It’s doubtful Mick Jagger had the Palestine-Israeli conflict in mind in 1968 when he and the Rolling Stones produced ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, but it certainly fits the pattern – Evil as the root cause of criminal atrocities throughout history. The irony of the title is not lost on me but seems to be lost to so many liberal apologists: Sympathy for the plight of Gazans has been conflated with the evil perpetrated by Hamas.
For two years following the horrors committed by the Islamist terrorists, Hamas, upon Israel October 7, 2023, the perversity continued in altogether unimaginable ways. Even with the ceasefire and the optimistic peace accord brokered by US President Donald Trump, violence and enmity threaten the fragile entente. And a fractured world warily watches, or worse, continues to vent its spleen over Israel’s right to exist and to seek justice. For two years Israel sought to have the return of the remaining hostages (most of whom are now cadavers) from Gazan tunnels, and the permanent elimination of Hamas terrorists; but the world perceived instead, wrongly in my view, a brutal destruction of the Palestinian enclave in Gaza. Israel’s fight for existential survival has, perversely, come to be seen as an oppressive occupation of the land of vulnerable victims. Privileged Western sympathizers have somehow put themselves in the position of supporting a brutal barbaric regime rather than an oasis of democratic ideals and hope. Civilized Western society is gradually being undermined and subverted, ironically, naively, from within.
In my blog article of 2023 November 15, titled No Tolerance for Terrorism, I inveighed against the brutal evil that was on display by 6000 Hamas terrorists from Gaza upon innocent Israelis just across the walled borders, with over 1200 Israeli civilians and a handful of IDF members ritually assaulted, raped, tortured and murdered, and some 240 others kidnapped and taken back to Gaza as hostages, bartering chips for future negotiations and leverage – grotesque crimes by any measure. Almost as horrifying was the wide displays of glee and triumph of non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza and by Palestinian sympathizers around the world. The widespread support for the truly evil Hamas insurgents came as a surprising, appalling, perversion of civilized values.
But it got worse. Instead of seeing the Hamas ‘Resistance’ for the depraved evil that it is, the world has largely cast its support for the Palestian cause, perhaps without realizing, or admitting, what that cause actually is. Aligned Muslim countries around the world, and most particularly the Arab world, reflexively backed the Palestinian cause (mostly Gaza) against the military might of Israel (tiny, democratic, fiercely determined to defend itself). (It must be noted, however, many Muslim countries, particularly Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were conspicuously silent on the Palestinian affair – they want no truck with these radical Islamists and their international Islamist Brotherhood.)
Many third world countries identified with Gazans as oppressed victims against Israeli aggression; (many did not, preferring to stand back and adopt an officially neutral stance – not their circus). The Union of South Africa took this twisted anti-Israel view to the highest court (?) – the International Criminal Court – and filed a complaint [preposterous, unfounded] against Israel for alleged genocide. Israel’s actions in Gaza do not even remotely meet the international definition of genocide. Israel had a right to pursue those perpetrators of heinous crimes and achieve the return of their kidnapped citizens; this has come at the cost of brutal urban warfare where-in the cowardly militant Hamas hid in their vast maze of tunnels and in plain sight using Gazan citizens as human shields. This is not Israeli-caused genocide of Gazans, but ongoing war-crimes by the barbaric Hamas.
But it got worse.
As Israel girded itself to seek justice for the victims of Hamas perversity and retrieve the Israeli hostages (and in a number of cases, other foreigners), Palestinian and their Islamist sympathizers in diaspora in Western countries including Canada began demonstrations of support for the alleged plight of the Gazans. Organized sympathisers and weekend warriors demonstrated in their thousands in the streets of major cities all over Western Europe, Canada and Australia, deliberately blocking the mobility of ordinary citizens, and without any regulation or intervention from law enforcement officers; tent city occupations on university campuses; frequent vandalism and violence against Jews, synagogues and businesses became widespread; deliberate acts of subversion masking as prayer disrupted the streets of Montral and Toronto weekly, almost daily, designed to mock and flaunt their destain for authority. To my amazement the ranks of these expected sympathizers quickly began to swell with many times more support from the citizenry of these Western countries – the idealistic and naive university students, and their subversive professors, the middle-aged social progressives seeking to express their sympathy for the ordinary residents of the war theatre that is Gaza, the burned out boomers who are reliving their own 1960’s rebellious youth. In the ensuing months, empathy for the Gazans became antipathy of Israel and Jews. Police forces, misguidedly perhaps, tolerated these acts of civil disobedience and mischief; they refused to police Western behavioural norms and have essentially lost control of the streets and public places. It was astounding.
