by Melanie Phillips
In my article here last week, I wrote that America was abandoning Israel. Last week, the Biden administration wrote its name in the annals of infamy by openly joining the axis of evil against those defending civilisation.
The UN Security Council has passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the remainder of Ramadan, and the immediate and unconditional release of Israeli hostages.
Breaking with its historic policy by vetoing hostile resolutions at the UNSC to protect Israel against those working for its destruction and the defeat of the west, the US abstained today and so the resolution was passed.
Even more appallingly (if that’s possible) the UK, the Biden administration’s poodle and whose Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has been threatening Israel with an end to arms sales unless it does what he and the US State Department are demanding, actually voted for the resolution.
So both the US and UK are now aligned with the west’s foes Russia and China against Israel, the sole defender of the west in the Middle East. What a disgrace.
The resolution is obnoxious because it fails to condition a ceasefire on the release of the hostages, thus destroying the chances of the latter actually occurring.
Last Friday, the US brought forward a draft resolution which said the UNSC “unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a ceasefire in connection with the release of all remaining hostages” (my emphasis). That resolution’s linkage between a ceasefire and the release of the hostages was the reason it was vetoed by China and Russia. On that occasion, America’s ambassador to the UN ambassador declared:
We should not move forward with any resolution that jeopardises the ongoing [hostage] negotiations.
What a difference three days make. Today, the US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby claimed that America’s abstention on today’s UNSC resolution didn’t amount to a shift in the US requirement that a ceasefire must be obtained through a hostage deal. “We have been consistent in our support for a ceasefire as part of a hostage deal,” he told reporters.
But today’s resolution does not make a ceasefire dependent on the release of the hostages. It says instead that the UNSC “demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”.
Either Kirby doesn’t understand the meaning of language, or he is lying.
Queue for rationed food in Jerusalem under siege, Israel War of Independence 1948
The US and UK have thus now voted for Israel to lose the war and for the hostages to remain in captivity. An immediate ceasefire would mean Hamas is able to regroup and fight on. America’s now open opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza means that Hamas has zero incentive to agree to the hostage deal currently under negotiation. As if to underscore the point, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Ashdod today after a lull of two months.
The UN has lost all credibility as a dispassionate world body committed to peace and justice. It stands revealed instead as a front for Hamas and an enemy of the Jewish people. Its Secretary-General, António Guterres, blamed the October 7 Hamas pogrom on Israel’s behaviour. More than five months on, the UN has still failed to condemn those mass atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians. In stark contrast, the UNSC immediately condemned Friday’s deadly terror attack at a Russian concert hall.
Despite the discovery that every hospital in Gaza has been used as a Hamas base, and despite the hundreds of Hamas terrorists arrested or killed these past few days in Gaza’s Shifa hospital — from whose emergency room and burns unit, no less, they were firing at Israeli troops — the UN has failed to condemn any of these abuses of medical facilities as the war crimes they indubitably are.
Instead, thousands of its own UNWRA employees have been revealed to be Hamas members or supporters. And the UN has been parroting as reliable the Hamas death totals of Gaza civilians, even though these are patently ridiculous.
The Biden administration and the UK have not only failed to push back against the UN’s Hamas ties and lies; they have themselves bought into Hamas propaganda. Refusing to acknowledge that most of the aid they’ve been pushing into Gaza has been stolen by Hamas for its own ends, the US and UK have been falsely blaming Israel for blocking aid supplies.
On the basis of the ludicrous Gaza death numbers dreamed up by Hamas, the UK and US have been accusing Israel of causing a humanitarian catastrophe. Yet as Professor John Spencer of West Point military academy and the former British army commander Richard Kemp have both observed, with an estimated ratio of 1.5 civilians for every one combatant killed Israel has achieved a lower total of civilians killed in war than any other army in world history.
By endorsing the demonisation of Israel based on the lies told by genocidal fanatics and their panders in the UN, Cameron and the Biden administration are not just exhibiting a malevolence they display towards no other country on earth. They are also fanning the flames of the antisemitism roaring out of control in their own countries and over which they so falsely wring their hands.
America has turned against Israel in this way because the Biden administration is determined that the IDF should not bombard Rafah. The fact that Israel cannot defeat Hamas unless it destroys the four remaining Hamas battalions hunkered down in the tunnels beneath Rafah is dismissed. The fact that if Israel doesn’t defeat Hamas more Israelis will face being butchered and taken hostage as they were on October 7 is of no concern to the Biden administration. It doesn’t care if Hamas survives to slaughter more Israelis. What concerns it is Israel’s refusal to lose this war in the way the US wants it to.
America is punishing Israel for a catastrophe that the Biden administration itself facilitated. The atrocities of October 7 that started the war took place because Hamas’s patron, Iran, correctly perceived that America would ultimately abandon Israel rather than itself get stuck in. If the Biden administration hadn’t shown such weakness in defending the interests of the free world from Afghanistan to Yemen and Iraq and Ukraine, Hamas would not have been unleashed on October 7.
After the war started, despite the two aircraft carriers the US dispatched to the region, the Biden administration responded to continued attacks by Iranian proxies — even against its own interests — with a mere limp wrist. It has done nothing to deter Iran’s proxy army Hezbollah from bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon with hundreds of rockets and anti-tank missiles.
It could have stopped the war in its tracks by telling Hamas’s protector Qatar that, unless it instructed Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, the US would end its profitable relationship and treat Qatar instead as a global pariah. Instead, the US is not only feeding Israel to its mortal enemies; by failing to use its muscle to end this war, it is also facilitating Hamas’s war crimes against the civilians of Gaza by using snuff movies of their distress to incite hysterical hatred of Israel in the west.
Biden and Cameron fail to acknowledge that Israel is fighting in this manner because it has no choice. With Hamas almost entirely underground, Israel cannot get at it in any other way. If it doesn’t defeat Hamas, Israel will continue to face genocidal attack. Only by defeating Hamas and killing or capturing its Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, does Israel have any chance of getting any of the hostages back. Only by defeating Hamas does Israel have any chance of avoiding an infinitely more terrible all-out war with Hezbollah.
This is the rupture with America that some of us have seen coming for a very long time. But the US and UK don’t realise what they have now done. This isn’t just about Israel. It’s also about them.
The October 7 pogrom was a clear inflection point for the west. Would it support Israel in the battle for civilisation against barbarism? Now we have the answer.
But there’s a deeper question. The UK is busily destroying itself by making a bonfire of its historic culture and values. Its public administration has all but collapsed, its indigenous people are dying out and it has lost control of its borders.
In the US vicious culture wars are raging, there are unbridgeable political and social divisions, its elites have torn up its historic global mission of exceptionalism — and it has also lost control of its border.
Do the US and UK actually want to survive, or are they now in a death spiral?
Throughout centuries of persecution, the Jewish people have survived against impossible odds — while every civilisation that has tried to destroy them has disappeared. Whatever horrors lie ahead, Israel will survive. The same certainty cannot apply to Britain and America. Today has demonstrated that they don’t even know how to do so.
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
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