Latest news with #WinstonChurchill
NDTV
10 hours ago
- Politics
- NDTV
How Did The Muslim World Go So Wrong?
You often run into people who look down upon the Muslim world, pointing at the chaos, armed terror groups, militia rule and dictatorship to conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with Muslims and their religion. Others take the opposite view, arguing that the Muslim world's present-day turmoil owes much to the West's repeated interventions and historical injustices. Both arguments offer partial truths, but they miss the broader reality: much of the Muslim world, especially in West Asia, lies in ruins. The causes are complex and layered, but the evidence is undeniable. From the shattered boulevards of Tripoli to the bombed-out alleys of Aleppo, from Baghdad's sectarian heartlands to Gaza's crumbled skyline, a common image emerges - of nations torn apart, societies hollowed and futures stolen. This devastation is neither natural nor inevitable. It is the cumulative result of decades of war, opportunistic foreign interventions, proxy conflicts, repressive regimes and colonial legacies. And in all of this, ordinary people, displaced, disillusioned and discarded, are the ones who suffer the most. Aftershocks Of Empire This is not about defending despots or absolving extremists. It is a plea for consistency, justice and memory. It is a call to understand how historical interference, political hypocrisy and selective moral outrage have turned one of the world's richest cultural regions into a perpetual battleground. The story of the Muslim world's chaos is not just about religion or governance. It is about the aftershocks of empire, the exploitation of oil and ideology, and a world order that has failed millions. In the 1920s, Winston Churchill famously quipped that he was not in favour of allowing 'the Arab tribes' to control their own affairs in Palestine. This imperial disdain wasn't just personal opinion; it was policy. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France carved up West Asia through the Sykes-Picot Agreement, drawing arbitrary borders and installing loyalist rulers. These new 'nation-states' were not crafted with local realities in mind but were designed to serve European interests - strategic positioning, oil pipelines and control of trade routes. This era of manufactured states and manipulated societies set the stage for future instability. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, each is a product of imperial drawing boards rather than organic nation-building. As regimes collapsed and identities clashed, these fissures widened. The West may have formally exited the region in the mid-20th century, but its legacy never left. Instead, West Asia continued to be haunted by postcolonial trauma, Cold War alignments and economic dependency. Sea Of Ruin Take Libya. Muammar Gaddafi ruled it for over four decades with an iron grip. He was a tyrant, but he also provided free education, healthcare and relative stability. NATO's intervention in 2011, under the guise of humanitarian protection, toppled him but offered no plan for what came next. Libya descended into chaos, with rival militias carving up the country. Weapons looted from Libyan arsenals flooded Mali and Syria, fueling other wars. Gaddafi's fall wasn't the birth of democracy; it was the opening act of a long, bloody disintegration. Iraq offers an even starker example. The 2003 US-led invasion, based on false claims of weapons of mass destruction, dismantled not only Saddam Hussein's regime but also the entire Ba'athist (party) state structure. The de-Ba'athification programme purged thousands of civil servants and military officers, creating a vacuum that was quickly filled by sectarian militias and, eventually, the dreaded and bloodthirsty Islamic State. Iraq went from dictatorship to a failed democracy haunted by car bombs and assassinations. Once a cradle of civilisation, it now struggles to keep the lights on. Syria, too, became a battlefield of global ambition. What began as peaceful protests in 2011 soon morphed into a full-scale civil war, drawing in Russia, the United States, Iran, Turkey, Israel and countless non-state actors. While Assad's brutality is undeniable, so too is the damage inflicted by competing foreign agendas. More than half of Syria's population has been displaced. Cities like Aleppo and Raqqa have become modern ruins. Afghanistan was a theatre of invasion and war, resulting in total collapse of the existing system. First it was the Communist USSR that invaded the country in the late '70s. It was ultimately ousted with the American money, muscle and machine guns after a decade of misrule. Then, the US-led allied forces invaded it in 2001, claiming to install stability and democracy. The experiment failed miserably. The ousted Taliban made a dramatic comeback in 2021, with Western forces making an inglorious retreat. They have left the local population, women and children, at the mercy of the extremist Taliban. Iran's Turn Now? And now it is Iran, dangerously poised to be on the road to ruin. It has been subjected to cycles of isolation, sanctions sabotage, and now, open threats of regime change. Its current hardline government owes its survival not just to repression but also to an embattled nationalism born from decades of foreign pressure. From the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed 1953 coup that ousted Prime Minister Mossadegh to present-day nuclear tensions, Iran's story is as much of external meddling as of internal strife. Meanwhile, regimes like those in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar continue to enjoy Western patronage. These nations are no less autocratic, no more democratic. Yet, their wealth and alignment with Western strategic interests insulate them from criticism. Human rights violations, censorship and state-sponsored religious extremism are quietly tolerated. The West does not oppose dictatorship, it