carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people. He was executed in 2001. Anders Breivik was convicted of the 2011 Norwegian attacks, which claimed eight lives in a car bomb attack followed by a further 69 people shot dead at a summer camp. He is currently serving a lengthy jail term.

Radical Islamist suicide bombers have also carried out a series of horrific attacks across Europe in recent years, many of them so-called lone wolf attacks. Granted, they may have been radicalised by a godfather, but the key concept is that it takes far less people to cause a terror campaign than the days of the Carsonite UVF or Irish Volunteers of the Home Rule crisis in Ireland before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

The theory for discussion is – could such loyalist lone wolf jihadis exist post Brexit if Northern Ireland leaving the European Union along with the rest of the UK brings the violence which notable, sensible political figures have warned about?

Again, I returned to an interview which I gained with a senior member of the Orange Order for my Masters thesis at Queen’s University during the post 1994 paramilitary ceasefire era. The thesis was entitled: “The contribution of the Orange Order to the development of Pan Loyalism during the period 1968 to the present day.” The thesis was completed in 1998. The source, an Orange chaplain, asked to remain anonymous. Readers should be aware please that these comments are more than 20 years old.

I’m quoting from the thesis, which should be available in the Queen’s library. He suggested in an interview that it was right to step outside the law of the land to protect the Word of God from Man’s law. He added:

As evangelical Protestants, who are born again Christians, are chosen of God, this could lead to the creation of a Protestant ‘jihad’ – or holy war. The Protestant use of violence to defend Ulster is viewed as part of this Protestant ‘jihad’, just as the knights of the Middle Ages viewed the legitimacy of the Crusades.
Given the view that Orangeism has to redefine its relationship with unionism, perhaps the way forward for the Order into the new millennium is as a pro-active defender of the evangelical Gospel of Christ – a modern-day Crusade, or ‘jihad’.
However, the reality of this Protestant ‘jihad’ is that should not be bound by Man’s laws, especially if those laws are contrary to the inspired Word of God as outlined in Holy Scriptures. Orangeism and unionism may need to be viewed as separate components in this ‘jihad’ of the future, just as the IRA and Sinn Fein are seen as separate components of the same republican movement.
‘This means that Ulster Protestants have two parts to their ‘jihad’ – the defence of the Union through political unionism, and the defence of the evangelical Gospel through Orangeism. By combining these two elements, we create what could be termed as evangelical unionism.

Looking at the comments of this Orange viewpoint from 1998 through 2018 eyes, it could be suggested this was the building block of a future loyalist ‘jihad’ against the republic in the event of a post-Brexit United Ireland. Put simply, given the developing nature of lone wolf terrorism, all it would take would be a handful of loyalist extremists to create the violent mayhem which the middle of the road politicians from both unionism and nationalism have warned about.

Unlike the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike which toppled the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive, such a violent loyalist campaign would not require massive street protests. Indeed, such a group of individuals would not even require the support of the majority of unionists to conduct A few godfathers who had radicalised some loyalists to carry out single atrocities would be all that is required if Islamic terror cells are taken as a benchmark.

The key worry for democrats of all persuasion across the island of Ireland is – has the groundwork for the loyalist ‘jihad’ already in motion and the fuse has already been primed on the violence which Messrs Trimble, Bruton, Ahern and Lady Hermon have warned about? The UVF, UDA, UFF and Red Hand had their day in the Troubles; is a new generation of post Brexit loyalist godfather and terrorist emerging?

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter


Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter

Dr John Coulter has been a journalist working in Northern Ireland since 1978. As well as being a former weekly newspaper editor, he has served as Religious Affairs Correspondent of the News Letter and is a past Director of Operations for Christian Communication Network television. He currently also writes political analysis articles for national newspaper titles.

A Morning Thought (37)

Republic of Islamophobia

Elsa Stéphan writing in Democratic Audit UK reviews a book on racism in France. 


Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France. Jim Wolfreys. Hurst. 2018. In Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France, Jim Wolfreys describes the emergence of a ‘respectable racism’ against Muslims in France since the 1980s, fuelled by the ‘War on Terror’ and rooted in the nation’s colonial history. Praising the book’s candid and incisive writing, Elsa Stéphan welcomes this as a commendably comprehensive and accessible account on Islamophobia in contemporary France.

