The Gaza War and the Decline of the West

By Michael Posner Copyright @ great untold stories inc.

I’m not worried about Israel.

Israel can — Israel will — look after itself. It may take a few months, but the IDF will eliminate Hamas as a military entity of any consequence, demolish its billion-dollar network of tunnels (paid for in part by the gullible European community), and destroy what the Gaza Strip has effectively been for 15 years, the world’s largest urban terrorist camp, and a forward base of Iranian subversion.

Much of the heavy lifting — all of northern Gaza, parts of Gaza City — has already been done. Hamas' parliament, such as it pretended to be, lies in ruins. Thousands of its foot soldiers have been dispatched, ostensibly to frolic with the 72 virgins. Others will follow. Ismail Haniyeh and the rest of the charming Hamas cabal -- billionaires barricaded in five-star Qatari hotels -- would be best advised to buy UVeyes, the hi-tech device that scans vehicles for bombs. An Israeli invention, by the way. Southern Gaza, particularly Khan Younis, remains, a formidable tactical challenge, but not insurmountable.

In deference to the jackals on the Arab street, moderate Arab leaders have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war, invoking the familiar canards — proportionality, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and collective punishment, yada, yada. Privately, however, they are cheering Israel on, grateful that it is doing what they would gladly do themselves, given half a chance. A few have even bold enough to say it out loud.

It’s instructive that, while Israel’s critics convulse in paroxysms of grief, not a single Arab or Muslim nation has offered to harbour a single Palestinian -- not for an hour. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, dragged its heels even on delivery of aid, and on the release of Gazans holding dual citizenship. Can we speak the truth? The wider Arab world reviles Palestinians far more than any Israeli. And justifiably, given the havoc Palestinians have wrought in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.

Exemplars of equivocation, paragons of posturing, earnest European politicians descended on the region, predictably condemning violence on both sides. They shook hands, nodded heads and then he expressed their deeply considered position. It boiled down to this: ‘you, Israel, clearly have the right to defend yourself. Just make sure you don’t kill anyone, okay?’

Speaking of double standards, the International Red Cross ought to win this year’s Golden Tourniquet award. The IRC navigates freely in dozens of challenging war zones, but in Gaza, it somehow could not manage to deliver a single bandage to any of the estimated 240 hostages, until the exchanges began. In fact, it took six weeks for the IRC president just to schedule a meeting with hostage family members in Geneva. Of course, it did manage a humanitarian visit to Hamas prisoners in Israel.

The IRC is part of Gaza’s vast, bureaucratic labyrinth. No fewer than 23 United Nations agencies maintain a presence there, manoeuvring within the nightmare of Hamas’ iron-fisted governance. But what applies to every journalist operating within the Strip, and to every doctor or nurse in hospitals that double as Hamas hideouts and weapon arsenals, also applies to UN staff. They are compromised. They can or will say nothing critical of the regime, for fear of their lives. Scan a decade of UN Commission of Human Rights reports, and you are unlikely to even find the word Hamas. In the Kafkaesque universe of UN rapporteurs, only Israel is guilty of human rights abuses. Some agency employees are actually complicit in promoting terror, using school curricula that lionize martyrs and teach Palestinian children to demonize Jews.

Another UN agency, UNICEF, which ostensibly exists to protect children, went to visit Gaza, but then managed to cancel plans to meet with parents and grandparents of the estimated 40 children taken as hostages by Hamas.

And the Western media? It is to laugh, or cry. Reporters for the BBC, CBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, the Guardian -- all the usual suspects -- might double as contortionists with Cirque du Soleil, so expertly did they twist every Hamas claim and statistic into unvarnished truth, and every Israeli talking point into “an allegation we have not been able to independently verify.” These organizations served an unending diet of stories that invariably cast Israel as the villain of the piece. No wonder, then, the animus directed at it by a heavily propagandized, ill-informed public.

Everyone with half a brain knows that Israel’s destruction of these Iranian proxies is a victory for light over darkness, and good over unadulterated evil. Alas, the number of people with less than half a brain seems to be rising exponentially.

