I’m back after a spell of illness that put me briefly in the hospital, but feeling better now. The Great Baboon has been especially busy while I’ve been away. The extent of his hubris and stupidity, and frankly, evil, has now reached biblical proportions, of which more below.
When I was a kid in Johannesburg in the sixties, I went to a high school where probably sixty or seventy percent of my schoolmates were Jewish. The ratio of Jews to gentiles was so high that on the Jewish holidays, the school effectively closed down. We goyim still went to classes, but all periods were free. We spent the day reading or having relaxed conversations with our teachers. It was great.
In 1967 came the Six Day War. In some classes where the teachers were more liberal, we gathered round transistor radios during lunchtime news bulletins. When the Arab states cried pax and the Israelis declared victory, it was like being in Liverpool when The Reds won league and FA Cup. When it was over, Israel had occupied the Sinai and the Golan.
In 1973 the Israelis were caught napping during Yom Kippur. By this time I was living in the UK. I was still a fully committed Israel supporter. The militarily brazen and brilliant Ari Sharon disobeyed orders, crossed the Suez and trapped a large Egyptian army on the other side of it. Israeli armour did prodigious feats on the Golan Heights.
I was still in South Africa during the Entebbe raid on 3rd July 1976. An Air France Airbus was hijacked on 27 June by operatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and German revolutionaries. It was flown to Benghazi and thence to Entebbe in Uganda, then run by Idi Amin. Some hostages were released but 106 Israelis were kept captive by the hijackers.
The Israeli response was swift and brutally clinical. An Israeli force landed at Entebbe and after a brief gun battle in which all seven hi-jackers were killed, with 45 Ugandan soldiers, the Israeli team left with 102 of their hostages. They destroyed eleven Mig aircraft of the Ugandan Airforce on the Entebbe tarmac before they departed. The Israeli operation was led by Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of the current Israeli Prime Minister, who was killed. There were delirious parties in South Africa at the success of the operation.
At around this time, Israel had got into bed with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Mainly, the co-operation centred on the arms industries of both countries, culminating in a test of an Israeli nuclear weapon in the southern Indian ocean in 1979 in which the South Africans were believed to have assisted – the so called Vela incident.
Now, I’m no longer on team Israeli. Notwithstanding the dreadful Hamas attack in October 2024, the Israeli response has been disproportionate in Gaza. The Israelis, in a kind of grim hysteria brilliantly orchestrated by Netanyahu and the always effective Mossad have dog-walked the Great Baboon into making war on Iran on their behalf, without any kind of plan about how to conduct it, let alone end it.
The current Israeli state, in its treatment of Palestinians and the cruel activities of extreme religious groups in occupying territory on the west bank, now looks just like the South Africa I grew up in. Now, it is getting difficult to counter the view that the Israeli state is carrying out a Zionist plan for a Greater Israel, first as a regional superpower and then, who knows, as a world one.
But back to the Bible. There is a lot of religion in what is currently going on, and not only in Teheran. Just before it all kicked off, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, proclaimed Israel’s possession of all of Israel and much more territory besides was justified in the Bible. On the American side, the grotesque, posturing US “Secretary for War” Hegseth is a noted Christian zealot, his body covered with tattoos of Crusader-era imprecations including “Deus Vult” – “God wills it”.
It is reported that American troops in theatre in the middle east have been harangued by commanders who have told them that Donald Trump was sent by God to sort out the middle east and reclaim it for Christianity, and that the war on Iran is all part of God’s great plan. Not long ago a group of evangelical preachers and pastors descended on the gilded Oval Office and laid hands on the Great Baboon while they prayed. American justification for the current situation in terms of Realpolitik is dubious enough, but reaching for the scriptures to do it is a step too far.
Christian fundamentalists long for the return of the Messiah to earth at The End of Days. It’s all set out in The Book of Revelation, and for it all to come true it must be preceded by the appearance of The Antichrist or Beast who will set himself up in opposition to the returned Christ. Famously, the Beast will carry his mark, which is 666, on his head.
If the Christian extremists are looking for this creature they might want to look under the preposterous coif of their boy in The Oval Office, who slouched towards Queens in 1946 to be born into the rough beast that now threatens the wellbeing of every human on the planet. I mean, if you really believe in a narrative for which there is no empirical evidence, your Beast is there, right in front of you and he’s running amok exactly as predicted in your texts. He’s the one with the fat ankles.
Leave a Reply