Boycotters of Israel are often silent about greater violations of human rights
Last week over 300 British university academics decided to boycott Israel over ‘commitment to Palestinian rights’. The writers vowed to maintain the boycott ‘until Israel complies with international law, and respects human rights’, in a pro-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) demonstration against violence in the West Bank and Gaza.
Similarly the European Union is being pushed by NGOs to boycott all Israeli products made in ‘Judea and Samaria’ (West Bank) as ‘part of a larger economic war’.
The rise in Palestinian knife attacks and ensuing Israeli retaliation has left 11 Israelis and 69 Palestinians dead in the latest insurgency, mirroring the historically skewed number of casualties in the conflict. Those calling for Israeli boycott cite this numerical disparity, while calling out ‘apartheid state’ Israel’s ‘illegal occupation’ of Palestinian territory.
While it’s hard to argue against the discrepancy in force and violence, it should be equally hard to counter that violations of a much greater degree are being exercised by states around the world. And so one wonders why those jumping the gun on Israeli boycott remain silent on other states’ brutalities.
For instance, no one seems interested in boycotting China for its ‘illegal occupation’ of Tibet, or its blatant anti-Muslim policies in its largest province Xinjiang. There are not many protests against China’s ‘Islamophobia’ when it bars Muslims from fasting during Ramadan, or bans beards and ‘Islamic dressing’.
China’s ‘cultural genocide’ uses the actions of fringe Uighur radicals as justification for a broader state clampdown against all Muslims. The province itself has been occupied territory since 1949, with a separatist movement for self-recognition brimming over for decades.
For those wanting to demonstrate against colonial occupation, the recently signed Sino-Pak agreement over the $46 billion economic corridor should be a good rallying cause, considering it connects Xinjiang with Pakistan-occupied Balochistan, primarily benefiting Islamabad and Beijing. Just like China usurped Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Pakistan took over Balochistan immediately after the Indo-Pak partition.
Balochistan is witnessing its fourth insurgency since 1947 as it continues fighting for autonomy. Meanwhile, Pakistan Army continues to lift and dump Baloch citizens at will, in one of the goriest examples of human rights violations in the world, which has left over 23,000 missing persons.
Another mutual Sino-Pak occupation was that of the Kashmir region. While Beijing majorly withdrew, the occupied region has become a point scoring tool for India and Pakistan, with not much heed paid to locals’ rights. Even though the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is still relatively peaceful, albeit without actual autonomy, India’s only Muslim-majority state has suffered savage human rights abuses since 1947.
The recent surge in Hindu radicalism, following right-wing BJP’s return to power in India, has seen Hindu mobs lynching Muslims over beef, as the state ups the ante on torture in Kashmir.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s ruling Awami Party is acquiescing to a killing spree targeting atheist and secular bloggers because it isn’t sure about the viewpoint of the ‘moderate Muslims’ – a significant vote bank. A little eastwards Myanmar is engaged in ethnic cleansing of indigenous Rohingya Muslims.
In addition to these South (east) Asians countries, another broader category of ‘Muslim world’ witnesses mass human rights violations. These 13 countries punish atheism by death – all Muslim majority states. While multiple factors – including Western imperialism – have marred progress in the Muslim world, most of these states have their own decades-long policies to blame for their volatility.
These include democracies and Western allies like Turkey, which occupies Cyprus and targets Kurds in the garb of the anti-ISIS fight, and Pakistan whose multi-pronged apartheid belittles Israel’s ostensible apartheid. In fact the uncanny semblance between the ugliest shades of Pakistan and Israel should be worthy of some attention from the anti-Israel protestors.
While the majority of the Muslim world doesn’t recognise the Israeli state anyway, all Muslims who seriously consider boycott as a means of protest, should actually self-reflect and start with Muslim countries. This year’s Hajj stampede death toll in Saudi Arabia should’ve instigated a mass boycott movement of the Saudi kingdom and the Muslim pilgrimage itself.
None of these wrongs make Israel’s injustices right. However, a complete lack of nuance and perspective in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict obviously aggravates the historical crisis.
