The Utterly Nauseating Hypocrisy of British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond
Of all the putrid comments that vomited from the mouths of foreign governments and diplomats yesterday concerning the 988 acres of land in Gush Etzion near Alon Shvuot, none was more stinkingly hypocritical than that of British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond:
“The UK deplores the Israeli government’s expropriation of 988 acres of land around the settlement of Etzion. Our position on settlements is clear. They are illegal under international law . . .”
“Expropriation”? One would have thought that the British Foreign Secretary would know all too well from the sordid history of the United Kingdom that expropriation, by definition, refers to “the act of a government taking private property.”
No private property is included in the 988 acres.
In choosing to use the word “expropriation”, Hammond is merely parroting the PLO/Palestinian Authority propaganda line, a propaganda line that has been reduced this morning to claiming that the 988 acres somehow belong amorphously four or five Palestinian settlements in the area.
But more than this, has there ever been a greater expropriator of land than England/Britain/the United Kingdom?
What the infamous phrase “The sun never sets on the British Empire” actually meant was that the colonialist and exploitative British Empire had set up a global network of expropriated territories in which it attempted to eradicate native cultures and languages and to denude the indigenous people of all of their natural resources.
The vast, snakelike tentacles of the British Empire evilly stretched from North American colonies in what is now the United States and Canada to Australia and New Zealand to Hong Kong and India to Rhodesia and Kenya–and more than 45 other places in between. And all of these were colonies in which the British moved British citizens in to supplant and rule over native peoples. Often these British citizens were criminals–such as those who “settled” your humble servant’s home state of Georgia in the United States.
And none of these colonies were places where the British had any historical connection to the land.
Nowhere have the British been more egregiously colonialist and exploitative than in their own backyard. Do we really have to recount the incredibly tortured history of Ireland to Foreign Secretary Hammond? The Irish were brutally raped of their land and culture by the British.
Is it any wonder that Scotland is voting on independence on September 18?
And the U.K. Foreign Secretary Hammond dares to accuse Israel of “land expropriation”?
This is nothing but utterly nauseating hypocrisy.