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Much-needed insights on the war against the West.

A leading British intellectual and Jewish commentator has just been on a speaking tour of Australia. Her meetings were well-attended and much-needed. I refer to Melanie Phillips. With a brand-new book out, and a host of terrific columns appearing on a regular basis, she has been offering clearheaded assessments of the Israel/Gaza situation in particular and the war the West is now in with political Islam in general.

I have previously discussed and quoted from her new book.

Here, I want to speak more to the book, and her latest column. Both offer much-needed clarity on how Western leftists are siding with Islamists to bring about the end, not only of Israel, but of the West. In Chapter 1 of her book, she looks at how Islamism is stalking the West:

The West’s abandonment on its biblically-based structures created a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched. They understood something that the West had forgotten – that religion was essential to a culture’s understanding of itself, and that without a religious underpinning, no culture would survive. They understood that the West was evacuating its culture of religion, meaning, and purpose, and so would no longer be prepared to defend itself.

In addition, Western nations weren’t having enough children to service their economies and support the increasingly top-heavy burden of people living ever-longer lives. As a result, they looked to the ever more mobile developing world for sources of immigrant labour. The Islamists accordingly seized their chance. (p. 14)

Unholy Alliance

Thus, the fastest-growing religion in Europe today is Islam. She goes on to speak about the red-green alliance:

The reason the Islamists have been able to suborn the Western brain like this is because the West has long been their willing accomplice through what’s been called the “red-green alliance.” Left-wingers who want to bring down the West have joined forces with Islamists who are working towards the same goal. This is even though the society envisaged by the Islamists would destroy every assumption beloved of Western liberals by denying human rights – treating women as second-class citizens, killing gay people, and regarding anyone leaving Islam as a traitor to be executed.

The most bizarre examples of this liberal delusion is “Queers for Palestine” who attack gay-friendly Israel for denying Palestinian human rights. But in Muslim society, gay people have no human rights whatsoever. In Iran, they are hanged from cranes; in Gaza they’ve been thrown off the top of tall buildings.

White liberals are Islamic supremacists’ useful idiots…

Liberals reflexive distaste for Israel and their more understandable compassion for the suffering of Gaza’s women and children – images of which were pumped out daily by mass media regurgitating Hamas propaganda – caused them to march under the grotesque banner of human rights alongside mobs calling for genocide. The October 7 pogrom simply couldn’t be allowed to challenge the liberals’ narrative of Palestinians oppressed by Israeli colonialism.

That narrative isn’t just a view they hold. It defines their moral personalities as people of conscience devoted to the cause of the oppressed. Anyone who opposes it is “right-wing” and inexplicably evil. If the Palestinian narrative is undermined or shown in any way to be false, the liberal fears that his or her claim to be a moral being will be destroyed.

That had to be prevented at all costs. And because for such post-truth liberals no facts could trump feelings, it followed that no facts could ever trump the images of Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the noble feelings of horror and compassion these produced.

Whether those images had been radically decontextualized, distorted, or were outright lies was irrelevant. What mattered above all was to deny the Israeli Jews status as victims. If Israeli Jews were the victims of Palestinian Arabs, the liberals’ whole narrative would be smashed, and their moral personality would be smashed with it. They would become “right wing” and therefore evil.

So Israeli Jews simply couldn’t be victims. That was one reason why those posters had to be ripped down – to tear away the threat to the rippers’ moral identity. And the similarly urgent task of neutralizing the genocidal Palestinian aim of wiping out the Jews was to be achieved by inverting the whole thing and accusing Israel of genocide.

In focusing upon their hatred of Israel, however, the West’s Palestinian supporters are being played in a war of civilization in which they stand to be the losers. They think they’re supporting the Palestinian victims of oppression. But the October 7 pogrom and subsequent war weren’t about Hamas or Gaza, just as the Palestinian cause isn’t itself about the Palestinians. These are instead fronts in the Islamic war against the West, in which the defeat of Israel and slaughter of the Jews is framed as the essential precursor to attack on the Christian West and the entire non-Islamic world.

