Let’s be clear. There is one resolutely genocidal force fighting in the Middle East today—Hamas and its Islamist allies. And the surest way to bring about genocide is to tell Israel to stop fighting them.
Demanding a ceasefire in Gaza now means calling on Israel to surrender to these antisemitic terrorists. It means telling the Israelis they are on their own in their life and death war. That is the obvious meaning of the execrable resolution passed by the general assembly of the United Nations, which demanded Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire but failed to condemn the Hamas massacres of Israelis on 7th October.
And let’s also be clear. The growing demand for an Israeli ceasefire in Europe and across the West, in face of a rising tide of antisemitism, is bad news for the rest of us, too. It is symptomatic of a Western unwillingness to fight the political and cultural war in our democracies which, as I argued here last week, is wider than Israel v Hamas; it is civilisation vs. barbarism.
There’s an old joke, told by late, great Jewish comedians like Jackie Mason and Mort Sahl, about two Jews facing a Nazi execution squad. One shouts “Do your worst, you Nazi b******s! Long live the Jewish homeland!” And the other one responds quietly, “Ssshhh, don’t make trouble…”
This is the caricature of the meek, humble Jew that those in the West demanding Israel declare an immediate ceasefire in Gaza are trying to invoke. Don’t make trouble, just because Hamas murderers deliberately massacred more than 1,400 Jewish civilians, raped, maimed and kidnapped hundreds more, and boasted about it across the internet.
Don’t make trouble, just because terrorists and their many supporters in Europe and the West have vowed to wipe your state and your people off the face of the earth. You will only make it worse if you resist the enemy, or fight back ‘disproportionately’ against a pogrom.
Fortunately, Israel is still more like the first Jew in that old joke. The Israeli state was formed as a Jewish homeland in response to the Nazi Holocaust, built on the principles of Never Again and No Surrender. Israelis are still fighting today because they understand that the very existence of their homeland and their people is at stake. An Israeli ceasefire would only grant Hamas and its allies a chance to reorganise, rearm, and come back to slaughter Israelis and Jews once more.
Don’t take our word for it, listen to the Hamas commanders themselves. This week Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, gave an interview on Lebanese television (translated by MEMRI TV). He vowed to repeat the bloody attacks on Israelis of 7th October as often as possible, declaring that, “We will do this again and again” because “everything we do is justified” as part of the campaign to “annihilate” Israel.
Hamad of Hamas was also unperturbed about the deaths of Gaza Palestinians in the war that has followed the massacre of Israelis. “We are paying a great price in blood,” he said, “but it is necessary.” This is not a national liberation movement to be satisfied with peace and freedom for Palestinians. It is a death cult, that needs Palestinians to suffer in Gaza to give Hamas propagandists the images of civilian casualties that they crave. “We are a nation of martyrs,” boasted Hamad, “and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
There can be no equitable peace with death-worshipping genocidal butchers. Israel has sought to conduct its war on Hamas within the rules of international law. But war is not cricket, and civilian deaths are inevitable, particularly when Hamas uses them as human shields, building its bases and tunnels in densely populated areas. Those who protest that Israel is inflicting ‘collective punishment’ on Palestinians by bombing selected targets in Gaza might ask themselves what Britain and the U.S. were doing in bombing German cities to rubble to defeat the Nazis.
It is important to insist, however, that there only one side is targeting civilians, and it is not the Israeli Defence Force. Theirs is a just war against avowedly genocidal enemies. Yet as ever, the world’s only Jewish state, the one beacon of democracy in the Middle East, must apparently be held to different standards of ‘legitimate’ self-defence than the rest.
And there can be no ceasefire, no surrender in our political and cultural war for civilisation in the West, either. That is why it is so important to stand with Israel, and oppose those forces here who hate Western society so much that they will side with Hamas and barbarism.
This week the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, issued a warning to Europeans in an interview with the German publication Die Welt. “You have to understand: if Israel no longer exists, Europe will be next. … And then the United States.” The president spoke of a civilisational conflict between those who believe in democracy and freedom and “those who celebrate hate, the beheading of children, the kidnapping of pregnant women, the taking hostage of grandparents.”
Anybody who imagines Europe is somehow distant or immune from that civilisational conflict has not been following the news in front of their noses. As reported by The European Conservative, in the guise of solidarity with Palestine we have seen a wave of antisemitic and pro-Hamas protests by Islamists and their useful idiots on the Islamo-left. The Jew-baiting demonstrators in Western Europe’s capitals are essentially expressing the same sentiments as the lynch-mob that attempted a pogrom in a Russian Muslim republic this week. Nobody should be in any doubt that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are now indivisible in this context.
