David Cameron, Flogging His Wares

by Hugh Fitzgerald (August 2010)

David Cameron went recently to Turkey, to deliver a speech in Ankara, one that would “establish a new partnership” between Great Britain and Turkey that he characterized as “ a vital strategic relationship for our country.” The speech tells us many things about Cameron, about, his knowledge of the changes in Turkey over the past century, changes in one direction, and then in another, his grasp of the nature of Islam and his understanding of what Islam inculcates and, above all, his own knowledge and appreciation of the country of which he is now, very much faute-de-mieux, the Prime Minister.

These Turks he met, the ones now running Turkey, were, David Cameron appeared to assume, trusted and true friends of the West – else why would Turkey be a member of NATO? And surely, since basically, David Cameron appears to think, Turks were just like the people in his own country of Great Britain, differing only in that 99% of them were Muslims, with some good, and a few bad apples, the usual mix, why be especially concerned? And since Turkey was now such an economic success story – did anything else matter? –. modern, thrusting, dynamic, expanding, to be admired and emulated in every respect – no further questions needed be asked of or about Turkey, and if this dynamic and modern and thrusting economy were not to be admitted to the E.U., surely that would be an offense to the E.U. itself and the great ideals for which it stood. if economic prosperity was not a sure guarantee of modernity, and “modernity” not a sure guarantee of being among the most advanced of nation-states, then what were the Financial Times and The Economist and the Wall Street Journal created for? And what sense did the world make, without that clear and comforting hierarchy of values?

Let’s start with David Cameron’s inspiring opening:

“Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for that very warm welcome. I can tell from your enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of the entrepreneurs that I met outside this incredible building that there is an enormous spirit of enterprise and entrepreneurialism and industry and business and trade here in Turkey, and that is one of the reasons that I want our two countries to build this incredibly strong relationship that I will be speaking about this morning.

“I have come to Ankara to establish a new partnership between Britain and Turkey. I think this is a vital strategic relationship for our country. As Prime Minister, I first visited our two largest European Union partners, then Afghanistan, then North America and now, I come to Turkey. People ask me, ‘Why Turkey?’ and, ‘Why so soon?’ Well, I can tell you why: because Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy.

“Let me explain. First, our economy.

“Over 400 years ago England’s first official diplomatic representative arrived in Istanbul. William Harborne came bearing gifts from Queen Elizabeth. As a nation, we sought the opportunity for our merchants to trade. More than 400 years on, I follow him to Turkey at least in part for the same reason.

“I ask myself this: which European country grew at 11% at the start of this year? Which European country will be the second fastest growing economy in the world by 2017? Which country in Europe has more young people than any of the 27 countries of the European Union? Which country in Europe is our number one manufacturer of televisions and second only to China in the world in construction and in contracting? Tabii ki Türkiye.

“Everyone is talking about the BRICs, the fast-growing emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey is Europe’s BRIC, and yet in Britain we export more to Ireland than we export to Brazil, Russia, India, China and Turkey all combined. With no disrespect to our partners and friends in Ireland, we have to change that. That is the first reason I am here today and it is why I have chosen to come to TOBB, right in the heart of the Turkish business community.”

So that’s it: “our economy.” Great Britain, on the ropes, needs to build a “new partnership” with prosperous Turkey and its (vibrant, dynamic, world-class – chose as many of these adjectives as you feel like) economy and (dynamic, vibrant, world-class) people. Cameron came as a supplicant, full of gushing admiration for everything, from the “incredible building” in which he spoke, to the “enormous spirit of enterprise and entrepreneurialism and industry and business and trade here in Turkey” which made him convinced, even more than ever, that it was absolutely essential for “our two countries to build this incredibly strong relationship, the very one that I will be speaking about this morning.”
 
And he had the facts to prove just how dynamic that Turkish economy was, for he had been provided by aides with bullet-riddled sheets of Talkiing Points, just so he could remind his Turksih audience of just how splendidly Turkey was doing:
“I ask myself this: which European country grew at 11% at the start of this year? Which European country will be the second fastest growing economy in the world by 2017? Which country in Europe has more young people than any of the 27 countries of the European Union? Which country in Europe is our number one manufacturer of televisions and second only to China in the world in construction and in contracting? Tabii ki Türkiye.”