We know that because the Islamic world tells us this in no uncertain terms. Iranian leaders have said repeatedly they are in a war to destroy the West. Hamas leaders have frequently declared that their aim is to conquer the entire world…

The West, however, refuses to acknowledge the war being waged by the Islamic world against Western civilization. Worse, by appeasing Iran, undermining Israel, and ignoring the Islamization of the free world, it has been giving succor to its mortal enemies. (pp. 19-21)

Phillips asks why the West is taking this suicidal course:

The terrible truth is that the West no longer understands what civilization actually is. Specifically, it no longer understands that civilization is Western, that the West gave birth to it. Instead, our best and brightest have told us for decades that the West was born in the original sins of imperialism and colonialism, racism and white privilege. It’s not worth fighting or dying for. Indeed, John Lennon’s “nothing to fight or die for” is the mantra of the modern deracinated liberal…

The West has become blind to reality because of the progressive disintegration of the shared and inherited values that uphold and protect a civilization. It’s the cultural equivalent of autoimmune disease, in which the West has been attacking its own protective mechanisms while embracing the organisms that would destroy it. (pp. 21-22)

Tortured

In her column penned just the day before yesterday, she speaks further to “What Israel is really up against”. She reminds us of some historical facts in light of current realities. She says this about Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy:

The three released captives were unrecognisable from the men who had been seized on October 7 2023 and dragged into the dungeons of Gaza. They were emaciated, sunken-eyed, walking unsteadily. They had been starved and tortured.

We now learn they were shackled inside a dark tunnel with no air or light; chained and unable to stand so that one of them had to be taught to walk again before being released; suffocated, hung upside down and burned; starved and then forced to eat rotten bread, and forced also to decide who among them would eat.

Trump, who was clearly shaken and appalled by these images, observed that that three men “looked like Holocaust survivors” and said: “I don’t know how much longer we can take that”. He was clearly not just horrified but deeply, profoundly angry.

At long last, this was a morally correct response by a western leader to current Jewish suffering. It was a vitally important response. It was the only decent response. Because the world has now seen graphic evidence of what Israel is up against.

She also discusses the recent comments made by Trump about Gaza:

The proposal to displace the people of Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with their ethnic composition. It is because they are an enemy population that not only tried but still intends to destroy another country and murder its citizens.

As the historian Andrew Roberts has written, if people launch aggressive wars and lose them they forfeit by their behaviour all rights to remain in the territory that they have turned into an engine of war.

Post-war population displacements have happened over and over again. After the Second World War, Europe accepted the deportation of some three million Germans from the Sudetenland because of their leader’s complicity with Hitler, and the area was re-populated with ethnic Czechs.

Gaza is not, as the progressive classes claim, “sovereign” territory; it has never been the sovereign territory of anybody. Nor is it the Gazans’ “home”; as Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has so aptly observed, if the Arabs of Gaza are “refugees” — as we have been told ad infinitum — Gaza cannot be their home. QED.

In fact, many if not most Gazans have long been desperate to live elsewhere but have been effectively imprisoned by an Arab world determined to keep them as far away as possible — both to enrage world opinion against the Jews, and because they are known to be trouble personified.

Ethnic cleansing is what actually happened after 1948 to the Jews of the Middle East, 800,000 of whom were driven out of Arab lands in which Jews had lived for centuries — driven out purely because they were Jews. And ethnic cleansing is what the very same people who are levelling this claim at Trump are themselves demanding when they insist that Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria should be removed from their homes there in accordance with the Palestinian demand that there should be no Jews in “Palestine”.

She concludes:

The obscene Palestinian cause is worn as the badge of conscience by the west’s progressive classes. That illustrates instead their repudiation of conscience. The Palestinian cause has destroyed the moral compass of the west. If Trump’s musings about a “Gaza Riviera” signal an equivalent strategy towards the Palestinian cause as a whole, he won’t just reshape the Middle East in a way that will bring it peace and justice. He will start to haul the west out of the moral abyss into which it has fallen.

While I did not get to hear Phillips speak when she was out here, many others did. We can be grateful that a voice of sanity and reason is still being heard, given that so much of the West, its intelligentsia, and the media have lost all touch with truth and reality.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch.