United Kingdom would never have survived without Uncle Sam
Re: “Israel would never have survived without Uncle Sam”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
If any nation owes special thanks to the United States it is the UK. Without the Lend-Lease act and America’s brave entry into World War II, Wernher von Braun and Germany might well have burned England to ashes. Similarly, the heroic actions of US fighting forces in the Pacific theatre let the Brits recoup their embarrassing losses and hold on to Singapore as a jewel of the Commonwealth and to Hong Kong until 1997. Had the US not safeguarded Europe for the 70 years after WWII, the USSR might have spread what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain up to the English Channel and perhaps beyond.
Paul and another contributor lied in an attempt to belittle Israel. The Brits have actually won 94 Nobel Prizes since 1948 (when Israel became a nation) not 130 as they exaggerated. So Israel’s 12 prizes is not so bad after all. Shooting from the hip, Paul then claims Israel “severely lags behind its competitors in certain areas”. Really? Which areas is he referring to?
As for Paul’s vile statement that Israel is “woefully inept at the game of life”, it is to be noted that Israel accepted some 600,000 Holocaust survivors and, very importantly, 1 million Jews who were kicked out of their homes in Arab countries (the true ethnic cleansing crisis of 1948), and turned broken people into a vibrant nation. That’s miraculous, not woefully inept.
Like all moralists, Paul should be reminded of his own nation’s atrocities. Let’s just focus on a few modern ones: world bodies are still investigating the UK’s actions regarding the killings in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday, 1972. The 1981 race riots and the London riots of 2011 show that the British scarcely have the right to lecture others about being inept at the “game of life”.
Ben Levin
Bangkok
