Taiwan has a "far more robust" claim to statehood than Palestine does, former British prime minister Boris Johnson said during a conference in Taipei, Taiwan, according to a Tuesday report by British outlet The Telegraph.
Taiwan has a "recognized government...boundaries that they control...a proper democratic system, none of which you could say, with all due respect, about Palestine," Johnson is cited as saying during a speech at the Ketagalan Forum.
The UK does not officially recognize Taiwanese sovereignty, and the current British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is set to recognize Palestinian statehood in September.
Johnson, in an interview with US outlet NewsNation, said it's ridiculous for the UK to recognize Palestine as a state.
Johnson: Sinwar could never have dreamed of UK recognizing Palestinian state
"Never in the wildest dreams of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, can he have believed – when he and his colleagues instigated the horror of October 7, 2023 – that only 22 months later the United Kingdom itself would be so craven and pathetic as to fall for Hamas propaganda and to turn against Israel," Johnson wrote in his column in the UK outlet Daily Mail on Friday.
"Never did Hamas imagine that London would be so easily manipulated as to conclude that the way to end the crisis was specifically to reward Hamas for its mayhem by tearing up its long-standing policy and officially recognising the state of Palestine," he added.
"From next month we are going to recognise this territory, at least partly controlled by Hamas, as a fully-fledged state – like France, or the United States," he continued.
"By recognising Palestine, the UK government is effectively claiming that Palestine is an entity with recognised borders, even though those borders are, of course, very far from clear, and the UK is claiming that Palestine has a viable government, when that government is actually shared between Fatah and Hamas, and Hamas, in case you have forgotten, is a psychotic Islamofascist death cult that treats women as second-class citizens and throws gays off rooftops," he stated.
"We thought it was worthwhile to rid the world of a homicidal Islamist death cult, and we were right. It was awful, but we could see no other way. In the end, it worked, and in the end – grim though things now seem – the Israeli operation will work in Gaza," Johnson added.
Johnson: 'Israel is right to try to remove the terrorist regime in Gaza'
"No government can live next door to another government that is expressly dedicated to killing your entire population. That is why Israel is right to try to remove the terrorist regime in Gaza, and that is why the UK is so wrong to puff Hamas and offer recognition now," he affirmed.
"Starmer’s gesture will do nothing to bring peace, nothing to accelerate a two-state solution, and nothing to bring back the hostages. But of course it has nothing to do with any of those foreign policy objectives: it was about Starmer’s oscillation between his own two states – a state of constipated paralysis, and a state of panic about the Labour Party. We are pointlessly p***ing in the wind," he concluded.