After reflecting further on Piers Akerman’s recent assertion that my analysis of the situation in the Middle East was “utter bullshit” and not tethered to reality, I realised how angry that made me feel. As a white, elderly, Anglo-Saxon male, I believe I have earned the right to be most distressed by Western privilege and the arrogance which so often distorts reality, much like a fairground mirror. It paints Palestinians as irrational terrorists and Iranians as fanatical mobs, erasing the colonial fingerprints smeared across their histories. That is the real bullshit.
Take Iran: a democracy overthrown in 1953 by Anglo-American operatives for the crime of nationalizing its oil. The CIA’s coup reinstated the Shah—a tyrant whose torture squads (trained by SAVAK and Mossad) disappeared thousands. When Iranians finally revolted in 1979, the West recoiled not at the Shah’s brutality but at the loss of a pliant client. Now, the same powers that strangled Iranian democracy lecture its theocrats on human rights—a grotesque pantomime.
I am sorry to say that Netanyahu embodies this hypocrisy. He rails against Iran’s “aggression” while annexing Palestinian land, arms settlers who burn olive groves, and starves Gaza into submission. His hysteria over Iran’s nuclear program (still unproven after decades of sanctions) mirrors the WMD lies he helped sell in 2003. Remember his cartoon bomb stunt at the UN? Pure theatre. What truly terrifies him isn’t ayatollahs with centrifuges but a regional order where Israel isn’t the unchecked hegemon.
The West has perfected a sinister alchemy of psychological inversion—an Orwellian recalibration of language that transforms resistance into terrorism, domination into peace, and sovereignty into existential threat. When Hamas fires rockets, it’s decried as barbarism, while Israel’s 56-year occupation of Palestinian land vanishes from view like morning mist. Apartheid walls that carve up stolen territory are rebranded as “security measures”, their concrete brutality softened by bureaucratic euphemisms. Iran’s civilian nuclear program sparks apocalyptic warnings, while Israel’s arsenal of 90 thermonuclear warheads—never inspected, never acknowledged—sits quietly in the Negev desert. This linguistic jujitsu doesn’t merely describe reality; it manufactures it, ensuring Western audiences see only mirrors and shadows where power and oppression stand plain as day.
I urge you to consider that none of this emerged in a vacuum. The US and UK engineered the Middle East’s instability—from Sykes-Picot’s arbitrary borders to arming Saddam against Iran, then crying havoc when blowback came. October 7th didn’t erupt from ancient hatreds; it was the predictable eruption of a people caged, humiliated, and drone-struck for generations. To focus solely on Hamas’ atrocities while ignoring Israel’s 56-year occupation is like condemning a burning man for screaming.
There can be no meaningful progress without first confronting uncomfortable truths. The West must reckon with its destructive legacy—the CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran that strangled democracy, the 1967 war that birthed an occupation now in its sixth decade, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on fabricated WMD claims. These aren’t ancient histories but open wounds that continue to shape regional dynamics. Pretending otherwise isn’t diplomacy; it’s willful blindness.
Netanyahu’s hysterical warnings about “existential threats” must be exposed for what they are—not genuine security concerns but a naked fear of justice. His real nightmare isn’t Iranian centrifuges but the collapse of the apartheid system that preserves Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Every settlement expansion, every Gaza blockade, and every racist nation-state law reveals the true project: not coexistence but permanent domination.
We must fearlessly reject the false symmetry of “both sides” narratives. While Israelis live with the psychological trauma of potential violence, Palestinians endure the daily reality of military checkpoints, land theft, and indiscriminate bombardment. Comparing Hamas rockets to Israel’s occupation is like comparing a slingshot to a tank battalion—technically both weapons, but existing in fundamentally different universes of destructive power. True peace begins when we stop equating the oppressed with their oppressors.
The future demands more than temporary ceasefires. It requires dismantling the myths that let the West play both arsonist and firefighter. Otherwise, we’re just counting the days until the next explosion.

It’s a good and worthy argument against the West whose history in this region goes way, way back to Rome and then later The Crusades and then the power grabs during the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
I would raise a few words of perspective though.
If every Israeli said ‘enough already’ and quit the land. If the West pulled out completely and said ‘OK yours to deal with, we’ll just buy oil from anyone’
IF.
Wars would go on, between nations, between regions, between ethnic groups, between religions and differences in religions. Every divide that exists within that turbulent area would just pick up the guns and carry on.
Historically it’s not been all that long ago since the Ottoman Empire started to fall apart (150 years is not a lot of time really), and when an empire falls this is what happens, fighting over scraps of hand, persecution of minorities, small time megalomaniacs and fanatics holding centre stage.
There is never a happy ending. No cue end music and roll credits.
Humanity is seriously flawed.
Only the Peacemakers have any merit and no one is listening much to them these days (unless its to shoot at them)
LikeLiked by 1 person
There’s a straight line from the Cavaliers’ failure to bring enough peasantry to support the English Baronial lifestyle they were accustomed to 400+ years ago and their subsequent solution to the labor shortage through the foundings of a Union of Free (slave) States and the War in Defense of Owning Slaves, reconstruction, the Klu Klux Klan and the solution to ‘The Indian Problem’ and Hitler’s expressed admiration for all of the above to what we and Israel are doing today … all of which done/doing in the name of God
Sometime about five (5) maybe ten (10) thousand (5,000 – 10,000) years ago the Cults of Male Domination usurped the place in the rightful order of the world and here we are. LOL
LikeLike