The west's moral confusion
Liberals cannot acknowledge the sources of evil, let alone defeat them
As was all too predictable, the war in Gaza is producing moral confusion in the west as people struggle to reconcile the evidence of unambiguous evil directed at the Jews with the innate liberal resistance to doing what is needed to defeat it.
People are nodding along sagely to the warnings that Israel must exercise “restraint”. In Monday’s Times of London (£), the former Conservative party leader William Hague argued that Israel must avoid the trap that had been set for it. The Hamas strategy, wrote Hague, was to provoke Israel into such uncontrollable rage at last Saturday’s atrocities that it would start a war so intense it would spread to other fronts and “bring down the ceiling on the whole region”.
As Israel now prepares to direct its bombers against Gaza City, it has warned the city’s 1.1 million residents to evacuate to the south. The UN has called for this order to be rescinded because of the risk of “devastating humanitarian consequences,” transforming “what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation”.
To all of which a few things need to be said.
We don’t need anyone to tell us of the dangers of this war spreading. We don’t need anyone to tell us of the likely hostile reaction from the world if Israel pulverises Gaza. But what exactly would Hague suggest Israel should do? What does he think “restraint” should look like given what Israel is up against? He doesn’t say because, as Gerard Baker asks in today’s Times, what exactly is “restraint” in the face of genocide?
As Baker notes, Israel has learnt bitter lessons in the past from exercising restraint in response to international demands. In all its wars, it has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid taking civilian casualties. It has previously achieved a ratio of combatants to civilians killed lower than any other nation on earth. It got no credit whatever for this from the west. Instead it was defamed, demonised and hounded for “war crimes”. And the result of this past “restraint” was the 1300 (and counting) slaughtered in the Hamas pogrom.
If there was a way to defeat Hamas without a war in which many civilians will unfortunately die, Israel would take it. There isn’t one. Those calling for “restraint” therefore mean Israel must not defeat Hamas, which would sentence yet more Israeli civilians to be murdered.
Yes, the prospects for Gaza’s civilians are frightful. And the death of civilians is always to be regretted. But this is war. In war there are civilian casualties. And what other army warns its enemy civilians, as Israel has done consistently during this (and every) war, to get out of harm’s way before it strikes?
When the US carpet-bombed Afghanistan after 9/11, or when it razed Mosul to the ground in Iraq, did it issue warnings to the civilians to evacuate? Of course not. Did the west’s virtue-signallers clutch their pearls then and demand that America show “restraint” because of the likely civilian casualties? Of course not; there was near silence.
When Britain and the allies carpet-bombed Nazi Germany, did anyone protest and call for “restraint”? Other than a few pacifists, of course not. People understood that this was a war to defend the existence of a free Britain and a free Europe. Israel is now fighting for its own existence against Iran-backed forces which are pursuing a genocidal agenda out of the Nazi playbook.
That was why Israel’s former prime minister Naftali Bennett let fly against the Sky News reporter who asked him what Israel was doing about the babies in Gaza’s hospitals whose incubators would have to be turned off because Israel had cut Gaza’s power. Responded a furious Bennett:
Are you seriously keeping on asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you? Have you not seen what’s happened? We’re fighting Nazis.
France’s president Emanuel Macron also doesn’t seem to understand this point. Urging Israel to show “restraint”, he said:
This is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians but between a terrorist group and a society of democratic values.
Wrong. Israel is not at war with a “terrorist group”. It is fighting for its survival against Iran and its proxies, which are prosecuting their genocidal agenda to wipe Israel and every Jew off the face of the earth. We know that is their aim because they tell us so; we know it by their actions; we saw it in the depravity of the Hamas death squads who set out to butcher Jews because they were Jews.
As for the UN, this is the body which, year in, year out lends support and legitimisation to those countries and regimes which want Israel destroyed — and which itself adds to the incitement against Israel through the UN’s own obsessive campaign of defamation, blood libels and other lies.
The UN is the body purportedly promoting “peace and justice” which refrains from condemning Hamas for tyrannising the people of Gaza, and for holding the entire civilian population as effective hostages and human shields by siting its missile batteries in and around apartment blocks, schools and hospitals. Hamas has now told the Gazans than Israel’s warning to evacuate Gaza City is false and they must stay put. That’s because Hamas wants them killed. Yet on this the UN is silent.
No surprise: in Gaza, like everything else there, the UN is under the Hamas thumb. Schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) teach Gazan children to hate and murder Jews, as you can see here. This is what these UN-taught children are saying:
“Right now, I am prepared to be a suicide bomber.”
“With Allah's help, I will fight for ISIS, the Islamic State.”
