Why will Stop the War not condemn Russia?
Published by The Sun (13th October, 2016)
IT was a telling demand from veteran Labour politician Ann Clwyd. Where, she asked fellow MPs, were the protests against Russia over the sickening slaughter being inflicted on the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo?
The answer from Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was superbly undiplomatic. ‘I would certainly like to see demonstrations outside the Russian embassy. Where is the Stop The War coalition?’
Russia responded furiously. Yet for all their love of protest there is more hope of peace in the Middle East than any prospect of the loud-mouthed Leftists behind Stop The War holding one of their noisy rallies against Moscow.
Despite their name, they only seem to believe in stopping some wars — namely, those in which they can condemn the likes of Britain and the United States.
This was made clear in an astonishing response on BBC radio by the group’s deputy chairman, rejecting the idea of protests against Russia over its devastating intervention in Syria.
Chris Nineham claimed such demos would only ‘increase the hysteria and the jingoism being whipped up at the minute to go against Russia.’ Then this twerp of a Trotskyite added that anyone caring about peace should fight growing risks of conflict between Moscow and the likes of Britain and America — ‘and that means opposing the West’.
It was a car-crash interview that showed the true face of this group — a gaggle of far-Left extremists still fighting the Cold War and blind to modern geopolitics.
These hardliners see the true enemies of peace only at home. They focus their fight on Western democracies, not blood-stained dictatorships that might mow them down on the streets or jail them for such criticism.
So despite carnage in Syria, there are no marches against a callous tyrant killing his citizens with cruel intensity. Nor are there protests against Russian president Vladimir Putin, widely condemned for carrying out barbaric war crimes there.
Yet what makes their one-eyed view of the world so frightening is these are the anti-American fanatics that have seized the Labour Party.
Jeremy Corbyn helped found the group after the 9/11 attacks to oppose a Western military response. He was chairman until winning the Labour leadership last year.
His spokesman Seumas Milne is close to Andrew Murray, the communist who succeeded Corbyn as chairman, and even hosted an event with Putin after the invasion of Ukraine (which he claimed, of course, was provoked by the West).
These are the kind of people who want voters to let them take over Britain. And this at a time of rising tension, much of it stirred by the ultra- nationalist Putin.
His regime is ramping up military spending, flexing muscles around the planet and moving missiles closer to former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe.
It may even have tried to influence the US election by hacking Democrat Party emails to help Republican Donald Trump, who questions the future of NATO.
Meanwhile IS is on the rampage in Iraq and Syria, jihadists are spreading terror around the world and Europe is at risk of unravelling amid a refugee crisis.
Yet when British soldiers were being blown up in Iraq in 2004, Stop The War backed ‘the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary’. And when 130 Parisians were massacred by terrorists last November, the group published an article saying the city ‘reaps the whirlwind of Western support for extremist violence’ in the Middle East.
Senior figures have backed Putin’s seizure of Crimea, supported Russian hostility over Georgia, defended Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and praised Syrian President Bashar Assad for ‘resisting imperialism.’ Posters supporting the dictator in Damascus have been seen at its rallies.
IS may be the world’s most infamous terror group, beheading journalists, stoning adulterers and pushing gay men off tall buildings — but Britain, America and its allies ‘are no less sociopathic’ claimed another article on its website.
Yes, the West has made catastrophic mistakes in the Middle East that fuelled the rise of jihadism and backs some appalling regimes such as Saudi Arabia.
But only a clown blinded by hatred for Western values could see moral equivalence between our democracies and blood-stained despots such as Assad and Putin — let alone bigoted savages torturing entire nations with twisted medieval ideology.
Yet these are the sort of people behind Stop The War. And these sort of people now run the Labour Party and want to run Britain after the next election.
They pose as peaceniks – but they are just a bunch of blinkered fools and boring fanatics driven by contempt for their own country.