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It’s as if both Stalin and Hitler are being afforded a posthumous victory
By: Melanie Phillips
I gave some talks in America over the past weekend. What follows is a composite of what I said in them.
In Israel, the population is traumatized, shocked and grieving. During the Hamas pogrom on October 7, Israelis were slaughtered with a level of barbarism and depravity not seen since the Shoah.
In such a small country, there’s hardly a family that’s not personally touched by what’s unfolded. They have relatives who were murdered in the pogrom, or who were kidnapped and taken hostage. Their children and grandchildren have been called up to military service and are now in harm’s way on the front. Hundreds of these conscripts have already been killed. Israelis are going to funeral after funeral. The rocket barrages keep coming. The anxiety levels are off the scale.
The agenda of Hamas and its puppet-master Iran is very clear. Destroy Israel, genocide against the Jews, and then wipe out the Christian west and all unbelievers. We know this is their agenda because they say so. Repeatedly.
The greater shock, however, has been the reaction to this of an enormous number of people in the west.
Western depravity
There have been shocking scenes in British, American and Australian cities of massive and mostly Muslim mobs celebrating the mass murder of Jews and calling for more. Among the non-Jewish population, this genocidal hysteria is being viewed by millions more with indifference or even support, especially among the young.
Polling has shown that among 18-24 year-old Americans, nearly half — 48 per cent — say they side more with Hamas. More than half — 51 per cent — think the Hamas pogrom in which 1400 Israelis were slaughtered can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.
In Britain and America, young people have been tearing down posters bearing pictures of some of the kidnapped Israeli children.
Thousands of demonstrators have been chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — the demand for the destruction of Israel. In London, mobs have been chanting “Khybar, Khybar, oh Jews, the army of Mohammed will return” — the reference to the seventh century slaughter of the Jews of Khybar by Islam’s founder Mohammed, which acts as a jubilant glorification and incitement of the slaughter of Jews today.
The western media have been pumping out Hamas propaganda. The BBC and other outlets headline civilian casualty figures put out by Hamas — regardless of the fact that these are always hugely exaggerated, and with no acknowledgment of the fact that terrorists are presumably included in these figures and may constitute the majority.
While berating Israel for causing a humanitarian “catastrophe,” they make no mention of the thefts of fuel and electricity to service the Hamas terrorist infrastructure in the miles of underground tunnels. They make no mention of the rocket attacks which continue without remission against Israeli civilians. Instead they demand of Israeli spokesmen: “Why are you killing babies in Gaza?”
Even though Hamas is committing war crimes by using Gazan civilians as human shields, western “progressives” are accusing Israel of war crimes. Even though Israel has been warning Gazan civilians to flee for their own safety as required by international law while Hamas is forcing them under gunfire to stay in place, Israel is being accused of breaking international law.
Thousands of cultural and intellectual figures have been signing declarations of solidarity with Gaza. They have not condemned Hamas for butchering and kidnapping Israelis. Nor have they acknowledged the plight of the 240-plus hostages.
Instead, they have blamed “settler colonial occupation and European empire”. They have blamed Israel for “collective punishment” of the Palestinian population, who voted Hamas into power and a majority of whom tell pollsters they still support it — and even if they don’t support Hamas, a majority support the killing of Jews.
All civilian casualties are regrettable. In war, however, these are inevitable. And these are Gazan civilians who handed out sweets and rejoiced at the slaughter of the pogrom. Gazan civilians who poured through the broken boundary fence after the Hamas terrorists smashed through and joined in the orgy of bloodletting, looting and kidnap. Gazan civilians who spat upon and desecrated the bodies of those who had been kidnapped and paraded through the streets.
Across the west, anti-Semitic attacks which were already at record levels have now increased many times over. People hurled firebombs at a synagogue in Berlin. In Amsterdam, three Jewish schools closed temporarily over safety worries. In Sydney where mobs chanted “gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House, the police advised the Jewish community to “stay home” for their own safety.
What’s been revealed is something far wider than the battle by Israel against genocidal Iran and its proxies. The depravity witnessed in the slaughter within Israel has put down roots in Britain, Europe, America and Australia. What we are seeing is a war of annihilation against Judaism and the Jewish people. And behind that is a war against the west from within the west, as expressed through what we might describe as its mass psychopathy moment. This is the west’s civilizational crisis.
Where did this come from? Despite the astonishment and bewilderment of so many — and untold thousands of decent, sane, civilized people are horrified by what they have seen unfold in the west over these past terrible weeks — it hasn’t come out of the blue. It’s been building up for decades. That’s because a horrifying number among the west’s ruling elites themselves were, and continue to be, complicit in the agenda to destroy western civilization.
This onslaught within the west has four components: Muslim communities in western countries, support for the Palestine cause, liberal ideology and the disintegration of conservatism.
Biden administration
At the most obvious and immediate level, the Iran-backed Hamas pogrom and the war against Israel are the result of American policy under the Biden administration and, previous to that, the Obama administration.
These two administrations have pursued policies that have hugely empowered Iran. The Obama nuclear deal, which contrary to the claims made for it actually legitimized an eventual Iranian nuclear weapons program, funneled billions of dollars in sanctions relief into the coffers of the Iranian regime, enabling it to expand its power in the region and funding the weaponry and training it gave its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, the “West Bank”.
