RUTHFULLY YOURS

Only one word captures the vibe in the West following Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah: anguish. Everywhere you look there is dread over what Israel has done, and fear of what it might unleash. Disquiet drips from every newspaper. You hear it in the trembling timbre of news anchors. You see it in the feverish warnings of ‘anti-war’ types that the Middle East now stands upon the precipice of apocalypse. You hear it in Guardianistas’ shrill damning of Israel as a ‘pugnacious out-of-control force’ that now even takes out terrorists ‘against the United States’ explicit wishes’. Yes, how dare this uppity state defy our masters in the neo-empire?

You see it most clearly in the hectic fretting over a ‘dangerous escalation’. Apparently, in bumping off Hezbollah’s top dog, Israel has sealed the region’s bloody fate. The New York Times agonises over this ‘escalatory attack on Hezbollah’. Jeremy Bowen of the BBC says the slaying of Nasrallah suggests the Middle East is no longer ‘on the brink of a much more serious war’ – it’s ‘tumbling over it’. An expert at the Middle East Institute in DC was positively overwrought. ‘The hinge of history has turned’, he said. Apparently, this ‘unprecedented’ attack – the idea that it’s unprecedented to target your terrorist foes will be news to many nations – is bloody proof that ‘the threshold for all-out war has been crossed’.

Even Israel’s allies have reached for the smelling salts following Nasrallah’s demise. Yes, the Biden administration welcomed his death, but it felt perfunctory: a timid congratulations that masked a deeper unease about what comes next. As the NYT summed it up, Biden issued a ‘measured statement’ that ‘expressed satisfaction’ but then swiftly warned all sides ‘to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts’. Israel is within its rights to expect a tad more appreciation from the US for dealing with the leader of a terror group that assisted in the Beirut suicide bombings of 1983 in which 241 US military personnel were killed.

We are now in the truly surreal situation where privileged Westerners seem distressed over the death of Nasrallah while Muslims in Lebanon, Syria and Iran are dancing in celebration over it. Moneyed genderfluid kids on the manicured lawns of Columbia in NYC might be experiencing pangs of grief, or at least worry, following the killing of Nasrallah. But feminists in Iran, anti-Hezbollah activists in Lebanon and the families of the Syrians Hezbollah helped to butcher when it sided with Assad in the Syrian Civil War are elated. Surely, nothing better captures the moral disarray of the woke of the West than their bitter tears for an Islamist extremist whose Jew hatred, misogyny, homophobia and rank authoritarianism made him the enemy of every Muslim in the Middle East who longs for the thing these pampered Westerners enjoy: liberty.

The Nasrallah angst of our opinion-forming classes is incredibly telling. It speaks to the staggering double standard by which Israel is judged. One wonders if it is historical ignorance or just brazen hypocrisy that means the puffed-up activist class of the US and UK can rail against Israel’s ‘unprecedented’ toppling of a terrorist mastermind even though their own nations have done likewise for decades. From Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, many terrorists have met a grim, just end in recent years. And I don’t recall spittle-flecked rage about it. I don’t remember self-righteous wails of ‘What now?!’. That Israel is pilloried for doing things we do, that killing terrorists suddenly becomes a war crime when Jews do it, is proof of the bigotry that lurks barely beneath the surface of ‘anti-Zionism’.

Even worse is the implicit message in all this handwringing over Israel’s targeting of the terrorists who wish to destroy it. Namely, that it would have been better to leave Nasrallah alone. That the region would be better off – hell, the world would be better off – if Nasrallah hadn’t been killed. Worse horrors will flow from Hezbollah’s destruction than from its continued existence – that’s the hint and whisper of every Western observer who frets over Nasrallah’s demise. ‘Leave Hezbollah be’ is their unspoken cry. That’s easy for a Gentile in the war-free West to say. I dare say these smug vilifiers of the Jewish nation would have a different take if they were suffering Hezbollah’s fusillade of missiles, as Israel is. If their own leafy communities were surrounded on all sides by armies of bigots hell-bent on their destruction – as Israel is.

Think about this: we have an activist set in the West – on our campuses, on our streets, in much of the press – that explicitly calls for the disarming of Israel and implicitly calls for the preservation of Israel’s enemies. Which one minute agitates for the cutting off of weapons sales to the Jewish State, and in the next insists it is too risky and reckless for Israel to take out Hezbollah leaders or Hamas cells, and so, presumably, should leave them be. Take away Israel’s weapons and let Hezbollah live, let Hamas regroup. Shorter version: no guns for Jews but guns for Jew-haters. This is not ‘anti-war’ activism. It is its precise opposite. It is a recipe for racist carnage, for the bloody destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. Rarely has the sinister nature of what passes for ‘progressive’ activism been so starkly exposed.

What has been made most clear by the Nasrallah angst of recent days is that many in the West still do not understand what is at stake in the post-7 October world. They fail to appreciate how serious it is that Israel is being targeted for violent persecution, and dreamt-of destruction, by militant Islamists whose loathing for Jews is matched only by their loathing for the West itself. They cannot see that the clash between Israel and its legion hysterical foes is at root a clash between the values of civilisation and the swirling myopia of barbarism. Between a state that aspires to fulfill the promise of modernity and medieval militants who are anti-Semitic, anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-Enlightenment.

This is what I explore in my new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. I revisit, in unflinching detail, how the influential of the West failed the moral test of Hamas’s attack on Israel and ended up making excuses for the pogromists instead of standing with their victims. And I make the case for standing with Jews against Jew hatred, with Israel against Islamism, and with civilisation against religious fanaticism. Who could have imagined that such positions would one day be controversial? And yet, here we are.