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The Gaza War Is a Test Case for the West

(JNS) Gadi Taub - The war in Gaza has come to play a major role in the global war of ideas. Its outcome will have significance for the future of liberal democracy everywhere because the war is a test case for one of the most crucial questions of our time: Can the West regain enough self-confidence to defend its own values? With the dispossession of Native Americans now relegated to the past, slavery extinct in the West, and European rule gone from the Far and Middle East, only Zionism is left to embody Western sins. Israel is viewed as a rearguard of Western colonialism and 19th century nationalism, the last vestige of retrograde Western ideologies. Demanding its destruction is therefore both a badge of morality and a ritual of atonement. Zionism serves as a voodoo doll: By stabbing it, one demonstrates that he has transcended Western sins. Yet, far from being a relic of the bad old colonial past, Israel is a trailblazer, pointing the way to a safer future. It is the front line of Western civilization in its war against barbarism. It is the vanguard now rushing to defend civilization's boundaries where they were violently breached. Progressive moral relativism first asserts the equality of all cultures, then lets anti-Western values into its midst through the gateway of boundless tolerance. Finally, it inverts morality by leveraging Western guilt in order to forbid any criticism of racist, misogynist, anti-gay, antisemitic and anti-Western ideologies - so long as these come from groups designated as victims of the West. It is also what led the International Court of Justice in The Hague to argue that Israel, not Hamas, should be tried for genocide. It fell to Israel not only to fight the barbarians for its own survival, but also to wake the West up and exhort it to return to itself. We Israelis are not the unpleasant remnant of your guilty past. We are the key to your future survival. We need to win on the battlefield despite efforts to stop us because it is essential to demonstrate that democracies can defend themselves. Israel must now prove that the West can be diverted from the path of cultural suicide. We are now the West's boots on the ground.
2025-05-11 00:00:00
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