The war for civilisation

Rupert Murdoch has made a direct, to-the-point, ambiguity-free speech about the anti-Israel, anti-Jew frenzy now consuming the west. In a speech to the Anti-Defamation League, which gave him an award, he said this:

My own perspective is simple:  We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews…This is the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere:  the media … multinational organizations … NGOs. In this war, the aim is to make Israel a pariah.

The result is the curious situation we have today:  Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran – a nation that has made no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction – pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.

For me, this ongoing war is a fairly obvious fact of life. Every day, the citizens of the Jewish homeland defend themselves against armies of terrorists whose maps spell out the goal they have in mind: a Middle East without Israel. In Europe, Jewish populations increasingly find themselves targeted by people who share that goal. And in the United States, I fear that our foreign policy sometimes emboldens these extremists.

Tonight I’d like to speak about two things that worry me most.  First is the disturbing new home that anti-Semitism has found in polite society – especially in Europe. Second is how violence and extremism are encouraged when the world sees Israel’s greatest ally distancing herself from the Jewish state.  When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century.   Today it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left.

Do read it all. It is a rebuke to the world on the single most important and defining issue of our time.

And right on cue, here’s some more anti-Israel bigotry which yearns for a Middle East without Israel — this time a ripe example of the genre from Adrian Hamilton in the Independent. Hamilton objects to Israel’s proposal for a ‘loyalty oath’ for non-Jews who want to become Israeli citizens.

Now much of the argument against this oath is emotional and muddled, since it merely refines an existing oath of loyalty to ‘the State of Israel’ — which is, after all, a Jewish and democratic state, just as Britain is British, France French and so on. (For a balanced view of this controversy, read this analysis on Just Journalism or this on Myths and Facts). Britain requires newly naturalised subjects to swear a loyalty oath to the British sovereign. Does that make it discriminatory against all those with republican sympathies? Of course not. But Israel’s loyalty oath is being called ‘racist’ — and by many who happen to support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a putative state of Palestine, and who are also totally silent about Arab countries which belligerently assert their exclusive Arab identity, as Professor Raphael Israeli observes here.

Israel’s oath may be tactically unwise but it is not racist. It poses no problems at all to Arabs who want to settle in Israel and are happy to be loyal to the country they want to live in — as indeed many Israeli Arabs already are.  The only people it ‘discriminates’ against are those who are hostile and treacherous towards the country they want to live in. And the reason for introducing this oath now is that, although the refusal by the Arab and Muslim world to accept Israel’s national identity has always been the sole reason for the conflict, this rejectionism is making ever more dangerous inroads within Israel, where Islamisation and anti-Israel incitement are steadily radicalising the Arab minority.

Within the west, it is also the ever-more brazenly explicit reason for the campaign of delegitimisation being waged against Israel. Israel is the one and only country in the world whose right to exist is being questioned. And that of course is the point of Hamilton’s little tirade. For he objects to the very idea of Israel being a Jewish state at all:

The more closely you define Israel as a uniquely ‘Jewish’ state, the less room there is for it to act as a co-operative member of a Muslim majority Middle East. Its role becomes that of an enclave which views itself as not just separate but in clear opposition to everyone else about it.

‘Uniquely Jewish’? What does that poisonous little phrase mean? Israel has Arab and other non-Jewish citizens — citizens of a Jewish state, who have full civil and political rights. But for Hamilton, a ‘Jewish state’ just sticks in his craw. For him, it seems that the Jews alone can’t have their own state. And why not? Because it is situated in a

Muslim majority Middle East.

The fact that it happens to be their lawfully constituted country, to which they are entitled many times over by virtue of their ancient claim to this land which predated by many centuries the birth of Mohammed let alone the

Muslim majority Middle East

counts for nothing. Rather than the historical fact that the Jews are the victims of nine decades of exterminatory aggression in that rightful homeland by Muslims (and note that Hamilton casts this as a religious conflict with Muslims, rather than Arabs) Hamilton believes that it is all Israel’s fault for being

in clear opposition to everyone else about it.

In other words, just for being. So what Hamilton wants is for Israel no longer to be.

Ahmadinejad and Hamas would agree.

Thus the ‘progressive’ western intelligentsia make themselves potential accomplices to genocide.