The war against Israel

An excerpt from Melanie Phillips

It was said by Holocaust survivors that what provoked in them the most intense despair, to the point where some attempted suicide, was not the infernal depredations to which they had been subject by their Nazi exterminators but the subsequent indifference and rank disbelief of a world which refused to face up to the enormity of what had happened and, in varying ways, sought to deny it. The survivors bore witness to a terrible truth, but no-one believed them. They spoke, but no-one heard.

This weekend, as rockets continue to rain down on northern Israel, there is a rash of demonstrations around Britain against Israel. Not against the genocidal warmongers of Syria and Iran, but against their victim, Israel. Not against Hezbollah, whose rockets are tipped with ball bearings in order to murder and maim as many innocents as possible, but against Israel for waging a war of self defence in which, as in all wars, civilians tragically will lose their lives. Even though Israel, unlike Hezbollah, is delivering repeated warnings to those civilians in advance of its attacks in order to minimise the loss of innocent life whereas the aim of Hezbollah and Hamas is to maximise their murder rate, it is Israel, not Hamas and Hezbollah, which stands condemned in too much of Britain - and as this war grinds on and the casualty rate in Lebanon mounts, such condemnation will surely only increase.

It is Israel, the target of annihilatory attack, which is seen as the guilty party. It is Israel, struggling to defend itself - which it may well not succeed in doing - (so much for its supposedly mythic power, one of the principal motifs of anti-Israel feeling) which is being demonised as brutal and violent, overreacting and at fault. It is Hezbollah which has hidden its rockets in the basements of Lebanon's apartment buildings, thus using the population of Lebanon as a collective human shield (as Hamas has done in Gaza) behind which it can pursue its murderous purpose against Israel. But it is Israel which is blamed for razing the `Paris of the Levant'.

Much has been made of the loss of Lebanon's tourism industry. The loss of Israel's tourism industry is not even mentioned. Israelis across the north of the country - some quarter of the population - are virtually living in bomb shelters and their casualty count is rising....

********************

ELSEWHERE

Is this the ultimate in dreamy Leftist self-delusion? A Dutch socialist has said that the Islamofascists are like the ANTI-Nazi resistance of World War II.

The United Church of Christ (USA) is rabidly anti-Jewish so can find no fault with Arabs but finds every fault with Israel in the present situation. Their pathetic attempt to explain their position has just drawn a blistering reply from the Simon Wiesenthal centre -- which you can read here

I suppose most readers here have by now seen the transcript of the informal conversation between GWB and Tony Blair. People have read all sorts of things into it but the sweater episode was what seemed most significant to me. I was delighted to see both men show such an excellent sense of humour over it.

Australia's main public broadcaster has climbed on to the moronic "peak oil" bandwagon. Good evidence of what nonsense it is, I suppose. See here. For just one hole in the story, see here.

A cycle of nonsense: "For reasons unknown, some people seem to regard verbal equivalence as moral equivalence -- and the latter as some kind of badge of broadmindedness, if not intellectual superiority. Therefore, when Palestinian terrorists ("militants" in politically correct Newspeak) attack Israel and then Israel responds with military force, that is just another "cycle of violence" in the Middle East to some people. The "cycle" notion suggests that each side is just responding to what the other side does. But just what had Israel done to set off these latest terrorist acts? It voluntarily pulled out of Gaza, after evacuating its own settlers, and left the land to the Palestinian authorities. Terrorists then used the newly acquired land to launch rockets into Israel and then seized an Israeli soldier. Other terrorists in Lebanon followed suit. The great mantra of the past, "trading land for peace," is now thoroughly discredited, or should be. But facts mean nothing to people who are determined to find equivalence, whether today in the Middle East or yesterday in the Cold War."

IRS threatens churches on political expression: "The Internal Revenue Service has been warning churches and nonprofit organizations that improper campaigning in the upcoming political season could endanger their tax-exempt status. In notices to more than 15,000 tax-exempt organizations, numerous church denominations and tax preparers, the agency has detailed its new enforcement program, called the Political Activity Compliance Initiative, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday. Under the initiative, the IRS plans to expedite investigations into claims of improper campaigning, no longer waiting for an annual tax return to be filed or the tax year to end before launching a probe. A three-member committee will make an initial review of complaints and then vote on whether to pursue the investigation in detail."

Self-inflicted poverty: ""Low-income residents of 13 cities across the nation pay extra for many everyday services, sometimes thousands of dollars more over a whole year, a study to be released today shows. By taking out higher-interest mortgages, shopping at rent-to-own furniture stores, using check-cashing businesses instead of banks and buying groceries at convenience stores, the nation's working poor households pay much more than moderate- and high-income households for life's essentials, says the Brookings Institution study, which analyzed services in San Francisco, Oakland and 11 other cities. The report -- 'From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Lower-Income Families' -- calls on government officials to create laws to curb services that gouge low-income consumers, and it proposes reproducing fledgling programs the authors found across the country."

A desperate cover for a lack of ideas: "Madison Ave. ad execs are so bent on taking control of America's children, they'd put computer chips in kids' brains if they could, Sen. Hillary Clinton said yesterday. Saying advertisers have found so many new ways to get at kids through video games and the Internet, Clinton warned that we're verging on a society out of a grim science fiction novel. "At the rate that technology is advancing, people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy," Clinton said at the Kaiser Family Foundation."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

**************************

"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

****************************