opposes defiant dictators. This selective morality has real consequences. When Western powers punish some regimes while shielding others, they lose credibility. Worse, they stoke cynicism and anger across the Muslim world. Young people see the hypocrisy. They see the bombs dropped in the name of freedom and the silence that follows when friendly monarchs crush dissent. In that silence, extremist narratives take root; terror groups do not emerge from cultural voids, they are born in environments of injustice, humiliation and betrayal. Even Sudan, often omitted from this conversation, has a familiar story. Its colonial past, where the British pitted ethnic groups against each other, laid the groundwork for later divisions. Post-independence governments, often backed or sanctioned by foreign powers, struggled to hold a fractured society together. The current infighting isn't just a power struggle, it is the delayed detonation of a colonial time bomb, exacerbated by modern meddling from Gulf rivals, the West, and even Russia. Gift Of Nostalgia Amid all this, it is the ordinary people who pay the highest price. Families displaced across generations. Children growing up without schools or safe drinking water. Doctors operating by flashlight in makeshift clinics. Artists silenced. Intellectuals exiled. Hope becomes a rare commodity. In Gaza, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, to name just a few, the future has become just a concept. In such an environment, the past - even a past ruled by dictators - can seem strangely preferable. Say what you will about Saddam or Gaddafi, many in their countries recall the order, security and predictability of life under their rule. That nostalgia isn't about love for tyranny but about despair at what followed. What the Muslim world needs isn't more interventions, more bombs, or more regime-change fantasies. It needs principled action from the global community. It needs investment in peacebuilding, infrastructure and local civil society. It needs space to breathe, heal and rebuild. The West Learns No Lessons This is not an ode to the past. It's a warning. If history continues to repeat itself, it won't just be West Asia that suffers. Instability radiates. Refugees flee. Radical ideologies spread. And global trust erodes. The price of selective intervention is paid not just in Baghdad or Tripoli, but in Paris, London and New York, too - mostly in boats full of refugees and immigrants. It's time to move beyond the tired binaries: West vs. East, Islam vs. modernity, stability vs. chaos. The real battle is between integrity and hypocrisy, between memory and amnesia. Only when Western powers hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others can we begin to imagine a different future for the Muslim world. Let that future be written not in the language of conquest or control but in the vernacular of justice, sovereignty and dignity - and hope for a better future for the Muslim world. Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Blenheim Palace replaces stolen gold lavatory with £10 substitute
Blenheim Palace has replaced its stolen golden lavatory with a replica with which visitors can pay £10 to take a selfie. The historic country house, which was the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, is planning to put the attraction in the Water Terraces. It comes after the original £4.75 million golden lavatory artwork, named America, was stolen from the Spencer-Churchill's family home back in 2019. Five men broke into the palace using sledgehammers, before ripping out the solid gold lavatory and fleeing in a stolen Volkswagen. The working lavatory, plumbed as part of an exhibition by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, had been on display for just under a week before it was taken. James Sheen, 40, Michael Jones, 39, Fred Doe, 36, and Bora Guccuk, 41, were accused of being part of a gang who planned and carried out the 'bold and brazen' burglary of the Oxfordshire stately home. Sheen was jailed for four years after pleading guilty to burglary and transferring criminal property in 2024, while Jones was found guilty of burglary in March 2025 and sentenced to 27 months. Doe, from Windsor, was convicted of conspiracy to sell the stolen gold and given a 21-month-long suspended sentence in May, while Guccuk, from west London, was cleared of the same charge. The golden lavatory was probably melted down after it was stolen and has not been recovered since. Blenheim Palace said the replica, which has been spray-painted gold and stuck to an old pallet, is 'aimed to be a fun focal point for visitors to sit down for a selfie with a difference.' A spokesman for Blenheim Palace said: 'We take the theft of any property extremely seriously, but with the incredible global interest in the golden toilet theft and the recent court case coming to a conclusion, we thought some light hearted amusement with a budget alternative in our gardens would raise a smile and become an unlikely new stop-off point for visitors to our stunning gardens.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Three Dramatic Consequences of Israel's Attack on Iran
