Islamist anti-Semitism is behind Israel’s darkest hour since the Yom Kippur war

Comment from Jake Wallis Simons the editor of ‘The Jewish Chronicle’ , writing today in the Telegraph

First he writes of the Yom Kippur war of 1973 then compares it to this weekends attack, this one during the holiday of Sukkot. 

Footage has shown militants firing their guns in residential areas. An unknown number of Israelis have been dragged away into Gaza as prisoners and Israel’s fabled intelligence services stand humiliated. Seeing crowds in Palestinian towns dancing and singing in jubilation, I can’t be alone in feeling sick to my stomach.

So begins a conflagration the likes of which have not been seen in my lifetime.

Meanwhile, there are fears that Hezbollah – whose stockpile of missiles is larger than some nation-states – will open an additional front in the north, splitting Israeli forces in two in a repeat of 1973. And behind it all is Iran, which funds both Hezbollah and Hamas and has long been intent on orchestrating a co-ordinated attack on the Jewish state.

It is hard to ignore the role of Western appeasement in emboldening the Iranian regime and its tentacles overseas, such as Hamas. In Britain, the Foreign Office has reportedly argued against efforts to blacklist Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, despite the MI5 director-general saying there had been 10 Iranian plots to kidnap or murder British residents in 2022. Regular readers will know of the efforts made by friends of mine and others to get the police and Home Office to ban just the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah from the annual Iran funded Al Quds parade. That’s just their symbolic flags, not their actual evil deeds. 

Yet as is ever the case with Israel, while the battle rages in the real world, a second conflict is fought on the airwaves and online, as armies of trolls try to undermine the case for the Jewish state’s defence. Even as Israeli civilians are butchered, we are told that they deserve it. When its military responds, we are told it is “disproportionate”. . .  Hamas are “resistance fighters”, say the useful idiots of the West, merely fighting a “colonial power” when they murder Jews.

In response, sensible voices must be absolutely clear: this was an anti-Semitic attack. It was of a piece with the pogroms carried out by the Cossacks, the Iraqi mobs during the Farhud, and the Nazis.

That last example is especially powerful, as a direct line can be drawn from Hitler to Hamas. During the Second World War, the extremist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, who compared Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes or bacilli, worked with Nazi officials to translate Third Reich ideology into an Arabic context and transmit it into the Middle East via radio, leaflets and other means. His twisted ideology rings loudly in our ears today.

The fact that some Western liberals defend such action, or equivocate in their condemnation, marks them as allies of Islamist fascists. Naivete is no excuse; it is a measure of their moral bankruptcy. We must stand against those smug voices just as we stand alongside Israel against the forces of Islamism.