The frightening trajectory of events in the Middle East has confirmed an initial suspicion that Hamas has triggered a conflagration that might or might not end up in World War Three.
If deliberate on the part of Hamas – and how could they not realise what was going to happen next, after the 7 October pogrom and its terrorist mayhem? – then the characterisation of Hamas as a modern-day Charles Manson rings even more true now. Like Manson, only measured, strategic and successful. An even better comparator might be James Earl Ray, the convicted Martin Luther King Jr shooter, who perhaps had the very same intention as Manson. And Hamas. Commit murder to ignite a war.
https://time.com/5218982/james-earl-ray-martin-luther-king/
Hamas has committed murder. And they have ignited a war.
Global emotions right now are sky high. Old and new ideological divisions are emerging. And even the anti-Covid State partisans have not been spared. Don’t call them “conservatives”, for at least some of those who formed the core of the Covid resistance were and are by no means conservative, or right wing in any sense of this term. They were and are simply freedom fighters, truth tellers, quasi anarchists, true libertarians, anti-corporatists, haters of totalitarianism all of whom left their previous ideological dispositions at the door and entered the anti-Covidian room to join hands in solidarity with others who were gripped by hatred of what was being done to people in the name of public health.
There were many conservatives, both in office and not, who did not enter that room. Many of these were in London this week, joining the conservative great and good in another room. Where Covid, as both Rebecca Weisser at The Spectator and I have noted, barely rated a mention. Where Covid criminals like Michael Gove were given a platform. Where Scotty from AstraZeneca and his NSW mate, Dominic Perrottet (remember him?) were networking away, among friends. (This was the same ex NSW Premier who, for a couple of months in late 2021, stopped me and many others from entering shops like Kmart and Big W. Who acquiesced in lockdowns and army supervision of citizens. Who buddied up with minister-colleagues driving the “digital papers please”, surveillance society). Where Konstantin Kisin was universally lauded for suggesting that we are now “in the fight of our lives”.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/jordans-ark/
Kisin apparently “electrified” the room. No, mate, the fight of my life was in 2020. This is where the Hobbesian State rubber hit my road. And the roads of just about every Australian.
No, many previous fellow liberal travellers either held fire from 2020-22 or simply joined the Covid Cult. (Tony Abbott spoke recently of the climate cult. As well he might. It is a cult, and dangerous to boot. Very, very sadly, though, he is still to call out the even bigger and far more deadly cult of the invented virus and its globalist drivers). In doing so, they became instant enemies of those of us who, unlike them, recognised exactly what was going on. And what it meant. On their watch. Rule by the unelected. Executive overreach. The trashing of liberal democracy. Memory-holing serious crimes. Buddying up to thugs like Daniel Andrews. Just like with every single battle against creeping wokedom and socialism since the 1970s that we lamented and they, for whom we had faithfully voted, squibbed. Every new battlement taken by the progressive class over two generations has, meekly, been left unattended by those who now, bravely, call for a new jihad against the left.
On the other hand, some old-time leftists joined the freedom movement. Four well-known exemplars will suffice – Naomi Wolf, C J Hopkins, Robin Monotti and Mark Crispin Miller. These unexpected paragons of freedom, our new allies, trod where many conservatives would not and did not. Other conservatives, like James Delingpole and (of late) Mark Steyn, haven’t just noticed the Covid timidity on the right, but have gone full throttle against their former ideological soul-mates. In Delingpole’s case, think Toby Young. In Steyn’s, think GB News management and former journalist colleagues. Delingpole described the good people at the London conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) as not just establishment insiders but as “controlled opposition”. No doubt, many at the conference would label Delingpole (and possibly me) as cookers. Of course, one of the stars in London this was Sir Paul Marshall, a shareholder in GB News.
Moreover, the anti-Covidians have taken on new totalitarian enemies, like facial recognition technology, online “safety” legislation (the 1984 bills), the World Health Organisation, proposed pandemic treaties, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and, above all, digital ID laws in preparation. These dissidents, more than establishment conservatives ever did, have grasped the core messages of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. These heroes, outsiders all, more than conservatives, insiders mostly, have seen the connections, have seen the way the world is run, have joined the dots, and have chosen active resistance. Their theorists, like Tucker Carlson – yes, he is a scholar journalist – Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen have recognised liberalism’s inner totalitarian demons and have seen, above all, that private institutions as well as the State can be totalitarian too. And the two of them can work together to screw you over.
Some establishment conservatives actually drive some of the above targets of the freedom fighters. Think the Liberal Party of Australia’s support for digital ID and “online safety”. They don’t just fail to recognise that these are not the vague “civilisational threats” about which risk-averse, conservative conference-goers and comfortable panellists like to lament, but, rather, are real threats to the freedom and rights of real people. Their own citizens.
What has all of this to do with Hamas and the coming Middle East conflagration?
Well, the new war in the Holy Land has caused substantial rifts in the outsider class, the heroes of the Covid era. There has been a reversion among the anti-Covid leftists, for example. Not Naomi Wolf, of course. But old leftists are traditionally pro-Palestinian, for whatever reason. Scratch a leftie and, mostly, you will find an anti-Zionist, perhaps an anti-Semite. They believe, with mostly nil evidence but much conviction, that Israel is a colonial power. And we know what leftists think of colonialism. The mildest version of this is the “faults on both sides” brigade, of whom Janet Albrechtsen might now be taken to be one.
Source, The Australian, 4 November 2023, paywalled.
There are also those who might well be pro-Israeli (or not), but who fear military escalation and who believe an all-out attack on Hamas might not, ultimately, be Israel’s interests, let alone anyone else’s. Finally, there are those for whom Israel’s current Prime Minister is (like many others of the political class) a Covid war criminal, that this matters hugely and that, therefore, is not to be trusted or revered, whatever the justice of his new cause. Miller believes Netanyahu to be the author of two attempted genocides, including against his own people with his almost manic pro-vaxxism of late 2020 and early 2021. (Mind you, I would have thought the latter is far easier to establish than Netanyahu’s other, alleged genocide).
Robin Monotti has urged Londoners to join peace-in-Palestine rallies, and urges a cease fire. Not every peacenik is anti-Jewish or anti-Israel. But they might well be seen as tending to a “faults on both sides” position.
(Michael Lind at Compact has done a useful sweep of current US foreign policy, covering the anti-war theorists, such as the “realists” and the “restrainers”, as well as the multilateralist liberals and the warmongering neocons. He finds all positions to have their contradictions and limitations in a changing geopolitical context.
https://compactmag.com/article/winning-the-second-cold-war)
One sub-group among the anti-Covid Staters, typified by Delingpole, consists of those who, following 9/11 and the subsequent, ill-considered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which yielded precisely nothing of benefit to anyone except arms manufacturers and their lobbyists. The massive efforts involved with the two decades long campaign clearly haven’t gotten rid of terrorists or terrorism. Worse, perhaps, some observers have drawn direct connections between Bush 43’s war on terror, declared within nano-seconds of the fall of the Twin Towers, the Deep State actors of the mid 2000s and the more recent Covid totalitarianism. Paula Jardine at TCW (The Conservative Woman) has explicated these connections in graphic detail.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-the-us-weaponised-the-war-on-covid/
The antiwar, anti-globalist types highlight the endless cheer-squadding for wars by the military industrial complex – not just the neocon policymakers – and fear the consequences of another war on terror, with Netanyahu in Gaza in danger of repeating the strategic errors of Bush 43. Or of Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger in Vietnam. The Delingpoles are fighting their own war (against the State and the globalist forces of evil), and tend to see real world conflicts, aka hot wars (like Ukraine, as well as the Middle East) through the prism of their rabbit-holing. They no longer take sides in regional conflicts, preferring to focus on the USA foreign policy dimension rather than the wrongs of terrorism and the rights of Israel in the light of these.
Some elements of the freedom movement go much further than non-aligned pacificism and faults on all sides. They are blatantly or surreptitiously anti-Israel.