While the Palestinian clerics and leaders’ incitement to violence is given a pass, and genocidal Islamists like Hamas are deemed freedom fighters, while global activists don’t even know – or care – about what’s going on in Balochistan, Kashmir, Xinjiang or Kurdistan, it’s easy to understand the common Israelis’ sense of victimhood.
Blatant depiction of Israel as evil and Palestinians as victims strengthens right-wings (Likud and Hamas) in both territories. Paranoid citizens worrying about their security don’t care much for ideologies, as Erdogan-led AKP’s return to a majority in this week’s Turkish elections testifies.
Anyone who doesn’t accept a two-state answer to the conflict can’t obviously be a part of the Palestinian solution. The same is true for all those who paint either of the two sides as the sole culprit.
An Israeli-Palestinian peaceful solution can only be reached via strengthening the inward-looking moderates who acknowledge and highlight their own side’s wrongs. An Israeli boycott that dubs the Jewish state as the ultimate evil would silence actual peacemakers on both sides.
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a Friday Times journalist. Follow him on Twitter
227 Responses to “Comment: The hypocrisy of boycotting Israel”
Sued By Red Teddy
Iain Duncan Smith’s 2002 leader’s speech in Bournemouth:
People say that we as politicians do not live in the real world. We don’t deal with the problems that they face on a day to day basis. That we spend more time lecturing than we do listening, but most of all that we make promises that we know we cannot keep.
This is the sound of a people tired of politics and crying out for change.
And that is our challenge.
That is my challenge.
To listen to what they are telling us and to deliver.
And by deliver, I don’t mean going out and saying ‘just trust me.’
That’s not enough… and it does not work.
If we as politicians do not show the people of Britain that we trust them to lead their own lives, then they will never again trust us.
Trust them to choose their schools and hospitals, trust them to look after their families and trust them to run their businesses. Trust them.
That is the message I will take to the people of Britain, every minute of every hour of every day until we take on this Government head to head at the next General Election.
Conservatives in a time of change
A generation ago, the Conservative Party took tough and often unpopular decisions. We laid the foundations for the prosperity that many enjoy today and now we face a new generation of challenges.
Millions more people own their own homes, but they fear to walk down their own street.
We have more money – but we have less time for the things in life that are most important.
Almost everyone here knows someone whose child is struggling with drug addiction.
Our streets – once the safest in the world – are now dirty and dangerous.
Britain has a successful economy. And yet our society seems more troubled than ever.
We must first understand the way life in Britain is lived today, and not the way it was lived twenty years ago.
We cannot remain the only part of Britain untouched by the changes that we ourselves unleashed.
Yes, it is right to be proud of the past, but it is wrong to try and live in the past.
This country has moved on, and so must we.
Being honest with ourselves
Our great achievement in the 1980s was to give people the power to fulfil their own economic ambitions.
We made people financially better off, but money isn’t everything, and in other ways, the quality of their lives declined.
The challenges changed, but we did not change to meet those challenges.
That is precisely what Theresa May said on Monday. What an excellent speech.
All of us here want to remember the good things we did – and there were many – but beyond this hall people too often remember the hurt we caused and the anger they felt.
Well I say this to you: Never again.
Never again can we take the people of Britain for granted.
Until people see that our Party has learned the lessons of 1997, we will go on getting the result of 1997.
The Party that I lead will live in the present and prepare for the future.
So to those who want to re-fight the battles of the past, and to those who want to live in the past, I simply say this: You stay in the past; we are moving on.
Labour
Five years ago, Tony Blair managed to catch the national mood.
People felt he had changed his party.
Then he promised to transform Britain.
Remember what we had to endure?
Cool Britannia? The Third Way? The Millennium Dome?
He promised so much, to so many.
How sad it has all come to so little.
Last week, Tony Blair spent most of his speech asking a lot of questions.
But just as he does every week at Prime Ministers Questions he then refused to answer any of them.
Well I have some questions for him:
Why are our hospitals so crowded?
Why are our streets so dangerous?
