The European Union’s leaders are all declaring their determination to defend democracy as the elections to the EU Parliament grow near. So why are so few of Europe’s self-flattering democrats now prepared to stand up for Israel, the nation state in the frontline of the battle to defend Western-style democracy?
Why do politicians who, in the name of defending democracy, want the EU to escalate its support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, at the same time threaten to withdraw arms from democratic Israel if it insists on using them to smash Hamas?
Let’s judge our leaders by what they do, not what they say about themselves. Why should we take seriously their claims to be democrats if they refuse to give full-throated support to Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, in its life-and-death war against the terrorists of Hamas?
Why should people who care about European civilisation give their vote to any politician or party who wants to impose an immediate ceasefire (code for surrender) on Israel and force the Israelis to make a deal that would leave the barbaric death cult of Hamas intact—and boost its antisemitic allies in Europe?
U.S. President Joe Biden has led the West’s retreat from Israel’s side. He is now pressing the Israelis to endorse a new proposal for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of their forces from Gaza, along with the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, in return for the release of ‘some’ of the remaining hostages that Hamas kidnapped during its October 7th pogrom in Israel. This smells like a rotten sell-out.
Predictably, the EU has rushed to add its name to the betrayal. Despite her recent assertions of the need for an independent EU foreign policy, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen quickly followed President Biden’s lead in backing away from Israel. The EU chief tweeted that she “wholeheartedly” agreed with Biden that his new plan “is a significant opportunity to move towards an end to war and civilian suffering in Gaza.”
“An end to war and civilian suffering”—who could be against such an abstractly pious wish? In reality, however, Hamas is responsible for the war and the civilian suffering in Israel and Gaza. Yet this EU-endorsed scheme would mean only an end to Israel’s war against Hamas. It would leave the terrorists free to rebuild and make good their promise to repeat October 7th “again and again.” With no end to the suffering in sight.
The Jew-hating jihadists of Hamas want to wipe the sovereign democratic state of Israel off the map and drive the Israeli people into the Mediterranean—the real meaning of that ‘From the River to the Sea’ slogan loved by their useful idiots on the Western Islamo-left.
Hamas want to kill Israelis, not to establish the sunshine democratic homeland of Palestine which their naïve Western fan club dreams of, but as a bloodstained step towards creating a grisly global Islamist caliphate in which those ‘Queers for Palestine’ morons would be the first of many lined up against the wall—or, more likely, thrown off the roof to save the bullets.
Anybody with an ounce of feeling for freedom and democracy should have stood foursquare with the Israelis since the Hamas massacres of October 7th. And the more decisive the battle, the closer Israel comes to crushing Hamas in Gaza and forcing the release of the remaining hostages, the louder and less compromising our support should surely be.
Yet as the stakes are raised higher in Gaza, most of Europe’s political elites are retreating further from defending Israel and democracy.
EU leaders have endorsed the orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to stop their assault in Rafah, the last holdout of Hamas. Many have backed the demand from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested as a war criminal. The governments of Spain and Ireland, along with non-EU member Norway, have even made a virtue signalling show of recognising the fantasy state of Palestine.
All of these gestures amount to the same thing: abandoning the only democracy in the Middle East, and giving the green light to the genocidal Islamists of Hamas. Europe’s leaders are effectively rewarding Hamas for the massacres and mass hostage-taking of October 7th, without which none of this would be happening.
Hamas leaders must be thinking, if they could make good on their threat to repeat October 7th “again and again,” who knows what rewards they might win next time?
The latest pretext used by Western leaders to turn on Israel was the death of 45 people in Rafah last week. A surgical IDF missile strike successfully eliminated two Hamas terrorist commanders. But it also led to a secondary explosion, “likely a hidden cache of weapons” according to The Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons, which caused a fire that spread through tents where Palestinians were sheltering. Israel’s PM Netanyahu, explained that “despite our utmost effort not to harm non-combatants, something unfortunately went tragically wrong.”
