On Monday, Britain’s foreign secretary Ed Miliband delivered a diatribe against Israel, accusing it of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, and vowing to punish it for the crime of allowing Jews to “settle” in their own historic land.
On Wednesday, four ordinary Israelis on a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv averted a new 9/11 by overpowering the co-pilot who was attempting to crash the plane, possibly in Israel.
There could hardly be a better illustration of the way Britain is now choosing to embrace a culture of death while Israel is choosing life.
When they heard an alarming commotion in the cockpit, a small handful of Israeli passengers jumped out of their seats and burst in to see the Omani co-pilot stabbing the captain.
One of the Israelis, a plumber by trade, got the assailant in a chokehold. As other Israeli passengers and Emirati crew members helped tie the terrorist up, the plumber seized the control stick and pulled the plane out of its lethal dive.
When Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, asked him afterwards how he’d known what to do, he replied that he’d seen it done on a TV show.
Only the Israelis could behave like this—regular people displaying raw courage, heroism and the lion-hearted, can-do Israeli spirit. Alerted to an existential threat, these ordinary guys immediately took matters into their own hands, neutralized the danger and saved countless lives.
What an amazing, wonderful, heroic country. What a symbol of everything Israel has been doing for the past three years, ever since Hamas launched its genocidal onslaught against it on Oct. 7, 2023.
What a statement of defiance against Britain and a Western world now consumed (whatever they think they’re supporting) by a deranged agenda to wipe this country out.
How this lifts the spirits. And how those spirits are instantly lowered by contact with the life-destroying venom of the Western intelligentsia.
Western media outlets tried everything they could to downplay the near-catastrophe in the skies over Saudi Arabia.
CNN called it “an internal personnel incident between pilots.” The New York Times called it “a clash in the cockpit.” Reuters headlined it: “A pilot brawl, then a rapid descent: Passengers recount chaos in flydubai flight.”
As ever, the BBC excelled itself as a disgrace to journalism. BBC News reported: “Israel’s far right national security minister Ben-Gvir says that an Israel bound flight that landed in Saudi Arabia was due to a terrorist who wanted to crash the plane and kill Israelis.”
By pointlessly singling out the left’s principal Israeli bogeyman as its source of information, the BBC primed its audience to believe that the Israelis must be assumed to be lying because they are political extremists.
A new order is being born in which Arabs and Jews are fighting together against the forces of barbarism in the Islamic world.
Remarkably, a BBC reporter subsequently referred to Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport as “Ben-Gvir airport”—a slip of the mind, perhaps, but all-too revealing about the state of that BBC mind.
On Thursday, a BBC News headline ran: “Too early to say what motive for Dubai-Tel Aviv flight attack was, Israeli PM says.”
No, he didn’t. Netanyahu made it clear that intelligence confirmed it was a terror attack and merely said it was too early to tell whether Iran had been involved.
In other words, the BBC grossly misreported what he had said.
Such wicked distortions by the media reflect a far wider pathology. Left-wingers simply can’t process the fact that Israelis may be targeted for destruction by the Palestinian Arabs or act courageously to defend themselves. Primed to believe in the oppression of the Palestinians at the hands of their cruel and demonic Israeli oppressors, leftists can only see the Palestinian Arabs as victims.
That’s why the British government is now to prioritize for refugee resettlement those “Palestinians who have fled the horrors of Gaza,” as well as Afghan women and girls.
Giving the Palestinian Arabs priority is astoundingly reckless. Many still support Hamas, and they overwhelmingly support the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.
Only recently, a Palestinian Arab to whom Britain had granted asylum and British citizenship, and who was formerly a bodyguard of assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, was arrested on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack against Jewish communities and Israelis in Europe.
And a Palestinian Arab influencer who was jailed for illegally entering the United Kingdom in a dinghy and had previously called for the slaughter of Jews is now facing deportation after he was found to be living in the Midlands.
The British government is blind to the risks posed by the Palestinian Arabs because, to the morally bankrupt left, the Palestinian cause is synonymous with morality.
The spittle-flecked fanaticism of Miliband’s speech to this week’s Labour Party conference took many people aback.
Having paid lip service to standing against antisemitism and for Israel’s right to defend itself, this scion of a Jewish family decimated by the Holocaust denounced Netanyahu’s responsibility for Palestinian “suffering” in Gaza and the West Bank as a “stain on the conscience of the world.”
Having falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” by the “settler terrorists of the West Bank,” “war crimes in Gaza” and the “illegal occupation of Palestine,” Miliband declared: “To the millions in Britain and elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right.”
Precisely what does Miliband think those people were “right” about? Their claim that Israel is committing “genocide”? That Palestine must be Arab “from the river to the sea”? Their demand to “globalize the intifada”?
Miliband, who came across as an unhinged demagogue, is a stain on the memory of his slaughtered family.
The suicidal imbecility of Britain’s hostility to Israel was demonstrated by the incident at RAF Fairford, the base in southwest England from where U.S. bombers have taken off for Iran.
Last Sunday, five men were arrested on suspicion of being about to attack the base. Although much about this incident remains murky, Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham has now said there are “strong indications” that Iran was involved.
But as Netanyahu has revealed, it was Israel that gave the Brits the intelligence warning of such an Iranian attack—and pretty much the next day, he said, the United Kingdom announced sanctions against the Israeli “settlements.”
Where Britain leads, the rest of the West follows. There is acute concern that these sanctions are intended to broaden out into a global financial strangulation of Israel, especially if the Democrats win the post-Trump presidency.
There’s anxiety that American support for Israel is crumbling. Some reports suggest that, apart from CENTCOM, even the U.S. defense establishment has become hostile to the Jewish state.
This is fundamentally because the West is undergoing a rapidly progressive erosion of its core values, including the destruction of morality, truth and reason itself.
Even today, diminished as it is, the United Kingdom sets the Western cultural pace. That’s why the British government’s defamation and delegitimization of Israel are so important.
Britain is leading the West into the heart of darkness—the abandonment of civilization for the embrace of barbarism. And the people upon whose backs Miliband et al have accordingly stuck a bullseye are the Jews.
But another narrative is emerging to counter this obscenity. Flydubai is a United Arab Emirates airline. The terrorist co-pilot was Omani. Oman is an ally of Iran. The UAE has become a close ally of Israel fighting Iran. The Emirati crew helped Israelis on the plane to avert catastrophe. And the plane was allowed to land in Saudi Arabia.
A new order is being born in which Arabs and Jews are fighting together against the forces of barbarism in the Islamic world.
On their way home to Israel, survivors of the hijacking sang the words written by the 18th- century Chassidic rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”
Britain and much of Europe—and even America if it allows the Democratic Party to gain power—are now hurtling downward towards a catastrophic crash. But Israel will live because it has seized the cockpit controls.
