How the cowardly West is emboldening Hamas

There’s a surefire way to know you’re on the wrong side of history: you get praised by Hamas. This ignominious fate befell Britain, France and Canada this week. The three big hitters of the West’s liberal conscience issued a statement condemning Israel and guess who loved it? Yes, the army of anti-Semites devoted to Israel’s destruction. The neo-fascist militia that killed more Jews in one day on 7 October 2023 than anyone has since the Nazis. These nations have taken ‘a significant step in the right direction’, gushed the Jew-killers.

Give yourselves a pat on the back, Starmer, Carney and Macron: you’ve made a gang of racist mass murderers very happy. Their statement called on Israel to ‘stop its military operations’ in Gaza and ‘allow humanitarian aid to enter’. If Israel fails to cease its ‘egregious’ ops, we will take ‘further concrete actions’, they imperiously threatened. It was music to the ears of Hamas. Of course it was: you don’t need a PhD in war studies to know that international condemnation of one side in a war tends to comfort and rouse the other. Britain, France and Canada have taken a ‘principled stance against the Israeli occupation’s policy of siege and starvation’, Hamas said.

The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. The leaders of Western nations have essentially given credence to the Hamas view of Israel’s war in Gaza – namely, that it is a criminal campaign of starvation masquerading as a war on terror. It is ‘egregious’ and ‘disproportionate’ and must stop, said Britain, France and Canada; it is a crusade of ‘forced displacement’ that is ruthlessly ‘targeting Palestinians’, said Hamas in its approving response. Different words, same sentiment: Israel’s behaviour is villainous and the world must stand against it.

Worse, both sides threaten consequences if Israel refuses to lay down arms. Hamas promises to keep fighting ‘the Zionist entity’. Britain, France and Canada promise ‘concrete’ punishments if Israel doesn’t immediately halt Operation Gideon’s Chariots, its latest ground push against Hamas’s remaining strongholds in Gaza. This reportedly includes France threatening to put the kibosh on the EU-Israel trade pact, which could have serious consequences for Israel’s economic health. So Hamas holds a gun to the head of the Jewish State and Europe holds a knife to its purse strings – a pincer movement of neo-fascists and haughty liberals devoted to halting Israel’s war on the barbarous authors of the 7 October pogrom. What a shameful day for what remains of Western civilisation.

It might be unwitting, it might be indirect, but we now have a horrifying situation where Britain, France and Canada are on the same page as Hamas. Morally if not politically, objectively if not intentionally. All think Israel’s intensified pursuit of the Hamas terror organisation is unacceptable. The United Nations too, it seems. It has slammed Israel’s latest efforts to crush the army of bigots that attacked it as a reckless campaign that will cause the deaths of thousands of children. A UN spokesman warns that 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours if Israel doesn’t immediately lift its siege of Gaza. How the UN arrived at such a figure, and such a timeframe, is a mystery. But the message is clear: if Israel doesn’t down arms, children will perish. It’s a kind of moral blackmail that will give moral succour to Hamas and its lie that Israel is fighting a war not against jihadism but against children.

Indeed, the UN’s fact-lite prediction has inflamed Israelophobia across social media. It has bolstered the neo-medieval belief of the West’s legion Israel-haters that the Jewish State is a baby-killing machine. ‘Scumbag Nazi Israel’, the mob cries. Is there nothing the UN won’t do to stymie Israel’s war efforts against the psycho Islamists of Hamas? Not content with funding the UNRWA schools in which Hamas-linked teachers inculcate anti-Semitism into the next generation, or with seeing UNRWA facilities be used by Hamas to hold Jews like Emily Damari, now the UN says Israel’s final push against its existential foe will have such calamitous consequences that it must be called off. Let Hamas be? Is that the policy?

The depiction of Operation Gideon’s Chariots as a cruel ‘targeting of Palestinians’ (Hamas) that will kill thousands of babies (UN) is way off. In truth, this is a military push by Israel against an enemy that poses a direct and imminent threat to its people and its territory. It is war. Israel says it has taken out dozens of Hamas terrorists in recent days, reportedly including leading figures. Yes, this war, like every war in history, has awful impacts on civilians. Britain and France should be well aware of the tragic scourge of ‘collateral damage’, given how many hundreds of thousands of innocents have perished in their often unjust wars in recent decades. For them now to lecture Israel for having the temerity to go after the neo-fascists who slaughtered 1,200 people in its territory is hypocrisy of the most sick-making variety. What’s really ‘egregious’, Starmer and Macron, is your global shaming of the Jewish nation as it fights for its survival against the racist tyrants on its borders.

No one doubts that the war in Gaza is awful. No one doubts that Palestinian civilians are suffering terribly. But absolutely the worst thing you could do in such a situation is embolden the malignant actors who started the war and who refuse to end it by returning the hostages and surrendering: Hamas. Everyone who wants to preserve the Jewish nation and save Palestinian lives should support the destruction of the poisonous cause of this conflict. That so many in the West are doing the opposite, and are essentially boosting Hamas’s belief that we need harsher ‘action’ against the ‘egregious’ child-killers of Israel, is horrendous. This is a war between civilisation and barbarism, and our leaders are recklessly isolating the former and emboldening the latter. It’s that that needs to stop, right now.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy