The lede carries the surrender.
The British Museum postponed a public lecture scheduled for Wednesday on the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah less than 24 hours before it was due to start. The reason, the museum said, was security concerns. A “significant proportion” of the registered attendees were “individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event.” The lecture, to be given by Paul Collins, who runs the museum’s Middle East department, was planned as a highlight of Britain’s first ever Jewish Culture Month.
“Security” concerns over “disruption.” Sure. Dominic Green’s subheadline understates the case:
Canceling events over “security concerns” gives bullies and frauds exactly what they want.
It’s far worse than that. These are people who should know better. They’re not only telling bigots they can have whatever they want, these…personages…are broadcasting to the world at large that what Brits have to say to those who threaten them is…”please don’t hurt us.”
Green had this near the end of his piece:
Rather than hunker down before the bigots and behind managerial waffle, Messrs Cullinan and Osborne [museum director and chairman, respectively] should seize the chance to redeem the museum from its self-inflicted disgrace and show the world what it stands for.
Sadly, they’ve already demonstrated plainly and for all to see exactly what the museum does not stand for.
Nor is the museum’s cowardice a one-off. Green listed some other examples of Brit surrender, also.
- Bournemouth exhibition on the local Jewish community’s history canceled altogether
- Edinburgh Festival canceled two Jewish comedians over “safety concerns.”
The inaugural Jewish Culture Month was created to counter this kind of criminal intimidation and institutional weakness. The museum’s lecture was intended to “highlight” the Month in its first major event. All the event highlighted, though, was timidity in the face of threats.
Beyond that, the British people continually and repeatedly elect governments infamous for looking the other way as their girls are groomed for the sex trade and then used in it; governments that insist that defending oneself against assault is itself a crime; governments that won’t even defend the nation’s own borders against illegal alien inflows, a particular infidelity to those few who were owed so much in times past.
These are not the people whose army stood tall against a vastly numerically superior Zulu army at Rorke’s Drift and won, nor are they the people whose army and air force stood tall against Germany’s Nazi armies and air forces, ultimately contributing critically to the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
Today’s Brits are utterly betraying their own Winston Churchill’s injunction to Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Further betrayal of their own, Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons in 1940:
[W]we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. …we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. …we shall never surrender.
These are not the people of a special relationship.
Today’s Brit meekness is as disgusting as it is dismaying.