Why are our schools so troubled?
Why is our countryside so neglected?
And the most important question of all:
Who does Tony Blair think has been running this country for the past five years?
Public service failure
And in those five years our public services have deteriorated.
Today our schools, our hospitals, and our criminal justice system are barely adequate at best – and truly shocking at worst.
The quality of everyone’s life is suffering as a result. But it is those for whom our public services are a lifeline – the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society – who are suffering the most.
We live in an era of prosperity and employment, but one fact remains as true today as it was a generation ago:
Britain isn’t working.
It is not the fault of those employed in our public services. They are the neglected heroes of British life.
Think of the exhausted nurse working long hours in unacceptable conditions dealing with angry and often confused patients.
The demoralised policeman trying to catch arrogant and aggressive criminals without adequate support.
And the over-worked teacher at an understaffed school comforting students who have just lost their place at university.
They are not to blame.
And if more money were simply the answer, Britain would have some of the best public services in the world. Sadly we do not.
Today the Government is spending money more quickly than the nation can earn it.
Taxes are rising for those who can least afford it: for people on fixed incomes and for small firms who are the job-creating and wealth-creating engines of our economy.
The plea is always for more time and more money, but too often new money is used simply to cover up for the failure of the money this Government has already spent.
And as Michael Howard made clear on Tuesday, our public services are suffering from the same problems that afflicted our economy a generation ago.
Now, as then, policies are dreamt up in No. 10 and imposed across the country.
Now, as then, too many decisions are taken too far away from the people who provide services and the people who use them.
It is time to take that power and give back to these who run our public services and those who rely on them.
It is time to start trusting people.
Because it is only by trusting people that we can begin to make Britain work again.
Policy Renewal
In the last twelve months, we’ve travelled the world. We’ve talked to patients and parents, doctors and teachers, police officers and hundreds of other professionals, both here and abroad.
We’ve taken the time to understand the problems, to study what works here in Britain and in other countries and to develop solutions.
The result has been our policy document published today. It sets out our immediate priorities and the approach we intend to take.
With important elections coming up for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, our parties there will decide exactly how to translate our principles into Conservative policies.
But our direction is clear.
There have been no short cuts.
No gimmicks.
No clever wheezes.
Just hard work.
Work that doesn’t always grab the headlines.
But work that has unearthed the real problems that face the people of Britain today.
Real problems that start when people are too young to know anything better.
Real problems that start in our schools.
Education
A society unable to educate its young doesn’t deserve to call itself civilised. But in many parts of Britain today, the state of education is a scandal.
The ‘learning gap’ between our inner cities and the rest of the country is growing wider every day.
Too many schools are suffering from a breakdown in authority, a lack of teachers and poor results and too many children are paying the price.
Thousands of young lives are being written off before they’ve scarcely begun.
These are the children Labour has left behind.
I want those children who are stuck in schools that are failing in our inner cities to have a way out. I want their parents to be able to do what others have done for their children. I want them to be able to choose excellence.
The Conservatives will give them that chance.
This means breaking with the dogma that says because the state pays for education, it must also run every single school in the land.
In Holland, in Sweden and in Denmark they’ve already broken with dogma. And that is what we must do here.
So Damian Green has announced this week our plans to give parents real control over how and where their children are educated.
Popular schools will be allowed to grow to take on more pupils.
But far too many children are locked into failing schools.
So we will help parents and other groups establish a new generation of independent schools funded by the state.
We will give state scholarships to pupils starting in our inner cities. That way parents can educate their children in schools that are paid for by the state but not run by the state.
And my aim is nothing less than to make sure no child is left behind.
Health
And if we can do that for parents and pupils, why on earth can’t we do it for patients?
Just like the pupils in failing inner city schools, the people who suffer most from the crisis in the NHS are the people who can least afford to do so. They are the old, the chronically sick, mothers and young children.
They can’t do what a quarter of million people a year do now. They can’t use their life savings for treatment outside the NHS because they have no life savings.
These are the patients Labour has left behind.