Picture: RG72, via a (CC BY SA 3.0) licence


I can understand the exasperation of some of our compatriots when there are some neighbourhoods where a mother or father will come home from work in the evening to learn their son has had his pain au chocolatsnatched out of his hand by thugs, telling him it is forbidden to eat during Ramadan (Jean Francois Copé reported in France 24, 2012).

A few decades ago, such a lurid invention targeting Muslims might have emerged from nationalist parties, but this very sentence was pronounced in 2012 by a centre-right French member of parliament, Jean-François Copé, revealing the normalisation and embrace of a racist discourse by mainstream parties in France. A few weeks later, Copé was elected president of the main French conservative party. This anecdote illustrates what Jim Wolfreys, in his new book Republic of Islamophobia, describes as the rise of a ‘respectable racism’ against Muslims in France since the 1980s: a poisonous narrative engrained in ‘a war on Terror’ with paternalistic and colonial overtones.

Far from confining his analysis solely to contemporary France, Wolfreys goes back into history to denounce what he views as a form of neo-colonialism deeply entrenched in a French past, affecting many communities as a result. As a further example, a few months after his 2007 election, former president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech in Dakar, Senegal, in front of scholars and journalists in which he described at length what he perceived to be Africa’s problems: ‘The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history.’ His advice that was ‘the African’ should start growing their own food to avoid starvation. With his speech, Sarkozy brought his audience back to the mindset of nineteenth-century colonialism.

In France, Islam in particular has been portrayed as breeding riots and terrorism and as subjugating women. Yet, as the author reminds us, the majority of third-generation French citizens of North African descent do not have any religion. It is generally assumed that France’s ‘Muslim population’ equates precisely to the number of people of North African background living in France, no matter what their relationship to religion might actually be. Islam has thus become an imagined threat in France over the last thirty years. There is a disturbing discrepancy between the way French Muslims are perceived and the reality of their religious practices.

This misrepresentation of Islam, coupled with mainstream racism, certainly goes far beyond French borders. As Wolfreys observes, a few months after US President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban and the Austrian far-right’s electoral triumph, we can unfortunately consider Islamophobia to be a global phenomenon. Nowhere, however, have efforts to unite Islamophobes behind the state’s authority been as successful as in France. Wolfreys brilliantly unpacks the political, cultural and economic mechanisms that have rendered French Muslims the ideal scapegoats of an entire nation.

Wolfreys’s position as a British political scientist perhaps gives him a perspective that few French scholars and journalists have been able to offer, as most French citizens are firm believers in secularism – or laïcité – as an unquestionable value: a national myth that one could ironically compare to a state religion, used to justify a state racism. Although scholars including Thomas Deltombe have studied a particular aspect of Islamophobia, such as its representation in the media, they have not provided the take on laïcité and French culture that Wolfreys presents in this book.

When the French government decided to ban the headscarf from public schools in 2005 and the burqa in 2010 and when a temporary ‘burkini ban’ was introduced on beaches in 2016, the authorities referred to the French tradition of laïcité. Originally, the 1905 law enforcing the separation of state and church was intended to break the hold of the Catholic Church, which had privileges, along with the aristocracy, before the French Revolution. Yet, as Wolfreys argues, secularism and feminism have since become alibis used by a large part of contemporary French society to discriminate against its Muslim population. As he points out, the so-called ‘feminist law’ of 2005 enforcing the ban on the wearing of the veil was not accompanied by any measures against female circumcision, rapes or forced marriage in a country where a woman dies of domestic violence every three days. Indeed, a report estimated that the burqa is worn in France by approximately 367 women. As a counterbalance to the ‘respectable racism’ of political and media actors and their use of the term laïcité to mask their own Islamophobia, Wolfreys’s own writing is candid and incisive:

Put bluntly, France’s problem is not laïcité but racism. Laïcité has simply become the most respectable and therefore effective means for it to be expressed today.