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. 'Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,' Winston Churchill observed in his magisterial biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. 'Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.' So it was then, and so it is today. Iran's war with Israel is rooted in the Islamic Republic's inveterate hostility to the Jewish state. It has consisted of multiple campaigns, including terror attacks against Jewish communities abroad (Argentina in 1994, for example) and missile salvos aimed at Israel (including from Lebanon and Iran itself last year). But three great events—the smashing of Hezbollah, the Syrian revolution that overthrew the Iranian-aligned regime, and now a climactic battle waged by long-range strikes and Mossad hit teams in Tehran—are changing the Middle East. We are living through the kind of moment that Churchill described. Israel's current campaign is built around two realities often missed by so-called realists: first, that the Iranian government is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and cannot be deterred, bought off, or persuaded to do otherwise, and second, that Israel reasonably believes itself to be facing an existential threat. When I served as counselor of the State Department during the second Bush administration, I had, among other keepsakes on my desk, an Iranian banknote picked up in Dubai. When I held it up to the light, I could see the sign of an atom superimposed over a map of Iran, with its nucleus roughly over Natanz, site of the major Iranian centrifuge hall. The banknote was a symbol of the determination that successive American governments chose to ignore, preferring to negotiate with a regime whose bad faith and malevolence were plain for those willing to see. The Iranian regime was happy to delay and temporize, but its destination was clearly visible in the expanding overt and covert programs to enrich uranium, design warheads, and develop delivery systems. Equally visible was Tehran's desire to destroy Israel. It takes a particular kind of idiocy or bad faith to disregard the speeches, propaganda, and shouts of 'death to Israel.' The Israeli lesson learned from the previous century—and, indeed, the Jewish one learned over a much longer span of time—is that if someone says they want to exterminate you, they mean it. And so Israel has acted in ways that have had three dramatic consequences. The first is the emergence of a distinct mode of warfare, already apparent in some of Ukraine's operations in Russia, that combines special operations with precision long-range strikes. Special operations are nothing new—the British secret services of the time played a role in a nearly successful bomb plot against Napoleon. But the innovation is combining large-scale and systematic use of assassinations and sabotage with nearly simultaneously precision strikes. Similar techniques helped decapitate Hezbollah's leadership and devastate its middle ranks while smashing its arsenals, but Israel's campaign against Iran is on an altogether different scale. This mode of warfare will not work everywhere, but in this case Israeli special operations helped neuter Iran's defenses and kill many of its senior leaders and nuclear scientists. The sobering lesson for the United States is that others can, at some point, do this to us more easily than we might be able to use these methods against a country like China. It is, in any event, part of the new face of war. The second is the way that the wars that began with Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, have reshaped the Middle East. Iran's position had been drastically weakened through the loss of its proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria, and now this current round of attacks has the potential to jeopardize the Iranian regime itself. The Iranian regime has delivered only misery and repression to its people. In return it was once offered religious and revolutionary zeal, which has been largely replaced by cynicism and hatred of the leadership. It had, and has now lost, imperial reach throughout the Middle East and beyond. The very last thing it offered was the prestige of its pursuit of nuclear weapons—weapons that Westerners may view with horror, but that others in the world (think India and Pakistan, for example) value quite differently. After losing all of these achievements to its own brutality and incompetence, as well as Israeli hit squads and fighter-bombers, all that the regime has left are its mechanisms of repression. Ultimately, those will not suffice to sustain it. Israel (and for that matter the United States) does not overtly aim at overthrowing the regime; neither has the intention of invading the country in the manner of Iraq in 2003. But a form of regime change may come—possibly through public upheaval, or just as likely through the rise of some strongman, probably from the military or security services, who will take Iran in a different direction. Perhaps such a strongman will lead Iran to some dark new place. But he could also proceed along the lines of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, denouncing and disposing of some of the current elite on charges of treachery, incompetence, and corruption to consolidate his power, and then acting as a dictatorial modernizer. That would be the first step on a much better path for Iran and the rest of the world. The Western world has reason, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said, to be grateful to Israel for doing the 'dirty work' of smashing Iran's nuclear program, because a nuclear-armed Iran would be a menace not just to Israel but to the wider Middle East and to the West. Which brings us to the third great shift in moods and atmospheres, the characteristically over-the-top, bellicose rhetoric of Donald Trump. At first the American government hastened to distance itself from the Israeli attacks, in a swift and now rather embarrassing statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But over time the president, communicating through explosive statements on Truth Social, began using the first-person plural in talking about the Israeli attacks, celebrating the American military hardware used in the attack, threatening worse to come, musing about killing the supreme leader of Iran, and clearly contemplating finishing the job of destroying the Iranian nuclear complex by sending B-2 bombers to deliver 15-ton GBU-57 penetrating bombs on the deeply subterranean Fordow facility. This has aroused consternation among some of his core supporters, such as Tucker Carlson (dismissed by the president as 'kooky') and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and required the dispatch of Vice President