Hence, in the shadow of the latest war, Norman Fenton and Karen Harradine at TCW, have called out elements of the freedom movement (aka Covid dissidents) for their anti-Semitism. Those at the conspiracy theory end of the freedom movement spectrum, like David Icke, come in for particular mention. There is certainly some crossover between the extreme anti-globalist elements of the freedom movement and anti-Semitism. Barely concealed. Jewish bankers and all that. This can also be witnessed, at times, in Australia (see cairnsnews.org). The TCW intro states:
This five-part series on the global rise and risks of anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Zionism and its worryingly unashamed endorsement by parts of the UK’s anti-globalist ‘freedom movement’ was prepared before the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
Tragically, some of the reaction in the West to this Nazi-like sadistic pogrom provides a dramatic, albeit unwelcome, confirmation of the authors’ fears. Jewish intellectuals Karen Harradine, anthropologist and social commentator, and Norman Fenton, a mathematician and Bayesian analyst, explain their dismay at this reversion to a dangerous and ignorant prejudice that discredits the case against globalism. Several of the freedom movement’s ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘spokesmen’ have, shockingly, either condoned this massacre of Jews or openly blamed Israelis for it under an anti-Zionist or ‘the bankers behind the war’ type narrative.
Visible to all now must be the latent anti-Semitism behind the ugly but ‘acceptable’ face of anti-Zionism, manifest in the terrifying displays of open hatred against Jews as well of the Jewish state across Western cities, on social and mainstream media and in open calls for their gassing or extermination.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/anti-semitism-and-the-new-world-order-part-1/
There is also a book that was doing the rounds at a recent UK pro-freedom event, the Better Way Conference. The book is Feargus O’Connor Greenwood’s book 180 Degrees: Unlearn the Lies You’ve Been Taught to Believe.
So, whether you ponder the Zionist (neocon?) vigour of a Douglas Murray, others at the recent London conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (referred to above) in call-to-civilisational-arms mode, like Kisin, the Palestiian flag-wavers at the Sydney Opera House and in cities across the West, the perturbed commenters at The Australian calling out Janet Abrechtsen’s perceived faults-on-all sides approach, the patent anti-Zionism of Hopkins and Miller, the worries of Fenton and Harradine about the freedom movement’s dangerous anti-Semitic linkages, the rabbit-holing of the Delingpole faction, there is little doubt that Hamas has not just sewn ideological confusion by its terrorist attacks, but has caused outright philosophical mayhem on the right. Philosophical confusion, an internal war of ideas in the West and what Steyn has often termed “civilisational ennui”, cannot but help the cause of the other sides. Whether they be Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia or China.
Talk about igniting a war.
A war that reveals the West to be running at speed in contradictory directions, controlled by clueless (at best) non-leaders and/or red-button-adjacent, warmongering chancers. We have confused and bickering conservatives, freedom fighters whose leftist elements do not see saving Israel in its hour of perhaps greatest need as any kind of priority, the jaded war-weary, and the genuinely fearful who see coming, if not the End Times of the Christian Bible, then certainly something approximating them. After all, the Armageddon of revelation does take place on the northern plains of Israel and the town of Megiddo. A real place as well as apocalyptic.
Manson and Ray, eat your hearts out.
Two things are clear, in view of the West’s current ideological uncertainty and contradictions, bordering on societal cognitive dissonance. First, both the insiders of the ARC and their sympathisers, on the one hand, and the outsider freedom-fighters, on the other, need in pretty short order to recognise that the other side’s defined battle is significant, and their business too. Nihilistic terrorism is barbarous, and the Covid State is totalitarian. This should be straightforward. We can walk AND chew gum, at least in principle. But there will be pain for the political class in any Nuremberg Two. And pain for the anti-globalists in recognising that not every war is only ever undertaken in the interests of the military industrial complex. There are also nation states and tribes with deep and abiding interests. Some are fighting for their very existence.
There is a second task, much harder, for those who broadly count themselves as being on the side of “civilisation” and against “barbarism”. That is, we have to decide whether we fear a major war more or less than we fear the annihilation of Israel. And whether we should simply abhor all wars. Many might cast this as our Neville Chamberlain moment (younger readers – look it up). It is the never-ending dilemma of those whose cherished friend has been attacked or bullied.