In the early 1920s, the visionary Ze’ev Jabotinsky maintained that Arabs in what was then British-mandate Palestine would never voluntarily acquiesce to the Zionist enterprise. They would only acquiesce involuntarily, and only when they finally understood and resigned themselves to that fact that no campaign of Arab terrorism, no coalition of armed forces, no amount of outside pressure — nothing — would ever breach Israel’s iron wall. For iron wall, read: military might. Or, invincibility. Only then, Jabotinsky argued, would Arab extremists be forced to yield to Arab moderates, willing to sue for an enduring peace.

Transparently, we are not there yet; we may never be there. As former Knesset member Einat Wulf noted recently, the essence of the conflict is simply this: Israel is dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish state. The Palestinians are pledged to its annihilation. Everything else is a detail.

But the IDF’s campaign in Gaza, and the threat of its extension to Hezbollah, to Lebanon and implicitly to Iran, is a projection of Jabotinsky’s iron wall. For 15 frustrating years, Israel fought Hamas with one hand behind its back, restrained by Western diplomatic pressure, and by a reluctance to sacrifice the lives of Israel soldiers in a bloody ground campaign. The time for half measures is over. On October 7th, the Hamas death cult issued an invitation to total war; Israel promptly RSVPed. Don’t mess with the Zohan.

True, years will be required for Israelis to recover from the collective trauma of the pogrom, and before its shattered faith in its security  apparatus is restored. Politically, a national reckoning is required. A leadership transition doubtless will occur -- in the prime minister's office, the IDF, the Shin Bet. All bear some degree of culpability for the events of October 7th. There also remains a smorgasbord of contentious domestic issues, including judicial reform, that are still unresolved. None of this will be easy. But in time, the Israeli nation will be whole again.

The real crisis is elsewhere. The real crisis is here. No one who has watched what is happening on Western streets, no one who has objectively absorbed the response to the atrocities committed on October 7th, can be sanguine about our future. It is Western civilization that looks increasingly vulnerable.

Let’s start with Europe. The Europe that incubated the Renaissance and spawned the Enlightenment, is effectively finished. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But inevitably. The Arabic handwriting is already on the wall.

Three decades or more of largely unrestricted immigration from Muslim and other third world countries is rapidly redrawing the demographic maps of the UK, Germany, France, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Denmark. What record immigration levels started -- the de facto Islamification of Europe -- the higher birth rate will finish. Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? It hardly matters. The collapse of Europe, as we knew it, is inevitable.

It’s inevitable because, as everyone knows (but seldom concedes), new migrant groups overwhelmingly do not truly assimilate, do not embrace the traditional values and practices of their host countries. Immigrants may shop at the same supermarkets, and wear the same Nikes, but they cling to mores, customs and ways of thinking fundamentally antithetical to secular liberalism. The mystery is why anyone ever thought it would be otherwise.

“Multiculturalism makes no demands of the newcomer to integrate,” former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently lamented. “It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.” A month or so after making her comments, Braverman was fired from the Conservative cabinet, another victim of cancel culture. It is one thing to know the truth; God forbid you should speak it.

Braverman’s remarks echoed those of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2010, who shocked the world by acknowledging that “this [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed.” Nevertheless, in a humanitarian gesture, Germany admitted 2.1 million new migrants in 2015, almost 300,000 Muslims from Syria alone.

Far from embracing their host culture, many immigrants revile it. At least five thousand Europeans travelled to the Middle East to join Isis. Remember Isis — the Islamic State? Those fine Salafalists who made snuff films of beheadings of journalists and aid workers?

Some young European Islamists are easily radicalized: they have genuine grievances. Poor jobs (if any), inferior housing, and the dim likelihood of ever clawing their way into the shrinking middle class. Add the incitement from the mosques, the anti-integrationist, anti-western dogma delivered by imams -- et voila: the next suicide bomber is born.

Extremism aside, does anyone seriously believe that the hard-won fruits of the liberal tradition -- gender equality, lgbtq+ rights, freedom of speech -- apply within the teeming Muslim communities of Malmo, Birmingham, Bradford, Brussels, Avignon, Marseilles, etc.? Those rights and others — habeas corpus, due process, freedom of the press — are rare in the Muslim world. Indeed, according to Islam, all commitments to the inviolability of human rights are expressly preempted by Sharia law, soft-pedalled though it is.

