In the long war, a new chapter begins.
October 7: a day of mourning. But take heart. In the global war between democratic civilization and torture-state barbarism, Israel is winning.
It’s been a bloody and terrible business. We can’t hide from that. The numbers are sharply contested, but the Gaza dead number in the vicinity of 40,000 people, including Hamas fighters. In Lebanon, at least 2,036 people have been killed, but like the Gaza Health Ministry the Lebanese government doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.
If there’s a silver lining, I make the case in a state-of-play overview I put together for the weekend National Post: Israel is winning: The IDF and Mossad have accomplished the nearly unimaginable. The main point: Am Israel Chai. After all their suffering and the terror they endure, the people of Israel live.
That’s something to keep in mind of a Sunday evening before the October 7 day of remembrance.
We should not lose sight of this: In all the daunting complexity and geopolitical convolutions and entanglements at work in this story, the cause of it all is Judenstaatrein, the contemporary iteration of Judenrein.
Anti-Zionism is the reconstructed sociopathology of antisemitism. And behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ansarallah Houthis of Yemen, is Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his wretched regime and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The primary accomplices of the Islamic Republic of Iran are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and the war Israel is fighting is one front of a global war that includes Moscow’s depradations in Ukraine, Bashar Assad’s ongoing war on his own people in Syria, the war the caudillo Nicolas Maduro is waging on the people of Venezuela, and on and on.
The smoke will clear one day, but for now, nothing can be clearer than this, and we cannot hide from it: All of the blood that has been shed since last October 7 began flowing in the unspeakably savage Hamas-led invasion of Southern Israel a year ago.
The obscene cruelty of it, the hysterically gleeful rape, dismemberment and massacre of innocents, must be remembered. The event shook Israelis and civilized people everywhere to their very core. That’s the thing to remember on Monday. You can’t allow your attention to be taken away from it or “problematized” by equivocations and polemics.
Roughly 1,200 people killed and 250 hostages taken in the most horrific single day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, the collossal failure of Israel’s defence command and the horrific brutality of the October 7 pogrom: That’s what set the Gaza war in motion, giving the expression “Never Again” a new and immediately urgent meaning.
I tried to make sense of it all a few weeks after October 7 after a visit to the ruins of the southern kibbutzim and the Supernova site and other locations for the National Post in A Place of Ghosts and Broken Lives, extended play version here in About the Day that Changed the World.
It’s not something I’ll soon forget, but just as shocking is the way the carnage and horror of that day was immediately celebrated in eruptions of delirious jubiliation in the streets of Toronto, New York, London, Vancouver and Montreal.
“Diversity is our strength.”
And I do mean immediately, before Israel’s war on Hamas could be used as a pretext. And I do mean celebrated. I wrote this for the Post on October 8 last year. It hasn’t stopped. It’s all very de rigueur in the faculty lounge imbecilities about “settler colonialism” and “systemic racism.”
The usual gargoyles in the Samidoun Network and the Palestinian Youth Movement are planning more celebrations on Monday, while the Trudeau government can’t say “antisemitism” in a sentence without saying something about “Islamophobia” too.
The Liberals insist that they believe Israel has the right to defend itself, but they’ve agreed with the New Democrats that Israel must not be allowed any Canadian-made arms or military materiel. Riddle me that.
What Canada’s Jews have had to endure is far and away the worst outbreak of vile and violent antisemitism in living memory. At the Post, Adrian Humphreys and Arif Blaff have conducted an extremely disturbing survey of the situation: Are Canada’s Jews at a tipping point? Most are anxious, many are fearful, and some have moved away
Antsemitic hate crimes in Canada are off the charts. The police can’t keep up. On Friday, in Montreal, where synagogues have been shot at and firebombed, a crowd of louts gathered around the Israeli consulate, screaming their oaths in Arabic: "In the path of the martyrs and the mujahideen. . . It's for jihad, for jihad, for jihad."
It was just another incident, barely registering in a steady barrage of antsemitic incitements to terrorism that have lasted an entire year.
If we won’t fight, at least let Israel win
The point of my weekend piece was to draw attention to the shadow war that the Israelis are bringing out into the light over the objections of the United States and its allies. I’m completely onside with Eli Lake here: Let Israel Win the War Iran Started. Time to take off the handcuffs.
The political class in the “west” is mostly worried about the price of oil and “stability,” and would rather continue to leave it all for the Israelis and the Ukrainians to deal with, so long as they’re not too successful in their efforts. It’s a point I’ve made before. See Iran is the China-funded fulcrum of global terror. See also “International Sponsors of War.” The news that makes the headlines, the news that doesn't, and why.
It’s about mass murderers in business suits, collaborators in Russia you’re not supposed to hear about, all that Chinese money behind Hamas and Hezbollah, Iranian oil, spectral ships in a worldwide ghost fleet and the failed appeasement policies embedded in the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy establishment.
As for what’s next, I’m no clairvoyant but I’m confident about this, from this past week in the Post and this newsletter: You'll be hearing a lot about something called Unit 910 in the coming months. As for the coming hours, something very odd just happened.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation shut down air traffic out of Iranian airports a few hours ago. The flight restrictions have now been lifted after conditions were “deemed safe”, according to regime-controlled media.
Oh well.
I’ll now confess to Real Story subscribers two motives at work in my weekend piece, and something I’ve been struggling with.