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In the year and a half since the horrific massacre of 1,200 innocents, the wounding of 5,000 and the kidnapping of 250 victims by the terrorists of Hamas on October 7, 2023, war has raged through and around Israel. It is closer to its end than it is to its beginning, but it rages still.
America’s early and strong support for the Jewish State faltered as President Biden’s cognitive impairment grew worse and more obvious. We do not know whether the former president’s infirmity impacted his original, resolute support for Israel by allowing the anti-Israel wing of his party to ascend within the West Wing or to worry his campaign’s guiding hands into advising him that appeasement of Iran and its forces was necessary to win last fall. Thanks to the new book “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by NBC’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes, however, we now know for sure that the divide between the U.S. and the equal of any of its allies on the planet widened and deepened as the months went by.
That very disturbing story was also alluded to by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview last week with Israeli journalist Gadi Taub. It wasn’t just the halt of a single shipment of 2,000 pound bombs. It wasn’t just Vice President Harris’s assertion that she’d “studied the maps” and Rafah could not be assaulted. It was a collective turn against Israel at every level of the Biden administration that should shock every friend of our ally.
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That has changed, of course, and President Donald Trump is at least the equal of any previous president in his resolute support for Israel. Which is a relief as Iran shows no sign of wanting to do anything but “break out” and build a nuclear weapon to add to its arsenal.
Israel’s destruction of most of Iran’s proxy forces in the region as well as of the Iranian air defenses which the enemy of the West thought extremely strong, but which proved very weak over the course of the war, has left Iran’s nuclear sites and oil refineries defenseless. The choice before Ayatollah Khamenei is stark. There is no public evidence that Iran’s “Supreme Leader” has dialed back his fanaticism and accepted President Trump’s invitation to peacefully abandon its nuclear ambitions, but we cannot know. Rogue states like Libya and apartheid-era South Africa chose to abandon their WMD programs. It’s not impossible that Iran will too. Unlikely, but not impossible.
What is impossible is to erase the record of who did what and said what over the course of what ought to be called the Israel-Iran War “Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing,” Douglas Murray writes in his profound “On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization.” That flare went up on 10/7 and has never for a moment dimmed. Everything is on the record. The reckoning continues.
Murray painstakingly reminds the reader of a few of the awful atrocities of the 10/7 war crimes as well as retracing the instant arrival of apologists for the terrorists. It is a necessary, but troubling revisiting of the facts of the attempt to destroy Israel before he turns to the biggest question. Not even as indefatigable a reporter as Murray can do more than remind us of some of the terrible crimes, some of the victims, some of Israel’s many heroes. What he does, elegantly, is set up the reader for the question that has haunted the world since 9/11: “What can Western liberal societies do in the face of such movements” as Hamas and Hezbollah and, of course, Iran.
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Murray cannot provide an answer, but he does lead the careful reader to some measured optimism. The West can rally, can reject the death cults, can produce a new generation of warriors and patriots even as Israel has over 18 months.
It does not require persuading the useful idiots in the West who march and scream in defense of the totalitarian killers. “Would there ever be any way to get into the heads of these students that this was not some kind of game?” Murray asks after reviewing some of the most stupid slogans of the apologists of terror. It does not seem likely.
But it also does not seem all that necessary. The United States, Israel and the rest of the West contain within it deep wells of resolve to live freely and without fear, to defeat some enemies and deter others.
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Journalists and public intellectuals like Murray arrive at the moments they are most needed, just as Murray has. “Fearless” doesn’t begin to describe how he has covered Israel’s trauma and its recovery and ongoing march towards a remarkable victory over the evil that surrounded it and overwhelmed it briefly. The cost has been so immense that it is sometimes difficult to recall that, through this long and often ghastly war, civilized people have rallied to Israel and will continue to do so. Indeed, there are signs now that the people of Gaza themselves are done with the butchers who have brought such devastation down on their heads. Lebanon too may be awakening, as did Syria, to the hope that the futures of their countries do not have to be mortgaged to the fanatics of Tehran.
The cost has been so very high and will grow higher still. Murray charts the reality that there is no choice but to confront and defeat the evil. It’s a book you should get and read and buy for family and friends. It is a riveting account and a profound assessment of where we have been and the choices we have to make. It should be a best-seller, proudly displayed on the table of anyone who stands for freedom and human dignity against the fanatics of our time.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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