As Liam Fox pointed out, these people have just as much right to excellence and just as much right to be treated quickly as anyone else.
We need to give them a helping hand.
The Conservatives will give them that chance.
This means recognising that you cannot deliver twenty-first century healthcare using a 1940s system.
No other country puts the demands of its health service before the needs of its patients.
So we will maintain the commitment of the NHS to provide comprehensive care on the basis of need. But we will go further than that.
We will help those who have already contributed to the NHS but who are unable to get their treatment in the NHS on time.
And we will give all patients greater choice about how they are treated and by whom.
My aim is nothing less than to make sure that no patient is left behind.
Crime
But it is not only schools and hospitals where Labour has failed the people of Britain.
Today our streets and our homes feel less safe than they did even a decade ago.
Parents are unable to let their children out to play, women are frightened to walk alone after dark and the elderly are frightened even to go out at all.
Rising crime hits defenceless people the hardest.
These are the victims that Labour has left behind.
I want to reclaim the streets for the young and the old and for all the decent people of Britain.
And that is what the Conservatives will do.
In Mayor Giuliani’s New York, crime dropped by two-thirds in ten years because police response times were forced down to two minutes and people could see officers on patrol catching criminals.
In today’s Britain, for every 40 crimes committed, only one results in someone receiving a criminal record. That is not good enough.
We must bring Giuliani-style policing to every city in this country.
As Oliver Letwin says, crime is not a single act – it is a conveyor belt stretching right back to a child’s early years at home. And we need to give young people every opportunity to opt out of a life of crime and to opt back into society.
So we will help parents with problem children provide the framework of discipline and affection that every child needs and deserves.
And we will deal with persistent young offenders by giving more purposeful and longer sentences.
We are also determined to break the link between crime and hard drugs.
That’s why we have pledged a ten-fold increase in the number of drug treatment places in this country.
Young crack and heroin addicts will face a stark choice: accept rehabilitation and rescue your own lives, or face prison where you can no longer blight the lives of others.
Rewarding responsibility
As Conservatives, we believe in freedom, but we also believe in society. It is our sense of responsibility that makes social beings out of free individuals.
But Gordon Brown is doing his best to undermine responsibility.
His policies have trapped nearly half the people in this country on income-related benefits, including the pensioners he has taxed into dependency.
People are penalised for working harder and saving harder.
These are the families Labour has left behind.
The Conservatives will give these families a chance.
We will give people the flexibility to save when they can, to draw on funds when they need to and to save again later in their lives – all without losing support from the taxpayer.
The lifetime savings account announced by David Willetts this week will be the biggest boost to responsibility that we can give this country.
However old you are, whatever you earn, we will reward everyone in this country who works hard and who saves hard.
But we will do more.
A generation ago, Conservatives gave council tenants the right to buy their own homes. Some two million people became property owners and gained control over their own lives.
As David Davis made clear this week, home ownership still remains the ultimate dream of most social tenants today.
Helping them realise that dream means giving them a helping hand.
So the Conservatives will again make that dream a reality and extend it to a new generation.
The right to buy is back.
But it’s no good having your own house if you lose it through ill health in old age.
My friends, if a week is a long time in politics, then a year sometimes seems like a lifetime.
I know you have been waiting impatiently for us to come forward with fresh ideas that would set our Party on a new course.
Now we have begun to fulfil those expectations and through your enthusiasm you have shown that we are moving in the right direction.
This will be remembered as the week when the Conservatives began the slow, hard road back to power.
So the next time you are asked what Conservatives stand for these days, tell them this from me:
We believe that when people are given the power to choose they choose to do the best for themselves and their families.
We believe that just because the state funds our public services it doesn’t need to run our public services.
We believe that the privileges of the few must be turned into the opportunities for the many.
Above all we believe that to build a better society you must trust people.
Not governments.
Our principles must be for a purpose.
And that purpose is simple.
To make Britain a better place than it is today.
I love my country.
For me, this is the greatest country on earth, and the tolerance, the decency and the strenfgth of the British people are worth fighting for.
That is why I am here.