We are witnessing a repulsive merger of Islamist antisemitism with a modern Western woke version of that ancient hatred. For the one-eyed zealots of the identitarian Left, Jews are inevitably the beneficiaries of ‘white privilege,’ whilst Palestinians are all born victims. They thus delude themselves that being on the side of Hamas puts them on the dreaded ‘right side of history.’ Anti-racist activists who will normally be outraged by a wrong word used in universities have turned a deaf ear to the chorus of antisemitism on European and U.S. campuses. Meanwhile the wider left-wing public that once stood by the young state of Israel has now abandoned the Israelis and Jews to their fate. Here in the UK, a poll suggests that only 9% of Labour Party supporters side with Israel.
Meanwhile from the top down, the spineless Western liberal establishment wrings its hands, calls for a ceasefire and warns the Israelis ‘Don’t make trouble.’ Only four EU member states—Austria, Croatia, Czechia, and Hungary—had the decency and guts to vote against the UN ceasefire resolution that ignored the Hamas massacres. In a Jewish area of London, the police do the Islamists’ job for them by tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children—to suppress ‘tensions’ in the community, of course. The more educated and supposedly liberal-minded European professionals are—academics, lawyers, medics—the more keen they seem to show off their political stupidity and historical ignorance by accusing Israel of genocide and demanding a ceasefire.
Since October 7th we have heard many influential voices in Europe and the West concede that, yes, Israel might have a right to defend itself—‘BUT…’ not too hard or too seriously. That ‘But’ is a buzzword of our equivocal age. We are familiar with the mealy-mouthed statements about how ‘I believe in free speech, BUT,’ and ‘I believe in democracy, BUT.’ Now Israel is the target of the promiscuous ‘But’ lobby.
The spread of the ‘But’ is a sign of the general spinelessness and loss of nerve in European and Western societies. It conveys the jaundiced view that nothing is really worth stand up for unequivocally, nothing is really worth fighting for if it involves taking risks. Just leave us alone in a ‘safe space’ and don’t make trouble. The consequence can only be to concede defeat without a fight to the other side, who pursue their gory cause with no ifs or buts.
It used to be commonly said that Western leaders need to have ‘the courage of their convictions.’ First, unlike most of our current crop of phoney political leaders, you need actually to have some convictions, starting with an unwavering belief in democracy and the national sovereignty on which it depends. Then you need the courage to take sides and stand against civilisation’s enemies—from the genocidal Hamas in the Middle East to the scourge of antisemitism in the West.
In short, forget about dreaming of a quiet life by joining the calls for ceasefire and surrender. If we want our democracy to survive, it’s time to make trouble.
Ceasefire Means Surrender
The date of October 7, 2023 tattooed on the arm of an Israeli cameraman in memory of a friend killed during the October 7th attack by Palestinian Hamas militants in Kibutz Beeri.
Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP
Let’s be clear. There is one resolutely genocidal force fighting in the Middle East today—Hamas and its Islamist allies. And the surest way to bring about genocide is to tell Israel to stop fighting them.
Demanding a ceasefire in Gaza now means calling on Israel to surrender to these antisemitic terrorists. It means telling the Israelis they are on their own in their life and death war. That is the obvious meaning of the execrable resolution passed by the general assembly of the United Nations, which demanded Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire but failed to condemn the Hamas massacres of Israelis on 7th October.
And let’s also be clear. The growing demand for an Israeli ceasefire in Europe and across the West, in face of a rising tide of antisemitism, is bad news for the rest of us, too. It is symptomatic of a Western unwillingness to fight the political and cultural war in our democracies which, as I argued here last week, is wider than Israel v Hamas; it is civilisation vs. barbarism.
There’s an old joke, told by late, great Jewish comedians like Jackie Mason and Mort Sahl, about two Jews facing a Nazi execution squad. One shouts “Do your worst, you Nazi b******s! Long live the Jewish homeland!” And the other one responds quietly, “Ssshhh, don’t make trouble…”
This is the caricature of the meek, humble Jew that those in the West demanding Israel declare an immediate ceasefire in Gaza are trying to invoke. Don’t make trouble, just because Hamas murderers deliberately massacred more than 1,400 Jewish civilians, raped, maimed and kidnapped hundreds more, and boasted about it across the internet.
Don’t make trouble, just because terrorists and their many supporters in Europe and the West have vowed to wipe your state and your people off the face of the earth. You will only make it worse if you resist the enemy, or fight back ‘disproportionately’ against a pogrom.
Fortunately, Israel is still more like the first Jew in that old joke. The Israeli state was formed as a Jewish homeland in response to the Nazi Holocaust, built on the principles of Never Again and No Surrender. Israelis are still fighting today because they understand that the very existence of their homeland and their people is at stake. An Israeli ceasefire would only grant Hamas and its allies a chance to reorganise, rearm, and come back to slaughter Israelis and Jews once more.
Don’t take our word for it, listen to the Hamas commanders themselves. This week Ghazi Hamad, deputy foreign minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, gave an interview on Lebanese television (translated by MEMRI TV). He vowed to repeat the bloody attacks on Israelis of 7th October as often as possible, declaring that, “We will do this again and again” because “everything we do is justified” as part of the campaign to “annihilate” Israel.
