Israel, the only civilised country in the Middle East, has since Monday been hit by 1,600 rockets fired by Hamas savages.
You see, when you express this situation in such simple terms, it sheds all its superfluous baggage. Granted, simple runs the risk of being simplistic, and one may argue that Islamic civilisation has a rich heritage too.
It has, but it’s a very distant heritage. Over the past 500 years (I’m being generous here), Islam has created nothing but mayhem. The whole Muslim world has produced 10 Nobel Prizes, of which six are of the meaningless peace variety. By contrast, Trinity, Cambridge, just one college in one Western university, boasts 34, all of them for science.
As to other aspects of civilisation, the less said about them, the better. All in all, if we limit ourselves to the present and not-so-distant past, Israel is indeed the only civilised oasis in a region dominated by various stages of barbarism.
Yet even within the vast desert of Muslim ignorance and backwardness, the so-called Palestinians take the pita (‘so-called’ because the way the term is used, one might think Israelis aren’t Palestinians). Those eternal refugees are consumed with malice, hatred and fanaticism, neglecting more useful and productive emotions.
Anyway, how many generations does it take for refugees to stop being refugees? I’ve got news for the ‘Palestinians’: millions of people (including yours truly) don’t live in the countries of their birth. Search a few generations back, and that number will grow to hundreds of millions of those who can trace their roots to foreign lands.
And yet we all, including those who were driven out of their countries against their will, somehow manage to make a life for ourselves. Some shed most of their heritage, some keep more of it – some even retain ethnic rancour whose origin goes back centuries. But no one stays a refugee for three generations, the way the ‘Palestinians’ have.
Some Arab states, notably Jordan and Lebanon, did the charitable thing and allowed ‘Palestinians’ to settle in their countries. By way of gratitude, those wild-eyed maniacs started civil wars, reducing Jordan and especially Lebanon to a charnel house.
Nothing but their own savagery prevents the ‘Palestinians’ from acquiring their own state. All they have to do is acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and abandon their murderous urge to kill every Jew in the region (and preferably beyond). But they’ve always refused to make even such elementary concessions. And now that Gaza and the West Bank have been taken over by Hamas terrorists, violence is all the ‘Palestinians’ are committed to.
Violence is what they are perpetrating now, with those rockets whose provenance isn’t hard to trace. Both Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov are regularly photographed canoodling with Hamas chieftains, and Russia is one of the few countries that have refused to recognise that Hamas is an extremist and terrorist organisation. The ruling junta has a soft spot for terrorists, doubtless sensing spiritual kinship.
If Russia provides tangible support for Hamas, Western ‘liberals’ keep it afloat by proliferating pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli propaganda, with moral equivalence as its leitmotif. Thus both parties are being asked to exercise restraint during the current exchange of fire.
At the same time, the ‘liberal’ media never tire of pointing out that the ‘Palestinian’ civilian population is suffering the greater casualties. There you go then, goes the refrain. Those Israelis are bullying their ‘Palestinian’ victims.
The difference between the Israelis and the other lot is that the former are civilised and the latter are savages – and ideologised savages at that. To Israel, the people are the end; to any ideology, including Hamas, they are the means.
Every Israeli killed is the country’s tragedy. Every ‘Palestinian’ killed is Hamas’s propaganda tool. That’s why those rocket sites are placed close to hospitals, schools and tower blocks – sometimes even on the roofs of those buildings.
The Israelis are doing their best trying to avoid inflicting civilian casualties by delivering precision strikes against rocket sites and terrorist leaders. Unfortunately, some civilian casualties can’t be avoided because Hamas does nothing to protect its non-combatants. Its own strategy is to target residential areas indiscriminately, and only the extensive defensive measures taken by the Israelis are keeping the body count down.
What Hamas is doing is an extension of Islam’s mission pursued over the past 1,400 years. Muslims see their conflict with the West as a clash of civilisations, a mortal struggle in which only one side can be left standing. Yet Western ‘liberals’ refuse to accept the situation on those terms.
They too hate Western civilisation, with its Judaeo-Christian origin and hence emphasis on individual freedom. Proceeding from the old adage of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, they see any Third World demagogues and terrorists as their spiritual brethren, whose desiderata (if not necessarily their methods) they share and whose enemies they loathe.
Hamas and the ‘Palestinians’ qualify as spiritual brethren, while Israel, with its Western civilisation, amply qualifies as the enemy. Add to this a healthy dose of run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism, and it’s clear whose side the ‘liberals’ are on.
This animus is camouflaged with appeals to even-handedness and mutual restraint. Moral equivalence all around.
Yet as the founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I maintain that there is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between civilisation and barbarism. The former must triumph in Israel if it’s to survive anywhere.
I am a Jew by descent and upbringing, but I am also an atheist and therefore subscribe to no religion. I consider that religion, as such, is not what drives the violence of the Palestinians nor the justified responses of the Israelis. The situation in Israel/Palestine torments me; I long for a solution but cannot see one, or any way forward that is hopeful.
After the Nazi Holocaust Jews are reasonably justified in seeking a homeland where they can defend themselves against oppression. And the land of Israel is the most appropriate possible homeland. Unfortunately there is no uninhabited area of the world that could serve instead. So the original inhabitants of Israel/Palestine had an unpleasant choice: either share or refuse to share their natal territory with the newborn Israeli state. To share willingly was, I suspect, politically impossible for most Arabs. And it that may have been made more difficult than need be by the most aggressive faction(s) of the incomers.
Now, some sixty years later, violence is entrenched and malign external agents exploit the situation as hard as they can. It is very hard to imagine any desirable or even tolerable outcome.
It’s ironic that Israel is the most secular society in the Middle East, and yet ardent secularists, Stephen Hawking for example, loathe(d) the place.
There is also a particularly nuanced form of antisemitism exhibited by Western ‘liberals’ which goes something like this: “Of course we appreciate Jews, the Holocaust was awful of course, but we like Jews to be pale, intellectual, and ideally victims. People like Freud, Anne Frank or Woody Allen (the latter prior to #MeToo) The thought of all those muscular, tanned Israelis surging to victory over the Arab world in a mere six days simply won’t do!”
“the ‘liberal’ media never tire of pointing out that the ‘Palestinian’ civilian population is suffering the greater casualties.”
War of the weak [Palestinian] versus the strong [Israel]. As the media loves to point out an unfair fight. Perception rather than reality. But then you can say reality is perception.