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Search Results for: Iran

Britain Global conflict 

Our arms sales help keep Iran’s plots in check

Melanie

The war in Yemen, however, poses yet more complex questions. Holding our noses to ally with unpleasant and illiberal regimes against Islamist terror might well be in Britain’s national interest. But Saudi Arabia is the originator of the Wahhabi extremist ideology which gave rise to the Sunni Islamist onslaught against the free world in the first place. So how can the West regard it as its ally against Islamist extremism? The answer should be a dual response: ban all Saudi-funded activity in Britain, but ally with the desert kingdom against…

Coronavirus Global conflict Israel 

Both hero and zero: Israel’s strategic incoherence

Melanie, , ,

While Israelis are increasingly alarmed by the government’s loss of control over the coronavirus crisis, different events suggest that the country may have pulled off a spectacular advance in the battle against another intractable foe. Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a succession of mysterious explosions in Iran. At the end of last month, there was a major explosion in the Khojir missile factory near Tehran and at a power plant in Shiraz, which plunged the city into darkness. There has also been an explosion at a…

revolutionary Culture wars 

The purposeless anomie behind today’s anarchy, violence and chaos

Melanie, , ,

Want to understand why so much of the western world seems to have lost its collective mind and descended into anarchy, violence and chaos? What follows below is what I wrote in my book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God,Truth and Power. It was published in 2010, and I believe it describes precisely what has now erupted in America, Britain and elsewhere. The very condition of the modern world provides emotional rocket-fuel for the belief that it can and must be transformed. Anomie, that state of…

HRH Israel 

EU second thoughts over hostility to Israel?

Melanie, , ,

Has the European Union reached a tipping point over Israel? Or to be more precise, is the Europeans’ bluff finally to be called over Israel’s proposal to extend its sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria? The E.U. has been mulling over punitive measures against Israel if it goes ahead with what its western critics call “annexation of the occupied territories of the West Bank.” A number of member states, headed by France along with Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and Luxembourg are calling for a…

virus Israel 

Israel-bashers fail to see the Arab train leaving the station

Melanie, , ,

It’s a busy time for Israel-haters. So what’s new? Well, a lot. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the Democratic congresswoman who has a lengthening record of lies about Israel, last week tweeted the boiler-plate falsehood that Israel’s foundation in 1948 had entailed the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinian Arabs who were “indigenous” to the land. The Jews, of course, are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national home. And the Palestinian Arabs’ displacement took place in the war of extermination against the nascent State of…

HRH Israel 

From San Remo to 72nd birthday, Israel displays rare and robust resilience

Melanie, , ,

One hundred years ago this Sunday, the four principal allied powers involved in World War I signed a resolution at San Remo. Next week, Israel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut, the 72nd anniversary of the state’s declaration of independence. Typically, the world thinks that the key step towards the establishment of the State of Israel was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the statement in which the British government committed itself to work for the establishment of a Jewish home in what was then called Palestine. Relatively little attention has been paid to the…

Culture wars Global conflict Israel 

How the virus exposes magical thinking and short-term greed

Melanie, ,

The coronavirus emergency has affected virtually the entire world. In the west, it has brutally exposed the effects of a cultural characteristic that is as amoral as it is self-destructive. There is a refusal to face reality and the difficult choices it often requires, taking refuge instead in magical thinking and short-term greed. It’s a characteristic that has made victims of Israel and the Jews, along with many other people. In the current crisis, the west is paying the price of pretending that China’s communist regime does not represent a…

Britain Israel USA 

The real centre ground: the only political show in town

Melanie, , ,

Democracy, the process through which the people get to choose who governs them, involves a choice of leaders telling competing stories about how the world should be organized. A healthy society, we have told ourselves, involves regularly changing those leaders and their stories to provide the checks and balances essential to avoid the dangers inherent in one-party rule. In Israel, the United States and Britain, that process has stalled. The reason is that, in all three countries as elsewhere in the west, the story offered by the progressive side of…

Jewish people 

The west mourns the Jewish dead. But what about the living?

Melanie, , ,

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Jan. 23, some 46 political leaders and royals, including Britain’s Prince Charles, will be attending the fifth World Holocaust Forum to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. At this and doubtless other such memorial events, many eloquent, important and heartfelt observations will be made about the evils of Nazism and Jew-hatred. In today’s climate, however, there’s something disquieting about such memorializing. Given the eruption of physical and verbal attacks on Jews in Britain, America and Europe, it…

Britain Culture wars Global conflict 

The perverse western mourning for Qassem Soleimani

Melanie, , ,

The liberal world is aghast. President Donald Trump has done something that repudiates the very rules of nature by which western progressives live. Faced with a military general intent on ramping up the decades-long war of conquest he had been commanding for his fanatically anti-western regime, Trump liquidated him before he could murder anyone else. Cue liberal horror and outrage. Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani — the man responsible for a vast infrastructure of global slaughter and oppression, and with blood on his hands from American and British soldiers, as well…