The left has fallen in love with Islam. By Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator.
Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a hundred thousand missiles into France these past three years. Imagine if the France-loathing maniacs had caused the deaths of hundreds of French people and forced almost half a million to flee their towns in terror. France would respond, right? It would take action, no? …
Why, then, does President Macron not extend the same right to fight to his supposed ally of Israel? Hezbollah has inflicted every one of those bloody horrors on Israel since 7 October 2023. I’ve scaled up the numbers to account for France’s population of 70 million, compared to Israel’s ten million. Yet this is what the tiny Jewish state has experienced at the hands of that self-styled Party of God — ceaseless, indiscriminate violence.
Reality:
In solidarity with Hamas’s Nazi-like pogrom of 7 October, Hezbollah started raining projectiles on Israel the very next day. It has fired around 12,000 missiles, rockets and drones at its neighbour. Scores have been slain, including 12 Druze children playing a game of football. Tens of thousands in Northern Israel have been forced into internal exile, leaving ghost towns behind them. Jew-free swathes of territory – just as the anti-Semites of Hezbollah like it.
There is not one country on earth that would tolerate such apocalyptic goading. …
And yet Macron this week rebuked Israel for striking back against Hezbollah. We condemn Israel’s ‘indiscriminate strikes’ in ‘the strongest possible terms’, he said, to the glee of every twit in a keffiyeh.
How do we know it’s love?
He’s being gushed over, naturally. The fastest route into the affections of the bourgeois left is to take a swipe at Israel.
Yet to those of us whose moral compasses have not been shattered on that wheel of hysterical hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, Macron’s comments are mad. Immoral, even. Reprimanding a democratic state for pushing back against the racist militia that has subjected it to such savage fire? Who does he think he is? …
Peruse social media, mingle with anti-war types, switch on the BBC, and you could be forgiven for thinking Israel is bombing Lebanon for sport. It’s that ‘genocidal bloodlust’ again, say the Israelophobes of the left, blind to how unhinged and pre-modern such libels against the Jewish state sound to the rest of us. These are lies of omission. To obsess over what Israel is currently doing to Hezbollah without mentioning what Hezbollah has already done to Israel is to engage in flagrant acts of deceit. …
Hezbollah is an army of bigots. It dreams of annihilating the ‘cancerous’ Jewish state. Its goal is a pogrom that would put into the shade those of the 1930s — it has promised to keep waging holy war against the Jews of the Holy Land, and those who survive ‘can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from’. …
Any coverage of the Lebanon crisis that leaves out these facts is not worth the paper it’s written on. Macron, Keir Starmer and every genuine progressive should be making one demand and one demand only: for the full surrender of Hezbollah and the liberation of both Lebanon and Israel from its hateful, violent ideology.
For example (by Catherine Salgado in PJ Media):
After Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah marked the ceasefire by immediately bombarding Israeli civilians, the IDF, of course, struck back. And completely contrary to all the propaganda that has been circulating nonstop from Jew-haters and Islamic terrorists online, Israel is not targeting Lebanese civilians; it is targeting Hezbollah operatives. The only reason Israel has to conduct some operations in “civilian” areas is that Hezbollah, like Hamas, uses civilians and their infrastructure as human shields.
Many of the northern Israeli towns under Hezbollah attack are still reeling from the Oct. 7 war. During that conflict, it was typical for Hezbollah to fire missiles at civilians in northern Israel on a weekly and sometimes a daily basis. Some towns saw a majority of their buildings damaged or destroyed in the Hezbollah bombardments. You can read about the harrowing story of an Israeli reservist crippled in a Hezbollah attack, whose town of Metula was largely reduced to rubble by Hezbollah. And while the jihad-loving Gazans can always be sure of billions of dollars from America and the West to rebuild, the bereft Israeli civilians receive no such aid.
It’s a religious war, and the western left supports the opposition — because it needs to see itself as more virtuous than its own population (who voted for Trump, etc.).