That is why we are all here.
To build a Britain that respects decency.
A Britain that values compassion.
A Britain worthy of all its people.
This week we have rediscovered the courage of our convictions.
So go out there and tell the world … the Conservatives are back.
Sued By Red Teddy
Iain Duncan Smith’s 2002 leader’s speech in Bournemouth:
People say that we as politicians do not live in the real world. We don’t deal with the problems that they face on a day to day basis. That we spend more time lecturing than we do listening, but most of all that we make promises that we know we cannot keep.
This is the sound of a people tired of politics and crying out for change.
And that is our challenge.
That is my challenge.
To listen to what they are telling us and to deliver.
And by deliver, I don’t mean going out and saying ‘just trust me.’
That’s not enough… and it does not work.
If we as politicians do not show the people of Britain that we trust them to lead their own lives, then they will never again trust us.
Trust them to choose their schools and hospitals, trust them to look after their families and trust them to run their businesses. Trust them.
That is the message I will take to the people of Britain, every minute of every hour of every day until we take on this Government head to head at the next General Election.
Conservatives in a time of change
A generation ago, the Conservative Party took tough and often unpopular decisions. We laid the foundations for the prosperity that many enjoy today and now we face a new generation of challenges.
Millions more people own their own homes, but they fear to walk down their own street.
We have more money – but we have less time for the things in life that are most important.
Almost everyone here knows someone whose child is struggling with drug addiction.
Our streets – once the safest in the world – are now dirty and dangerous.
Britain has a successful economy. And yet our society seems more troubled than ever.
We must first understand the way life in Britain is lived today, and not the way it was lived twenty years ago.
We cannot remain the only part of Britain untouched by the changes that we ourselves unleashed.
Yes, it is right to be proud of the past, but it is wrong to try and live in the past.
This country has moved on, and so must we.
Being honest with ourselves
Our great achievement in the 1980s was to give people the power to fulfil their own economic ambitions.
We made people financially better off, but money isn’t everything, and in other ways, the quality of their lives declined.
The challenges changed, but we did not change to meet those challenges.
That is precisely what Theresa May said on Monday. What an excellent speech.
All of us here want to remember the good things we did – and there were many – but beyond this hall people too often remember the hurt we caused and the anger they felt.
Well I say this to you: Never again.
Never again can we take the people of Britain for granted.
Until people see that our Party has learned the lessons of 1997, we will go on getting the result of 1997.
The Party that I lead will live in the present and prepare for the future.
So to those who want to re-fight the battles of the past, and to those who want to live in the past, I simply say this: You stay in the past; we are moving on.
Labour
Five years ago, Tony Blair managed to catch the national mood.
People felt he had changed his party.
Then he promised to transform Britain.
Remember what we had to endure?
Cool Britannia? The Third Way? The Millennium Dome?
He promised so much, to so many.
How sad it has all come to so little.
Last week, Tony Blair spent most of his speech asking a lot of questions.
But just as he does every week at Prime Ministers Questions he then refused to answer any of them.
Well I have some questions for him:
Why are our hospitals so crowded?
Why are our streets so dangerous?
Why are our schools so troubled?
Why is our countryside so neglected?
And the most important question of all:
Who does Tony Blair think has been running this country for the past five years?
Public service failure
And in those five years our public services have deteriorated.
Today our schools, our hospitals, and our criminal justice system are barely adequate at best – and truly shocking at worst.
The quality of everyone’s life is suffering as a result. But it is those for whom our public services are a lifeline – the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society – who are suffering the most.
We live in an era of prosperity and employment, but one fact remains as true today as it was a generation ago:
Britain isn’t working.
It is not the fault of those employed in our public services. They are the neglected heroes of British life.
Think of the exhausted nurse working long hours in unacceptable conditions dealing with angry and often confused patients.
The demoralised policeman trying to catch arrogant and aggressive criminals without adequate support.
And the over-worked teacher at an understaffed school comforting students who have just lost their place at university.
They are not to blame.
And if more money were simply the answer, Britain would have some of the best public services in the world. Sadly we do not.
