An explosive moment of clarification

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The Iranian war of extermination against Israel continues to be a clarifying moment for the supposedly civilized world.

Melanie Phillips

As this crisis continues, it is remorselessly spotlighting those who stand against such evil and those who are shamefully siding with it.

Israel’s astounding feat this week in killing or disabling thousands of senior Hezbollah operatives by causing their pagers and walkie-talkie radios to explode has sent its Western enemies into a frenzy. Anti-Israel activists and the media have been falling over each other to claim that the attack indiscriminately endangered and killed innocent civilians and amounted to a reckless escalation of the war.

In fact, never in the history of warfare has there been a more precisely targeted attack against enemy combatants. The explosive devices had only been distributed to senior Hezbollah operatives. The small amount of explosive inside was designed to hurt only the carriers.

The number of civilian casualties was accordingly extremely small. All such casualties are regrettable. But those accusing Israel of recklessly endangering civilians and escalating the war fail to acknowledge the difference between deliberately aiming to kill civilians and inadvertently causing civilian casualties in a just war of defence.

They fail to register the dozens of Hezbollah missiles and rockets that Hezbollah is firing every day to kill Israelis. They fail to refer to the 12 Druze children and young people killed by such an attack in July on Majdal Shams. They fail to note that Hezbollah has been increasingly widening its target range ever more deeply into Israel.

Escalation, it seems, is a one-way street. It never applies to attacks on Israel, only to Israel when it defends itself.

The Biden administration continues to play a double game. Ever since the Oct. 7 pogrom, it has pressured Israel not to take the steps needed to defeat Hamas, stop Hezbollah and neutralize Iran. That pressure has become frenzied in recent days as Israel has signalled it may have no alternative but to clear Hezbollah out of Southern Lebanon altogether.

But at least the United States voted against the appalling resolution passed by the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday—by 124-14 with 43 abstentions—demanding that Israel should end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within 12 months.

The text of the resolution was based on the advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in July that Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian territory” was illegal. But the ICJ is a kangaroo court, relying for its “evidence” entirely on falsehoods propagated by those who want to see the Jewish state destroyed.

That includes the United Nations itself, which is institutionally programmed for Israel’s destruction by singling it out for a campaign of lies, bullying, harassment, discrimination and demonization that it deploys against no other country in the world.

This world body is morally bankrupt. So, too, is the British government, which couldn’t bring itself to vote against a resolution demanding Israel’s withdrawal to the 1948 ceasefire lines—dubbed by Israeli statesman Abba Eban “Auschwitz borders” because their indefensibility would guarantee Israel’s extermination—but instead abstained.

The British government has long misrepresented international law by falsely declaring Israel to be in “illegal occupation” of the “Palestinian territories,” which have never existed in law or history.

The new Labour Party government under Sir Keir Starmer, now prime minister of the United Kingdom, has ramped up hostility towards Israel by repeating the falsehoods and blood libels being promoted by the international “humanitarian” establishment led by the Hamas-supporting United Nations; endorsed the request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for warrants to arrest Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, despite the prosecutor’s arguments resting entirely on malicious falsehoods; restored funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) despite overwhelming evidence that it is an adjunct of Hamas; and introduced a partial arms embargo against Israel when it is fighting for its life against an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.

So, the fact that Britain didn’t oppose this vicious U.N. resolution is hardly surprising. What’s even more despicable is that it didn’t have the spine to vote in favor of it, and thus openly revealed this so-called ally of Israel to have become in practice its enemy.

This hostility is now so bad that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a rare public rebuke this week in an interview with Britain’s Daily Mail. He accused Starmer of being “misguided,” sending a “horrible message” to Hamas by partially suspending arms supplies to Israel and undermining its ability to defend itself.

But Britain no longer seems interested in fighting just wars at all. In a speech this week, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said climate change was the “most profound and universal source of global disorder” and more “fundamental” than either terrorism or an “imperialist autocrat”—an apparent reference to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Many people in Britain are nauseatingly voicing sympathy for the Hezbollah operatives killed or maimed in the exploding pager and radio attacks. This is hardly surprising since the all-important BBC has been framing these attacks as indiscriminate, illegal and a lurch towards a regional war that the media behemoth appears not to have noticed has been underway for the past 11 months.

On the BBC World Service, reporter Orla Guerin misleadingly described “nightmarish” explosions in Lebanon’s “food markets, homes and restaurants” with casualties streaming to hospitals, as if those hurt were all innocent civilians rather than the vast majority being Hezbollah men.

Daniel Levy, the far-left son of the prominent British Jewish philanthropist and Labour Party fundraiser Lord Levy, told the BBC: “This is a new type of warfare. We see mass maimings. This has clearly hit civilians. It feels like a textbook definition of terrorizing people.”

This felt like a textbook definition of an anti-Israel Jew who was maiming his own people with lies framed to destroy their homeland.

On the BBC’s flagship radio program Today, Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, head of the Israel Defence and Security Forum of senior Israeli military and intelligence experts, was a rare voice defending Israel.

Avivi said that if Hezbollah retreated according to U.N. resolution 1701 and stopped firing at Israel, that would be the end of it; otherwise, if the 60,000 families displaced from their homes in northern Israel were ever to be able to return, Israel would have no choice but to invade Lebanon and destroy Hezbollah.

After he left the show, both the presenter Nick Robinson and the U.K.’s former ambassador to Lebanon, Tom Fletcher, agreed that Avivi was a “hardliner” who made them nervous.

To the BBC and much of the progressive world, the unequivocal determination to defend Israel by defeating its enemies who threaten genocide against it is to be “hard-line”. This is because the left-wing BBC and the rest of the progressive world believe themselves to embody centrist values.

For similar reasons, last week’s monumental report by the Tel Aviv-based British lawyer Trevor Asserson, which identified 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy in four months of Israel war reporting, was dismissed by the BBC as “biased” and methodologically unsound. The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, whose egregious hostility to Israel merited an entire section to himself in the Asserson report, dismissed it all as “a smear.”

However, as the Jewish Chronicle reported this week, Bowen proceeded to prove the truth of Asserson’s central complaint by saying, during a closed-doors BBC “masterclass” on reporting war impartially, that Hamas was a “good” source of information on Gaza casualty figures.

Yet statisticians and others have shown that the Hamas figures are grossly exaggerated, ludicrously failing to acknowledge a single terrorist among the total of Gazans who have been killed—all of whom it claims were civilians.

This is a seismic battle of civilization against barbarism, victim against oppressor, truth against lies. Lonely Israel is leading the great fight of good against evil, while the so-called civilized world no longer knows what side it’s on.