The Biden administration followed suit with further backdoor sanctions relief as it groveled to Tehran in an attempt to revive the nuclear deal. Dozens of Iran-backed attacks on American assets in the region have been ignored by the Biden administration or answered with only a feeble response. The administration has given the Iranian regime — as well as Russia, China and North Korea — the impression that the United States is no longer prepared to go to war anywhere in the world over anything. This impression of a toothless and weak America has hugely emboldened Iran to increase its aggression.
And Iran was behind the Hamas pogrom, as it is behind the Syrians, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen who are all currently developing a multi-front onslaught against Israel.
So far, there has still been a muted and ambiguous response from America. There are persistent doubts that it will allow Israel to destroy Hamas. An existential war of self-defense — as in the Allies’ war against Nazi Germany — requires for its victory that the entire enemy population is regarded as hostile. Yet the Biden administration has been warning Israel to hold back its assault and to admit “humanitarian” aid even though this will be appropriated by Hamas, and even though weapons are likely to be smuggled in among the aid trucks.
Moreover, for a deterrent to work it has to be credible. America has sailed a mighty force into the region to deter Iran from escalating the war. But although Hezbollah has been firing missiles at northern Israel to probe American resolve, and although American assets have now been repeatedly attacked, the US has responded only sparsely and feebly. If even America’s friends don’t believe it will decisively enter this fight, why should the regime in Tehran believe it either?
The question is why these Democrat administrations are so keen to appease rather than fight and defeat tyranny.
Liberal delusions of reason
One reason is the liberal “kumbaya” mindset: the belief that everyone in the world is governed by reason, that everyone is susceptible to appeals to their self-interest, and that all conflict can be ended by negotiation and “conflict resolution”. War, to such liberals, is never ever necessary and always self-defeating. Such an attitude, so prevalent in the west during the 1930s, facilitated the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust; had it continued to prevail, the Nazis would have overrun the free world.
Today, such liberals can’t get their heads around Islamic religious fanaticism and the belief in jihadi holy war that elevates death to the highest goal of life.
This liberal mindset is a bottomless and lethal delusion. It is largely why the US has remained hell-bent upon “negotiating” with Iran. And it’s why, even now, President Joe Biden is insisting “what comes next has to be a two-state solution…a path towards peace”.
This is deluded on two grounds. The first is that the issue behind the battle with Hamas is the non-existence of a state of Palestine. This is asinine. The issue is Iran’s genocidal war to destroy Israel and murder Jews, an aim that Hamas fully shares.
The second delusion is the belief — so evident in the Biden administration — that there are the “bad” Palestinians of Hamas and the “good” Palestinians of the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas.
This distinction is false. The PA’s tactics may be different from Hamas but its aim is the same. The PA wants the destruction of Israel, as anyone can see from its maps of “Palestine” which consists of the whole of Israel; it has said repeatedly that a Palestine state is a means to that end in its “strategy of stages”; and it teaches its children that their highest calling is to murder Jews and steal all their land including Tel Aviv, Jaffa and Haifa. Moreover, Abbas’s role model is the Nazis’ Middle Eastern ally, Haj Amin al Husseini, who promised Hitler that if he won the war al Husseini would exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
A Palestine state would mean importing Gaza into the heart of Israel.
Victim culture
But there’s a broader degree to which liberals have been complicit in fuelling the current incendiary atmosphere. The “progressive” world has not only created a dominant narrative of Israeli “colonialism” and Palestinian victimization by Israeli “oppression”. It has created a similarly unchallengeable narrative of a Muslim world composed entirely of victims of the west.
For decades, it has promoted the doctrine that white-skinned westerners are colonial oppressors so everything they do is bad, while those in the brown or black-skinned developing world are their victims and therefore morally pure.
Under the dogma of identity politics, victim status gives “powerless” (and therefore morally pure) groups defined by race, ethnicity, sexuality or gender a free pass for their misdeeds, for which their “oppressors” are blamed instead.
Accordingly, no criticism can be made of Muslims; those who do so are promptly accused of “Islamophobia”. According to this mindset, Islamic terrorism or extremism has nothing whatever to do with Islam; it is instead caused by poverty, discrimination, marginalization and so forth.
This failure to understand the theological driver of Islamic extremism, whose aim is to Islamize the world and defeat modernity as a source of evil that threatens Islam, means in turn a failure to grasp the Islamists’ belief that modernity is driven by the Jews who they believe are the prime source of evil in the world. Islamism, or modern jihadi Islam, fuses theological Jew-hatred with Nazism, reflecting the Nazi influence on the fanatical ideologues who created Islamism in the early decades of the last century.
Anti-Semitism is rampant throughout the Islamic world. This is ignored by the west, which also doesn’t understand anti-Semitism and thinks it’s just another form of racism rather than a uniquely deranged, paranoid and murderous creed.
Accordingly, the west is gripped by the naive and ignorant belief that the “Middle East conflict” is over the division of the land. It is not. It was always at root an Islamic holy war against the Jewish presence in the land. The west’s mistaken support has conscripted western liberals into a Palestinian narrative based entirely on lies, demonization and the writing of the Jewish people out of their own history.