Wolfreys also analyses the role played by political actors, supported by ‘neo-reactionary’ intellectuals and the quasi-permanent platform they have been given by the increasingly sensationalist media. Despite the serious analysis Wolfreys makes of an alarming global wave of racism, his humour and derision when describing the actors who have contributed to its rise in France renders his essay viciously delightful at times. By making a mockery of Sarkozy’s ‘vulgar chauvinism’, ‘veteran media darling Alain Finkielkraut’ and ‘well-to-do billionaire feminist Elisabeth Badinter’, Wolfreys denounces all the protagonists responsible for recasting racist attitudes into a republican framework, from public intellectuals to journalists and politicians of all parties, while only devoting a few pages to Marine Le Pen, too often considered as the sole incarnation of French racism.

Indeed, for Wolfreys, the rise of racism in contemporary France has little to do with her party, the Front National. Instead, he argues that one of the reasons France has been particularly affected by Islamophobia is due to its economic situation and growing inequalities. In Chapter Four, Wolfreys refers to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (2013) to compare inequalities in contemporary France to novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac’s vision of nineteenth-century France. Inequalities are indeed greater now than they were in this era. Not only is unemployment high, but jobless individuals in France go through one of the longest periods of unemployment in any developed nation. In 2006, 48 per cent of the population thought that they could one day become homeless. In 2008, that percentage had reached 60 per cent. To Wolfreys, Islamophobia and the popularity of the Front National is furthermore fuelled by a deep crisis of political representation, as centre-right and centre-left parties try to support a faltering neoliberal project, while blaming Muslims for the lack of jobs resulting, in part, from their own political decisions.

Wolfreys’s book has the merit of providing not only a retrospective and external perspective on a particular situation in France today, but it also forces us to look at a range of global phenomena: the consequences of neoliberalism, the role of growing inequalities since the financial crash of 2008, the crisis of political representation in mainstream parties and the rise of Islamophobia. These are worldwide threats that need to be not only analysed but also linked in order to face the crisis encountered by many Western democracies. While other books have tackled these issues, the present book is by far the most comprehensive work on Islamophobia in contemporary France. Wolfreys’s direct style and caustic humour make his work accessible to a wide variety of audiences, including students and scholars in French studies, political science and religion.

This review gives the views of the author, and not that of Democratic Audit. It first appeared on the LSE Review of Books blog.

Elsa Stéphan is a lecturer in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University, New York. She studied journalism at the Sorbonne before completing a dissertation in the United States on technological utopias in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature. Her current research focuses on media studies.

Mike Pence Is Having Faith In Faith

Lena M contends that US Vice President Mike Pence is spoofing when he says religion is on the rise in the US. 
Photo Credits: Images Express
Despite the fact that numerous researchers and studies show that the share of believers in the total population is steadily declining in America, Vice President Mike Pence is very optimistic about the faith in the United States. Actually, he shared his words of encouragement about the state of faith to a group of graduates and their families at a conservative Christian college.

The percentage of Americans who live out their religion on a weekly basis — praying, going to church, reading and believing in the Bible — has remained remarkably consistent over the decades, even as the population of the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. I mean, think about it, today, relative to the population, four times as many Americans go to church on a regular basis than at the time of our nation’s founding. Religion in America isn’t receding. It’s just the opposite. Faith is gaining new life across America every day. -  Vice President Mike Pence said at Hillsdale College commencement ceremony on May 12, 2018.

Josh Grubbs, college professor and researcher, reacted sharply to these claims by Vice President on Twitter: “This is demonstrably false. Like, I’ve coauthored two of the dozens and dozens of papers demonstrating this to be false.”

"Faith in America is rising again because President Trump and our entire administration is advancing the very principles that you learned here in the halls of Hillsdale College," Pence said, referring to the Trump administration's defense of religious freedom.

He also pointed to the country's growing economy, unemployment reaching a 17-year low, the U.S. withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, moving a U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and ongoing discussions with North Korea as positive steps renewing faith in America under Donald Trump's presidency.

An article from the April edition of the journal ”Social Psychological and Personality Science” entitled “How Many Atheists Are There?” and another article, “The Number of Americans with No Religious Affiliation Is Rising” by Will M. Gervais and Maxine B. Najle, both psychologists at the University of Kentucky, contend that there may be far more atheists than pollsters report because “social pressures favoring religiosity, coupled with stigma against religious disbelief ... might cause people who privately disbelieve in God to nonetheless self-present as believers, even in anonymous questionnaires.”

Maybe Mike Pence is reading other kind of studies, but data shows that the number of Americans with no mainstream religious affiliation has been rising. Pence is certainly not telling only lies, but he is telling only one side of the story because the percentage of the population who believes in a literal Bible and attends church weekly has stayed relatively steady for the last 25 years, while the number of people with no faith is going up.


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A Morning Thought (36)

Eire Nua

Anthony McIntyre reflects on the outcome of yesterday's referendum.
Sleeveless, the ink on our arms projecting a range of messages, political and personal we sauntered  toward the polling station. There was an evening sun which on our return seemed to be symbolically setting on Catholic Ireland. Eire Nua was rising at the intersection where the sun was going down, an Ireland no longer willing to impose the essentially religious diktat that the foetus from the moment of conception, in terms of rights, was on a par with the mother.

For my wife and myself, casting a vote in this referendum was important. Like the images on our arms, it is not just a political act but a personal one. Our daughter is 17 and dating. The notion that, were the situation ever to arise, she should have to take the Liverpool boat is anathema to us: for no reason apart from others like the Iona Institute choosing for themselves that she would have no choice - that she should be the victim of their coercion, persuasion having no role to play. While we were not to know it with certainty at the time of placing our Yes vote in the ballot box,  from those very same boxes, a deluge would erupt to sweep away the haughtiness of No.

If we had any lingering doubts the exit polls soon caused them to dissipate. The opinion polls were confounded but this time not as a result of the largely racist and reactionary tidal wave that brought Trump and Brexit over the line. As Miriam Lord put it:

Yes, Yes, Yes. A resounding, emphatic Yes. And what a way to say it – the only way to say it: with conviction and clarity. This massive vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution leaves no doubt. The Irish people have taken ownership of their abortion issue. They have taken it out of the hands of unrepresentative lobby groups and celibate clerics and decided how they want to approach it.

The Yes camp has won and won decisively. Young Ireland had sent old Ireland on a boat, not to Liverpool but to Port Irrelevant. The practitioners of Priestcraft, who once upon a time inflicted with arrogant impunity their superstitions on everybody, regardless of creed, were told they could continue to practice but only on themselves.

In recent days while not over confident, I was hard pressed to find from where a serious challenge to Repeal could emerge. Sporting my Yes badge in work and having brought a Ziplock bag of them in for anybody who wanted them, I soon had no bag and plenty of endorsements. I remained faithful to   my own rule of thumb: when in doubt, look at where the bishops are lined up. They are always on the wrong side of the line, the wrong side of history. Behind all socially conservative initiatives for aeons, they have, since 1986 been knocked out in every gladiatorial contest by the very society they sought to lord it over. Neither threats of hell nor excommunication could carry the day.

As a young republican I grew familiar with the five isms of republicanism: nationalism, socialism, separatism, non-sectarianism and secularism.  These days as an old republican, there is much solace to be drawn from the unmitigated success of one of them - secularism.



Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
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A Morning Thought (35)

Yes

Anthony McIntyre is voting Yes in today's referendum.

In just over an hour's time this society will begin the process of casting their votes in the referendum on the 8th Amendment. Before the weekend is over we should know if the emancipatory campaign to Repeal the 8th has been successful or if conservative Catholicism is to have a stay of execution. I remain confident that like all previous secular driven campaigns, Repeal shall prevail.




While conservative religious opinion appears to be the engine driving the No Campaign, it would be a mistake to reduce the lobby to that. There are many people from all walks of life, including avowed atheists and secularists, who are opposed to Repeal. Many of them voted in favour of same sex marriage. That they cannot in all conscience vote for Repeal is arguably due to a feeling that same sex marriage caused no harm whereas abortion does. A day or two ago one of them told me that they voted for same sex marriage because they believe in equality and that this belief is what drives them to vote no today. Repeal, in their view runs counter to an equality ethos, stripping life in the womb of equal rights.

Unlike many motivated by religious opinion, this is not a perspective that subscribes to the theology of domination whereby others must be compelled to conduct live their lives in accordance with a religious opinion not their own. They are not some sort of fertility police eager to have customs officials intervene to prevent abortion pills making their way into Ireland.

