Well, well, well. Another Tuesday in the Holy Land, and the carousel of carnage is spinning merrily. Six souls extinguished, including one Al Jazeera cameraman who, I presume, made the fatal mistake of pointing his lens at something the Israelis would rather keep in the dark. The response from Whitehall? A prim, pressed-lip call for 'restraint.' Restraint! As if Israel were a boisterous terrier at a garden party, not a state with a fondness for precision-guided munitions and a remarkable talent for missing the target.
The dead man's name? Abdul Aziz. He was filming the rubble of a destroyed school, because that's what passes for scenery in Gaza these days. His final frame, I'd wager, was a puff of smoke and a sudden, violent silence. The Al Jazeera office will now do what it does best: issue a statement of outrage, play the footage on loop, and wait for the next martyr to add to the montage. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defence Forces will issue a statement about 'terrorist infrastructure,' and the world will nod sagely and move on.
Ah, but Britain! Dear, deluded Britain. The Foreign Office, that palace of polite impotence, has 'urged restraint.' Restraint from what? From bombing civilians? That's rather like telling a cat to stop eating the canary because it's bad for its digestion. The cat will look at you, lick its whiskers, and continue its feast. And the canary? Well, the canary is just dead.
The real joke is that everyone knows the script. Israel will continue its strikes. Hamas will fire its pathetic rockets. The United Nations will wring its hands. And Britain will issue statements that sound like a headmaster's mild disappointment at a schoolboy's poor handwriting. 'Dear Israel, please try not to kill so many journalists. It makes us look bad at tea parties.'
But let's not forget the gin-soaked truth. This is theatre. Great, bloody, spectacular theatre. The actors are passionate, the stage is messy, and the audience is obliged to watch. The only question is how many encores we'll suffer before the curtain falls. And as for the cameraman? His final close-up is a smear of blood on a lens. Cut to commercial.
So raise a glass, dear reader. Raise it to Abdul Aziz, to the six forgotten souls, and to the sanctimonious suckers who think a strongly worded letter will solve anything. The show must go on, after all. And on it goes.