Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Oct. 18, 2023
“… there is something else we need to investigate, too – the supine willingness of our own liberal elites to parrot the Hamas line that this was definitely an Israeli strike and proof of Israel’s evil. It is not enough to investigate where the missile came from – we must also investigate where this moral rot comes from; how we arrived at a situation where so many in the educated elites are happy to take at face value the claims of a movement of anti-Semitic mass murderers.”
It should be clear to everyone on this grim day that the fashionable rage against Israel is no longer just irrational, it is dangerous. That most peculiar union of woke elites and perma-angry Islamists, wedded together in an implacable loathing for the Jewish State, is not only unsettling, it is also menacing. In the aftermath of the calamity at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, and the rush to blame it on Israel, we can now see that anti-Israel hysteria poses a palpable threat to regional stability in the Middle East and to the social fabric here in the West.
There is really only one thing we can say with certainty about the explosion at al-Ahli hospital – that it was a tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions. Hundreds of Palestinians were reportedly killed in or around the hospital after a missile of some kind fell on the car park and started a raging fire. This is a dark day for Palestinians, and for humanity. The sooner we bring the war in Gaza to an end – which is to say the sooner Hamas returns the 199 civilians it kidnapped from Israel and declares a complete ceasefire – the better.
Much else about the horror at the hospital remains unclear, shrouded in claim and counterclaim. The Pavlovian response of the MSM, and of that army of preening Israel-haters on social media, was to say that Israel did it. And that it was an act of genocide. Further bloody proof, they cried, of Israel’s determination not only to neuter Hamas but also to erase an entire people. ‘Biden, Biden, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!’, chanted protesters outside the White House last night, furious that their president backs a nation that would do something as unconscionable as bomb a hospital. … [To read the full article, click here]