So: on the assumption that the West's secular liberal values are worth preserving and defending, will they survive when a critical demographic mass no longer exists?

A decade after Merkel’s truth bomb, the romantic vision of multicultural cross-pollination peddled by other western governments has been exposed as a myth. It is simply not possible to reconcile the comforting, kumbaya fairy tale that we are all brothers and sisters -- ‘you savour my shawarma and I'll devour your poutine’ -- and then take to the streets to rip posters of kidnapped children from light standards, shoot bullets at synagogues and Jewish schools, and glorify death-cult jihadists intent on unholy war. The chasm cannot be bridged.

The virtue-signalling on pluralism has gone hand in hand with incessant bromides about diversity. As others have noted (Frank Furedi, Mark Steyn), the diversity agenda emerged first in Europe, as a hoped-for antidote to the evils of nationalism, which had yielded two world wars, left millions dead, and the continent in rubble. The ostensible lesson: patriotism bad, diversity good.

Be careful what you wish for. Diversity, it turns out, is the incubator of identity politics, everyone now required to wear a tribal badge for race, ethnicity, gender and pronoun preferences. And what a winner identity politics has been, eh?

While performative politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continue to sing ad nauseum from the multicultural/diversity hymn book, the grim reality has been on display for weeks: hundreds of thousands, in every major European city and many in North America, openly calling for the death of Jews, thirsting for a ‘multicultural’ pogrom, and valourizing murderers, rapists, and kidnappers.

Despite elaborate attempts to fudge its meaning, their kindergarten chant, "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is a clarion call for a genocide of the Jews. (That phrase, not incidentally, was first invoked in the mid-1930s, when Arab leaders told Britain’s Peel Commission that they would countenance no Jewish state anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea). Not a few of these aspiring Einsatzgruppen — no small irony — are Jewish, or claim to be. Indeed, the hate marches, as Suella Braverman accurately characterized them, have been populated by a United Nations of antisemites — not unlike the United Nations itself.

Notably, there were no such demonstrations when 158,000 Muslims died in the Yemenite civil war, nor any public protests when the Kuwaitis evicted almost 300,000 Palestinians (ethnic cleansing, anyone?), no demands for ceasefire when Syrian strongman Bashir Al-Assad killed 3,900 Palestinians, bombed their schools and hospitals, deployed nerve gas, and catalyzed the exodus of 5.7 million Syrians.

In this light, it’s difficult — actually, it’s impossible — not to conclude that what really motivates the protesters has very little to do with the suffering of their Arabs brothers, and almost everything to do with unfiltered, unfettered Jew-hatred.

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the world's oldest virus, long-suppressed, has been loosed from the laboratory and is spreading, fast. Millions are now afflicted, demonstrably in the grip of some kind of mass hysteria. Baying mobs, acts of vandalism, the unapologetic embrace of toxic ideology — can anyone doubt their yearning to do to Jewish communities around the world precisely what Hamas did to the hapless residents of Israel?

About militant Islam, the West remains largely in denial. Far too many people still naively believe the conflict is territorial, that if only Israel made sufficient concessions, a two-state solution could be found, and peace would be made. But land, West Bank settlements, the so-called occupation — none of this is remotely the issue. The shaheeds of the fledgling Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964 were attacking Jews and Jewish settlers long before the 1967 war, before Israel acquired a single hectare of the West Bank.

Before the Six-Day War, Jordan controlled all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; Egypt controlled the Sinai. Did anyone then say Palestinians deserved a state of their own? Did anyone campaign for Palestinian self-determination? No— not a word.

The point is, movements birthed by the Muslim Brotherhood, including Sunni radicals like Hamas, regard any Israeli presence in the holy land as a cancer to be excised. All of Israel— Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem— is therefore deemed an illegal occupation. And the Islamists are obsessively committed to slaughtering the infidel occupiers. One prominent spiritual leader, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, regarded Adolf Hitler as a divine punishment for the Jews, and advocated for another Holocaust, “inflicted by the hand of the Faithful” —i.e., Muslims.