Today the Government is spending money more quickly than the nation can earn it.
Taxes are rising for those who can least afford it: for people on fixed incomes and for small firms who are the job-creating and wealth-creating engines of our economy.
The plea is always for more time and more money, but too often new money is used simply to cover up for the failure of the money this Government has already spent.
And as Michael Howard made clear on Tuesday, our public services are suffering from the same problems that afflicted our economy a generation ago.
Now, as then, policies are dreamt up in No. 10 and imposed across the country.
Now, as then, too many decisions are taken too far away from the people who provide services and the people who use them.
It is time to take that power and give back to these who run our public services and those who rely on them.
It is time to start trusting people.
Because it is only by trusting people that we can begin to make Britain work again.
Policy Renewal
In the last twelve months, we’ve travelled the world. We’ve talked to patients and parents, doctors and teachers, police officers and hundreds of other professionals, both here and abroad.
We’ve taken the time to understand the problems, to study what works here in Britain and in other countries and to develop solutions.
The result has been our policy document published today. It sets out our immediate priorities and the approach we intend to take.
With important elections coming up for the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, our parties there will decide exactly how to translate our principles into Conservative policies.
But our direction is clear.
There have been no short cuts.
No gimmicks.
No clever wheezes.
Just hard work.
Work that doesn’t always grab the headlines.
But work that has unearthed the real problems that face the people of Britain today.
Real problems that start when people are too young to know anything better.
Real problems that start in our schools.
Education
A society unable to educate its young doesn’t deserve to call itself civilised. But in many parts of Britain today, the state of education is a scandal.
The ‘learning gap’ between our inner cities and the rest of the country is growing wider every day.
Too many schools are suffering from a breakdown in authority, a lack of teachers and poor results and too many children are paying the price.
Thousands of young lives are being written off before they’ve scarcely begun.
These are the children Labour has left behind.
I want those children who are stuck in schools that are failing in our inner cities to have a way out. I want their parents to be able to do what others have done for their children. I want them to be able to choose excellence.
The Conservatives will give them that chance.
This means breaking with the dogma that says because the state pays for education, it must also run every single school in the land.
In Holland, in Sweden and in Denmark they’ve already broken with dogma. And that is what we must do here.
So Damian Green has announced this week our plans to give parents real control over how and where their children are educated.
Popular schools will be allowed to grow to take on more pupils.
But far too many children are locked into failing schools.
So we will help parents and other groups establish a new generation of independent schools funded by the state.
We will give state scholarships to pupils starting in our inner cities. That way parents can educate their children in schools that are paid for by the state but not run by the state.
And my aim is nothing less than to make sure no child is left behind.
Health
And if we can do that for parents and pupils, why on earth can’t we do it for patients?
Just like the pupils in failing inner city schools, the people who suffer most from the crisis in the NHS are the people who can least afford to do so. They are the old, the chronically sick, mothers and young children.
They can’t do what a quarter of million people a year do now. They can’t use their life savings for treatment outside the NHS because they have no life savings.
These are the patients Labour has left behind.
As Liam Fox pointed out, these people have just as much right to excellence and just as much right to be treated quickly as anyone else.
We need to give them a helping hand.
The Conservatives will give them that chance.
This means recognising that you cannot deliver twenty-first century healthcare using a 1940s system.
No other country puts the demands of its health service before the needs of its patients.
So we will maintain the commitment of the NHS to provide comprehensive care on the basis of need. But we will go further than that.
We will help those who have already contributed to the NHS but who are unable to get their treatment in the NHS on time.
And we will give all patients greater choice about how they are treated and by whom.
My aim is nothing less than to make sure that no patient is left behind.
Crime
But it is not only schools and hospitals where Labour has failed the people of Britain.
Today our streets and our homes feel less safe than they did even a decade ago.
Parents are unable to let their children out to play, women are frightened to walk alone after dark and the elderly are frightened even to go out at all.
Rising crime hits defenceless people the hardest.
These are the victims that Labour has left behind.
