GHOSTS OF XMAS PAST STIRRED BUT WHERE IS PEACE AND GOODWILL?
Posted on 23rd December 2023
I like Christmas Memories from my childhood come roaring past. Many happy, some confusing and for those who have passed away, a sadness for their absence. However, recalling in some cases their foibles brings a smile to my face. Christmas lights are something to behold and one house in our locality seems to get better by the year. Our decorations are mainly floral, that being a favourite of my wife. Christmas brings music into the house. Thursday morning David Bowie and Bing Crosby were singing Little Drummer Boy on the radio. David Bowie played Slane in 1987. He was one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. This year it was, of course, Harry Styles. Now my mind is focused on next year’s event. Until the choice is made, I won’t feel settled.
This year every time I think about Christmas I think almost immediately of Gaza and Ukraine. The images coming out of Gaza are deeply disturbing – the flattening of whole sections of the Strip rendering them completely uninhabitable, the children being dragged from the rubble covered in dust and blood, people now probably in their thousands suffering from starvation and a shortage of water. Is this the price the Israelis think appropriate in rooting out Hamas. Every time I watch CNN reporting on the war in Gaza, I feel a sense of rage and revulsion. We had a visitor from Palestine in our house last weekend and all I could say was how sorry I was. It is profoundly shocking. I was interested in what Ben Wallace, a former British Defence Secretary had to say this week. “Going after Hamas is legitimate, obliterating vast swathes of Gaza is not. Using proportionate force is legal but collective punishment and forced movement of civilians is not”. The truth of the matter is that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is rapidly destroying the support it had following the obscene attack on Israel on October 7th. Let us not forget that it was his government that let the guard down in the first place. The Israeli Armed Forces are some of the best equipped in the world and Mossad their intelligence agency is legendary. So this Christmas I will be praying for what currently seems impossible, a cease fire in Gaza and a break-through in Ukraine. We must not forget Zelensky. He is a bulwark against the dangerous imperialistic ambitions of Vlad the Bad.