To that end, any means is justified. What the western mind seems unable to grasp is that, as philosopher Sam Harris has explained, jihadists feel no compunction using civilians as human shields, because they know “any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity…If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, or resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.”

Perhaps October 7th will help move the needle of our understanding; I’m not optimistic.

It will be argued, inevitably, that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful. That is undeniable. But is it relevant? Where are these peaceful Muslims in the current controversy? Have there been any counter-demonstrations — of any size — by moderate Muslims, to protest the haters of London, Paris, New York, Toronto, etc.? How many moderate Muslim politicians, imams, intellectuals or TikTok/Instagram influencers have penned op-ed pieces, given sermons, appeared on television, or recorded videos to say, in effect, ‘I categorically and unreservedly disown the Hamas massacre, and these marchers; they are giving Islam a bad name’?

There’s an obvious reason why this almost never happens. The moderates are intimidated, effectively cowed. They may privately rail against Islamic fundamentalism, but it is simply too dangerous to speak out.

Moreover, if even .01 percent of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims is a murderous zealot, that’s 1.8 million — the equivalent of a city the size of Mosul.

Another common argument is that, however precise Israel's weapons, however scrupulous the IDF's efforts to minimize casualties, many innocent Gazans are dying -- and thus radicalizing the next generation. This thesis, too, is yawn-worthy, because all the evidence suggests that if (in the unlikely event) democratic elections were ever held in Gaza or the West Bank, Hamas or some facsimile would win the vote handily. A recent poll conducted by Arab World for Research and Development reported that 75 percent of Palestinians support the massacre of October 7th, and 83 per cent endorse the slaughtering of Jews. In other words, most of them already have murder on their minds— what difference a few more?

For Jews, one of the most worrying aspects of the weekly hate orgies has been the apparent unwillingness of the police — except in Germany— to intervene aggressively. Yes, the authorities are hopelessly outnumbered. But the larger concern is that police forces themselves have become increasingly politicized, indoctrinated in the same progressive ideology as many of the protesters — champions of diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI is the ugly stepchild of critical race theory, which assumes a priori that the West is irredeemably evil, racist, and colonialist, and that its demise should be welcomed, not mourned.

Thus, the manifestations of moral inversion: Instead of preventing people from stripping off the kidnap posters, some police officials men have actually joined in. Instead of arresting demonstrators calling for a new intifada — remember the intifada? When Palestinian suicide bombers blew up Israeli buses and children buying pizza? — most police forces have stood idly by. Yet while letting hate speech go uncurbed, British cops actually arrested a man who had the temerity to post a video objecting to the dozens of Palestinian flags in his neighbourhood.

"Two things form the bedrock of any open society," writer Salmon Rushdie has said. "Freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country." Ultimately, rigorous, impartial enforcement of the rule of law is all that stands between social order and anarchy, between where we are today and the next Kristallnacht — or worse.

One would like to think the outlook in American, Australia or Canada is rosier than Europe. It isn't.

On Veterans Day in the United States, pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City climbed lamp posts to tear down the American flag, and replace it with the Palestinian flag.

In Sydney, even before the Israelis had finished counting their corpses, emissaries of the religion of peace were in the streets, calling for the gassing of Jews.

In Canada, a country with “no core identity” according to its jejune prime minister, Remembrance Day was marked by speeches that ignored the heroic sacrifices of previous wartime generations, to rail against — you guessed it — white supremacy, colonialism and racism. In other words, the West, by virtue of is original sins, deserves the kinds of barbarism associated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis and Iran.

Two weeks ago, Sarah Jama, an independent member of the Ontario legislature — evicted earlier from the New Democratic Party for spewing anti-Jewish hate — co-signed a letter to Canadian parliamentarians, urging them to end support for Israel. In a measure of their moral derangement, the signatories — describing themselves as “residents of so-called Canada”— alleged that no women were raped during the Hamas assault, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You can’t make this stuff up.

