We agreed with this excellent summation of the Libyan lunatic’s 100-minute-long ramble, which caused even its Arab translator to collapse in a foaming heap, bellowing, “I can’t take it any more!”

 

Writing about the Gaddafi speech shortly afterwards in the Herald on Sunday, however, columnist Matt McCarten scolded the world’s media for being insufficiently awed by the oration, which he believes contained many valuable insights on the Middle East and a number of uncomfortable truths about the developed world.

 

Last night, we appeared with McCarten on Media7 to discuss the speech. You can see what transpired here.

 

Sadly, due to technical limitations — oh, all right, because McCarten kept yapping over us like a madman — we were unable to get through many of our rebuttals.

 

In all their rhetorical glory, we’re now pleased to present those talking points we brought along with us, alongside McCarten's initial objections, in italics, from his column:

 

 

This only shows McCarten’s ignorance or naivety about the Middle East. The only nation which might conceivably support Iran getting nuclear weapons is its ally Syria (which relies on it for a lot of financial and weaponry support), but all other nations in the region don't want a nuclear armed Iran because (a) they fear Iran's aims of regional hegemony, and (b) they are Sunni and Arab, and Iran is Shi'ite and non-Arab. So this is not a "valuable insight" — just common knowledge and common sense of the sort available to any 12-year old who follows world affairs.

Unsurprisingly, [the Arab nations] want Israel to dismantle their atomic arsenal too.

This is hardly new, too, and it has nothing to do with a fear of Israel using nuclear weapons on them. Israel had them at the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but Egypt and Syria knew that they were not in danger of nuclear attack, because Israel has said it will never be the first to use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East. These other nations want Israel to get rid of its nuclear capability simply because they hate Israel and want to get rid of it, and anything that will strategically weaken Israel they see as a good thing. McCarten is also hinting at the argument that Israel with nuclear capability is as dangerous to the region as Iran with nuclear capability, but it isn't, because no sensible person believes that Israel will use its nuclear weapons aggressively.

Gaddafi doesn't support the two-state solution [to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict]. 

 

No surprise here. Gaddafi and other Arab countries know that a single state will be to Israel's disadvantage. They know that Israel doesn't want it, which is why they promote it. And for McCarten to say it “is the most sensible solution for both peoples” is deliberately ignoring that Israel, including a majority of Arab-Israelis, doesn't want it.  In any event, the "one-state" solution to the Palestinian question is as old an idea as the modern Israeli state. (As are the various three-, two- and no-state proposals.) McCarten has never visited the Middle East. Has he never read any literature about it, either?

Everybody knows the current situation in Israel/Palestine is apartheid.

 

They don't, because it isn't. But yes, it is alleged, and opponents of Israel like to claim the allegation as fact. As Rhoda Kadalie and Julia Bertelsmann, two black South African women whose families were active in the anti-apartheid movement, wrote recently: “Israel is not an apartheid state ... Arab citizens of Israel can vote and serve in the Knesset; black South Africans could not vote until 1994. There are no laws in Israel that discriminate against Arab citizens or separate them from Jews. ... South Africa had a job reservation policy for white people; Israel has adopted pro-Arab affirmative action measures in some sectors. Israeli schools, universities and hospitals make no distinction between Jews and Arabs. An Arab citizen who brings a case before an Israeli court will have that case decided on the basis of merit, not ethnicity. This was never the case for blacks under apartheid.” Kadalie and Bertelsmann, who are critical of Israel's policies in the occupied territories, add: “Racism and discrimination do not form the rationale for Israel's policies and actions ... In the West Bank, measures such as the ugly security barrier have been used to prevent suicide bombings and attacks on civilians, not to enforce any racist ideology. Without the ongoing conflict and the tendency of Palestinian leaders to resort to violence, these would not exist.”

It worked in South Africa and Germany. It's worth discussing.

 

What on earth is McCarten talking about? South Africa was an apartheid state with unjust and oppressive laws imposed by the white minority on the black majority. Germany was a nation divided in two as the result of a war it had begun. Neither situation remotely compares with Israel and the Palestinians. McCarten seems to be comparing the Berlin Wall with Israel’s security barrier, but the two are totally different situations. There were Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall; the East ones were trying to escape into the West, hence the wall to stop them. There are Israelis on one side of the security barrier and Palestinians on the other side, and the barrier between them, which is not a wall in the first place, was put there to stop Palestinian terrorists from getting too easily into Israel and killing Israelis.

[Gaddafi’s] best contribution was his expose of the hypocrisy of the United Nations. The UN Charter claims all its nation members are equal. Yet it's run by a Security Council with five nations … Imagine if in New Zealand we had five cabinet ministers, any one of whom had the right to veto any decision of Parliament they saw fit. We wouldn't put up with it.

The comparison, like virtually everything else in McCarten's screed,  is nonsensical. A New Zealand cabinet is the outcome of a democratic election, and can be changed (by the PM, or by caucus, or by the government falling, or by a subsequent election). The five permanent members of the UN Security Council aren't elected, they are entrenched by the UN Charter — whether Muammar Gaddafi, Matt McCarten or indeed Krusty the Clown likes it or not.