Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2024. © Richard Kemp
Hassan Nasrallah was a vicious, murderous terrorist with the blood of many thousands on his hands, in Israel, across the Middle East and around the world. But you may not have known that had you read the New York Times’s hero-worshipping eulogy of the dead Hezbollah leader, in which they labelled him a ‘beloved’ and ‘powerful orator’, who supposedly championed equality among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Associated Press joined in the applause, calling him ‘charismatic and shrewd’, an astute strategist, idolised by his Lebanese Shiite followers, and respected by millions across the Arab and Islamic world.
All this is reminiscent of the Washington Post’s infamous 2019 headline that described Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi as an ‘austere religious scholar’ after he was killed during a raid by US special forces. This insanity illustrates just how dangerous the Left-leaning media’s shift away from moral clarity on such issues has become.
We saw the effects of such distortion last year when Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’, published on the Guardian website, went viral on social media. The letter, which called for assault against ‘Americans and Jews’, was widely praised by many TikTokers.
That was a reaction by pro-Palestinian activists to the war in Gaza, and may well have been orchestrated by the well-funded anti-Israel propaganda campaign that has been gaining immense traction in the West since Hamas terrorists, along with hundreds of Gazan civilians, invaded Israel in an orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnap on October 7. That abomination was quickly forgotten – and even wilfully denied – by swathes of the progressive Left amid Israel’s defensive campaign in Gaza.
Despite unprecedented Israeli efforts to minimise civilian casualties and enable aid delivery, both of which I have personally witnessed, the Israel Defense Forces have been widely vilified as war criminals, while Jerusalem’s opponents have been given the sort of treatment Nasrallah enjoyed from the New York Times. The bias is shamefully blatant.
These distortions don’t just influence the activists who have taken to our streets and have been intimidating pro-Israel students on university campuses. I have spoken to political leaders and government officials calling for an arms embargo on Israel whose evidence is exclusively from what they have seen in the progressive media.
At the very moment when there is a need more than ever to stand up for Western values, decades of indoctrination in moral relativism, where no-one is objectively right or wrong, have weakened our resolve to the extent that a notorious terrorist leader can effectively be exalted by the progressive media. Too many political leaders reacted to the killing of Nasrallah by calling on Israel to ‘de-escalate’ its defensive war in a situation where de-escalation can lead only to defeat.
The Guardian concluded its obituary of Nasrallah by branding him a ‘political leader’ rather than an arch-terrorist. He was indeed a politician, but he was one who succeeded in bringing Lebanon to its knees. His political agenda was not prosperity for his country or, as the New York Times preposterously suggested, religious equality for all. It was the destruction of Israel, the ejection of the US from the Middle East and the fight for supremacy of Shia over Sunni Islam, at the behest of his masters in Tehran. There was no place for negotiation for a fanatical jihadist who knew only bloodshed and declared his determination to go after Jews worldwide.
Hezbollah’s violence cannot be ended by de-escalation and negotiation, but only by military defeat. We in the West don’t any longer understand that, believing that there is a reasonable political solution to every problem. Fortunately Israel does understand it and should be fully supported by us in its war to eradicate the enemies that are set on its own annihilation.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