J. D. Vance to quiet the protests of the isolationist, and in some cases borderline anti-Semitic, wing of the MAGA movement. Trump's turnaround is less surprising when one considers his political gifts, among them a feral instinct for weakness. He is a politician who is willing to kick opponents when they are down, and enjoys doing just that. He senses, far better than most of his advisers and experts, just how weak Iran is. No doubt as well, he delights in the opportunity to punish the regime that plotted to assassinate him in 2024. And he has aspirations to be not a warlord, much though he delights in military bluster and show, but a kind of peacemaker. He understands that a different kind of Iran—if not a democratic one, then a tamed dictatorship—would be open for deals, and he would gladly make them. He has engaged more with the Persian Gulf in recent years than with any other part of the world, and sees opportunities there. He believes that the price would be low, and although the Israelis have done the heavy lifting, he will get the credit from them and others for the finishing touches. Trump has undoubtedly already authorized various forms of support to Israel's campaign. He may or may not order the dropping of GBU-57s on Fordow. But he has, in any case, supported actions that are doing far more than those of any of his predecessors to eliminate a threat that has already killed American soldiers and civilians as well as many others, and that would be infinitely worse if left unchecked. Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
a day ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Three Dramatic Consequences of Israel's Attack on Iran
'Battles are the principal milestones in secular history,' Winston Churchill observed in his magisterial biography of the Duke of Marlborough in 1936. 'Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth … But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.' So it was then, and so it is today. Iran's war with Israel is rooted in the Islamic Republic's inveterate hostility to the Jewish state. It has consisted of multiple campaigns, including terror attacks against Jewish communities abroad (Argentina in 1994, for example) and missile salvos aimed at Israel (including from Lebanon and Iran itself last year). But three great events—the smashing of Hezbollah, the Syrian revolution that overthrew the Iranian-aligned regime, and now a climactic battle waged by long-range strikes and Mossad hit teams in Tehran—are changing the Middle East. We are living through the kind of moment that Churchill described. Israel's current campaign is built around two realities often missed by so-called realists: first, that the Iranian government is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and cannot be deterred, bought off, or persuaded to do otherwise, and second, that Israel reasonably believes itself to be facing an existential threat. When I served as counselor of the State Department during the second Bush administration, I had, among other keepsakes on my desk, an Iranian banknote picked up in Dubai. When I held it up to the light, I could see the sign of an atom superimposed over a map of Iran, with its nucleus roughly over Natanz, site of the major Iranian centrifuge hall. The banknote was a symbol of the determination that successive American governments chose to ignore, preferring to negotiate with a regime whose bad faith and malevolence were plain for those willing to see. The Iranian regime was happy to delay and temporize, but its destination was clearly visible in the expanding overt and covert programs to enrich uranium, design warheads, and develop delivery systems. Equally visible was Tehran's desire to destroy Israel. It takes a particular kind of idiocy or bad faith to disregard the speeches, propaganda, and shouts of 'death to Israel.' The Israeli lesson learned from the previous century—and, indeed, the Jewish one learned over a much longer span of time—is that if someone says they want to exterminate you, they mean it. And so Israel has acted in ways that have had three dramatic consequences. The first is the emergence of a distinct mode of warfare, already apparent in some of Ukraine's operations in Russia, that combines special operations with precision long-range strikes. Special operations are nothing new—the British secret services of the time played a role in a nearly successful bomb plot against Napoleon. But the innovation is combining large-scale and systematic use of assassinations and sabotage with nearly simultaneously precision strikes. Similar techniques helped decapitate Hezbollah's leadership and devastate its middle ranks while smashing its arsenals, but Israel's campaign against Iran is on an altogether different scale. This mode of warfare will not work everywhere, but in this case Israeli special operations helped neuter Iran's defenses and kill many of its senior leaders and nuclear scientists. The sobering lesson for the United States is that others can, at some point, do this to us more easily than we might be able to use these methods against a country like China. It is, in any event, part of the new face of war. The second is the way that the wars that began with Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, have reshaped the Middle East. Iran's position had been drastically weakened through the loss of its proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria, and now this current round of attacks has the potential to jeopardize the Iranian regime itself. The Iranian regime has delivered only misery and repression to its people. In return it was once offered religious and revolutionary zeal, which has been largely replaced by cynicism and hatred of the leadership. It had, and has now lost, imperial reach throughout the Middle East and beyond. The very last thing it offered was the prestige of its pursuit of nuclear weapons—weapons that Westerners may view with horror, but that others