It was, as he said, a “tragic mishap,” a terrible incident of the sort that can happen in every war around the world. It starkly illustrated, not the criminality of Israel, but the yawning moral gap between the Israelis and Hamas.
On one hand, the IDF are doing their utmost to limit civilian casualties and avoid such tragic, unintended fatalities in Gaza. On the other hand, Hamas are deliberately killing Jewish civilians for being Jews—the IDF strike was a response to rocket attacks aimed at Israel’s capital Tel Aviv. The terrorists not only hide their military camps and arms dumps behind and amidst Palestinian refugees in Rafah, but even celebrate civilian deaths that follow as the creation of more “martyrs.”
Yet Europe’s leaders reacted to the Rafah mishap as if were a war crime deliberately perpetrated by Israel. As always, the world’s only Jewish state is held to a higher standard than any other in times of war. Why ever could that be?
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, a longstanding critic of Israel, called the deaths “horrifying” and demanded that the IDF obey the international court orders to stop fighting in Rafah. He was backed by Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. Spain’s José Manuel Albares said that his fellow EU foreign ministers must now discuss how to “take the right measures to enforce that decision.” These people seriously believe it is their job to make decisions about the future of the Middle East and tell the Israelis how (not) to defend themselves.
French president Emmanuel Macron went on Twitter/X to declare himself “outraged” by the Israeli airstrike on Rafah and demand “full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire.” An “immediate ceasefire” being, as we should all know by now, code for an Israeli surrender. Western leaders will hide behind “international law” enforced by unaccountable activist judges, as a device to deny the right of a democratic nation state to defend its national laws, borders, and people.
Of course, what happened in Rafah was terrible. But if you understand this war as an historic, existential struggle between the forces of civilisation and barbarism, you would not abandon our side because of an unintended tragedy. You would lay the responsibility for it at the door of the barbarians who use civilians as human shields. Instead, by using the tragic mishap as a stick to try to beat the Israelis into submission, those EU leaders have shown that they are effectively on the wrong side in the struggle to defend Europe’s traditions and shape our future.
Because this is much more than a faraway war. The battle to defend civilisation is going on inside the gates of the European citadel. In the anti-Israeli protests that have swept the West since October 7th, an unholy alliance of Islamists and leftist culture warriors has congealed around their shared hatred for Western civilisation and democracy, with Europe’s Jews nominated as the despised embodiment of ‘white privilege.’
Their poisonous message has now spread from the streets and college campuses to the ballot box, with candidates standing across Europe ‘for Gaza.’ As the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote recently in the UK Spectator, “antisemitism has returned to French politics” with the emergence of leftist EU election candidates who, in response to questions about anything from climate change to the cost of living, have “but one thing to say: ‘Israel is committing genocide in Gaza’. That’s what the German Social Democrats of the late 19th century called socialism for imbeciles. In short, it’s antisemitism.”
Yet where are the pro-Israeli parties and candidates in June’s elections? The leaders prepared to stand up and be counted on the side of those in the frontline of the war for civilisation? With a few noble exceptions, they are notable by their absence from this election campaign.
This matters. The Israelis do not only deserve our sympathy. They need and deserve Europe’s unwavering support, because they are fighting for many of the things our leaders should be championing: national sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, and a ‘diverse’ society that is nevertheless integrated around a core set of shared values.
Fortunately, there is hope, because Europe’s peoples, as so often, are ahead of their so-called leaders in knowing the right side when they see it. That is evident in the predictions of a surge in support for sovereigntist parties in June’s elections—which also tend to be the firmest allies of Israeli sovereignty.
It was also evident in the less auspicious vote for the Eurovision Song Contest, where the elite juries of experts sided with the protesting Hamas groupies and snubbed the Israeli contestant, while the mass of TV viewers got on their phones and voted for Israel. And it wasn’t because they loved the song.
Vote for democracy. Vote for national sovereignty. Support Israel. No surrender.
Why Vote for EU Leaders Who Won’t Defend Israeli Democracy?
