Mere Rhetoric: BREAKING: Palestinian Arrested In British Bombings (Plus: Failed Leftist British Politician: It's Israel's Fault)

We were going to sit on this post about Israel scapegoating until this afternoon, but CNN just reported that a Palestinian has been arrested by British police. Multiple online sources are confirming:

One of the suspects arrested in Britain by police investigating three failed car bombings is a Jordanian doctor called Mohammed Jamil Abdelkader Asha... Asha, 27, is of Palestinian origin and carries a Jordanian passport, they said. He obtained his medical degree in Jordan in 2004.

This will no doubt perversely help anti-Israel lunatics in Britain - those who seek to blame any problem anywhere in the world on "Western support for Israel" (because obviously Britain has been oh-so-warm toward Israel in recent months, what with being the global center of anti-Israel boycotts and everything). So rather than concluding that Palestinian terrorists are part and parcel of global jihadism, they reduce global jihadism to the alleged "legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people". They do this no matter how many times jihadists openly declare their goals.

Example: Chris Marsden is a the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, a perennial Trotskyist also-ran in Scottish and Welsh elections. He's been pondering why radical Muslims would come to London to try to kill people. And wouldn't you know it, while there's a lot that Britain has done wrong - the coup de grace is that they're just too damn nice to Jews:

The assertion that Muslim peoples have no legitimate cause for grievance against Britain... is a grotesque lie. Historically, the role of British imperialism in subjugating vast areas of the world - in India, Africa, Asia and the Middle East - has earned it the enmity of millions. Moreover, this is no past episode for which the British ruling elite are no longer responsible. Britain is a major power, whose corporations and banks play a significant role in maintaining the impoverished economic state of vast layers of the world's population. And during Blair's decade in office, it has played second-fiddle to the Bush administration in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in backing Israel in its brutal suppression of the Palestinians and last year's offensive against Lebanon. The ability of Islamic fundamentalists to channel legitimate outrage at a nominally "Labour" government's neo-colonial foreign policy and its promotion of social divisions and anti-immigrant sentiment at home is fuelled by the role played by the trade union bureaucracy in supporting this imperialist and anti-social agenda.

Bonus conspiracy theory not-saying-just-asking-questions lunacy: "Given the nature of terrorism and the numerous examples of infiltration by the security services, it is impossible to rule out state involvement in or foreknowledge of the bomb plots." This is what's happened to an international Left - the Socialist Equality Party is a member of the Fourth International - that once boasted about being the most scientific and rational of all political movements.

But it makes sense for British socialists to take the side of Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. After all, Hamas and Hezbollah are well-known supporters of secular international socialism, while Israel doesn't have anything like a history of Labor domination or a President with a history of participation in international workers' struggles. If we were to be asked, we'd suggest that it's "impossible to rule out" that leftist opposition to Israel is steeped in an unseemly history of vicious anti-Semitism that goes back literally to Marx.

References:
* Britain's terror alert raised to critical [World Social Wesbite]

Previously:
* What Institutional European Anti-Semitism?
* Israeli Public Diplomacy Expert : British Boycott Is Vicious Anti-Semitism
* British Academics Boycotted Israel In the 70s And 80s. Guess How It Turned Out.

Cross-posted to:
* The Astute Bloggers
* Israpundit