A growth rate of 11% “at the start of this year.” And the “second fastest growing economy in the world by 2017” (let’s make sure to check when 2017 rolls round, since there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip). And then there are the deeply impressive demographic figures for Turkey:

“Which country in Europe has more young people than any of the 27 countries of the European Union?”

This fact appears to one that Cameron regards as admirable, as one more reason to support Turkey’s admission to the E.U., rather than as one more reason to resolutely wish to keep it out, so as to keep all of those young Turks from moving freely throughout Schengenland, settling wherever they felt like, exercising their rights as citizens of a member of the E.U.

And here’s more of this paean to the Turkish economy:

“ Which country in Europe is our number one manufacturer of televisions and second only to China in the world in construction and in contracting? Tabii ki Türkiye.”
That fulsome lapse into cheaply crowd-pleasing Turkish – “Tabii ki Türkiye” – perfectly expresses what’s wrong with this speech, and its transparent and clumsy Aim To Please.

Here’s the final paragraph on the Turkish economy.

“Everyone is talking about the BRICs, the fast-growing emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Turkey is Europe’s BRIC, and yet in Britain we export more to Ireland than we export to Brazil, Russia, India, China and Turkey all combined. With no disrespect to our partners and friends in Ireland, we have to change that. That is the first reason I am here today and it is why I have chosen to come to TOBB, right in the heart of the Turkish business community.”

There’s a telling blend here of the tone of some tittle-tattle television show – “Everyone is talking about” –about Lindsay Lohan in rehab, or about the BRICs, “the fast-growing emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, Indian and China. And since Turkey is not a constituent of the BRICs, and thus irrelevant, Cameron hastened to add that “Turkey is Europe’s BRIC.” And although British trade with Turkey is low, and “Great Britain exports more to Ireland than it does to Brazil, Russia, India, China and Turkey,” “we have to change that.” Why? Should America worry if most of its exports go to Canada, or Canada worry if most of its exports go to the United States? Perhaps ideally countries should be encouraged to trade closest to home, so that transportation costs, and the oil they use up, are minimized.

So that’s the “first reason” David Cameron was there, but it is also by far the main reason, for to David Cameron the rest hardly matters. It’s trade, it’s gold, it’s growth – these are the great themes of the thoroughly-modern politician today, the one who in brief authority is never quite a leader but is always taking – the Americans started this – a “leadership role.” He’s for all the world like some fund operator, interested in the world, but only insofar as it offers investment opportunities.

Great Britain wants economic ties, wants to make money, from the Turkish market. That’s it for David Cameron. And he comes not as the representative of a country that is equal to, much less conceivably superior to, that of the country and regime he is visiting, but as a supplicant, kowtowing rhetorically to Erdogan.

For David Cameron has very little sense of statecraft as being about something other than markets or money. He is not a leader of Great Britain, but the current C.E.O., and his disturbingly youthful face – and that of his able assistant Mr. Clegg – remind one not of farseeing Churchill scanning the London sky with binoculars, or good old Macmillan on the links, or even of pipe-puffing Harold Wilson, but of public school boys who have sown their wild oats previously, but are now having a slightly more sedate yet still excellent adventure, something like the old stories about “Tom and Jerry in London.”

He is the apotheosis of modern with-it politicians, who do not have much knowledge of their own, or other people’s histories, and who seem to have been born yesterday and proud of it. The most telling remark that David Cameron has ever made is that about 1940. That was the most important year, save possibly for 1215 or 1066, in British history. It was the year that, with the Nazis having overrun the Continent, and the United States not yet in the war, Great Britain stood alone. Some may remember the famous Low cartoon of that day: “Very well, then. Alone.” But David Cameron spoke a few weeks ago about the United States fighting fiercely in 1940 – in other words, he could not even remember that in that year the British were alone and trying to persuade the Americans to enter the war, until the bombs at Pearl Harbor made such persuasion unnecessary. Some may call it a mere slip, the oral equivalent of a typographical error. They are being too kind.

