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.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
14 comments:
None so blind as those who do not see.....
Please stop reposting Brendan O'Neill here. We're tired of his viewpoint.
Must admit I tend to skip over Brendan quickly as I entirely agree with everything he writes. I don't know why a person like you reads this blog at all.
Where was the N.Y. Times during the holocaust? Their silence then says everything about reporting position today. Well written Brendan
You are alone on this. And why do you hide behind anonymous ?
Is NZ " island-bound"? Nothing of the outside world to be discussed? Only the " great Treaty debate" ?
One thing which only a very few analysts picked up on and mentioned is that, in order to kill one man, with 86 US Corporation 2000- pound bunker buster bombs, a whole neighbourhood full of apartment buildings was turned into ruins, resulting in the deaths of around 1000 civilians who were living in those apartment buildings all around.
The US Corporation and Netanyahu are two cheeks of the same backside.
Brendan's viewpoint is essential to ensure all perspectives are heard. You don't have to like it or read it.
If anonymous people would take the time to read ancient and modern history of the area, they would understand why Isreal fights for its very survival.
!00% support your posts B.O. (on this topic at least)
Jews, unlike most groups with a sense of humility and humanity, have a particularist morality: the only thing that matters is "is it good for the Jews?" They don't see anything as being categorically moral or immoral, but only the degree in which an act benefits Jews.
That's why, for instance, Jews can invent modern terrorist tactics, and then go around decrying everyone else as a "terrorist"; that's why they can flatten Gaza and kill tens of thousands of civilians, but continually bleat about 1,000 dead Jews (many of who they killed themselves); that's why they never talk about the genocidal slaughter of Christian Russians by the Jewish-dominated Bolsheviks and the early Soviet regime, yet they never stop talking about the far fewer Jews killed by Germans.
Why the double-standards? Because double-standards are the basis of Jewish morality. That's why its so hard to take their histrionics seriously.
That is an excellent article, Brendan. You have described the situation very clearly. Israel did NOT start this war. They were invaded in October last year.
You sum it up in your words here:-
"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.
Here we are again compelled to side with one side or the other. One side is using more might than the other, the other side has been relentless, persistent and not interested in peace. Really not sorry about Nasrallah’s demise. Or the rooting out of Hezbollah.
I do not believe you see at all clearly - you appear to me to be a bigot.
I.C. Clairly has either never heard of the holocaust, or worse, is a holocaust denier. The holocaust gave the Jews 6 million reasons to ask the question "is it good for the Jews?" And even before the Holocaust, history records a lot of things that have not been good for the Jews, possibly starting with the exile of the Jews by the Assyrians around 732BC, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70CE and the Islamic conquest of the 7th century. Can you blame them therefore that they now react badly (by others' standards) when their enemies threaten to once again wipe them off the map? Seems to me they actually have a very well defined and understandable set of standards, all directed at the one thing every society craves, namely survival.
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