Being open to all manner of opinion on the abortion question other than a religious one (Unicornology is of no concern to me) I find it easy to live with that alternative view. Nevertheless, because the issue is so polarising, opinion so divided, allowing the individual to behave in accordance with their own conscience rather than somebody else's, is the best way to proceed: optimum not perfect.

When I go to the polling station this evening after work, I will not be doing so out of any belief that it empowers child killers to inflict some form of biblical infanticide. I will cast my vote to help those faced with a difficult decision, the power to make the decision.

As for the luminaries of the No campaign, as Ruth Coppinger observed of them:

As well as saying ‘no’ to the right of a woman to have a choice, the leaders of the No campaign have said no to contraception. They said no to sex education. They said no to same-sex marriage three years ago. They have said no to divorce, to equal employment, to married women being in the public service, to working mothers, to LGBT+ rights and to gender recognition . . .

My Yes vote is a No to all of that.


Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
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A Morning Thought (34)

Who Is The Vassal?

The Uri Avnery Column looks at Israel's obsession with Iran.

It is good advice.

If you are living in Israel, these days, you get the impression that the huge State of Israel is dictating to its American vassal what to do about Iran.

President Donald Trump listens and complies. Bibi the Great tells him to tear up the Iranian deal for no obvious reason, and he obeys. He has no choice, poor man.

But then you look at the map, and to your great surprise you discover that the USA is a huge country, while Israel is a mere speck, so small that its name has to be written outside its borders, in the sea.

So what is wrong? Geography, of course, is not the only factor. Israel has some millions of faithful adherents, who are American citizens and have a lot of money. But still.

Can it be that we got the picture wrong? That Trump is not the vassal of Netanyahu, that it's the other way round? That Trump dictates, and Bibi, for all his bluster, just obeys?

IT WOULD not be the first time. In ancient times, the leaders of the Jewish commonwealth in Palestine tried very hard to please the imperator in Rome. Nero, for example, the man who enjoyed setting fire to his own city, and to the world, while playing the flute, or whatever.

Donald Trump is the present-day Nero, the imperator of the New Rome.

Trump's main object in life is to get out of the Iran deal, "the worst deal ever". Why? I have listened intently and have discerned no other reason than that the deal was forged by his hated predecessor, Barack Obama.

What other reason was there for annulling the deal? I have heard none. The deal stopped Iran from proceeding with the building of a nuclear weapon. All experts, without exception (even in Israel) confirm that Iran has scrupulously adhered to its commitment.

Indeed, the entire world outside the US (and Israel, of course) has now decided to go on with the deal. Germany, France and Britain, three not quite insignificant powers, believe that the deal has to be maintained. So do Russia and China, no tiny countries, either.

Except Israel. Ah, Israel.

Most People in Israel now believe that Binyamin Netanyahu, Bibi the Great, is really leading Trump on a leash. Bibi has such a magical hold over Trump, that the American president has to follow Israel's lead.

Bibi is obsessed with Iran. He wakes up in the morning with Iran and goes to sleep with Iran.

Nobody seems to ask: Why, for God's sake?

Going back to Napoleon's map: there seems to be no clash of interests between the countries of Iran and Israel. No common border. No territories of one that the other desires. Also, no natural resources of one that the other would like to get its hands on.

Proof: not so long ago, well within my lifetime, Iran was Israel's closest ally (except our American vassal, of course). Iran was governed by the Shah, with his beautiful uniform and his beautiful wife (please indulge me for once, dear feminists).

Israel and Iran went to steal chickens together, as we say. The Iranians helped us to infiltrate agents into the Kurdish region of Iraq, in order to make trouble for the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Later, we supported Iran in its war against Iraq, started by the same Hussein.

In one of the greatest scandals of its time, the so-called Iran-Contra affair, Israel transferred American arms to Iran. (Iran paid for them, and the Americans used the money to illegally finance the "Contra'" war against the leftist government in Nicaragua. My friend Amiram Nir, a journalist turned government security advisor, personally delivered the arms to Tehran. (His US counterpart, Oliver North, has just been appointed to head the powerful American Rifle Association.)

