Peace and War

Terry Glavin on straight.com, Vancouver, writes about the Peace Movement.

Things started at a July 18 demonstration in Montreal, when a small group of young Lebanese showed up with a sign that read “Peace for Lebanon and Israel”. They were shouted at and shoved around and driven off. Their sign was torn up. The event then proceeded, with people carrying placards that bore the flag of the fascist organization Hezbollah and pictures of Hezbollah’s rabidly anti-Semitic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the StopWar Coalition organised a rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Their main speaker was Rafeh Hulays, who just after this event wrote to Haaretz to say that he didn't believe in peace and that “There are many monsters that need to be dealt with. Israel happens to be the biggest, ugliest, and most dangerous.”

Glavin points out the obvious.

But this isn’t about peace at all — peace is just code for opposing Israel. This is about war.

Actually, two wars.

One is the just struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, for their own state, and for peaceful coexistence with Israel. The other is an Islamist war against modernity, against liberalism, and, as always, against the Jews. In that larger war, the Palestinian cause is a cover, the Palestinian poor are fodder, and there is no shortage of useful idiots to make light work of it all.

He is right, but it is not the usual idiots that worry me. It's the rest of us, those whose contact with the catastrophe of the Middle East is in the form of news bulletins, or opinions overheard in the pub, or in jokes over a coffee.

My wife was in the kitchen at work the other day when two of her colleagues (old friends these two who have known each other for years) started horsing about. She flicked some water from the top of her glass at him. He was standing by the sink and launched an overwhelming attack of suds and dishwater. She was soaked and protested. He smirked, "The Israeli response."

The Islamists are winning that war for they are seemingly impregnable in the fortress of victimhood. They are victims of the societies that will not save them from themselves. They are victims of a culture they cannot compete with. They are victims of the wars that they have started. In their self-hatred, they have found a like-minded response in the innards of their enemy and so they strike home.

(via Harry's Place)

Tagged: Israel, The West, The Left, Self-hatred