Melanie Phillips: Turning self-defence into a war crime -- again

Despite its predictability, the BBC's twisted treatment of Israel is deeply shocking

Even by the standards of the BBC’s venomous bias against Israel, today’s exchange between BBC Radio Today programme anchor Anna Foster and Israeli spokesman Alex Gandler was jaw-dropping.

Gandler tried to present an accurate timeline and context to show that Israel had attacked both Lebanon and Iran in response to their attacks on Israel. He didn’t get very far. Constantly interrupting him, with a voice made tremulous with indignation at Israel’s apparent perfidy, Foster insisted that the Lebanon ceasefire wasn’t really a ceasefire at all because Israel had continued to attack Hezbollah. Indeed, she charged, in attacking Beirut “it looks like Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire”. To Foster, it seems, demonic Israel just wants to kill people for its own opaque but nefarious purposes.

Dave Patterson: Hezbollah and Iran Narco-Terrorists on US Back Porch

Dangerous Middle East networks thrive in Central and South America.

If you thought that Hezbollah was just Israel’s problem, think again. Iran’s proxy and Iran are well established in America’s southern neighbor countries, and, without intervention by the United States, they are there to stay. A tropical islet in northeast Venezuela called Margarita Island – also known as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “Terror Island” – is a safe haven for Hezbollah and Iranian operatives. They move freely, participating in narco-terrorism, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorist training, and arms trafficking.

Melanie Phillips: Israel dodges a bullet

Donald Trump is far from perfect. But at this moment, his election feels like deliverance

A nightmare has been averted, both for Israel and the west.

With the stunning re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Israel has dodged a virtual bullet just as Trump himself was saved this summer from a projectile that came within an inch of assassinating him.

Brendan O'Neill: The West’s reckless dishonesty over Lebanon

Why won’t the political and media establishment tell us the truth: that Hezbollah started this awful war?

If a keffiyeh-adorned posh kid on a leafy campus were to hold forth on the Israel-Lebanon clash without once saying the word ‘Hezbollah’, none of us would be surprised. To the West’s à la mode loathers of Israel, the Jewish State is responsible for every ill in the Middle East, and its foes are always blameless. But for a world leader to do it, to pontificate on this bloody battle without mentioning the ruthless terror outfit whose rocket fire started it, is unforgivable.

Brendan O'Neill: Why is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates?

Israel has every right to respond to Hezbollah’s cruel slaughter of 12 Druze kids.

The New York Times is breathing a sigh of relief. For while Israel has fired a few rockets at Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s massacre of 12 Druze kids in the Golan Heights on Saturday, it has stopped short of launching all-out war on its unfriendly neighbour. For now, says the NYT, we’ve not seen a ‘major escalation’ in Israel-Lebanon hostilities. Yes we have. The slaughter of the Druze youths was a ‘major escalation’. Hezbollah’s firing of a missile that butchered 12 children was surely the very ‘surge in fighting’ that the NYT fears. Or is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates to the apocalyptic violence of the Islamist armies that surround it?

Alexander Gillespie: Israel-Gaza crisis

NZ must condemn atrocities but keep pushing for a two-state solution

It was perhaps inevitable that the shock Hamas attack on Israel would become a minor election sideshow in New Zealand. Less than a week from the polls, a crisis in the Middle East offered opposition parties a brief chance to criticise the foreign minister’s initial reaction.

But if it was a fleeting and fairly trivial moment in the heat of a campaign, the crisis itself is far from it – and it will test the foreign policy positions of whichever parties manage to form a government after Saturday.

It can be tempting to see the latest eruption of violence in Gaza and Israel as somehow “normal”, given the history of the region. But this is far from normal.