The difficulty is, there are good, if not compelling arguments for both positions here. You can easily be pulled in either direction. The objectives of Hamas are confined to Israel, it would seem. They are evil but limited in their reach. Horrendous but specific. Hamas isn’t Hitler or Stalin. This is not to diminish the evil involved.
Likewise, while Israel wishes to destroy Hamas once and for all time, it also desires friendly relations with Arab countries generally. It has them with Eqypt already. It wants them with Saudi Arabia and various Emirates. Its only fight is with those that threaten its existence – Hamas and, by extension, Hezbollah and their backers. So, letting Israel and Hamas sort it out on their own has appeal. But we also recognise, given that terrorism will not be eliminated any time soon, and that Iran won’t stop supporting terrorists, and that Russia and maybe China will support Iran, if we (in the broader West) sit this war out, we still have all of the instability and threats when the missiles cease to be fired this time around. We are simply kicking the problem down the road.
In rugby league, it was always the “third man in” who got sent off. International relations are far more complicated.
What to make, then, of the offer by the Pope’s man in Jerusalem, the delightfully named Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, to exchange himself for Israeli hostages held by Hamas?
https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/jerusalem-cardinal-offers-himself-exchange-israeli-hostages
This good and heroic man is replicating in the twenty-first century the astonishing witness to Christ of St Maximilian Kolbe, who did the same thing at Auschwitz.
He arrived in Auschwitz on May 28, 1941, and became prisoner number 16670. Following the escape of a prisoner, he offered up his life in late July to save a stranger, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had been sentenced to death by starvation.
Maximilian paid the big price. The Cardinal’s offer has, so far, not been taken up. His witness, though, is a timely reminder that there is still, in this greatest of geopolitical messes, goodness in the hearts of men. As he said:
The Lord ‘Wants Me to Bring His Grace to This Place’
And he was only appointed at the end of September.
Such green shoots are few and far between, and at a time and in a place of embedded hatred, mutual blame and total war, unlikely to make much difference to Middle Eastern tribes determined, it would seem, to recreate hell on earth. The Cardinal will have his work cut out.
In the meantime, it behooves those good people marching for a ceasefire this weekend in London and elsewhere to ponder and spell out what such a “peace” might look like. When one side is no more and no less than a terror outfit that itself doesn’t want peace, and, given this, where the other side cannot really adopt any other position than the one it has. For terrorists, “peace” is merely a pause before the next terror strike. And in the case of Hamas, the terrorists are the Government of Gaza, supported by those under them and now in the line of fire, and they are on Israel’s doorstep. As one Israeli supporter said recently, their nation is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t. A participant in “a war it didn’t want”, as Elisa Albert of Table magazine in an article titled “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders”.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/open-letter-hamas-defenders
There is, forever, a thin line through the hearts of men, with evil on one side and good on the other. The good is winning in the heart of Cardinal Pizzaballa, and we can only admire his offer, as well as the desires of the Londoners out there marching for peace. I don’t envy their missions.
Paul Collits
5 November 2023
"The objectives of Hamas are confined to Israel, it would seem." Please read the Hamas charter
I have total disgust for religious zealots of any kind. That definitely includes Hamas near the top of that list. I have problems with the Israeli approach in their retaliation. In 2006 when the last election conducted in Gaza took place, only 44% voted for Hamas. I was, for many years, a NSW Police Sergeant. I compare what is happening in Gaza with my policing experience. It goes like this. If I witnessed a brutal murder being committed by an armed man, and that man ran into a large city crowd, I would not be justified in, and definitely would not, be firing my pistol into that crowd in order to take out the armed murderer if innocent lives were in any way at risk. I cannot see the justification in bombing crowds where possibly the 44% who did not want Hamas as their government and probably more who weren't even guilty of the atrocities of 7 October were present. A cease fire is the humane solution regardless of 'who gets away'. As far as solving the problem in trying to negotiate anything the Hamas lunatics who are, and have been, calling for the destruction of Israel? That is a different question all together.