Protesters holding Palestinian flags sitting below the Monument a la Republique in Paris on May 28, 2024.
Photo by Antonin UTZ / AFP
The European Union’s leaders are all declaring their determination to defend democracy as the elections to the EU Parliament grow near. So why are so few of Europe’s self-flattering democrats now prepared to stand up for Israel, the nation state in the frontline of the battle to defend Western-style democracy?
Why do politicians who, in the name of defending democracy, want the EU to escalate its support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, at the same time threaten to withdraw arms from democratic Israel if it insists on using them to smash Hamas?
Let’s judge our leaders by what they do, not what they say about themselves. Why should we take seriously their claims to be democrats if they refuse to give full-throated support to Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, in its life-and-death war against the terrorists of Hamas?
Why should people who care about European civilisation give their vote to any politician or party who wants to impose an immediate ceasefire (code for surrender) on Israel and force the Israelis to make a deal that would leave the barbaric death cult of Hamas intact—and boost its antisemitic allies in Europe?
U.S. President Joe Biden has led the West’s retreat from Israel’s side. He is now pressing the Israelis to endorse a new proposal for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of their forces from Gaza, along with the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, in return for the release of ‘some’ of the remaining hostages that Hamas kidnapped during its October 7th pogrom in Israel. This smells like a rotten sell-out.
Predictably, the EU has rushed to add its name to the betrayal. Despite her recent assertions of the need for an independent EU foreign policy, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen quickly followed President Biden’s lead in backing away from Israel. The EU chief tweeted that she “wholeheartedly” agreed with Biden that his new plan “is a significant opportunity to move towards an end to war and civilian suffering in Gaza.”
“An end to war and civilian suffering”—who could be against such an abstractly pious wish? In reality, however, Hamas is responsible for the war and the civilian suffering in Israel and Gaza. Yet this EU-endorsed scheme would mean only an end to Israel’s war against Hamas. It would leave the terrorists free to rebuild and make good their promise to repeat October 7th “again and again.” With no end to the suffering in sight.
The Jew-hating jihadists of Hamas want to wipe the sovereign democratic state of Israel off the map and drive the Israeli people into the Mediterranean—the real meaning of that ‘From the River to the Sea’ slogan loved by their useful idiots on the Western Islamo-left.
Hamas want to kill Israelis, not to establish the sunshine democratic homeland of Palestine which their naïve Western fan club dreams of, but as a bloodstained step towards creating a grisly global Islamist caliphate in which those ‘Queers for Palestine’ morons would be the first of many lined up against the wall—or, more likely, thrown off the roof to save the bullets.
Anybody with an ounce of feeling for freedom and democracy should have stood foursquare with the Israelis since the Hamas massacres of October 7th. And the more decisive the battle, the closer Israel comes to crushing Hamas in Gaza and forcing the release of the remaining hostages, the louder and less compromising our support should surely be.
Yet as the stakes are raised higher in Gaza, most of Europe’s political elites are retreating further from defending Israel and democracy.
EU leaders have endorsed the orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to stop their assault in Rafah, the last holdout of Hamas. Many have backed the demand from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested as a war criminal. The governments of Spain and Ireland, along with non-EU member Norway, have even made a virtue signalling show of recognising the fantasy state of Palestine.
All of these gestures amount to the same thing: abandoning the only democracy in the Middle East, and giving the green light to the genocidal Islamists of Hamas. Europe’s leaders are effectively rewarding Hamas for the massacres and mass hostage-taking of October 7th, without which none of this would be happening.
Hamas leaders must be thinking, if they could make good on their threat to repeat October 7th “again and again,” who knows what rewards they might win next time?
The latest pretext used by Western leaders to turn on Israel was the death of 45 people in Rafah last week. A surgical IDF missile strike successfully eliminated two Hamas terrorist commanders. But it also led to a secondary explosion, “likely a hidden cache of weapons” according to The Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons, which caused a fire that spread through tents where Palestinians were sheltering. Israel’s PM Netanyahu, explained that “despite our utmost effort not to harm non-combatants, something unfortunately went tragically wrong.”
