Israel Deserves More Than Just Our Thanks

Israel also deserves the justice -- including our full support -- that only full context can give regarding its acts of self-defense.

***

Over at Sp!ked is what I would call a good start on a massive calling-out the Western intellectual and political establishment more than earned long ago regarding Israel.

In what I would likewise call a good start, Israel has killed or incapacitated half a thousand terrorists in Lebanon, including an adult male Islamist known as Ibrahim Aqil, who was behind the murder of hundreds of American soldiers forty three years ago. (Aqil was never a man in the proper sense of the term, nor did he "mastermind" anything.)

The piece is good on two counts: (1) Calling attention to the "ruthless decontextualisation of the Israel-Lebanon clash" as a "kind of war censorship," and (2) slamming our "leaders" for going along with it.

Brendan O'Neill does both in the following passage:

Thank you, Israel. (Image by Rewards for Justice, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

No one denies the horror of civilian casualties. But it is a flagrant lie to call Israel's actions in Lebanon a war on civilians. It's a war on terrorists, and it's been a year brewing, ever since Hezbollah chose to bombard Israel to rub salt in the wound of Hamas's pogrom. In more normal times, the French president, and the US president, would be thanking Israel for its removal of a terror commander like Aqil. After all, Aqil is widely suspected of assisting in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings that killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel. It is a testament to the moral disarray of the West's elites, if not their outright moral collapse, that they've responded to the just killing of a West-hating mass murderer by tut-tutting at those who brought him to justice. So where Macron bemoans Israeli aggression in Lebanon, Joe Biden's America is 'like a deer in the headlights', says one DC think-tanker. Way to commemorate your servicemen and women that Aqil helped to butcher, France and America. [bold added, links in original]

As with Israel's long-delayed undertaking of responding on the northern front of the war that has been waged against it for decades, only to be escalated on October 7, O'Neill's piece is a good start, but it will not be enough to save the West.

Let's all do whatever we can to ensure that neither is too little or too late.

-- CAV