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Luxury Beliefs Are Helping the Authoritarians Defeat the West

(The Times-UK) Niall Ferguson - 22 months after the slaughter of the innocents in Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, murderous appendages of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Western liberals join the Iranians and the apologists for Hamas by sanctimoniously and erroneously accusing Israel of genocide. These sentiments are the moral posturing of politicians and publicists more concerned with flaunting their own confused ethics than with helping the democracies to beat the authoritarians. Accusing Israel of genocide and recognizing a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of Western foreign policy, elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality. The war in Gaza is brutal, but one cannot call this nasty war genocide. The Israeli government does not intend to kill Palestinian civilians. Nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is an oxymoron; Palestinians despise it, and it has no authority. Hamas continues to enjoy significant support in both Gaza and the West Bank. According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in May, 64% of Gazans said they opposed the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war. Most Israelis regard Oct. 7 as an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it. Nine out of ten Palestinians simply deny the Oct. 7 atrocities took place. The writer, a historian who has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard, is a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
2025-08-07 00:00:00
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