How did we arrive at this morally blighted moment? There is no single cause, but our colleges and universities must bear much of the blame. Once beacons of truth, free expression and open-ended inquiry, they have been become indoctrination camps worthy of Mao and Pol Pot. What they now teach, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is cultural totalitarianism.

“Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason,” Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind (in 1987!). “It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power…We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.”

Among the millions marching for ‘Palestine’ are ostensibly well- educated college students, some of whom spearheaded the recent attacks on Jews on campuses. But it’s not only students. The moral rot is systemic.

This week, more than 100 faculty members of that once-elite institution known as Harvard denounceduniversity president Claudine Gay for daring to issue an anodyne statement opposing antisemitism; they claimed she was curtailing free speech.

Individual scholars at various institutions have been outspoken in support of Hamas’ brutality. Cornell professor of history Russell Rickford, for example, told a cheering throng of Palestinian supporters that news of the murders, rapes, beheadings and incineration of infants committed on October 7th was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Chastised by his employer, Rickford later issued a lukewarm apology, but who would give it credence?

Other marchers have proudly hoisted ‘Queers for Palestine’ placards, a laughable display of ignorance on several levels. For starters, merely to hold such a sign (let alone to be caught in flagrante delicto) in Gaza City, Ramallah, Baghdad, Damascus or virtually anywhere in Muslimdom would likely lead to a swift act of defenestration.

And then there are the social justice commandos — hyper-sensitive people ‘triggered’ by every perceived ‘micro-aggression’ or ‘violent’ insult. Invoke the wrong pronoun in addressing ‘they/them,’ and you’re liable to provoke a human rights complaint. But they have no trouble celebrating maniacal terrorists, who gleefully sodomize grandmothers in wheelchairs, and subject young women to serial rape, decapitate them on camera, and then send the videos to parents.

Of course, no angry rally speech — no chant, social media post, or press interview — has been complete without multiple invocations of the word ‘Palestine.’ As if there actually were such a place, or it could be magically wished into existence by mere incantation. Deploying this term is at once a mind game and a perversion of language, because at no time in history has there been a nation ruled by Arabs called Palestine. It is a make-believe country for, as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir bravely acknowledged, a make-believe people, invented by the KGB in 1964, using its hand-picked stooge, Yasir Arafat -- a native Egyptian.

It gets worse. The war on reason — the intellectual death spiral of our colleges and universities — has been underway for more than thirty years. Today, the jack-booted brigades of wokeism — drunk on moral relativism and the denial of objective truth — have infiltrated and taken power in our major institutions, corporations, labour unions, the civil service, public agencies, the media, and artistic communities. As writer Bari Weiss noted in a recent speech, in the topsy-turvy progressive universe, colour blindness has been replaced with race obsession; ideas with identity; debate with denunciation; persuasion with public shaming; and the rule of law with the fury of the mob.

The validity of Weiss’s observation was confirmed last week on, appropriately enough, TikTok, which comedian Sacha Baron Cohen aptly said was creating “the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.” Online, someone stumbled upon Osama bin Laden’s 2002 Letter to America, which attempted to justify 9/11 by accusing the U. S. government of being in the pocket of, naturally, the Jews, and therefore complicit in bombing Palestinians home. And before you could say ‘protocols of the elders of Zion,’ fevered TikTokers had experienced a life-altering epiphany, and concluded that Osama was actually a victim — and therefore, automatically, the good guy — and America was the satanic oppressor. In short, a perfect illustration of the historical ignorance and moral obtuseness that plagues Millennials and GenZ.

As a snapshot of our current predicament, the TikTok episode should be framed.

Literally unspeakable crimes were committed on October 7th. We don’t really have a vocabulary that can fully capture the butchery. The  savagery of Hamas out-ISISed ISIS, no small achievement. But the response of the vox populi — the millions savouring these atrocities as a victory for ‘the resistance’— testifies eloquently, tragically, to how damaged the West’s moral compass has become. Jews are always society’s coal mine canary, and the epidemic of Jew-hate we are now seeing marks a decisive turning, what Joe Biden likes to call an inflection point. Our civilization is breaking down, and it is likely to get worse, before it gets worse.