It was, as he said, a “tragic mishap,” a terrible incident of the sort that can happen in every war around the world. It starkly illustrated, not the criminality of Israel, but the yawning moral gap between the Israelis and Hamas.
On one hand, the IDF are doing their utmost to limit civilian casualties and avoid such tragic, unintended fatalities in Gaza. On the other hand, Hamas are deliberately killing Jewish civilians for being Jews—the IDF strike was a response to rocket attacks aimed at Israel’s capital Tel Aviv. The terrorists not only hide their military camps and arms dumps behind and amidst Palestinian refugees in Rafah, but even celebrate civilian deaths that follow as the creation of more “martyrs.”
Yet Europe’s leaders reacted to the Rafah mishap as if were a war crime deliberately perpetrated by Israel. As always, the world’s only Jewish state is held to a higher standard than any other in times of war. Why ever could that be?
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, a longstanding critic of Israel, called the deaths “horrifying” and demanded that the IDF obey the international court orders to stop fighting in Rafah. He was backed by Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. Spain’s José Manuel Albares said that his fellow EU foreign ministers must now discuss how to “take the right measures to enforce that decision.” These people seriously believe it is their job to make decisions about the future of the Middle East and tell the Israelis how (not) to defend themselves.
French president Emmanuel Macron went on Twitter/X to declare himself “outraged” by the Israeli airstrike on Rafah and demand “full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire.” An “immediate ceasefire” being, as we should all know by now, code for an Israeli surrender. Western leaders will hide behind “international law” enforced by unaccountable activist judges, as a device to deny the right of a democratic nation state to defend its national laws, borders, and people.
Of course, what happened in Rafah was terrible. But if you understand this war as an historic, existential struggle between the forces of civilisation and barbarism, you would not abandon our side because of an unintended tragedy. You would lay the responsibility for it at the door of the barbarians who use civilians as human shields. Instead, by using the tragic mishap as a stick to try to beat the Israelis into submission, those EU leaders have shown that they are effectively on the wrong side in the struggle to defend Europe’s traditions and shape our future.
Because this is much more than a faraway war. The battle to defend civilisation is going on inside the gates of the European citadel. In the anti-Israeli protests that have swept the West since October 7th, an unholy alliance of Islamists and leftist culture warriors has congealed around their shared hatred for Western civilisation and democracy, with Europe’s Jews nominated as the despised embodiment of ‘white privilege.’
Their poisonous message has now spread from the streets and college campuses to the ballot box, with candidates standing across Europe ‘for Gaza.’ As the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote recently in the UK Spectator, “antisemitism has returned to French politics” with the emergence of leftist EU election candidates who, in response to questions about anything from climate change to the cost of living, have “but one thing to say: ‘Israel is committing genocide in Gaza’. That’s what the German Social Democrats of the late 19th century called socialism for imbeciles. In short, it’s antisemitism.”
Yet where are the pro-Israeli parties and candidates in June’s elections? The leaders prepared to stand up and be counted on the side of those in the frontline of the war for civilisation? With a few noble exceptions, they are notable by their absence from this election campaign.
This matters. The Israelis do not only deserve our sympathy. They need and deserve Europe’s unwavering support, because they are fighting for many of the things our leaders should be championing: national sovereignty, parliamentary democracy, and a ‘diverse’ society that is nevertheless integrated around a core set of shared values.
Fortunately, there is hope, because Europe’s peoples, as so often, are ahead of their so-called leaders in knowing the right side when they see it. That is evident in the predictions of a surge in support for sovereigntist parties in June’s elections—which also tend to be the firmest allies of Israeli sovereignty.
It was also evident in the less auspicious vote for the Eurovision Song Contest, where the elite juries of experts sided with the protesting Hamas groupies and snubbed the Israeli contestant, while the mass of TV viewers got on their phones and voted for Israel. And it wasn’t because they loved the song.
Vote for democracy. Vote for national sovereignty. Support Israel. No surrender.
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