First test results are in

Yesterday I proposed a test to identify evil in our midst. One half of it dealt with Gaza.

The test is simple and binary: any Westerner who supports HAMAS savagery and believes Israel has only herself to blame is evil. Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether the support is overt (see the photo) or camouflaged.

The latter category includes pretensions of even-handedness, assurances that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem, reminders that “it takes two to tango”, fulsome abhorrence of violence in general, calls for immediate peace at any price. (Today I’m disengaging Gaza and the Ukraine, but all the same observations hold true for responses to both HAMAS’s and Russia’s savagery.)

However, I omitted to mention that what went for individuals also went for organisations. That omission calls for immediate correction, starting with left-wing student groups all over Britain.

Wide swathes of our fledgling intellectual elite are “inspired” by videos of decapitated babies and some such. According to Warwick University’s Palestine group, the attackers are “martyrs” resisting a “vile occupation” by an “apartheid state”.

Justice for Palestine, a University College London group, hailed the decapitators for “freeing the world”.

A similar group at the London School of Economics both anticipates and deplores Israel’s response by stating that it is “heartbroken and enraged as another wave of brutal and indiscriminate violence prepares to unleash itself against the Palestinian people of Gaza.”

The University of East Anglia’s student union is duly appalled – by Israel’s “crimes”: “Those who exercise their internationally recognised right to resist such crimes are being met with force by the Israeli occupation forces.”

I’ve heard of youthful impetuosity, but this goes beyond everything I’ve ever heard. However, it’s always good to learn something new: it turns out that the right to slit babies’ throats, fire indiscriminately at crowds of defenceless people, rape children male and female, enjoys international recognition.

A new fact doesn’t amount to knowledge unless it is confirmed. Such confirmation promptly arrived, this time not from adolescents but from grown-ups, specifically those who run the UN and the EU.

In my comments on those organisations, I’ve always exercised self-restraint by resisting the temptation to call them evil. “Wicked” is as far as I’ve gone. However, to quote Barry Goldwater, “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Both organisations have failed my test by first making a barely perceptible nod towards Israel’s right to fight back, but then expressing their full-blooded opprobrium of any serious attempt to exercise that right.

Thus the UN’s top diplomat Josep Borrell is deeply concerned with Israel’s response to the greatest savagery Jews have faced since the Holocaust:

“Israel has the right to defend (itself) but it has to be done accordingly with international law, humanitarian law, and some decisions are contrary to international law,” he said. “Some of the actions – (such) as cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people is against international law.”

In other words, while Israelis are being slaughtered with nauseating sadism, Israel is supposed to keep up its supplies of water, electricity and food to HAMAS-run Gaza. International law says so. Does it also say Israel should equip HAMAS with arms by any chance?

Mr Borrell would do me a great favour if he were to name one modern war in which victims of brutal aggressions continued to supply their assailants throughout. “Israel has the right to defend itself, provided she doesn’t succeed.” There, Mr Borrell, isn’t this closer to what you really mean?

Speaking of evil organisations, Black Lives Matter gets top marks for honesty. Unlike the UN and EU that have to maintain a veneer of respectability, BLM doesn’t pull punches.

Its Chicago chapter posted a graphic of a HAMAS murderer paragliding into Israel. The caption said: “I stand with Palestine”. I’m amazed they didn’t illustrate what that parachutist did next. The impulse to do so must have been strong: black activists of any kind, especially BLM, are easily the most anti-Semitic group in America.

In my day, ‘black leaders’ like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Andrew Young et al. routinely made pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic statements. Jackson, for example, tended to refer to New York as “Hymietown”.

Such sentiments struck a chord with even educated blacks. One of them, my NASA co-worker, explained that the blacks hated Jews because they lent them money and then demanded repayment.

As someone who has often found himself on the receiving end of financial services, I sympathise. After all, you borrow someone else’s money but pay back your own. However, I didn’t hate NatWest when I repaid my mortgage. Many American blacks, on the other hand, do hate Jews, and what my colleague cited was a pretext, not the reason.

BLM keeps that fine tradition alive by depicting the current situation as strictly a racial clash. Actually, Arabs and Jews belong to the same Semitic race, but, as Pascal observed, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of” (Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne con​naît point).

In that spirit BLM posted another visual, showing two groups of celebrities. The caption asked the rhetorical question: “Notice anything about those who support Israel and those who support Palestine?”

What the audience is expected to notice is that the first group are all white people, most of them, such as David Schwimmer and Sarah Poulson, Jewish, whereas the second group is made up of blacks, such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.

Not belonging to the assumed target audience, I also noticed that all three models weren’t just any old blacks but those involved in the odd bit of terrorism. Obviously, according to BLM, propensity for violence is essential to blackness.

Evil comes out of the woodwork gloating all over the world. But at least it does come out, for all to see its contorted face. Meanwhile, we must brace ourselves for what’s coming in our predominantly ‘liberal’ (meaning illiberal) media.

Once the initial shock of decapitated Israeli babies dies out, the newspapers and airwaves will be flooded with pictures of destroyed tower blocks in Gaza and dead Palestinians. These will be accompanied by long stories couched in bien pensant terms but leaving no one in doubt as to which side the media support.

As you toss a slipper at the TV screen or a newspaper into the bin, I hope you’ll remember the test I proposed. For evil doesn’t have to scowl savagely. It may also introduce itself with a beneficent smile. Yet the scowling and smiling varieties are equally evil because they share a common DNA.

I hope Israel stamps out that particular specimen of evil once and for all. Someone has to.

P.S. I wish we had more black people like Floyd Mayweather — no, scratch ‘black’. I wish we had more good people like Floyd Mayweather. The boxing champ sent to Israel his private jet loaded with aid. “I stand with Israel,” he said. So do I — and I also stand with Floyd Mayweather.