Ellul, Eid & Iran

Last weekend was special for both Jews and Muslims. For Jews it was Rosh Chodesh Ellul, the first day of a month of repentance before the High Holydays. For Muslims it was the Feast of Eid, marking the end of their fasting month of Ramadan.

On Sunday morning Jews blew the shofar. Muslims blew up people.

From twin car bombs in Libya, to the bombing of a Shia group in Iraq, to the suicide bombing of a funeral service in northern Russia, the bodies piled up.

For many years TheReligionOfPeace.Com has maintained a record of deadly attacks by Islamic terrorists since 9/11. I've embedded their counter in this blog for some time. At the time of writing, their tally of documented incidents stands at 19,473. That’s just the attacks, not the victims. Their special ‘Ramadan Bombathon’ scoreboard recorded 1,206 slain in 260 terror attacks over the 30-day period.

After more than a decade of almost daily terrorist alerts and attacks from Tripoli to Toulouse, any primate would recognise this as a classic conflict between good and evil. So why is it that all those educated people in media and academia fail to report the ugly truth and refuse to call evil by its true name? I suspect it is because telling the truth would mean aligning themselves with the opposing forces of which Israel is at the forefront. It means aligning themselves with the likes of George Bush, whom they saw as a trigger-happy cowboy with lower than average intelligence. The fact that Nobel peace laureate Obama has had more military campaigns under his watch than his predecessor cuts no ice with the enlightened Left. They see Obama as simply cleaning up Bush’s mess.

The sad truth is that the world’s newest evil is still not stronger than its oldest hatred. In mainstream media and academia this daily slaughter and its looming threat to basic freedoms at home is a lesser evil than having to publicly support the Jews and their state.

The brave and outspoken British journalist Melanie Phillips once told a gathering at Hebrew University that support of Israel was ‘the kiss of death’ for any journalist in the media. Negative reporting of Israel always earns plaudits and promotion. But when the lies are exposed, as with France-2’s Al-Durrah forgery, every legal obstacle is deployed to hide the blatant bias, just as the BBC buried the Balen report into its own anti-Israel reporting.

Whilst editors and academics may not own up to their institutional anti-Semitism, their behaviour is not lost on the mullahs in Teheran and may well answer some vital questions. Ask yourself: what have Israel or the Jews ever done to Iran to warrant its threats of nuclear annihilation? Why would a religious junta, with a stranglehold on such a vast country and its natural resources, risk losing everything by sanctions or war just to get rid of a tiny Jewish state minding its own business? Can they really believe they will ever succeed with a surprise attack? Isn’t it all just empty rhetoric?

The answer to the last question is yes. But critically it is rhetoric that the wily Ayatollahs know the world and its dishonest media want to believe in. For the radical Left and its useful idiots in media, academia, the unions and boycott movement, Israel has always been the problem and the cause of all the violence coming from the East not to mention the rest of all the world’s ills. They’re not uncomfortable with a messianic agenda of removing Israel from the map and they see the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons as solely directed to that end.

Behind that smokescreen lurks Iran’s real agenda. The urgent need for untouchability. Having been almost toppled by the Green Revolution in 2009 they have watched the dominos fall in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. The Revolutionary Guard and their Basij thugs are ready to beat down the next uprising with far more brutality than even Assad has used. The only thing the Ayatollahs fear is western intervention, of the kind which empowered rebels in Libya and now assists in Syria. And the only way Tehran can block this threat is to turn itself into another Pyongyang.

The Iranian leadership watched North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Il defy all American threats and pressure of sanctions to end his domestic tyranny and external trouble-making. Faced with a frighteningly unstable nuclear threat, America has climbed down from every demand, going so far as ‘reverse sanctions’ to make sure that Pyongyang is shipped all the oil and other creature-comforts needed to keep it docile. Tehran wants and needs nothing less. Israel is just a diversion.

Only the truth will set the West free of this looming Islamic tyranny and it is time for the news media to own up to the truth so that ordinary folks can make the right choice between Ellul and Eid.