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Since President Bush has just delivered his State of the Union address, I thought it might be handy if somebody reviewed the state of the world. Now I know what you're thinking -- we've got the news media for that job, right? Seriously, I know you're not thinking that. But you have to laugh at the sheer pretence of our television networks, with their slogans. CBC -- "the news Canadians trust." Global's new catch-phrase, "News understood." Mm-hm, mm-hm. And as for CTV, is it "older than time itself?" -- I don't recall, oh yes it's something about Canada's home. So in other words, a whole bunch of largely misinformed individuals misinforming the nation and feeling good about themselves while they do it.
Where I start to lose patience with the mainstream media, though, is on its coverage of world affairs. These are also fairly easy to diagnose, but you would never know that from our mainstream media. They have determined, for example, that there is no doubt about global warming, despite the rather obvious forced enthusiasm for it among scientists. Perhaps more threatening to our freedom, they have also decided not to call a spade a spade in relations between militant Islam and the rest of the world. This is where smug declarations of wisdom and insight could come back to haunt our media, when the mistakes of the 1930s become apparent again, only too late for some to realize they were taken in.
The recent election of Hamas in Palestine is being widely marketed to gullible western audiences as a bland protest vote against a corrupt Fatah, which in itself is a part-time terrorist organization of considerable venom. We are asked to believe that the Palestinians are not buying into the political ambitions of Hamas, but have just parked their vote there as a signal to Fatah that they need to deliver the services promised for many years, but largely watered down to nothing thanks to corruption. I suppose some voters may have had that in mind, but we in the democratic west need to understand that what is happening in the Middle East is an eruption of long-suppressed rage that previous regimes, whether in Iran or Syria or Palestine, channelled through empty rhetoric into a sort of limbo where nothing terrible on a large scale was likely to happen to either Israel or pro-western elements in the region.
That is all changing rather rapidly today. A large and restless population, recently radicalized by the activities of Al Qaeda, and fuelled by a total hatred of both Israel and America, would probably welcome a more adventurous form of government and darn the consequences, so to speak. The fact that Israel has not come under massive attack since the abortive attempts of 1967 and 1973 is largely due to the success of international diplomacy working behind the scenes on a number of fronts, either to reduce the armed potential of the possible adversaries, or by neutralizing the hostility that might emanate from further afield. Some of those checks and balances are now washing out in a "new world order" that is actually more like a world disorder.
We should not be fooled by any declarations, any analysis, or any hopeful projections. The only real foundation we have for predicting the outcome of events in the Middle East, besides perhaps Biblical prophecy which is stark to say the least, would be the experience of our grandparents' generation with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. These regimes shared the passion, the focused hatred of enemies, and the degree of guile, that we now see in our Islamic adversaries. The fact that, relatively speaking, the strength of these modern adversaries does not match the threat posed by Hitler and Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, in 1937-38, is more of a distraction than a true comfort. These new adversaries mean us the same degree of harm, and in particular have the same murderous hatred of Jews, only this time it can be focused on one limited area of land. And while the threat may be relatively smaller, the potential for destructive acts would have to be called greater, since Hitler thankfully never had access to nuclear weapons.
The fact that the United States and Britain are now actively engaged in the region is also on balance a good thing, since they are already in possession of forward bases should the situation in the Middle East deteriorate rapidly. This should prove to be a deterrent to the enemy, but as columnist David Warren has pointed out on a number of occasions since 9-11, the Islamic threat to western civilization and more particularly to Israel does not follow conventional logic because it is partly motivated by a totally alien set of moral values based on a religion which is nowhere near as similar to Judaism or Christianity as many uninformed observers would like us to believe. We should not expect that these adversaries will act even as logically as we might have determined that the Nazis or the Communists acted in our confrontations of past years. An attack might come out of the blue and despite what we would assess as unfavorable conditions for eventual success.
Therefore, our foreign policy, like those of the other western nations, needs to forget all about political correctness or any of the bland assurances offered up by Muslim apologists in our midst, the sorts of cultured-voice deceivers who are easily found by our gullible media in their search for "balance" and "justice." This is why many of our people have lost the thread altogether in this conflict, and have bought into the essentially ludicrous notion that we are to blame for Muslim anger, and that the Israelis are every bit as much to blame for the conflict as the Palestinians.
What we have right now is a gradual drift towards some kind of long-avoided bloodletting and settling of scores that was made inevitable the day that the "Arab nation" together with Iran committed to long-term terrorism and militant Islamo-fascism as their path forward in choosing conflict and not negotiated settlement. Of course they have every right to choose a militant approach, but we have every right to defend ourselves. The political questions are both complex, and simple. The complexity is rooted in a long history and different visions of God's word, making this conflict even more tense than most of the world's disagreements over territory. But the situation is also simple, in that the resolution will depend on which side exerts the greater willpower and which side is willing to take the more dramatic action to preserve its freedom of action. In other words, we need to believe that God is on our side, and that we are entitled to defend Israel and the western, democratic way of life, especially where it is taking genuine roots in the Middle East. Our Muslim apologists will fume over this kind of analysis, and our news media will shy away from it as though it were creationism times social conservatism, but if we don't rise to this occasion and enforce what we believe to be the right of Israel to live in peace and reasonable security, then we might as well face the prospect that in fifty or a hundred years, our culture will be swept away in a tide of pagan or alien belief structures, and that Christianity and Judaism will be forced underground again. If that's what we want, then our media will be the perfect standard-bearers, because I suspect that's what they want.
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