Alistair Heath
The Telegraph, Sept. 18, 2024
“Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and contradictions.”
Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.
Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group’s walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation worldwide.
A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman.
The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration.
The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing “escalation,” even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain’s help.
Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following – and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an unforgivable moral inversion. ….SOURCE