“We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilt to redeem our land!” – Yasser Arafat

Eight young men, students, teenagers, gunned down by another young man acting out a virtue his religious orthodoxy drilled into his head since childhood. The soothing platitudes of peace and diplomacy are once again shown false. The truth so plain and so horrific even the most addled multi-cultural utopian surely knows in their heart of hearts, there can be no peace where a Jew faces Islam.

There can be no peace even when Israel retreats and retreats again, when she caves into international pressure and sacrifices her security; even when she, in good faith, forces Jewish settlers from lands where Palestinians never lived to satisfy a peace agreement that had little hope of success. After the TV cameras were gone and all the fixtures removed and resold in Egypt, the land lies fallow and abandoned. All the handshakes, pieces of paper and sincere promises mean nothing. All we have to do is listen to the Palestinians own words. All we have to do is listen to the sermons preached in mosques worldwide. All we have to do open our eyes.

Israel responded to Hamas rocket attacks on its towns and villages in as restrained a fashion as possible, yet it gets no credit. They could have wiped Gaza clean in short order and saved countless Israeli lives. They did not. The worldwide press carries the wildly inflated Palestinian casualty figures and pictures of the civilian dead without question. Talking heads urge restraint, government officials in dictatorships condemn Israel, and Syria murders another Christian official in Lebanon.

In a theater of the macabre where Hamas and Hezbollah use their own people as propaganda tools, tiny corpses are held up and every injury is displayed to hammer the world with the violent images of their suffering, suffering they could have easily avoided. Then they agree to another ceasefire brokered by some self-important diplomat, so they can refresh their weapons inventory. Then the rockets return, fired at hospitals, schools and houses, made ever more accurate by Iranian and Syrian factories and applauded by Muslims worldwide.

The international community saps Israel’s strength at every opportunity. It pays millions of dollars to the same butchers that applaud the massacre of children and string along “negotiations” for decade after decade and failure after failure, endlessly blaming Israel for their own intransigence and deceit. The UN tries to condemn Israel’s self-defense, European leftists support Hezbollah, American academics write absurd treatises about dark Jewish conspiracies and the fanatics steadily and openly make headway. The UN cannot even issue a statement of condemnation for the yeshiva atrocity.

Israel is prosperous and her people are industrious and creative. Her scientists are widely respected; her technology sector is first rate. She has taken the desert and made it bloom. She is a net exporter of foodstuffs.  Her military is the envy of the world. She has been repeatedly attacked, facing seemingly insurmountable odds and has triumphed. She has survived and thrived where so many have failed.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah encourage no such industry, they can claim no achievement, they bring no improvement to the lands they inhabit. Their children are raised in the fires of hatred, their young men lost to ignorance and fanaticism. Their only vocation is terror and genocide. If they succeed in destroying Israel in very short order, their eyes would turn west and north, to a greater Albania or an Andalusia reborn, to breach the gates of Vienna and avenge a battle lost to the hated crusaders. This is their nature, this is their theology and they are irredeemable.

“We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion...We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.” – Yasser Arafat

There was dancing in the streets in Gaza after this latest attack, as there would have been had the victims been small children, as there was after 9/11. Arafat at least understood that the staged appearance of propriety would secure more aid money for his Swiss accounts. His successors are motivated by a Jihadist ideology. With nuclear weapons potentially in the hands of Islamic fanatics in Iran and elsewhere, appeasement is suicide. Timidity will not be rewarded in this life and the barbarians are already howling at our gates

If Israel goes down in the flames of Jihad, the world will be a far poorer place, a hopeless place. Israel has always been the very definition of hope. We must ignore the propaganda and the disinformation that poisons our politics and our universities. We must see past the lies and dispel the morally relative neutrality that ensures Western inaction. Where Israel goes so goes the West and so goes America. It is time to take sides.