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Sunday 8 November 2009

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The Islamists are winning

19 July 2006

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century

Truth is generally the first casualty in war. On the battlefields of the Middle East, especially when Israel is involved, Reason also has a hard time of it. For neither Israel nor the Jews are seen — whether by themselves, by their friends, or by their foes — as a nation and a people like others.

One form of irrationality, shared by (some) evangelical Christians and (some) Jews, has it that Israel is the ‘Zion’ of prophecy, part of God’s plan, with its borders fixed for eternity by the Almighty. A contrary irrationality denies Israel’s right to exist, or regards Israel as not a nation at all. In the words of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in April 2000, it is merely a ‘cancerous body in the region’. Or, according to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’, speaking last Sunday — and breaking new medical ground — Israel is an ‘infectious tumour for the entire Islamic world’.

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