A terrible resonance

Melanie Phillips

The Daily Telegraph, which once was considered to be a quality newspaper, has carried a poisonous little story. It read:

The US has said it is ‘deeply concerned’ over Israel's plans to build hundreds of new homes in West Bank settlements. In response to an attack on a settler family over the weekend, Israel approved the construction of between 300 to 500 new homes in the West Bank.

The US Embassy called the Israeli settlements ‘illegitimate’ and an obstacle to resuming direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians. ‘They murder, we build,’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday during a condolence call to the grieving family. Palestinian militants are presumed to have carried out the assault, killing both parents and their three children. ‘We're deeply concerned by continuing Israeli actions on settlements in the West Bank,’ the statement from the U.S. Embassy said. ‘As we said before, we view these settlements as illegitimate and as running counter to efforts to resume direct negotiations.’ A senior Israeli official responded to the U.S. criticism by reasserting Israel's position that the major settlement blocs, where most of the 300,000 West Bank settlers live, will remain in Israeli hands under any final peace accord. (my emphasis).

This is how the Obama administration and the Telegraph view the significance of the massacre of Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, three months old, at their house in Itamar in Samaria last Friday night.

The warped and degraded priorities embodied in this short Telegraph item have been echoed since the massacre throughout the media – on the BBC and Sky, on CNN and in the New York Times, and by both the Obama administration and the British government.

If they reported or acknowledged the terrible details of this atrocity at all, these were nevertheless given short shrift. It has become a given that that the most important aspect of the events at Itamar last Friday night was not the murder of the Fogels and their three young children but the subsequent decision by the Israel government to resume building homes for Jews in the disputed territories.

The western media and political class regard the latter as the ‘obstacle to peace’, while the slaughter of a Jewish family by Arab terrorists is apparently irrelevant to the achievement of peace. This even though if the atrocity turns out to have been committed, as has been speculated, by members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the armed wing of ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas’s party Fatah, that would be a game changer for a ‘peace process’ predicated on the (ludicrous) assumption that Abbas/Fatah are legitimate ‘partners for peace’.

Such considerations are, it seems, quite irrelevant to Obama, the British government and the western media. All instead blame the ‘settlers’ for producing a ‘cycle of violence’ -- even though massacres of Jews by Arabs have been taking place in the land of Israel since the 1920s. And that's because the ‘settlement’ to which the Arabs react by mass murder is, as it always has been, the presence of Jews in any part of the land they currently occupy in the Middle East, including their own country.

This amoral response by the west is simply devastating. It means that it no longer possesses the capacity even to acknowledge Jewish victimisation at the hands of the Arabs – the actual cause of this nine-decade long conflict. Instead, Israelis have become literally dehumanised in the eyes of these British and American commentators. The murder of Israeli children is simply airbrushed out of the western media and political picture as just too inconvenient, because it gets in the way of what they have all persuaded themselves is an axiomatic fact: that this is merely a dispute over land between two rival peoples, and it is all Israel’s fault that it still isn’t resolved.

Indeed, some of the media couldn’t even bring themselves to call this atrocity an act of terrorism. But even ‘terrorism’ doesn’t accurately convey what happened in Itamar. Terrorism is when people murder the innocent to achieve a political end. Heaven knows, that’s bad enough. But this goes much further even than that. The Arabs who broke into the Fogels’ house and went from room to room murdering the family, slitting their throats while they slept, did so because they reach a psychotic state of ecstasy from murdering Jews.

We know that because the Arabs in Gaza handed out sweets and rejoiced at the slaughter. We know it because we have seen it before many times: Arab hands being dipped exultantly in the blood of the Israeli victims they have butchered. We know it because the Palestinian Authority-controlled media, mosques and educational materials tell their children that it is the greatest glory and a religious duty to kill Jews. We know it because the Palestinian Authority names squares and streets after such genocidal murders in order to honour their deeds.

This is not merely terrorism. This is a depraved death cult -- one adopted by the direct heirs to the Arabs of inter-war Palestine who formed Hitler’s Middle East legion. And their present-day descendants use the very same Nazi motifs and tactics of psychopathic dehumanisation of the Jews to incite their murder.

