ISRAEL MUST BE STOPPED NOW !, page-4354

Declan Mansfield, The Spectator 29 January 2024

What occurred on the seventh of October in Israel was an atrocity of such monumental proportions that it is impossible for anyone with a semblance of fellow-feeling for other human beings to understand how anyone, after hearing accounts of the sadistic depravity, could defend Hamas or unequivocally support the Palestinians. It is the equivalent of learning about the mass graves of Babi Yar and the gas chambers of Majdanek and, instead of sympathising with the Jewish victims, supporting the SS, the Nazi party and the Germans during the second world war. Excusing the Palestinians and holding Israel responsible for the current war in Gaza is similar to blaming the Jews of Warsaw, who, about to be gassed in Treblinka, rebelled against the Nazis. It’s such an inversion of morality that ordinary people, after listening to the pro-Palestinian rhetoric of politicians, ‘human rights activists’ and journalists, must believe they have awakened to a dystopian nightmare where every moral virtue has been turned upside down.

The events of October the seventh should have shocked the conscience of the world. Instead of revulsion and an ocean of empathy directed towards the victims of such a catalogue of horrors, we have witnessed, across the globe, millions of people support the torturers, rapists, incinerators, mutilators and murderers of Hamas. Among a bestiality of barbarous acts, Hamas terrorists gang-raped, mutilated and murdered women, and burnt babies alive. And, let us not forget their co-conspirators, the seventy-two per cent of Palestinians who agreed, after the fact, that what Hamas did on that infernal day was a good and beautiful thing. To put the mass killing in perspective, Hamas most likely have been planning to commit such an atrocity since 2007, when Hamas murdered their political rivals and turned Gaza’s underground into a tunnelled military fortress. So much for humanitarian aid.

Suddenly we weren’t expected to ‘#Bring Back our Girls’ or ‘Believe all women’, the latter of which is an example of pure fatuous imbecility. But the hypocrisy and deafening silence of the propagators of that asinine notion, when faced with the gut-wrenching, despicable sexual abuse and appalling violence directed against women that day, was telling.

Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist organisation, who kidnapped the girls are, like Hamas, Islamic fundamentalists, but they are located a long way from Israel, which must be the reason for the difference in the response from the great and the good towards a similarly religiously motivated atrocity. Remember, the supposedly secular Fatah, in the West Bank, immediately supported Hamas. (Incidentally, there were no calls for the boys in Nigeria to come home because they had all been murdered).

If the Israeli people, though, are routinely conflated with their government, then we can call the members of Hamas what they are, Palestinians. Although, like the majority of the population of the Middle East, and to the mystification and ignorance of many pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who don’t know the river and can’t find the sea, Palestinians are Arabs, just like Bohemians are Czechs and Dubliners are Irish. The Arabs, to explain one reason why Israel is a legitimate country, were allocated almost all the land of the former Ottoman Empire and the indigenous Christians and Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews of North Africa and the Middle East were allotted two slivers of land in, respectively, Lebanon and Israel, but even that slender bequest was too much for their Arab, Muslim neighbours.

Also missing, for decades, from the conventional analysis about the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict is an understanding of what constitutes proportionality. The death of civilians is not necessarily a war crime. War, even in self-defence, would always be a crime using a definition which only measures the number of casualties. Proportionality is the effort required to neutralise the threat of future attacks on your territory or against your people. Until the threat Hamas poses is removed, Israel is following the internationally recognised rules of armed conflict. Remember, after the seventh of October, Hamas said they would repeat the atrocities a million times. Proportionality becomes an even more fraught issue when Hamas use women and children as human shields, and hospitals and schools as arms dumps and military headquarters. Hamas, who are an extremist Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organisation, similar in ideology to Isis, who have no respect for human rights, and who believe that martyrs automatically enter heaven, are the war criminals in this conflict and not, preposterously, the Israelis. Even the Nazis and the communists never deliberately put their own people in harm’s way to win a propaganda war.

A strange anti-reason and anti-moral ideology has taken over the world. It’s the antithesis of everything that ordinary people have believed for years in the liberal democratic West. How, though, did this perfect storm of madness happen? Multiple fringe ideas proliferated on the internet, spawned, and created a hydra-headed monster of irrationalism. Match the lunacy with the philosophy of the moment, the applied postmodernism of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which is the simplistic left-wing idea that the world is divided, in an absolutely black and white dichotomy, between the oppressors and the oppressed, then create an army of mal-educated activist bureaucrats and idiot tech savants, and the result is the madness and immorality we are experiencing, which upended centuries-old notions of justice. Your racial identity, through this lens, determines your guilt or innocence, and not your actions. Put simply, white skin is bad, and brown and black skin are good. It doesn’t matter that over 60 per cent of Israelis fall in the latter categories – they’re ‘intersectionally’ white. And like many times in the past, when the world fell for the latest fashionable lunacy, the Jews are the archetypal canaries in the coal mine, the touchstone of the zeitgeist, because what happens to the Jews will eventually, in some form, happen to everyone else. Supporting the theocrats of Palestine rather than the democrats of Israel is a sign the liberal democratic West is committing intellectual and moral suicide.