David Cameron, like his Tweedle-twin Clegg, has the soft expression that one too often sees in American highschool yearbooks, the expression of people who have not known adversity, are not schooled in the ways and wiles of other peoples who are possibly wiser and less trusting and less innocent. The impression one has is of a permanent naif.

And what does David Cameron know about what he talks about Islam, when he courts Turkey, or rather courts those who now rule Turkey, and whose good will he thinks he needs? There have been so many eviscerating articles that one hardly knows what to add. When he tells Erdogan, and tells the world, that he, David Cameron, knows what the “real Islam” is, and that the “real Islam” has nothing to do with what those whom Bush and Blair used to describe as those who “had hijacked a great religion,” he offers no evidence. He invites ridicule, and ridicule has accepted the invitation, and has moved in to 10 Downing Street, I think for quite a long stay, perhaps for as long as David Cameron the ephebe continues to discharge, as best he can, the responsibilities of rule from there.

By now many understand that those who conduct violent jihad are acting in a way of which Muhammad, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, would approve. Jihad is not– as Karen Armstrong and John Brennan, would have it — primarily an “interior struggle” to be “good Muslims.” Rather, it refers to the “struggle” that must go on, permanently, between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslims and Infidels. For a state of permanent war must exist between the two, and it is incumbent upon Muslims – that is what they are taught, not necessarily what all of them do – that they must engage in that struggle to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. Instruments of jihad may, but need not, include terrorism and qitaal. In early Islam, however, before such things as the Money Weapon and propaganda and demographic conquest became possible, terrorism (“strike terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers”) and qitaal (combat, warfare) were the only instruments available. Now there are so many other ways to conquer the enemy’s lands, and not from without, but from within.

Cameron did not appear to realize that he had damaged the cause of the secularists, the ones who exist in the same intellectual and moral universe as Western man, the people who are now subject to every form of harassment that the sinister Erdogan regime and its henchmen think they can get away with, including trumped-up charges about plots that seem to be taking a leaf from Andrey Vyshinsky and the Purge Trials in Moscow, circa 1938. Cameron appeared not to notice that Turkey has changed, and he certainly said nothing to indicate that he was appealing not to Erdogan, but to another once-and-possibly-future Turkish regime. In what he said, and what he didn’t say, he disheartened the secularists, not least because he uttered all kinds of nonsense about Islam that was intended to please Erdogan and the AKP. Should that party lose the next election, should the secular party return, its members will not forget Cameron’s craven nonsense, and will be less likely to want to engage in “trade” with a country, Great Britain, that for the sake of such trade was willing to heap praise on Erdogan’s Turkey.

David Cameron, on the basis of some bullet-riddled Executive Summary prepared for him by some Deputy Assistant Underling For Pious Nonsense, someone seconded from the Foreign Office to the Circumlocution Office and at last, to the Office of the Prime Minister, said this in Ankara:

“They [those in the West who are worried about the ideology of Islam, and therefore worried about the adherents and spreaders of that ideology] see no difference between real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists. They think the values of Islam can never be compatible with the values of other religions, societies or cultures.”

Now among those doubters, those naysayers, those “right wing” or “extreme right wing” impugners of wonderful Islam, which David Cameron has been studying for years and any minute now will produce those verses that prove that Islam is as he says, are such people as Wafa Sultan, Magdi Allam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Afshin Elian, and many others. And among those doubters and skeptics and worriers, too, one can find, among many others, Alexis De Tocqueville and John Quincy Adams. One can even find former Prime Ministers of Great Britain. There was Gladstone – he was the last Prime Minister to speak at length about the Turks, when he wrote and agitated about the Bulgarian Wars. Does Mr. Cameron know what Gladstone said about the Turks, in pre-Ataturk period of their existence? And does he care? And then there was one other Prime Minister who wrote memorably not about the Turks, but about the votaries of Islam. That was Winston Churchill, the man whose bust was removed by Obama from the White House and returned to the Embassy of Great Britain, for reasons that have yet to be explained, and whose memory, apparently, has been largely effaced from the mental hard-drive of young David Cameron.