I want to reclaim the streets for the young and the old and for all the decent people of Britain.
And that is what the Conservatives will do.
In Mayor Giuliani’s New York, crime dropped by two-thirds in ten years because police response times were forced down to two minutes and people could see officers on patrol catching criminals.
In today’s Britain, for every 40 crimes committed, only one results in someone receiving a criminal record. That is not good enough.
We must bring Giuliani-style policing to every city in this country.
As Oliver Letwin says, crime is not a single act – it is a conveyor belt stretching right back to a child’s early years at home. And we need to give young people every opportunity to opt out of a life of crime and to opt back into society.
So we will help parents with problem children provide the framework of discipline and affection that every child needs and deserves.
And we will deal with persistent young offenders by giving more purposeful and longer sentences.
We are also determined to break the link between crime and hard drugs.
That’s why we have pledged a ten-fold increase in the number of drug treatment places in this country.
Young crack and heroin addicts will face a stark choice: accept rehabilitation and rescue your own lives, or face prison where you can no longer blight the lives of others.
Rewarding responsibility
As Conservatives, we believe in freedom, but we also believe in society. It is our sense of responsibility that makes social beings out of free individuals.
But Gordon Brown is doing his best to undermine responsibility.
His policies have trapped nearly half the people in this country on income-related benefits, including the pensioners he has taxed into dependency.
People are penalised for working harder and saving harder.
These are the families Labour has left behind.
The Conservatives will give these families a chance.
We will give people the flexibility to save when they can, to draw on funds when they need to and to save again later in their lives – all without losing support from the taxpayer.
The lifetime savings account announced by David Willetts this week will be the biggest boost to responsibility that we can give this country.
However old you are, whatever you earn, we will reward everyone in this country who works hard and who saves hard.
But we will do more.
A generation ago, Conservatives gave council tenants the right to buy their own homes. Some two million people became property owners and gained control over their own lives.
As David Davis made clear this week, home ownership still remains the ultimate dream of most social tenants today.
Helping them realise that dream means giving them a helping hand.
So the Conservatives will again make that dream a reality and extend it to a new generation.
The right to buy is back.
But it’s no good having your own house if you lose it through ill health in old age.
My friends, if a week is a long time in politics, then a year sometimes seems like a lifetime.
I know you have been waiting impatiently for us to come forward with fresh ideas that would set our Party on a new course.
Now we have begun to fulfil those expectations and through your enthusiasm you have shown that we are moving in the right direction.
This will be remembered as the week when the Conservatives began the slow, hard road back to power.
So the next time you are asked what Conservatives stand for these days, tell them this from me:
We believe that when people are given the power to choose they choose to do the best for themselves and their families.
We believe that just because the state funds our public services it doesn’t need to run our public services.
We believe that the privileges of the few must be turned into the opportunities for the many.
Above all we believe that to build a better society you must trust people.
Not governments.
Our principles must be for a purpose.
And that purpose is simple.
To make Britain a better place than it is today.
I love my country.
For me, this is the greatest country on earth, and the tolerance, the decency and the strength of the British people are worth fighting for.
That is why I am here.
That is why we are all here.
To build a Britain that respects decency.
A Britain that values compassion.
A Britain worthy of all its people.
This week we have rediscovered the courage of our convictions.
So go out there and tell the world … the Conservatives are back.
Ian Harris
Israel was created by the Balfour Declaration. How are facts comparing Israeli with Arab achievement odious? It’s true. And I did not make any comparison with Germany’s artistic or technical achievements, which have been remarkable: even more remarkable that such a civilised society could achieve the barbarity of the Holocaust, or Oradour-sur-Glane (look up) something similar to which fundamentalist Arabs would like to do to all non-Muslims. Read their lips.
Ian Harris
Too true. We take their money, and look the other way over their fundamentalist religion and intolerance for others who do not share it.
jj
Slavery, something the English banned officially in England in the times of William the Conquer, and enforced internationally in 1833, is widely being committed in the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, officially banning it in the 60s, actually still practices slavery. But oil comes before lives I guess.