Rod Liddle
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The seething really got under way when I watched the exodus of ‘British’ citizens from Beirut harbour to the safety of Cyprus and thence home, an operation for which you and I have paid a lot of money. We were not spared their views. Were they grateful and full of humility? For the most part, were they hellers. Everyone was to blame for the uncomfortable time they’d endured in the previous seven days — the British embassy, America, Israel and so on — but not themselves. And not Hezbollah either, who were exonerated by all and sundry either by omission or quite explicitly.
There was, for example, the breathtakingly cretinous girl who explained that she’d just come to Beirut to ‘do some deejaying, like’ and was appalled that the British embassy hadn’t got its act together and flown her home when the first bombs landed. I have the feeling we will see her again soon enough, looking bemused standing with her rucksack by a landing strip in Quetta or Khandahar, other places where her ‘deejaying’ sojourn runs into a spot of bother. There were people angry that their ‘beach holiday’ hadn’t turned out as they’d expected, what with the heavy ordnance and everything. Now, I don’t wish to be callous, but don’t phrases like ‘on your head be it’ and ‘you made your bed’ etc., spring to mind here? A beach holiday, in Beirut? Didn’t they wonder why it was so cheap? Might they not have guessed that Beirut would be a little different from Biarritz?
There then followed, from the embassy coach on to the Royal Navy ship, a grim procession of implacably Arabist hags who spewed forth a tirade of anti-Israeli, anti-British and anti-American propaganda, during which the phrase ‘Israeli war crimes’ cropped up with remarkable regularity. The British embassy was not merely negligent, they averred, but sort of complicit in the Israeli action; it had conspired to hide from the world these Israeli ‘atrocities’ (clearly they weren’t aware that, far from being hidden, we’d watched it all unfold every night on our news programmes). There was not the slightest gratitude to the embassy, or the navy, or the British government, that we’d hauled them out of a pit they had dug for themselves. They wanted the rights which are traditionally afforded British citizens — the right to be removed from the presence of excitable, swarthy foreigners as soon as the first gunshot is heard — but also the right to pledge their political allegiance to the country from which they were determinedly fleeing. Horribly, unforgivably, John Betjeman’s nasty little phrase ‘Come friendly bombs’ drifted through my mind as I watched them walk up the gangplank to HMS Gloucester where they were to be served, according to the starchy navy spokesbabe, ‘a tasty meal prepared by our chef’. Let them eat hummus, for the rest of their lives.
A year or two back I remember complaining about the official British government advice to people wishing to travel abroad and, in particular — because it’s where I was writing from — Malaysia. In short, the Foreign Office advised Brits not to go and, if they must go, to avoid places where lots of Westerners congregate, i.e., hotels and beaches. I believe that this is still the official advice, for that matter. Anyway, it struck me as being absurd; Malaysia has been a wholly safe place to visit since about 1968; there have been no terrorist attacks, there is no internal strife whatsoever. And at a time when we needed all the Muslim friends we could get, the government’s warning to potential tourists infuriated the Malaysian government — with justification, I thought.
But watching that long march of stumpy harridans on to HMS Gloucester, I changed my tune. Such advice is simply a defence against the remonstrations of those people who, upon booking a beach holiday in Beirut, are shocked and appalled to find themselves, on day three, cowering in an air-raid shelter. People who expect the rest of the world to treat them rather as they are treated in Wilmslow or Wokingham and somehow find it possible to blame the British government when they are treated somewhat differently. For many of the British citizens fleeing Lebanon, there was nothing in the way of a mumbled admission that perhaps, all things considered, Magaluf might have been a better bet this year. Nor, from those domiciled in Beirut, the careless shrug, a heigh-ho and ‘well, that’s what you expect if you live in a country which allows extremists to shell its closest neighbour’. Instead, just a fugue of concerted whining and spite directed, bizarrely, at the very people who were helping them. Travel may have got them nearly killed, but it certainly didn’t broaden their minds.
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