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Cowardly Starmer has put Britain on the wrong side of history

Cowardly Starmer has put Britain on the wrong side of history

Telegraph2 days ago

There are cowards, there are the morally bankrupt, and then there is Sir Keir Starmer. Never one to miss an opportunity to humiliate Britain, the Prime Minister's cataclysmic misreading of the conflict in the Middle East has put him, and the UK, on the wrong side of history.
Instead of standing with Israel in its existential struggle to rid the world of a millenarian death cult intent on building nuclear weapons, Starmer found it easier to hoist the white flag.
Rather than offering to help shoot down Iranian missiles slaughtering Israeli civilians, the Prime Minister spent the past week calling for 'de-escalation' (and thus for the preservation of the genocidal nuclear programme); in lieu of pleading with Donald Trump to send B-2 stealth bombers to take out Iran's Fordow enrichment plant, Starmer chose to spout neo-pacifist verbiage and to demonstrate how embarrassingly little access and influence he retains in Washington.
To our great shame, at a moment of maximal global danger, the nation of Wilberforce and Churchill has chosen to go AWOL for the first time, betraying our friends and allies, making a mockery of our supposed values and admitting to the world that we are no longer a serious power.
What is even more galling is that Iran is one of our bitter enemies: its spies and propagandists operate in the UK, it has kidnapped and threatened our citizens and it despises us as one of two 'Little Satans' (the other is Israel) to America's Big Satan. We should be thanking Jerusalem for taking care of the Mullahs and the IRGC on our behalf, and yet our Government of non-entities is sitting on the sidelines, terrified of its Israelophobic electoral 'base '. What kind of country opposes a military intervention that will directly make its citizens safer?
The answer is an irrelevant one, which is what Britain has become under Labour. Everything has suddenly changed in the Middle East, no thanks to us – or, for that matter, Brussels or Paris.
The good guys are winning a key battle in the great global conflict that broke out when Russia invaded Ukraine. Israel and America are reestablishing Western deterrence after Joe Biden's half-hearted response to Vladimir Putin and following the debacle of the retreat from Afghanistan. They are well on their way to preempting a nuclear apocalypse. North Korea and Pakistan obtained the bomb, which was a disaster; Iran's defenestration amounts to a rare yet hugely important victory in the fight against atomic proliferation.
It is hard to exaggerate the outsized role that Israel is now playing, and how much it is aiding an ungrateful and ethically compromised Europe. By necessity and out of self-interest, it has become the West's praetorian guard, a nation of heroes dedicated to doing our dirty work for us, as well as a (not always comfortable) proxy of sorts for the US.
A tiny country the size of Wales, its population barely larger than London's, Israel is annihilating – from 1,000 miles away, in an unprecedented long-distance war – an oil-rich regional superpower that is nine times more populous and boasts a 75 times larger land area, while waging a conflict on seven fronts.
The Jewish state has demonstrated a level of military and strategic brilliance over the past year last witnessed from a Western nation in the Second World War. This isn't Desert Storm-style bulldozing; this is the real deal, a la Hannibal or Carl von Clausewitz, and it will be studied for centuries to come. It turns out that October 7 was Israel's Pearl Harbor, not its 9/11: its fightback has been astonishing, and is helping to undo the narrative of Western decline.
Israel has shrugged off a Blitz-style attack that no European country could have remotely coped with, and is emerging as the uncontested regional hegemon. America too might yet still be much more powerful than we realised; its weapons remain the best. The notion of a multi-polar world has been undermined: Russia and China were happy to use Iran, but aren't lifting a finger to defend it.
The forces of Islamism are in historic retreat: Israel's destruction of the Iranian proxy system is an even greater victory for Western civilisation than the ending of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The regime pioneered modern Islamism and state terrorism; it funded Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias and the Houthis.
Some 2563 years after Cyrus the Great of Persia freed the Jews from captivity, Israel is returning the favour, with a little help from Trump. The Iranian people, savagely oppressed by the Mullahs, may soon liberate themselves; unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, where the opposition is often worse than the ruling tyrants, most ordinary Iranians are desperate for Westernisation.
Bereft of Iran's financial, military and psychological support, unable to siphon aid from the UN, Hamas could sue for a ceasefire, its leaders opting for exile in return for the hostages. Israel's triumph over Iran and its proxies, combined with the end of the war in Gaza, would undoubtedly be enough to precipitate an expansion of the Abraham Accords.
For all their flaws, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, if they finish the task at hand, would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. I doubted both men – Trump looked as if he was going soft, and I feared Netanyahu, who now looks positively Churchillian, could never redeem himself for the October 7 pogroms happening on his watch. They appear to have proved me wrong.
It is striking how Europe's objections to Israel's actions – the alleged violation of international law, the militarism – embody all the pathologies that are eating away at the soul of our nations. Ever since Michel Foucault, a key figure in the woke movement, penned pro-Islamic revolution propaganda masquerading as journalism in 1978, much of the Left has had a blind spot for the regime. France even put up Ayatollah Khomeini in a luxury villa.
By defiling progressive pieties, Israel is mending the world. Netanyahu and Trump are drivers of history. They are changing rather than merely experiencing reality, unlike vapid non-player characters like Starmer or Emmanuel Macron. With the West being rescued from its own stupidity, perhaps now is the time to allow ourselves a fleeting moment of optimism.

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