The shameful gloating at Israel

Leftists love to fantasise about how heroic they’d have been when Jews were being rounded up in the 1930s. ‘I’d have said something’, they insist. Well, Jews are being rounded up again. They’re being kidnapped, humiliated, paraded through the streets, slaughtered. And leftists are definitely saying something. They’re saying: ‘Good’.

The radical gloating over Israel’s suffering today is beyond the pale. It’s a new low for a left that was already in the moral gutter. Across social media you will see radicals cheering Hamas’s invasion of Israel. That nasty Jewish State had it coming – that’s the implication of their rank apologism for this radical Islamist assault on a democratic nation.

Consider Rivkah Brown, who works for Novara Media. She is calling today a ‘day of celebration’. It’s wonderful to see ‘Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory’, she says. To us softies who think the massacre of Israeli-Jewish civilians is a bad thing, Ms Brown says: ‘The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless.’

Struggle for freedom? Israeli women and children are being kidnapped. The elderly are being kidnapped. At least 150 Israelis have been killed. There are video clips seeming to show the ritual humiliation of dead Israeli soldiers. These are war crimes. They are acts of genocidal bigotry carried out by a movement whose founding charter committed it to an existential ‘struggle against the Jews’. If you ‘celebrate’ this, you are truly lost.

Ms Brown is not alone. Many others are chirping the praises of the ‘Palestinian resistance’. From the comfort of their Dalston flats and Home Counties houses, the middle-class left raises a collective fist as elderly Israeli women are taken hostage and a dead young woman, half naked, is paraded before a cheering mob in Gaza. It’s sickening.

Let’s remind ourselves what is being ‘celebrated’ here. Hamas is a virulently anti-Semitic movement. It started out, in the late 1980s with the express intention of killing Jews. As recently as 2021, one of its senior officials was telling Palestinians to ‘cut off the heads of Jews’. Is there anything more ridiculous than plummy, pink-haired, trans-friendly lefties in the West siding with the boorish, bigoted, Islamist patriarchs of Hamas? These people wouldn’t last five seconds in Gaza.

Alongside the shameful celebrations of the Israelophobic left, there has been a notably muted response to the Hamas invasion in the liberal media. ‘Israel launches airstrikes on Gaza Strip… after Palestinian gunmen infiltrate its territory’, said BBC Breaking News. What nice, neutral language to describe an extremist onslaught against a sovereign nation.

To get a real sense of what happened today – the kidnappings, the killings, the criminal humiliation of civilians – you need to look to the internet rather than the mainstream media. The opinion-forming set’s longstanding agitation with the uppity State of Israel has led to a situation where they can’t even bring themselves to give a full, clear account of the atrocities visited on it today by an army of hardcore religionists.

The Western world has been found seriously wanting today. Unforgiving extremists, as hostile to us as they are to Israel, attacked men, women and children for the ‘crime’ of being Jews in Israel, and too many over here either looked the other way or said: ‘Well, what did Israel expect…? Those women and kids being abducted in trucks? They were asking for it.’