Let’s just put that by-now well-known statement here, so that David Cameron can find it, and read it, and think about it:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

But, David Cameron may splutter, things are different now. Islam has changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born, and so on and so bloody forth. Or he might simply ignore what Churchill had to say, or tell us “what the hell did that old fuddy-duddy know about anything? He knew nothing. He didn’t have the education I did.” True. Winston Churchill did not have the “education” that David Cameron did.

Nowhere in the speech of David Cameron was there any sense of Europe, or of the West. He surely knew, but did not care, that the French and the Germans would be furious at his remarks about Turkey’s admission to the. E.U., an admission which he not only said should take place, but that he, David Cameron, would personally “fight” for. And one wonders if even now he realizes how many European governments, and how many people in Europe, horrified at the prospect of Turkey entering the E.U., have decided that they cannot count on the British government, under the two callow and philo-Islamic Tweedle twins, Cameron and Clegg, and certainly cannot count on the Obama Administration, which just like the Bush Administration apparently thinks – despite all the changes in Turkey that have rendered its political system unrecognizable from that of a decade ago — that Turkey’s admission to the E.U. would be an excellent idea. Well, it may be an excellent idea for an American administration that does not know where to put its feet and hands when it comes to Islam, and would just as soon win a point or two with Turkey, even if that might just mean changing the face of Europe forever. Americans are not much interested in Europe. Once you could count on those who ruled to know French well enough to read it unaided; you could count on Americans of that ruling class to have travelled, and spent summers in, Western Europe. You could count on some of them having studied in England, having lived in France and Italy. And there were still, in such places as Massachusetts and Virginia, members of the English-Speaking Union that now seems to have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Unless you are a professor with long vacations, and a house in Umbria or Provence, you may not even be aware of what is going on, and even some of those people seem blandly indifferent to, what a large and growing Islamic presence in Western Europe means now, and what it will mean, if not diminished, in the unappetizing future.

There was talk about “security.” Apparently David Cameron is under the impression that Turkey is a loyal and important member of NATO. It might once have been that, or might once have had its uses, but that was during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was, in Turkish eyes, merely Russia, the hereditary enemy of Turkey, and thus to be opposed. When 5,400 Turkish troops took part in the Korean conflict, and Turkey was amply rewarded, too amply, by membership in NATO, that did not mean that Turkey was now a member of the West. And what’s more, those troops were under the command of secular officers, and sent by a secular government, and the North Koreans and Chinese were not Muslims, so could be fought without any second thoughts. Successive Turkish governments, or rather the Turkish military, have cooperated with the Americans, who were allowed then the base at Incirlik. But to the great surprise of many in the Bush Administration who completely misunderstood the power and tug of Islamic solidarity, the Turks did not allow a fourth division to enter Iraq from the north, from Turkey, that might, just possibly, have made things in that north quite different early on.

Does David Cameron not know about the Turkish political figures who compared American troops in Iraq – unfavorably – to the Nazis? Does he not know of the popularity of “Valley of the Wolves,” of that Der-Stuermer-like movie, about Americanazis stormtrooping their way through Iraq, and about a Jewish doctor, a regular Mengele, who harvests the organs of murdered Iraqis for re-sale to his clients in Los Angeles, New York, and Tel Aviv? Wikipedia tells us that “the Wall Street Journal characterized it as ‘a cross between ‘American Psycho’ in uniform and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while Turkey’s parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc described it as ‘absolutely magnificent.’”

