RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/09/bidens-unforgivable-betrayal-of-israel/

Imagine if, in 2017, the world told the Kurds to hold off from attacking Raqqa. Imagine if, following their valiant liberation of 2,000 square miles of Syrian territory from the barbaric diktat of the Islamic State, the Kurdish-led forces were told to down arms. To leave Raqqa be. To leave intact the capital of the cruellest pseudo-state the modern world has known. We would have looked upon such a request as lunacy. We might even have considered it an essentially pro-ISIS position. After all, the flipside of telling the enemies of ISIS to cease fire is that ISIS would gain the breathing space to regroup, rearm and revisit its apocalyptic sadism on the people of Syria and beyond.

Well, just such an unhinged demand is being made right now, though of Israel, not the Kurds. From the White House to those whiffy tents on campus lawns, from the leader pages of the liberal press to the Israelophobic pulpits of social media, the cry goes out: don’t attack Rafah. If Israeli forces launch an invasion of that southern Gazan city, in pursuit of Hamas, it will be a bloodbath, the posing peaceniks cry. It would be ‘genocide in action’, insists former Corbynite bigwig John McDonnell. If you do it, President Biden warns Israel, we will stop providing you with certain weapons. In short: leave Rafah be. Which means leave Hamas be. Leave in peace the army of anti-Semites that butchered a thousand of your people – this, fundamentally, is the request being made of the Jewish State by the self-righteous of the Earth.

We need to talk about the cravenness, the outright iniquity, of the Western world’s lofty insistence that Israel back off from Rafah. It is presented to us as a ‘pro-peace’ position, underpinned by a pure urge to save life. But it could just as easily be seen as the antithesis of peace, as a position likely to benefit and even fortify the army of violent bigots that started this war and who seem hell-bent on continuing it. We know that huge numbers of Hamas militants have decamped to Rafah. We know they’re firing rockets from Rafah. We know some of these deadly devices have killed IDF soldiers while others have fallen on Israeli towns, with the intent of slaughtering the Jews who live there. In such circumstances, the cry ‘Hands off Rafah!’ is really a demand that Israel throw its own hands in the air and submit to the violent persecutions of its medieval foe.

https://nypost.com/2024/05/08/opinion/i-witnessed-israel-choosing-life-as-it-fights-against-a-death-cult/

Adapted from Douglas Murray‘s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.

“I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.”

I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza.

I was here in New York on the 7th of October, and on the 8th, I went down to Times Square.

And there were these men and women, waving signs, celebrating the massacre.

They were holding these signs in Times Square, “by any means necessary.”

At a time when we already knew what those means included.

I thought I had to get to Israel as soon as I could, that we were going to see a kind of Holocaust denialism in real time, and therefore I should see with my own eyes everything that had happened.

In Israel, I joined the pathologists in the morgues of Tel Aviv as they were trying to identify the dead.

An unbelievable task, which they do with extraordinary delicacy and religiosity.

I had the great opportunity to witness firsthand Israel’s response, because unlike some countries today, Israel doesn’t just sit back with equanimity when it’s attacked.

Some of the world would like it to do so.