Boris Johnson got a lot wrong but he's right about Hamas and Israel
Some Scottish politicians appear all too willing to downplay the horrors of the genocidal Hamas movement’s October 7 attack
It was quiet outside the Usher Hall on Tuesday evening, with a trickle of respectable-looking people like for a Sunday afternoon classical recital, and as the performance started, the audience was not much bigger.
But this was no Romanian or Slovakian orchestra playing Khachaturian or Rimsky-Korsakov – they would have started on time – but the man for whom Conservative party members once queued for hours to hear. Well, in England anyway. Boris Johnson was back in town.
In the wider public, it’s undeniable he didn’t have anything like the same level of popularity in Scotland that he enjoyed elsewhere, and views within the Scottish party were more divided earlier than they eventually became in the south. But if such a large Edinburgh venue might not have been packed even in his heyday, there would certainly have been a noisy gathering of those with a different outlook outside. On Tuesday I’m told there were two, but I didn’t spot them.
The sadness in Johnson’s voice
Interviewed by The Scotsman’s Catriona Stewart, he seemed his normal ramshackle, ebullient self, fizzing off on all sorts of tangents from his views about Keir Starmer, Reform and independence, but something was missing. In the past he had the unique ability to make an utter shambles of a speech seem brilliant and strangely inspiring, and his leadership campaign against Jeremy Hunt in the 2019 was more Jokers Wild than a serious political joust. And it clearly worked, for a time anyway.
But on Tuesday not only was the sense of ambition and momentum gone, but there was a sadness in his voice when admitting to mismanagement of his parliamentary party and confessing he did not see a way back into politics any time soon, if at all.
As some stood to applaud at the end of the show, he didn’t hang around to milk such adulation as he might have detected, instead quickly shuffling off stage; for now, anyway, a man whose time even he thinks has passed. Most of the rest of the country, in Scotland certainly, would say good riddance, but a good proportion of the audience, admittedly made up mostly of those of a right-of-centre disposition, would like nothing better than a triumphant return.
READ MORE: Cancellation of Jewish comedians leaves an indelible stain on this year’s Edinburgh Fringe
Necessary secrecy
A very different event took place on Monday night, another which ordinarily might have been accompanied by a bigger crowd outside than in, were it not for the obvious risk of serious disruption. It seems that a new ‘right’ to prevent people hearing or discussing views others don’t want them to share is not a theoretical danger.
Angry student demonstrators prevented the screening of the gender-critical documentary Adult Human Female in 2023, and there is little doubt there would have been attempts to do the same had it been known that a documentary, October 8, about the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7 2023, and the subsequent rise of antisemitism in America, was due to be presented by its director and producer Wendy Sachs to an invited audience at the Everyman cinema complex in the St James Quarter.
Such was the sadly necessary secrecy that details of the location were only circulated 24 hours ahead, extraordinary for a place like Edinburgh with a very small Jewish community. But with furious anti-Israel demonstrations all too frequent, an explanation is hardly needed. As it turned out, no more than 40 people were there, compared to the 300 who attended a screening in Glasgow the night before.
The event went off without a hitch and the few customers wandering round the complex on a quiet Monday night would never have known what would be considered by pro-Hamas activists as a hugely provocative film was being shown in a small cinema on the top floor. Maybe now the St James Quarter and the Everyman will join Leonardo and Raytheon ─ how will their Edinburgh employees like being called “Merchants of Death” by Green MSP Maggie Chapman ─ on the list of organisations proscribed by the righteous.
Point-blank murder of children
Shot well over a year ago, the film cannot take the past year’s escalation of the military campaign into account but features powerful testimonies from witnesses of the massacre and from Jewish Americans about the hatred they have faced, right from October 8. It echoes what happened here too, the willingness of a significant section of the community, particularly in universities, to excuse what happened on October 7 as somehow Israel’s actions over the years justified the pre-meditated rape and the point-blank murder of children by an organisation sworn to exterminate the Jewish state.
If allegations of genocidal intent are to be bandied about, as they were repeatedly during a three-hour debate in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday, then they must start with Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, elected Scottish politicians sought not just to draw equivalence between the viciously intolerant death cult of Hamas and the Middle East’s only democracy, where the right to protest is unquestioned, but by ignoring Hamas’s genocidal orthodoxy to place Israel below it.
While First Minster John Swinney was careful to repeat his condemnation of the October 7 pogrom in Wednesday’s ministerial statement, nowhere was Hamas’s goal of Israel’s eradication recognised, and neither was there any mention of their total appropriation of the territory to turn it into a massive subterranean launchpad for repeated attacks on Israel under the shield of the civilian population.
Returning the hostages is not the half of it, and, despite all the talk of two-state solutions, that will never be possible until Iran’s murderous proxies are not in control of one of them. And on that, Boris was absolutely correct.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.