Has he noticed that his host, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been spending a lot of time in Arab countries lately, and also with the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for whom he has attempted to run diplomatic interference with the West, and whose “right” to acquire nuclear weapons he wholeheartedly supports? Does he not know that Erdgoan has turned to the Muslim lands not because he feels that “Europe is rejecting him” but because even if, or perhaps especially if, Turkey were admitted to the E.U., he would do so, and help Muslims outside of Turkey to use Turkey’s membership in the E.U. to the advantage of Islam, and of Muslims, worldwide? Does David Cameron know — have those who tell him what they think he should know about Turkey in three, or perhaps four, pages, told him? — that Erdogan has talked of granting Turkish citizenship to Muslims outside of Turkey? Were that to be the policy, were Turkey to be – as various Muslim leaders including the occasionally truth-telling Qaddafy have suggested – a stalking horse or rather a Trojan Horse for Muslims inside Europe (that was what Qaddafy called it), there might be no way to stop not only millions of Turks from moving freely about the cabin of the E.U., but of millions or tens of millions of other Muslims, now “Turkish citizens,” perhaps some of them paying the government of Turkey for the privilege of doing the same, of becoming “citizens of an E.U. member” entitled to move and live anywhere in any of the constituent member-states of the E.U.

Has David Cameron been made aware that the Erdogan regime, the one that hosted him, the one that now rules in Turkey, was deeply implicated in the publicity stunt directed by the I.H.H., a group that Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French terrorism expert and former magistrate, has linked directly to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups such as Hamas? The Mavi Marmara incident was a set-up to pressure Israel to abandon its nautical checkpoint designed to keep out weapons and those goods that have a dual-use as war materiel. No, Cameron didn’t know that? Why not?

One has an awful feeling about David Cameron that, as a thoroughly callow and shallow product of the most up-to-date blackberry-and-computer world, he’s not much of a reader of history. Oh, you’ll tell me, didn’t he study PPE, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at Oxford, and didn’t he get a First? Well, if at this point you still can be impressed with those of presumably high degree, you haven’t been spending enough time with the “well-educated” who are churned out at Harvard, Yale, and similar places, and you fail to imagine the dons, and the circumstances, that would allow Old Etonian Mr. Cameron to smirk-swagger his way through Oxford, and the kind of examinations that demand not thought but regurgitation, a simulacrum of thought. And even if we were to concede – I don’t – that at one point David Cameron was capable of taking in things, and capable of thinking about them, that was three decades ago. What has he thought for us lately?

Cameron has no idea that an “Idea of Europe” exists. He does not understand Islam, as many have already said. If asked, he could not adduce textual evidence for his assertion that the “real Islam” has nothing to do with those people the Obama administration likes to call “violent extremists.” There is not a single passage from the Qur’an, not a single story in the Hadith, not a single detail from the life of Muhammad, the Model of Conduct for all time, that is made up by those who are propagandists, or members of, Al Qaeda. The texts are on their side. Some Muslims choose not to act upon those texts, out of ignorance of Islam, or more often out of the human desire to simply get on with their lives. This is combined in the West with the prudent decision that now is not yet the time to rock the boat or to show too obviously what Islam is all about, and that it would be better to conduct jihad slowly by other means. All this is, writ large, a little like the quarrel over tactics and timing, but not on ultimate goals, that separate the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, who are most impatient, from the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, who realize that the war against Israel must for now continue to be conducted through such means as diplomatic pressure, unceasing propaganda, economic boycotts, and whatever else comes to hand short of outright warfare on the battlefield, at least as long as Israel has not yet been pushed back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, which will make going-in-for-the-kill much more immediately attractive an option.

What does matter to David Cameron is money, trade, the great business of buying and selling. That would be understandable if he were merely the head of the British Board of Trade, akin to the head of the American Chamber of Commerce, visiting Turkey to drum up more trade. But he is not that. He is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and his country is part of the West, and the West is now threatened by the large-scale and growing presence of Muslims within that very West. David Cameron, instead of discreetly avoiding the topic, took it right on – took it right on, and came down firmly, boldly, uncompromisingly, on the side of the Muslims. He will fight for Turkey’s admission to the E. U. He will ignore the fact that Turkey is now ruled by the most Muslim and, therefore, the most anti-Infidel, anti-Western, government, since the days of Abdul Hamid. He knows nothing of the “real Islam” whose spirit and letter he so self-assuredly, and baselessly, invokes. He offers not one shred of evidence to show that what every decent Western scholar – from Schacht and Snouck Hurgoronje to Jeffrey and Dufourcq – understood about Islam, he acts as if Wafa Sultan and Magdi Allam and Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali had not provided ample and convincing testimony, as defectors from the Army of Islam, as to what it is all about. He instead is merely a Commercial traveler, unpacking his wares, making his pitch, a Podsnap who wants to know nothing at all about those who interest him for one reason and one reason only: they are to be his customers. That’s what counts.

