Robert Fisk:

​Britain can’t launch wars abroad and be safe at home

Rasa - British Prime Minister Theresa May should know that Britain cannot launch wars abroad and be safe at home, according to Robert Fisk, a celebrated English writer and journalist.​

News ID: 430140

Date: 05 June 2017 - 19:50

RNA - Fisk, who has been primarily based in Beirut, Lebanon, for nearly three decades, made the remarks in an article published by The Independent on Monday, following a deadly attack in central London.

On Saturday night, three attackers targeted the heart of London. Seven people were killed and 48 injured when the assailants in a white van mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing a police officer and revelers in bars around Borough Market.

Addressing the British people on Sunday morning, May stressed the need for change, both in people’s tolerance of extremism and in the government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

She vowed to fight what she called the “evil ideology of Islamist extremism,” and declared “enough is enough.”

The prime minister went on to say that British values were “superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.”

In his article, Fisk censured May for not referencing Saudi Arabia, whose “Wahhabist ‘ideology’ has seeped into the bloodstream of ISIS [Daesh], al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”

On the other hand, he appreciated Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who said on Sunday the British people “need to have some difficult conversations starting with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states that have funded and fueled extremist ideology.”

Fisk said May is “too gutless, too cowardly, to deal with the [Persian] Gulf Arab autocrats to whom she sells weapons (albeit not on the scale of Donald Trump, whose principal Arabian dictator, the head-chopper-in-chief, is so worthy of our mourning that May’s predecessor lowered the British flag to half-mast on his death).”

Elsewhere in his remarks, the journalist wrote the British and American military actions in the Middle East “led us into war with the Arabs so many times.”

“One thinks of British ‘military action’ in Palestine, at Suez, in Iraq. And now in Iraq and Syria. Yet we continue groveling to the [Persian] Gulf monarchies as we assist them in their criminal campaign in Yemen,” he added.

"And still May will not say what she knows to be true: that Britain can no longer expect to go on foreign adventures and be safe at home,” he stated.

The writer advised the British government to have “a thorough reappraisal of its entire relationship with the Middle East, especially with the Arab dictators and torturers whom we arm.”

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