Hamad of Hamas was also unperturbed about the deaths of Gaza Palestinians in the war that has followed the massacre of Israelis. “We are paying a great price in blood,” he said, “but it is necessary.” This is not a national liberation movement to be satisfied with peace and freedom for Palestinians. It is a death cult, that needs Palestinians to suffer in Gaza to give Hamas propagandists the images of civilian casualties that they crave. “We are a nation of martyrs,” boasted Hamad, “and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
There can be no equitable peace with death-worshipping genocidal butchers. Israel has sought to conduct its war on Hamas within the rules of international law. But war is not cricket, and civilian deaths are inevitable, particularly when Hamas uses them as human shields, building its bases and tunnels in densely populated areas. Those who protest that Israel is inflicting ‘collective punishment’ on Palestinians by bombing selected targets in Gaza might ask themselves what Britain and the U.S. were doing in bombing German cities to rubble to defeat the Nazis.
It is important to insist, however, that there only one side is targeting civilians, and it is not the Israeli Defence Force. Theirs is a just war against avowedly genocidal enemies. Yet as ever, the world’s only Jewish state, the one beacon of democracy in the Middle East, must apparently be held to different standards of ‘legitimate’ self-defence than the rest.
And there can be no ceasefire, no surrender in our political and cultural war for civilisation in the West, either. That is why it is so important to stand with Israel, and oppose those forces here who hate Western society so much that they will side with Hamas and barbarism.
This week the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, issued a warning to Europeans in an interview with the German publication Die Welt. “You have to understand: if Israel no longer exists, Europe will be next. … And then the United States.” The president spoke of a civilisational conflict between those who believe in democracy and freedom and “those who celebrate hate, the beheading of children, the kidnapping of pregnant women, the taking hostage of grandparents.”
Anybody who imagines Europe is somehow distant or immune from that civilisational conflict has not been following the news in front of their noses. As reported by The European Conservative, in the guise of solidarity with Palestine we have seen a wave of antisemitic and pro-Hamas protests by Islamists and their useful idiots on the Islamo-left. The Jew-baiting demonstrators in Western Europe’s capitals are essentially expressing the same sentiments as the lynch-mob that attempted a pogrom in a Russian Muslim republic this week. Nobody should be in any doubt that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are now indivisible in this context.
We are witnessing a repulsive merger of Islamist antisemitism with a modern Western woke version of that ancient hatred. For the one-eyed zealots of the identitarian Left, Jews are inevitably the beneficiaries of ‘white privilege,’ whilst Palestinians are all born victims. They thus delude themselves that being on the side of Hamas puts them on the dreaded ‘right side of history.’ Anti-racist activists who will normally be outraged by a wrong word used in universities have turned a deaf ear to the chorus of antisemitism on European and U.S. campuses. Meanwhile the wider left-wing public that once stood by the young state of Israel has now abandoned the Israelis and Jews to their fate. Here in the UK, a poll suggests that only 9% of Labour Party supporters side with Israel.
Meanwhile from the top down, the spineless Western liberal establishment wrings its hands, calls for a ceasefire and warns the Israelis ‘Don’t make trouble.’ Only four EU member states—Austria, Croatia, Czechia, and Hungary—had the decency and guts to vote against the UN ceasefire resolution that ignored the Hamas massacres. In a Jewish area of London, the police do the Islamists’ job for them by tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children—to suppress ‘tensions’ in the community, of course. The more educated and supposedly liberal-minded European professionals are—academics, lawyers, medics—the more keen they seem to show off their political stupidity and historical ignorance by accusing Israel of genocide and demanding a ceasefire.
Since October 7th we have heard many influential voices in Europe and the West concede that, yes, Israel might have a right to defend itself—‘BUT…’ not too hard or too seriously. That ‘But’ is a buzzword of our equivocal age. We are familiar with the mealy-mouthed statements about how ‘I believe in free speech, BUT,’ and ‘I believe in democracy, BUT.’ Now Israel is the target of the promiscuous ‘But’ lobby.
The spread of the ‘But’ is a sign of the general spinelessness and loss of nerve in European and Western societies. It conveys the jaundiced view that nothing is really worth stand up for unequivocally, nothing is really worth fighting for if it involves taking risks. Just leave us alone in a ‘safe space’ and don’t make trouble. The consequence can only be to concede defeat without a fight to the other side, who pursue their gory cause with no ifs or buts.
It used to be commonly said that Western leaders need to have ‘the courage of their convictions.’ First, unlike most of our current crop of phoney political leaders, you need actually to have some convictions, starting with an unwavering belief in democracy and the national sovereignty on which it depends. Then you need the courage to take sides and stand against civilisation’s enemies—from the genocidal Hamas in the Middle East to the scourge of antisemitism in the West.
In short, forget about dreaming of a quiet life by joining the calls for ceasefire and surrender. If we want our democracy to survive, it’s time to make trouble.
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