Cowards

by G. Murphy Donovan (July 2024)

Coward, Kazimir Malevich (1913)

 

Conscience doth make cowards of us all. —William Shakespeare

 

An old cliché says truth is the first casualty of war. Indeed, the Gaza war illustrates the truth of official lies in ways that make words like propaganda and spin sound like compliments. The level of mendacity, the breath of distortion seems to have made truth the enemy of the people – especially in the West, EU countries, and the English speaking world at large. Indeed, our unwillingness to see the reality of real threats, in the real world, has “made cowards of us all.”

We are ensnared in a wilderness of lies of our own making. America, especially, no longer has the restraints of conscience or common sense. In a few short months Israel has morphed from victim to villain. At the mercy of woke media, Israel has gone from wining to sinning overnight.

In short, we can not, for love or money, call a spade a spade. The Gaza war, if the truth be told, is unique among wars only because it is existential for one party. Neither the West bank, Gaza, nor “Palestine” are countries in any meaningful sense of the word. Nor are Palestinians a unique ethnic or national group. So called “Palestinians” are just one of many restive and toxically recidivist Arab tribes that unfortunately share a border with Israel.

After October 7, 2023, rewarding Palestinians with affirmation like statehood would make it another Afghanistan.

No country in Persian or Arabian worlds welcomes Palestinian refugees or migrants – for good and prudent reasons. In spite of these truths, the Gaza conflict is now represented as a lose/lose narrative, as if it were a RAND Corporation war game.

The best that can be said about the Islamic fanatics that surround Israel on two sides is that Palestinians are, as Lenin might say, “useful idiots.” Palestine is literally being used by Sunni and Shiite as confrontation proxies where the bait is a promise of sovereignty at Israel’s expense, if not extinction.

Call it Holocaust Mock II. If Hamas and Hezbollah survive, Israel and eight million Jews may not.

Statehood for Palestine would come at Israel’s expense under any scenario. With such; the jihad, Islam, and Mecca get the big win and the non-Muslim world would still be at risk from terror and colonization. Ironically, Islam’s fascists are as big a threat to janissaries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia as they are to totalitarian kingdoms like the Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The threat of Islamic fascism, in a nutshell, is now global.

The Taliban victory over the US in Afghanistan surely played a role in motivating Hamas to attack Israel. Any triumph over Israel is likely to put imperial religion in overdrive. When terror wins, neighbors cringe. Pakistan, a nuclear power, should be sleeping with one eye open and their boots on now that religious fascism has a very big win next door in Kabul.

Islamic kingdoms and secular governments are red meat for jihadi, the mad dogs, the Assassins of modern Muslim religious fascism.

Any idea that Mohammed’s psychotics will be satisfied in South Asia with just Afghanistan is a pipe dream. The loss of Afghanistan was a blow to civilization itself. Indeed, India has no illusions about Islamism, whether it comes under the veil of an Islamic janissary like Pakistan or an Islamic theocracy like Afghanistan. Pious fascism is what the two have in common. Russia and China have no illusions either about the Mecca menace. Both have been unequivocal and ruthless in their suppression of Islamic sedition and terror.

Only naïve woke liberals of the West believe that they can accommodate, appease, or coexist with Islamic religious fascism. Today, real fears and real threats are “misgendered” as phobias. Islamophobia is an example. Alas; democracy, freedom, common sense, and national sovereignty at risk are not illusions.

Surely, not all Muslims are fascists, supremacists, or even imperial religious crackpots. But militant numbers are irrelevant in an Ummah that boasts two billion or more on the bench. The problem with the theocratic gene pool is indifference and apathy about kefirs and fakirs alike, where silence literally means violence. Islam is united by contempt for non-believers.

The Shite sect has opened a new front in northern Israel using Lebanon as a proxy, much the same way as Sunni sponsors are using the West Bank and Gaza. All the while, team Blinken/Biden whistle in the dark for a cease fire in advance of November elections. The war in Gaza is now existential for Israel – and Joe Robinette. Clearly, the ayatollahs of Iran see weakness at the White House and hope to replicate the Afghan win with another score at America’s and Israel’s expense in the Levant.

If team JRB gives Islamists another big win, Biden will have solidified his place as the worst and most hopelessly naïve president in American history.

Ironically, Israel may have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to thank if the West ever gets behind Israel again. RFK might be the real agent of change in 2024 politics.

Gaza and now Lebanon, as Caroline Glick likes to point out, are now two fronts in the same war against Isreal. Israel’s goal is survival; Mecca’s goal is a “final solution.” Today, Hitler’s dream is a refrain now heard again on the streets of Washington, DC, New York, London, and Brussels.

“From the river to the sea,” indeed. Alas, nobody gets a second chance to change the great mistakes of history.

The camel in the room is Islam, the nexus in the  “clash of civilizations.” Indeed; religious politics, like political fascism, are just another form of imperial or supremacist ideology. If the West were to confront the sponsor states of Islamism, the war with Israel and the bloodshed could end tomorrow. But no, we continue to play “whack-a-mole,” pretending that terror proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban are independent actors, unrelated to Ummah sponsors in what is now a global crusade.

Unfortunately, the West, including America, the EU, the Commonwealth, and surely NATO, are not able or willing to recognize or confront what is a clear and growing danger. If the vectors of religious fascism are to be undone or defeated, we may have to wait for a new generation of alliances less hobbled by wishful thinking, utopian illusions, and cowardice.

At some point, countries like India, Russia, and China may have to coalesce as real politik partners, and confront theocratic supremacists. When that day arrives, the carnage in the Ummah will make Gaza look like child’s play in a sand box.

Islam, like all the utopian schemes of history, is no match for the power of rational, common sense nationalism.

Shalom.

 

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast