The Jewish moment
Earlier this week, there was a sound that has become all too rare. It was a Western political leader expressing unequivocal moral clarity.
Melanie Phillips
Asked about U.S. President Joe Biden’s opposition to Israel striking Iran’s nuclear facilities in defence against the Islamic regime’s attacks, Canada’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said: “I think the idea of allowing a genocidal, theocratic, unstable dictatorship that is desperate to avoid being overthrown by its own people to develop nuclear weapons is about the most dangerous and irresponsible thing that the world could ever allow. If Israel were to stop that genocidal, theocratic, unstable government from acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”
Poilievre’s remarks were as startling as finding a diamond in a garbage heap.
Most political and cultural leaders in the so-called civilized world either make equivocal, two-faced expressions of support for Israel or are part of the axis of demonization trying to bring down the Jewish state through lies and blood libels.
We now live in a world in which morality has been sickeningly turned on its head. The latest example is the nomination of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for the Nobel Peace Prize, whose winner will be announced this weekend. Other favourites are reportedly the International Court of Justice and the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
What do all these candidates have in common? Absolute moral bankruptcy, expressed through their attempts to destroy Israel by weaponizing libellous falsehoods, murderous bigotry, and, in the case of UNRWA, active connivance with and even membership of Hamas.
There’s copious evidence of UNWRA members in Gaza who doubled as Hamas terrorists, and of countless UNRWA facilities that housed Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.
The ICJ has presided over a travesty of law and justice by falsely accusing Israel of illegally occupying the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, giving serious consideration to a grotesque claim that Israel is committing genocide by defending itself against genocide, and relying for its information on viciously distorted claims by anti-Israel bodies.
The United Nations itself is a source of moral corruption. Guterres blamed Israel for bringing the Oct. 7 pogrom upon itself, and has consistently defamed Israel and soft-soaped Hamas during the months of war that have followed.
Far from being the avatar of global peace and justice in accordance with its foundational obligations, the United Nations has aligned itself with global forces of tyranny and terror while singling out Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, for systematic harassment, vilification and delegitimization.
This week, the United Nations elected to its Human Rights Council—long the redoubt of human rights abusers—Qatar, patron of Hamas and perpetrator of enslavement, violence against women and the execution of gay people.
The moral depravity of these international bodies is integral to the epidemic antisemitism that has surged across the free world. This is a full-blown civilizational collapse that has engulfed political and cultural elites across the board and, most terrifyingly of all, fried the brains of millions of young people.
In this cultural meltdown, media outlets have played a key role. The media is essential to upholding freedom and democracy by keeping society’s leaders honest. But the media itself is now the problem, having stopped being outsiders to the establishment—as journalists once thought of themselves—and becoming instead an outpost of the university-educated elite that has incubated the poisonous rot.
That’s why staggering media malfeasance now goes hand in hand with the disintegration of political leadership.
The recent media appearances of vice-president Kamala Harris have revealed her to be beyond parody as an utterly hopeless, incompetent and inept presidential candidate.
In one live video briefing on the Florida hurricane, she was caught covering her mouth to tell an aide, who was surreptitiously feeding her questions to ask, that it was a “live broadcast”—without realizing her microphone was itself live.
Far worse occurred on the CBS show “Face the Nation.” Asked by Bill Whitaker if the United States lacked influence over Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Harris gave one of her infamous “word salad” answers that was incoherent, incomprehensible and absurd.
But CBS then doctored the footage by removing the word salad and splicing in a different answer Harris had given in order to present the interview as coherent and focused.
This was straightforward journalistic corruption. It was part of the same intellectual environment in which media outlets systematically promulgated lies about former President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, while sanitizing and obscuring the fact that this was an illegal attempt by an alliance between the Democratic Party and elements in the justice and law-enforcement establishment to lever him out of office.
It’s the same environment in which the BBC, The New York Times and most mainstream media outlets have been systematically recycling Hamas propaganda for the past year while inciting murderous hatred against Israel.
It’s the same environment in which the deranged hatred of Israel and the Jewish people in the general population has become mainstream and is overwhelming the culture.
This is obviously very frightening. However, it’s important for Jews to view these tumultuous events not through corrupted Western eyes, which peer through a prism of demoralization and despair, but through Jewish eyes, which gaze through a prism of clarity and hope.
We Jews are not alone. There are good people who support us. They are people who still understand the distinction between right and wrong, truth and lies, victim and victimizer.
Although there are millions of them, they don’t possess cultural and political power. They have been effectively disenfranchised by those who aim to destroy Western civilization, who despise Israel and the Jews, and who dominate the elite positions within Western society.
With the decent millions fighting back through the democratic avenues available to them, a titanic civilizational struggle is under way.
The Jews are the leaders of that resistance. Israel is leading it in geopolitical and military terms, fighting to defeat the forces of evil in Iran and the Islamic world.
More generally, the historic culture of the Jewish people reaffirms the core values of civilization against the forces upholding lies, hatred and the abuse of power.
Those forces are embedded within the left-wing establishment in every country. In the Diaspora, many Jews themselves are signed up to the ideologies that have unleashed them. Some of these Jews have been deeply dismayed since Oct. 7 to find their supposed fellow “progressives” have turned against them.
These Jews have a choice. They can recognize the unique value of the inherited, specific precepts of Judaism that have bound the Jewish people together over the centuries and enabled it to survive every culture that has tried to annihilate it. Or else they can stick with a Western culture which, unless it dramatically changes course, is going down.
This weekend is Yom Kippur. Rarely has its central theme of teshuvah—“return”—seemed more apposite.
In the Middle East, the enemies of the Jewish people are now on the back foot. In Israel, there’s a quiet certainty that we are winning.
More than that, it’s astounding that this tiny country is standing alone to defend civilization against barbarism—a service to humanity that it’s delivering on behalf of the entire world.
No one is under any illusion. Many perils and maybe even more suffering lie ahead. What’s certain, however, is that Israel and the Jewish people will survive and thrive.
As Poilievre so movingly declared: “One thing I know—even a thousand years from now, on Friday as the sun sets and Shabbat begins in Israel, the songs of Shabbat will continue to be heard, and the Jewish people will continue to exist.”
We are living through a seismic chapter in Jewish destiny. The world may rage and shout and scream—because they know it, too. This is the Jewish moment.
Memorable words from both Poilievre and Melanie Phillips.