The alternative universe of the western left

Any rational and fair-minded individual who has been following the unfolding of the Turkish terrorist flotilla saga – the video proof that the Israeli marines only started using live ammunition to prevent themselves from being lynched, kidnapped and murdered; the fact that the same Israeli tactics resulted in six out of the seven boats in the flotilla landing peacefully in Ashdod; the fact that the Mavi Marmara was stacked with al Qaeda-related Islamists who declared they were bound for ‘martyrdom’ before they set out; not to mention the fact that in Gaza, Hamas actually refused to accept the flotilla’s ‘humanitarian aid’ that was the ostensible purpose of the voyage – anyone assimilating all this would doubtless have felt, watching the BBC1 Andrew Marr show this morning, that they had strayed into a parallel universe from which reason had totally departed.

First off on the sofa discussing the morning papers was David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. Despite declaring himself to have ‘great affection’ for the State of Israel, he nevertheless proceeded to denounce it for having procured a ‘catastrophic …disaster’ – and distinguished himself by roundly declaring that ‘the occupation is the problem’. Remnick doesn’t seem to realise that Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended in 2005; that’s why it had to stop this possible shipment of weapons out at sea. Duh! What sort of idiot is this? And of course, Marr didn’t correct him. Maybe he doesn’t know either?

The flotilla episode is only a ‘catastrophic disaster’ because of the reaction to it by people like Remnick, Marr — and Marr’s first guest, the newly defeated former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Now Miliband was on ostensibly to talk about Labour’s leadership race, in which he is a prime contender. Yet Marr invited him first of all to opine on the most important topic seemingly on either or both of their minds, the one that drives out everything else, the Big Obsession on the left. Israel was still defiant, marvelled Marr. It wouldn’t – couldn’t – occur to him that, far from defiance over its reprehensible behaviour, the facts were actually on Israel’s side. How could they ever be? Impossible!

And so Miliband – whose tenure at the Foreign Office was marked by a dramatic escalation in British government hostility and malice towards its ostensible ally in the Middle East – energetically took the opportunity to depart altogether from Planet Reality. It was a ‘disaster’ for those killed and injured, he frothed, and for Israel. Whoa! Really? Since when did British politicians conclude that killing Islamic jihadists in self-defence to prevent them from lynching, kidnapping and murdering your own soldiers constitutes a ‘disaster’? Does Miliband think that the killing of thousands of Taleban, not to mention Afghan civilians, is similarly a ‘disaster’ for the Taleban or for British and American forces doing the killing? If not, why the double standard?

The flotilla episode, Miliband went on, was merely the latest in ‘a series of deadly and self-defeating actions’ by successive Israeli governments. Really? Such as Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005?  Such as the offer to Abbas last year by former Prime Minister Olmert of virtually all the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem? Ditto by Barak in 2000? Or was he thinking of Israel’s military attempts of last resort to stop the Hamas rockets or Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli citizens? Because for Miliband, any use of military force by Israel to defend itself against attack is simply not permissible, whatever the circumstances.

Of course Israel should lift the blockade, spluttered Miliband; there could be no peace when Gaza was isolated and unable to obtain the basic commodities of life. And then the final threat, doubtless parroting the thinking of Miliband’s admirer across the pond, Hillary Clinton –that the political process to bring about a Palestinian state now has to be ‘jump-started by outside forces’.

Thus in Miliband’s alternative moral universe, Israel is to be punished for defending itself against attack. Its sovereign ability to protect its own security would be taken away by America, Britain and the EU, who would impose upon it (how?) a set of measures which would hand the final weapon to its would-be destroyers with which they could achieve their exterminatory aim – and worse. For far from Miliband’s claims, the blockade was imposed with western agreement in order to isolate and weaken Hamas, rightly thought to be a threat to the region and therefore to the west, as well as to protect Israel from the smuggling of weapons.

And as for Gaza being unable to obtain the basic commodities of life, just look at the pictures above and below (hat tip:Tom Gross, Arutz Sheva)  to see that this is the opposite of reality. Indeed, there is some grim amusement to be had from the attempts by western correspondents to square the undeniable reality of Gaza’s absence of a humanitarian crisis with the political imperative – without which their reporting of the Middle East makes no sense – that there is one.

Thus the incoherent report in today’s Sunday Telegraph, in which some of these truths sit alongside Hamas propaganda that has been swallowed wholesale. For example, it repeats the canard that Operation Cast Lead killed

over 1,200 people, many of them civilians

whereas in fact most of these were Hamas operatives; yet it also quotes Khalil Hamada, a senior official at Hamas’s ministry of justice, saying;

‘There is no starvation in Gaza…No-one has died of hunger.’

A similar article in the Washington Post makes this even clearer:

Gazans lament where they can’t go more than what they can’t buy. They also decry the lack of employment — with no building supplies and few trade possibilities, joblessness is rampant. Once an exporter of fruits and other goods, Gaza has been turned into a mini-welfare state with a broken economy where food and daily goods are plentiful, but where 80 percent of the population depends on charity. Hospitals, schools, electricity systems and sewage treatment facilities are all in deep disrepair.

Yet if you walk down Gaza City’s main thoroughfare — Salah al-Din Street — grocery stores are stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Cocoa Puffs smuggled in from Egypt. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.

‘When Western people come, they have this certain image of Gaza,’ said Omar Shaban, an economist who heads Pal-Think for Strategic Studies in Gaza. ‘We have microwaves in our homes, not only me, everybody. If you go to a refugee camp, the house is bad, but the people and the equipment are very modern. The problem is the public infrastructure.’

That there is hardship in Gaza is indisputable. But that is caused solely by the fact that it is at war with Israel –waged by a regime that also imposes great hardship and suffering upon the Gazans themselves. The flotilla activists and their supporters, however, continue to maintain that Gaza is starving and that their purpose was to bring in supplies that don’t exist because of the blockade. That is a lie — serving to promote and widen the ultimate Big Lie about Israel which is causing so many in the west, including leading politicians and journalists, so spectacularly to take their leave of reality altogether.