The West is stuck in its arrogant torpor: thank God for Israel’s bravery
There’s the real world in which there are bullies, aggressors and perpetrators… and the proper response to them.
And then there’s the fake world of arrogant entitlement, a world in which right and wrong and life and death don’t seem to exist, in which the victim is blamed for angering, and then responding to, the bully. In which the bully becomes the victim as soon as anyone tries to stop them.
In which mendacious respectability requires the condemnation of war, escalation, and the inflammation of tensions – no matter what tensions, what war, what cause. In which anything is better than making the bully more angry. In which appeasement is the emotional and political order of the day.
In which winning is taboo. In which the “international community” and dubious “international law” are weaponised against the good guys.
Israel is the real world. It alone among Western nations is awake. It is fighting a multi-pronged war with its Iran-funded enemies, and it is a war waged to be won.
It is through the struggle of the Israeli nation that those in the la-la land of Western denial are finally being catapulted into reality, no longer able to remain ignorant to the forces of history.
While the great and the good cluck over fears of Israel pushing the region to the brink of all-out war, Israel is busy fighting a battle whose outcome could determine the fate of the entire world, in the West and beyond. Israel knows it is facing an existential threat. We don’t seem to, even though it is staring us in the face.
Iran, in cahoots with other Islamist territories, plus Russia and China, could well take us all down – and would stand a much greater chance of doing so if Israel was behaving with less warlike courage, clarity of mission, ingenuity and persistence.
Iran is an almost-nuclear power and its intentions for mass murder and destruction are not hidden, especially where “the Zionists” and America are concerned (the Great Satan and Little Satan).
Its endless proxy wars and campaigns of terror, its destabilising strategies and its myriad terror groups operating through the Middle East and Europe have already done much damage, instilling doubt and fear alongside a growing bill of murders. We splutter and hedge and appease, but it is already on our doorstep; just last week there were explosions outside the Jewish embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Terror has been active in Europe for some time.
Israel, too, was sleeping before October 7, distracted by domestic disputes about the judiciary. But after that day of unparalleled violence, a year ago tomorrow, it was catapulted into a new historical era, one of showdown with the real post-Nazi axis of evil, aka the Iran-led “axis of resistance”. We in the West are in that new era, caught in the same battle, whether we realise it or not.
Israel doesn’t have the luxury not to realise the existential stakes.
In the course of a little over a week, while smug Western prestige commentators and leaders have shaken their heads, accused Israel of “invading” Lebanon with intent to kill and conquer, and mocked the use of “high explosives” to solve problems – and while the masses online spout their vicious anti-Semitic bile – Israel has taken out Hassan Nasrallah, one of the nastiest dictators in the world, and many of his henchmen.
Iranian missiles have flown through the night sky bound for Tel Aviv but been mostly rebuffed by the best missile defence system in the world. Terrorists killed more than half a dozen Jews strolling in the hip Tel Aviv-adjacent neighbourhood of Jaffa; the IDF has left huge craters in Hezbollah-run enclaves of Beirut where the Islamist dictatorship’s honchos once schemed, and, so that Israel’s northern residents can return home after a year of shelling, has sent troops into southern Lebanon to manually remove Hezbollah from its infestation of border towns and villages.
And what have we done?
Our military “played their part”, according to the Defence Secretary John Healey, as Iran battered Israel with 200 long-range missiles last week.
This elementary declaration turned out to mean that RAF jets played a supporting role in Israel’s air defence… but failed to actually hit any incoming bombs. At least we joined the right side, unlike in 1948, but our military uselessness next to Israel and its enemies is not just laughable, it’s terrifying. Indeed, it is hard to fathom the sheer stupidity of the management-consultant-type thinking that has led to us having barely any defensive ability at all.
As some noted last week, Britain’s Type 45 anti-missile destroyers would be hard-pressed to respond to any attack at all, let alone to an onslaught of last week’s scale. Some expressed doubt that Britain even has enough sailors to operate the ships in a war zone.
The plague of lethal complacency is Europe-wide. A new report from the UK Defence Journal highlighted that neither Britain nor any “European Nato air forces have sufficient expertise or munitions stocks to conduct suppression and destruction of enemy air defences at scale”.
Addressing this, they wrote, is all the more urgent in view of Russia’s ongoing onslaught in Ukraine. Indeed, Russia’s attack, now almost three years old, ought to have been enough to stir us from our stupor, at the very least spurring us to improve our creaking, outdated defences.
It didn’t.
But the harsh reality is catching up with us. This is not the first time in history that the Jews have catapulted a complacent, morally bankrupt West into the molten core of the absolute binary between good and evil. I just hope this time that the lessons will be learnt before it’s too late.