And, finally, unsurprisingly perhaps, the leaders of many of the major Western democracies have come out holding Israel accountable for the destruction of Gaza (a predictable consequence of a complicated urban war), paying lip service-only to Hamas’ fundamental responsibility for this mess. Countries from which we should expect true leadership for the fundamentals of democratic free societies – Britain, France, Australia and even peace-loving Canada – have abandoned 70 years of moral clarity and now equivocate over the right of Israel to defend itself against enemies on all sides bent on its destruction and refusal to accept its right to exist. It is to weep.
These sycophants may genuinely believe, Chamberlain-like, that peace in our time can be achieved through the implementation of a two-state solution. The two-state solution has been on the table since 1947 with UN Resolution 181 establishing the states of Israel and Palestine. But the Palestinians and other Arab neighbours did not accept this solution and made war on the fledgling state of Israel, surprisingly losing to the desperate Jews determined never again to submit to tyranny. Israel subsequently won six[1] more conflicts with the Palestinian and Arab neighbours over the ensuing almost eighty years, and endured almost constant rocket barrages from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Fatah in the West Bank territories, Hamas in Gaza and Houthis in faraway Yemen. While Israel built a prosperous enlightened democratic society, the Palestinians built tunnels, and provoked conflict. And with each loss Israel took more and more control of ancient Palestinian-claimed territory. One by one Arab nations abandoned the fight and recognized the right of Israel to exist. Except the Palestinian fanatics and their Iranian Islamic theocracy backers – they refused to accept a two-state solution, only one – Palestine.
The Palestinian chant, ‘From the River to the Sea’, i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, did not mean freedom for the Palestinians, it meant the annihilation of Israel.
But ultimately, to the Islamist Brotherhood, it means even more than that. It means the suppression of the very concept of nation-state. It means a universal Islamist caliphate of the entire world, the destruction of Western society. Somehow, sympathetic Liberal Infidels don’t understand this.
The Western World may one day come to appreciate the conviction of American President Donald Trump standing up in support of Israel and against the barbarity of the would-be architects of the Muslim caliphate. The Arab world increasingly seems to agree.
The moral dissonance we find on the progressive left defies understanding: the DEI adherents supporting a society with no consideration of Women, LGBT, Trans, and other minority rights; supporters of freedom of expression who would enjoy no such rights in Muslim societies; and most particularly, Sharia Law over western principles of democratically determined Rule of Law. Curiously, incomprehensibly, progressive supporters of Hamas seem to conflate Russian aims in Ukraine with Israeli ‘aggression’ in Gaza; it should be obvious that Israel and Ukraine have the same fundamental goal – fight for survival. (And it must be said, Trump’s quixotic behaviour vis-à-vis the Ukraine theatre seems so much at odds with his steadfast support for Israel.)
Israel is not just fighting for its own survival, it is now our surrogate, effectively fighting on our behalf for the ideals of the Western world for fairness, respect for individual rights and freedoms, and for the rule of law. We should be grateful for Israel’s grit, determination and success, not marching in the streets campaigning for some illusion of ‘Free Palestine’.
In ‘No Tolerance for Terrorism’ I wrote: ‘Canadians can have an opinion about the complex issues that are the Middle East, and more particularly the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but to justify, not to mention celebrate, the terrorist acts of Hamas (or Hezbollah for that matter) is ethically, morally and even intellectually wrong.’ How have the confused minds of Western sympathizers got it so wrong?
Doug Jordan, reporting to you from Kanata
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[1] Suez Crisis, 1956; Six-Day War, 1967; The Yom Kapur War, 1973; the First Intifada, 1987-93; the Second Intifada, 2000 – 05; and now the ‘Gaza Resistance’, 2023-25.
