The War Against Israel

Eight Israeli civilians were killed today by Hezbollah which fired 130 rockets at Israel within a ninety-minute period. 130 in 90 minutes! And at such a tiny country! Israel is smaller than Wales. Just imagine if humdreds rockets were fired from Scotland, say, at Wales with a view to wiping Wales off the map and murdering all Welsh people. If only a small number of rockets were fired at Britain day after day, it would be at war.

Can anyone doubt that if Britain was subjected to the kind of bombardment Israel has been enduring, with 100, 150, 200 rockets per day being fired at its towns and cities with the express purpose of wiping it out altogether, Britain’s armed forces would be responding with ferocity to put a stop to it?

Yet in Britain, the rules for the Jewish state are totally different. Israel is under genocidal attack, Ahmadinejad says the way to achieve peace in the Middle East is for Israel to be destroyed, one third of Israel is living in bomb shelters, its defence forces have their hands tied behind their backs because Hezbollah has hidden its rockets among civilians with the monstrous intention that as many of them as possible should be killed in order to turn the west against Israel victims; and yet as Haaretz reports, the Edinburgh Film Festival has barred an Israeli film director from the screening of his own work because ‘it might be in your best interest not to attend the festival this year for your own sake, rather than for ours’,

BBC News Online thinks the most important news of the day is; Lebanon damage ‘holding up’ aid Aid agencies in Lebanon say the severe damage to roads and bridges by Israeli air strikes is having a drastic effect on distribution of badly needed aid. Goods can only be transported in small lorries for fears that larger vehicles will be targeted, they say,

and Tony Blair is under siege from his Labour MPs who are consumed with righteous anger not against Hezbollah which is using the Lebanese as human shields, not against Ahmadinejad for his neo-Hitlerian agenda, but against Israel, their chosen victims, for refusing this time to line up passively to be slaughtered. Thus the Labour party and much of Britain (along with similarly-minded folk elsewhere: the New York Times is on this vile bandwagon, too) respond to genocidal aggression by viciously turning upon its designated victims for having the gall to defend themselves.

If, heaven forbid, this does turn into a second Holocaust, we can now discern the key difference from the first one. This time the Jews will be blamed for their own destruction. And this time, the political left and the media will have blood on their hands. Indeed, they already do. The lies, libels and distortions, the selective reporting and omissions, the egregious double standards, the moral inversion which turns jihadi murderers into resistance fighters and their victims into war criminals.

The willingess to report Hezbollah propaganda as the truth while disparaging Israeli statements as lies (when they are even reported at all), not to mention the ancient canards against the Jews now being blurted out everywhere from California to Canary Wharf – all are not only creating a lethal climate of increasingly hysterical hatred against Israel and the Jews, but are also egging on the terror-puppeteers of the jihad and recruiting yet more to the cause of murdering Jews and waging holy war against the west.

As ever, Mark Steyn lays bare the savage truth:

For centuries, Jews were viewed as sinister wandering rootless cosmopolitan figures of no national allegiance. So they became a conventional sovereign state and now they’re hated for that. The standard defense is that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israeli policies, but, as Miss Campbell’s letter suggests, what’s being questioned is not Israel’s policies but the right of Israel to have policies, especially on national security.

If, say, some fellows in Mexico had kidnapped California State Troopers and were lobbing rockets randomly into residential areas of San Diego and Los Angeles, even La-La-Land libs would be demanding the US respond. It’s only the Israelis the world wishes to deny the conventional rights of sovereignty.

In other words, it’s the legitimacy of the state that’s at issue. In effect, Israel has become the geopolitical version of the European Jew who’s allowed to operate a store in the town but not to exercise full ownership rights: in the old days, Jews faced property restrictions; now they face sovereignty restrictions.

The old chestnut that to be anti-Israel is not necessarily to be anti-Jew won’t wash. Antisemitism is protean. It changes shape from generation to generation. First, Jews were hated on account of their religion. Then they were hated on account of their (supposed) race. And now they are hated on account of their nation state. Just as the individual Jew was once made the universal scapegoat for the crimes of others, now the collective Jew in the Jewish state is being forced to play the same role.

Israel is the defining moral issue of our time. Appallingly, Britain has put itself on the wrong side. The prejudice that now consumes what passes for public debate simply puts it beyond the moral pale. What is happening now in Britain is shocking beyond words.

Gamla
08.07.2006