"The distinction between coarse blundering Israelis and subtle sophisticated Britons depends where you’re standing. If you happen to be the late Jean Charles de Menezes, for example, you might wish fate had selected you instead to be the Palestinian suicide bomber interrupted en route to Tel Aviv that same Friday. The Euro-reviled IDF managed to disarm the Fatah terrorist of his explosives belt, packed with nails, without harming a hair on his pretty little suicide-bomber head. If the demented anti-Zionism of the British and Continental media these last four years ever had a point, it doesn’t now, when you’re in the early stages of the Israelification of Europe — and, in one of fate’s better jests, in this scenario you’re the Jews."
[snip]
"On the Thursday of the second attacks, I happened to pass through London, which isn’t the easiest town to pass through these days. I am a Canadian subject of Her Majesty and, when I showed up at the ‘Fast Track’ lane at Heathrow, the immigration officer plonked down in my passport a big stamp saying ‘RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS PROHIBITED’. ‘Tosser,’ I sneered. Well, OK, I murmured it, very sotto voce, as I had no desire to miss my appointment because the zealots of HM Customs suddenly fancied an intimate cavity search. But honestly, what a pathetic example of pointless gesture politics: if you’re a fancypants North American business traveller in town for less than 24 hours and splashing a ton of hard currency around the West End, the Home Office goes through a big hoop-de-doo about saying you’ve no entitlement to welfare. But if you’re a Somali and you want to live in public housing at public expense for six years while you fine-tune your plot to blow up Warren Street Tube station, pas de problème!"
Priceless.
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