In other words, the Arab war against the Jews of Israel can be seen as the unfinished business of World War Two. The awful difference is that, whereas then it was ordinary Germans who looked the other way while the Jews were slaughtered, now it is ordinary Britons and other westerners who look the other way when a Jewish family is butchered – averting their gaze in order not to have to confront the terribly inconvenient fact that the genocide of the Jews, which they wish to obliterate from the collective western psyche, is still an active project.

So they tell themselves that the reason people slit the throats of children as they sleep is because Jews are building houses. Wickedly, these western fellow-travellers of genocide fail even to acknowledge publicly the open incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis that pours out of the Arab world and the Palestinian Authority (and that’s without even considering Hamas, whose genocidal aims are written for all to see.) Indeed, how can the west draw attention to this incitement: they help fund it.

Not only do they persist in this farcical analysis, not only do they then build upon this grotesque misrepresentation of the conflict to force Israel to compromise its security to these fanatics, but they also refuse to acknowledge the full depravity of what happened in Itamar because this shows up only too clearly the wicked falsehood of their assertion that it is Israel’s ‘settlements’ that prevent peace in the Middle East. And so, obscenely, they twist the presentation of this massacre to blame those who have been murdered for causing their own destruction.

Religious fascism as thus displayed by Arabs from Ramallah to Gaza City is bad enough. But it is the evil that now consumes Britain and the west which so completely chills the heart and prompts a terrible despair. For such moral blindness and worse means that, facing the heirs of the Nazis, the Jews once again find themselves abandoned, their victimisation once again dismissed and themselves once again blamed for their own persecution. Listen to the BBC, read the British newspapers or the New York Times, read the vicious readers’ comments on so many websites (including this one) and you will see that the blind eye to deranged racism and totalitarian mass murder that paved the way for so much slaughter under Nazism and Stalinism is rampant once again, showing us once more that civilisation is merely a thin veneer for barbarism.

In the face of this crisis of western civilisation and its chilling implications for the Jewish people, Israel itself is worse than useless. This is because -- contrary to the brutish power ascribed to it by its enemies -- Israel is pathologically timid. And so, even when faced with the terrifying consequences for its own security from the moral inversion of the west, it has chosen to stay silent.

It does not say what it should be shouting from the rooftops, that it is being forced by Britain, America and Europe to cut its own throat and that it refuses to do so; that it stands for truth, justice and international law while Britain, America and the EU stand for their negation; that it is not Israel but these western powers that are the cause of the Middle East impasse, because from the get-go the more the Arabs massacred the Jews the more Britain and the west rewarded them and punished their Jewish victims, a pattern which continues to this day.

Israel doesn’t say any of this because it fears that unless it goes along with the farce of the ‘peace process’ it will become delegitimised by a world that will take its revenge and abandon it to its fate at the hands of the billions in the Arab and Muslim world who want it destroyed. Which all goes to show that you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but it is far harder to take the ghetto out of the Jew. And now we can see what the result of Israel’s brilliant strategy has been – that it has indeed become delegitimised by the so-called civilised world, and that Britain, America and the EU are not just abandoning it to its fate but effectively giving it a choice – slit your own throat, or we will do it for you.

The question now has to be asked of every person in Britain and the west who promotes the boycott of Israel, or wears the keffiyeh in solidarity with the ‘Palestinians’, or so obsessively demonises the ‘settlers’ or ‘apartheid’ Israel, or makes vicious comments at the dinner tables of the elite about the bloody Jews and shitty Israel, why these ‘enlightened’ folk turn a blind eye to the slaughter of infants as they sleep, and assist Jew-hating fanatics in their racist aim of destroying Israel and denying to the Jews alone the right to live in their own historic country – and all because Israel is reluctant to reward these fanatics by giving them the territory from where they can finally achieve their murderous aims. These ‘progressives’ need to be outed for what they are – the fellow-travellers of psychotic religious fascism.

Israel is the signature moral issue of our time. Which side people choose to be on in the Arab and Muslim war against Israel tells us whether they are on the side of truth, justice and basic humanity – or the side of evil. The sickening response to the slaughter of the Fogel family shows us all too horrifyingly which side the west is on.