Melanie Philips has written a must—read essay in the London Daily Mail, on the subject of the world's disturbing treatment of Israel and the Jews. An excerpt:

If the Jews have always been a society's pit canaries whose fate is an early warning of that society's wider collapse, Israel is surely the canary in the mine of the world. The way it is being treated bespeaks a mortal sickness. Israel is the victim of a continuing, half—century attempt to annihilate it. Yet its attempts to defend itself are denounced and vilified, its activities are misreported and distorted.

The UN has now pronounced that Israel should not defend itself against the war of exterminatory mass murder being perpetrated against its citizens. The obsessive malice with which it is vilified and libeled, and the tacit and even explicit encouragement of the war of mass murder against it, while atrocities in Africa are not only ignored but their perpetrators given a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, for heaven's sake, shows that not just the UN but the world order it represents are bust, broken, and bankrupt.

Faced with this obscene parody of a world body that is supposed to promote and uphold peace and justice but actually ignores, promotes, and upholds genocide, mass murder, tyranny, terrorism, and endemic corruption, the democracies of the West not only ignore such evidence but profess to believe that the UN is a moral exemplar without whose imprimatur wars are illegitimate and whose every utterance or action possesses unchallengeable moral authority.

Israel is the defining moral issue of our time. Not because its situation is the worst in the world — the genocide in Sudan is clearly in a different league. But because the way the world is treating it exemplifies a global moral sickness in which truth, goodness, and the victims of an annihilatory madness are ignored, dehumanized, or attacked, while lies, wickedness, and their perpetrators are appeased, endorsed, and supported.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Richard  8 1 04