in the world (think India and Pakistan, for example) value quite differently. After losing all of these achievements to its own brutality and incompetence, as well as Israeli hit squads and fighter-bombers, all that the regime has left are its mechanisms of repression. Ultimately, those will not suffice to sustain it. Israel (and for that matter the United States) does not overtly aim at overthrowing the regime; neither has the intention of invading the country in the manner of Iraq in 2003. But a form of regime change may come—possibly through public upheaval, or just as likely through the rise of some strongman, probably from the military or security services, who will take Iran in a different direction. Perhaps such a strongman will lead Iran to some dark new place. But he could also proceed along the lines of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, denouncing and disposing of some of the current elite on charges of treachery, incompetence, and corruption to consolidate his power, and then acting as a dictatorial modernizer. That would be the first step on a much better path for Iran and the rest of the world. The Western world has reason, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said, to be grateful to Israel for doing the 'dirty work' of smashing Iran's nuclear program, because a nuclear-armed Iran would be a menace not just to Israel but to the wider Middle East and to the West. Which brings us to the third great shift in moods and atmospheres, the characteristically over-the-top, bellicose rhetoric of Donald Trump. At first the American government hastened to distance itself from the Israeli attacks, in a swift and now rather embarrassing statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But over time the president, communicating through explosive statements on Truth Social, began using the first-person plural in talking about the Israeli attacks, celebrating the American military hardware used in the attack, threatening worse to come, musing about killing the supreme leader of Iran, and clearly contemplating finishing the job of destroying the Iranian nuclear complex by sending B-2 bombers to deliver 15-ton GBU-57 penetrating bombs on the deeply subterranean Fordow facility. This has aroused consternation among some of his core supporters, such as Tucker Carlson (dismissed by the president as 'kooky') and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and required the dispatch of Vice President J. D. Vance to quiet the protests of the isolationist, and in some cases borderline anti-Semitic, wing of the MAGA movement. Trump's turnaround is less surprising when one considers his political gifts, among them a feral instinct for weakness. He is a politician who is willing to kick opponents when they are down, and enjoys doing just that. He senses, far better than most of his advisers and experts, just how weak Iran is. No doubt as well, he delights in the opportunity to punish the regime that plotted to assassinate him in 2024. And he has aspirations to be not a warlord, much though he delights in military bluster and show, but a kind of peacemaker. He understands that a different kind of Iran—if not a democratic one, then a tamed dictatorship—would be open for deals, and he would gladly make them. He has engaged more with the Persian Gulf in recent years than with any other part of the world, and sees opportunities there. He believes that the price would be low, and although the Israelis have done the heavy lifting, he will get the credit from them and others for the finishing touches. Trump has undoubtedly already authorized various forms of support to Israel's campaign. He may or may not order the dropping of GBU-57s on Fordow. But he has, in any case, supported actions that are doing far more than those of any of his predecessors to eliminate a threat that has already killed American soldiers and civilians as well as many others, and that would be infinitely worse if left unchecked. Much as it may pain his critics to admit it, in this matter he is acting, if not conventionally, then like a statesman of a distinctively Trumpian stamp.
Vogue
2 days ago
- Vogue
This Classic Dolce Vita Hotel in Portofino Has Reopened With a Very 'Splendido' Makeover
No matter where you're coming from, Portofino isn't the easiest spot to reach. This crown jewel of the Italian Riviera—and corner of the world long beloved by the international jet set—sits the furthest tip of a small peninsula that juts out into the Mediterranean, requiring a drive along hair-raising roads, winding their way along the dramatic cliffs and bays that run from Genoa in one direction, or the north of Tuscany in the other. But once you arrive, you quickly understand why people make the effort. Portofino is Italy at its breeziest and most beautiful: a picture-postcard jumble of colorful buildings clustered around an impossibly picturesque harbor, with church spires and lush forests above and the shimmering Ligurian Sea beyond. You'll need to head up one of the nearby hills, however, to discover the Italian Riviera's real crown jewel: Splendido, A Belmond Hotel. Once an abandoned Benedictine monastery, the property was completely overhauled in the 19th century to become the eye-poppingly lavish summer home of an Italian baron; in 1902, it opened its doors as a hotel for the first time, quickly becoming a hot spot for some of the world's most glittering stars. And when I say glittering, I mean glittering: The list of former guests includes everyone from the Duke of Windsor to Winston Churchill, Grace Kelly to Madonna; the hotel was even one of the few constants in Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's turbulent romance, with Burton proposing with an enormous Bulgari rock on one of its famous wisteria-clad terraces. (And if you needed further proof the hotel has lost none of its shine, more recent overnighters include the likes of Dua Lipa—that's a woman who knows how to holiday.)