Enough amusing anecdotes. There is no basic antagonism, dictated by geography, between our two nations. So what is it?

Well, there is ideology. The present rulers of Iran are extreme Shia Islamists. They want to become the overlords of the Arab Muslim world. The Arabs hate Israel, mainly because of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. So the Iranians pretend to be the great enemy of the "Little Satan" (their rather insulting appellation of Israel, to distinguish it from the Great Satan, the USA).

Frankly, I think that the rulers of Iran don't give a damn about Israel, except as an useful instrument. The hatred of Israel is a weapon in the battle with the Sunni Arab world, led by the hyper-active Saudi Crown Prince.

(The conflict between Sunni and Shia goes back almost to the times of the Prophet, more than 15 centuries ago.)

So Why is Bibi obsessed with Iran, to such an extent that he commands his American vassal to drive towards World War III?

Depends how cynical you are.

If you are very cynical, you might well say that both Trump and Bibi are up to their respective necks in criminal investigations. With a bit of luck, both might end up in prison.

What better way to divert the attention of their subjects than a little war? It is a precept that has been tried out since the beginning of the world, and it almost never fails. Who will worry about trifles like Trump's porno stars or Bibi's gifts from (American) billionaires, when the lives of our boys are at stake?

The US is still far from war with Iran but we are not. Perhaps we are already in it, without believing it.

These days – or should I say, these nights – our brave boys fly over Syria and bomb Iranian army installations there. Until this minute, the Iranians have not reacted, except for a feeble attempt that was quickly answered by a massive Israeli air strike.

Why are Iranians there in the first place? It is a part of their objective to create an Iranian sphere of influence extending from Iran proper to the Mediterranean Sea. In Iraq, which has a large Shia population, they are already dominant. With the help of Russia, they are now almost dominant in Syria. In Lebanon their close allies, the Shia Hizbollah movement, controls a large part of the country and has just won the elections.

The US does not like this at all. True, Trump has decided to withdraw from the Middle East (costs too much money), but he does not want the void to be filled by Vladimir Putin. Not at all. So he sends his boys back, and tells Israel to make the life of the Iranians in Syria hell.

It is playing with fire (for us). Until now, the Iranians have limited their reaction to our nightly bombing of their forces to the utterance of dire threats and the ineffectual response this week. But for how much longer?

Iran is a wise country. Whatever the bluster of the present regime, it does exercise a lot of restraint. It remembers that quite recently (just about 2500 years ago) it was a world power. It can wait. It does not satisfy Trump's expectations. After all, how long does the USA exist?

So we bomb. So they react with threats. So Trump is happy.

And The Israeli public?

One may wonder: is there such a thing?

Some local commentators are already asking: have Israeli citizens turned into mere subjects?

Israel is obviously on the path to war. The nightly bombing of Iranian forces is an insult to their national pride. In our region, national pride plays a large role. Our army has told the population in the north of the country to open the air-raid shelters and prepare them for use. Large anti-aircraft forces have been moved to the Syrian frontier.

And the Israelis? They shrug their shoulders. They know that Bibi is a showman of genius. Just now he has held the country and the world in thrall with a superb TV demonstration, in which he revealed a wealth of information about Iran's nuclear activities. The brave boys and girls of the Mossad stole this trove in Teheran and brought it to Israel, risking their lives.

Wonderful. Except that it turned out that this trove consists of obsolete documents from before the deal, which show what everybody already knew: that Iran wanted to emulate Israel and produce its own nuclear bomb. It was to prevent this that the nuclear deal was initiated in the first place.

But what showmanship! What a stage set! What wonderful (American) English! What perfect coordination with Trump's decision to scuttle the deal! Can it be that the entire show was ordered by Trump?

Some Israeli commentators pointed all this out. But there is no real opposition to Bibi in the Knesset, the popular press or on TV.

The vast majority of the people in Israel – and everywhere else - stand at attention when the word "security" is mentioned. OK, Bibi may be a tiny bit corrupt, he may have taken some bribes here and there, but he is our commander-in-chief! He is sending our boys into battle! So hail to the Chief!

Hail Bibi!

Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist.
He writes @ Gush Shalom