“I am ready to stab a Jew and drive a car over them.”
“We have to constantly stab them, drive over them, and shoot them.”
“Stabbing and running over Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians.”
The reason the west is always in uproar over the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza has nothing to do with concern for the Palestinians in Gaza. If westerners were concerned for them, they would be in uproar over the oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza by the Palestinians who rule them.
The uproar over Israel’s wars in Gaza is because support for the Palestinians and bigotry against Israel are normative among western liberals. They have thoroughly assimilated the lie that Israel is reckless and callous with Palestinian lives. Not only is this the opposite of the truth; by supporting the Palestinians, the west is supporting the heirs to the Nazis.
That’s because it’s not just Hamas which acts out of the Nazi playbook. The supposedly “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority (PA), wrote his doctorate in vicious Holocaust denial and openly venerates Hitler’s ally in the Middle East, the Mufti of Jersualem Haj Amin al Husseini, who pledged to Hitler that he would annihilate every Jew in the Middle East.
The PA pumps out media and educational materials that recycle Nazi tropes demonising Jews, and teach Palestinian children that their highest calling is to murder Jews and steal their land.
Fatah, the largest party in the PA, has praised Hamas as the “forces of heroism” for the Simchat Torah pogrom, and has called on the Palestinian public to “answer the calls to confront” Israel and escalate the situation on the ground “in every conflict area and throughout the homeland”.
Despite all this, and again all too predictably, the west is now now dividing the Palestinian Arabs into the “bad” Palestinians of Hamas and the “good” Palestinians who are all the others. The distinction is false, ignorant and dangerous. Those who make it demonstrate not only that they don’t understand the Palestinian cause is a war to destroy the Jewish state and to kill Jews because they are Jews. It also shows they haven’t a clue about the danger now facing the west itself from within.
Hamas isn’t just a fanatic sect in the Middle East supported by a few crazies in the west. It promotes jihadi holy war in accordance with the ideology promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood. That holy war has western civilisation squarely within its sights.
In the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead (whose recent book The Arc of a Covenant displays monumental naivety and delusion about the Palestinians and their non-negotiable, existential war against Israel’s existence) writes ($) :
The ability of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a member) to advance democracy in the Arab world has sustained a staggering, perhaps fatal blow. Until the Brotherhood unambiguously repudiates Hamas, its credibility as a stabilising democratic force will collapse.
This is ridiculous. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood, as were ISIS and al Qaeda.
The Brotherhood tailors its approach for different societies. It is embedded across the west in institutions and organisations which are careful there to use non-violent means to further its global aim: to capture the non-Islamic (or not Islamic-enough) world and replace their culture by Islamic rule. To suggest that it was ever a “stabilising democratic force” displays quite staggering ignorance. As Egypt’s president Abdel Fatah al Sisi said, after the catastrophic and oppressive year-long rule by the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi which was ended when al Sisi removed him in 2013 :
The Muslim Brotherhood has been eating away at the mind and body of Egypt for 90 years.
The Brotherhood is behind a global network of Sunni jihadi groups sowing terror and mass murder. Yet the west continues to look the other way. Neither the UK nor US will proscribe it. In 2022, the Egyptian-American scholar Cynthia Farahat wrote in the Jerusalem Post:
While Hamas, Islamic State (IS, ISIS), the Islamic Jihad and various other Islamist organizations are designated as terrorist groups, the US has refused to designate as a terrorist enterprise the very organisation that spawned them. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood continues to churn out Islamic terrorists at a shocking rate, actively seeking to undermine western societies…
The enterprise serving as the command and control of the world’s radical Islamic theology continues to be the Muslim Brotherhood. Most Americans know al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas from the headlines recounting the carnage of their strikes on civilians.
However, the Muslim Brotherhood is the organisation that is proselytising American hatred to its members, those who stay within the organisation as political soldiers, and those who are spun off to organise separate terrorist groups…
The Muslim Brotherhood benefits from the west’s ethnocentric arrogance. It maintains our wilful ignorance about its organisation. Further, jihadist groups conceal their operational discourses in Islamic terminology, religious edicts and sermons precisely because they are obscure to Westerners.
In other words, westerners will believe what Islamists tell them in English and disregard what the Islamists are saying in either their native languages or buried in their cloaked communication techniques. But we can no longer remain ignorant of the Muslim Brotherhood’s game plan…
Unless western democracies tear down the ideological support provided by the Muslim Brotherhood, a game of terrorist whack-a-mole will continue endlessly.
Until the west properly understands the Islamist threat to civilisation, westerners will continue to facilitate evil in the Middle East — even as they flinch from the depravity and barbarism that follow.
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