PETER HITCHENS: Ignorance and anger drive the debate on Israel and Russia

Why is politics like football? I have no idea. But it is. If you take one political position, it is automatically assumed that you have joined a party, and therefore have chosen all the other positions that often come with it.

Either you cheer for United, or you cheer for City. What if you like some of the things United do, and some of the things City do?

Take, for example, my strong distaste for the British surrender to the IRA in 1998, which is now nearing its ultimate outcome: the takeover of the entire island of Ireland by the horrific Sinn Fein.

If I ever say this I’ll be bombarded on social media by people who think I’m supporting the horrible ‘loyalist’ gangsters. Or they think I sympathize with the discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. I really don’t.

Or there is the current bloody mess in the Middle East. You must either be a strong supporter of the Arab cause in Israel, which I am not. Or you should support the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which I will not do.

This egregious attack is not only indefensibly cruel to the innocent. It is also a gigantic political mistake, destroying what remains of public support for Israel in much of the West. In this case there is a third view, which is, if possible, even worse than the other two.

The official “moderate” position is to support something called “the two-state solution,” perhaps the stupidest and most patently disastrous plan for deadly chaos ever devised by the human mind.

This plan would create a sovereign Arab state, right next to Israel, its capital, its most populous regions and its only international airport.

Nothing would separate the two except a fence and a plowed strip a few meters wide, impossible to patrol effectively and of course no barrier to missiles. What if such a state were to be taken over (which could very easily be) by Hamas or a similar group?

The horrific pogrom near Gaza last October is now sadly largely forgotten, thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to paralyze Gaza. But I remember. And I wouldn’t advocate a “solution” that makes it not only possible but easy to repeat these dozens of times a year.

And then of course there is the war in Ukraine. When I suggest that U.S. policy toward Russia over the past thirty years has been misguided and dangerous, I am immediately met with accusations that I am an agent of Moscow.

Well, listen a minute. I have spent much of my life traveling in the areas now disputed, from Jerusalem to Moscow and from Ukraine to Iraq. Yes, I even visited Hamas-controlled Gaza.

I followed my travels with a lot of reading, to answer the questions that my travels raised for me.

And I can tell you that the foreign policy debates in this country now, especially when David Cameron is involved, are at a level that gives Toytown a sophisticated look.

It is a positive disadvantage in these matters to know something about the problems involved or the places involved.

If you like football, it’s your misfortune and you have my sympathy. But please don’t apply your crude ideas of “one side good, the other side bad” to foreign policy.

Branson is wrong about drugs

Sir Richard Branson has challenged me on the letters page of our sister paper, the Daily Mail.

Sir Richard is annoyed that I have made public the increasingly undeniable link between marijuana and mental illness. I have also pointed out the clear link between such a disease and horrific, insane violence.

Examples of these crazy, senseless and cruel attacks appear in the media every week or two. Teenage killer Scarlett Jenkinson, who smoked dope at school at the age of 13, is another example.

For some reason Sir Richard has not indicated any personal interest in the decriminalization of marijuana, which he advocates, although he once told Piers Morgan that he had smoked it with his son, saying: ‘I don’t think smoking of an occasional joint is like that. that’s all wrong.’

But even Sir Richard now admits there may be a problem with it. He says that “no serious advocate” of weakening drug laws “will downplay the risk of high-potency cannabis strains to mental health.”

I’m glad to hear it, although I wonder where and when he himself actively used his vast media power to draw attention to this threat, and I would be grateful if he would let me know.

But his main claim is that dismantling our defenses against this horrible substance will somehow reduce the danger, leading to ‘regulation’ and less intense tensions.

This claim has been shown to be false, and he has no excuse for not knowing this.

In Canada and in the US states where legalization and ‘regulation’ have been attempted, the ‘unregulated’ illegal market continues to flourish alongside legal stores.

And I wonder how Sir Richard’s claims that legalization has not been followed by a ‘notable increase in mental health problems or violent crime’ will hold up to serious scrutiny in a few years’ time.

What he calls “prohibition,” the actual enforcement of laws against marijuana possession, works well in Japan and South Korea, as it once did here.

It is perfectly workable. Sir Richard is wrong. Protect your children from this insidious danger and ignore it

Duty died… and Mary floated in

For sixty years I refused to watch the movie Mary Poppins. When it came out in 1964, at the age of 13 I felt like I was far too grown up for such nursery stuff.

In my teens, the painful sweetness repelled me. I thought seeing it might cause tooth decay. You couldn’t escape those songs. A Spoonful Of Sugar pretty much summed it up.

Yet over many decades I must have had hundreds of conversations and read thousands of newspaper articles in which everyone assumed I had seen it.

Now I have. Oh dear. How strange it is. I hadn’t realized until now that Mary Poppins wasn’t filmed in real London, but on a painted stage set. No wonder so many Americans have a peculiar idea of ​​what this country and its people are like.

It dates from the same era as the equally embarrassing Roger Miller song England Swings with its ‘bobbies on bicycles’, which were already abolished, and men in bowler hats – now completely extinct.

Why is the fox Irish? And is the old woman feeding the pigeons on the steps of a painted St. Paul’s Cathedral the cause of what has become a major social problem?

Overall, the whole thing seems like a paean to lame parenting.

Messy rooms don’t tidy themselves up, never have and never will, just as two and two will always add up to four, no matter how much we often want them to add up to five or three.

Maybe that’s why it was so popular, because it came right at the end of the service era.