Cameron is the wedding-cake groom, or the eager salesman in the blue suit which, even if bought bespoke at great expense, looks as cheesy as the worst 7th Avenue knockoff. So in the chanceries of France and Germany and Italy, in the banana-skin-lined corridors of power in the Pentagon and the State Department, and in Great Britain itself, those who know what’s what will not exactly ignore him, but having now taken his measure, and taken as well the measure, or rather the remarkably similar measurements (just look at their identical suits, ties, shirts, expressions, minds) of his nearly identical twin, the apologist for all that is not Western, Mr. Clegg, Tweedledee to his Tweedledum (and this allows us to think of them both as the Tweedle Twins), we all learn to hold him at a distance and in contempt, and work around him, around both of the Tweedle Twins.

Earlier I offered remarks on Islam and Muslims by Churchill, the greatest Prime Minister of Great Britain in the twentieth century. But Gladstone, the greatest Prime Minster of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, had put on the record his own thoughts on Islam, and the Turks who represented, at the time he wrote, the world’s Muslims. Gladstone, like Churchill, did not think much of Islam or of Muslims. The immediate prompt for his observations were the massacres, by Muslim Turks, of Christian Bulgarians, but Gladstone might have been prompted by any number of massacres by Muslims (Turks, Kurds, Arabs) of non-Muslims, in the Ottoman Empire, as the Sick Man of Europe took a long time dying. In 1860 the Muslim Arabs and Turks of Damascus had massacred the Maronites in that city. In the late 1870s, there were the massacres of the Bulgarians. Greeks, Rumanians, Serbs also came in for killings. In 1894-96 there was the first mass murder of the Armenians, followed by a far greater mass-murder of Armenians by Turks in 1915 and the years following. Many scholarly works on these massacres exist, and one can consult Angelov on the Bulgarians, Papoulia on the Rumanians Vryonis on the Greeks, Bat Ye’or on the Jews, Dadrian on the Armenians. Among those preparing Cameron for his trip to Turkey, no one mentioned any of this, or that it was Ataturk who broke with that past, and in systematically constraining Islam, made possible whatever achievements have been made in modern Turkey and put an end to such behavior. 

Here is a single paragraph in Gladstone’s “The Bulgarian Wars and the Question of the East”:

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

Gladstone, with his observations on the Turks based on observations of the Turks, and Churchill, with his celebrated remarks on Islam and Muslims, both served as Prime Ministers of Great Britain. And so, now, does David Cameron. But he has nothing but good things to say about the Turks, even or perhaps especially under Erdogan, who is making those factories hum, that GDP rise — the updated equivalent to “Mussolini drained the Pontine marshes and makes the trains run on time.” And he has nothing but good things to say about Muslims, though he has bad things to say, or most miscomprehending, unsympathetic things to say, about Israel, a tiny state this has been, is, and always will be the victim of jihad that is most permanently imperilled. Indeed, long before his tete-a-tete with Obama, Cameron was proudly recalling how, on a visit to Jerusalem, he had dared to call that part which includes the Old City, with the Western Wall, and Temple Mount, part of “occupied East Jerusalem.”

Yes, like Gladstone and like Churchill, he too will be on the roll of Prime Ministers of Great Britain. But he’s cut from a different cloth, perhaps the very cloth that this shallow commercial traveller, a true child of his mercenary age, having opened his sample cases, is about to take out and hold up so that it may be admired by his Turkish guests, as he tells them, in two alliteratively-linked words, what he really meant, and what to him is just about all that matters: Buy British!

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