Thursday, 3 December 2015

Hilary Benn's great war speech: a paraphrase

Please could the PM say sorry for bullying my friend Jezza. People disagree, but that's OK. Well done to those that made interesting speeches about it, by the way.

The issue looks complex but it's actually simple. Some people are dropping bombs on some other, bad people. Should we join in? The things they did in Paris could have happened to you, after all.

We are already bombing Iraq, so we should bomb Syria too. We have already discussed this and agreed we should anyway, and the UN say we are allowed to because there are bad people in Syria too. In fact, the UN say we should. We invented the UN, by the way, we know all about the UN, and if they say we should, we should. Anyway, people in Iraq and thereabouts want us to, and lots of other people are doing it.  

Yes, the fighting in Syria should stop. People are already talking about this, and about who should be in charge afterwards. This is important because it will help beat the bad guys in the long run and those migrants will go away at last.

Let me remind you, the bad guys do exceptionally bad things, and some day they might do them to us. Should we really do nothing about it? Are you saying we should just leave it up to those other people already dropping bombs? What will they think if we don't join in? They want us to join in. We're already doing it in Iraq. Some people say there's no point, but the good guys say it seems to have worked in Iraq. I know it's a shame when we kill the wrong people by mistake, but the bad guys do that deliberately.

Now some people say we don't know how many good guys there are in Syria and that the good guys are already busy with other bad guys, but if we don't drop bombs on our bad guys they'll kill more of the good guys and then there will be even less, so we shouldn't wait until the good guys aren't busy with the other bad guys any more. This doesn't mean we don't also ask people not to help the bad guys or don't also help the good guys ourselves now and afterwards, by the way.

Some people who say we shouldn't drop bombs do have a point, and it is a difficult decision, but we have to deal with this now and there is never going to be a good time for this sort of thing anyway. The good guys in Iraq have pointed out how helpful bombing is there and that the bad guys don't care about the difference between Syria and Iraq.

I am going to finish by talking to Jezza's mates. You know we have never not helped someone just because they're from another country. And the bad guys in Syria think they're better than us, and what makes them bad is actually the opposite of what makes us good. You can't ignore this kind of bad guy, you have to deal with them, and we have done so before, so we should again.

Specifically, by dropping bombs like the PM says.  

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