Some years ago a study sought to compare the foreign policy acumen of everyday folk and highly paid think-tank ‘experts’. What they found that, armed with a reasonably close reading of the news, the man in the street was just as accurate at picking foreign policy winners as the ‘experts’.
So, when a political parvenu like Donald Trump ventured into global politics, to the collective sneering of the ‘experts’ and the bootlicking media chatterers, all that mattered was who got it right.
Say it after us, mainstream media:
Trump was right.
It infuriates the chatterers that Trump not only brought Kim Jong-Un to the negotiating table, but he had Putin’s number in Europe. The EU elite have never forgiven him for calling their bluff and forcing them to start living up to their NATO obligations.
It will infuriate the average mainstream media journalist even more to admit that he was right on the Middle East – and so is Benjamin Netanyahu.
The so-called ‘adults in the room’, from Anthony Blinken to Penny Wong, have repeatedly got it disastrously wrong.
The tragic conflict unfolding in southern Lebanon holds the strangest geostrategic lesson: that the two most reviled democratic leaders in politics today, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, actually understand the Middle East better than most foreign policy professionals. This includes, sad to say, the fatuous posturings of our own government.
From the instant Hamas launched the atrocities of October 7, the ‘expert’ class erupted into a cacophony of ‘ceasefire’ and ‘two state solution’.
Are these people completely deranged? A ceasefire would amount to nothing more than a reward for Hamas’ barbarity. Literally bargaining with terrorists.
As for a two-state solution, have the ‘experts’ never listened to a single thing Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc., ever say? They have absolutely zero interest in a two-state solution. They never have. From the instant in 1948 that the Palestinians were offered a two-state solution far more generous than anything on the table since, they violently rejected it. Their Arab neighbours agreed. They collectively launched a war of extermination on Israel. Despite getting their arses kicked again and again by the ‘yahud’, extermination remains the goal for much of the Middle East.
Israel is one of the smallest countries in the world, smaller than the equivalent of one-third of Tasmania. On every land border it faces enemies or recent enemies. It has been subject to repeated conventional military attack by massed armies, and every possible form of terrorism.
Hezbollah is a Shi’ite terrorist organisation, unlike Hamas, which is Sunni. Both are funded by Iran’s Shi’ite regime. All three are united by a profound anti-Semitism, by an explicit determination to exterminate Israel and by a religious commitment to an Islamist political order.
Yet, pseudo-profound cretins like Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong persist in acting as Israel is at fault for not reaching an agreement with these genocidal maniacs.
But nothing puts Labor’s nose out of joint quite like Jews fighting back.
Israel’s strike through exploding message pagers against Hezbollah terrorists was the most precisely targeted military action in modern warfare. Everyone with a pager was a Hezbollah operative. Hezbollah, like Hamas, is proscribed as a terrorist organisation under Australian law.
Yet the Albanese government criticised Israel’s actions. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since October 7 and has long planned October 7-style murderous raids. The Albanese government claims Israel has a right to defend itself but condemns every single act of self-defence Israel takes or could possibly take.
So, how did Bibi and Trump do better?
Netanyahu once told me in an interview, as he explained to others countless times, that his long-term aim for peace with the Palestinians was “outside in”. That is, that Israel would make peace with its neighbours first. This would lead to a long period of normalisation and eventually, in such an atmosphere, peace with the Palestinians would be possible.
Trump in office was a long way to making that happen.
Trump, through the Abraham Accords – peace treaties Israel signed with several of its Arab and North African neighbours – gave life to Netanyahu’s dream […]
Hamas rendered all that impossible by its barbaric attacks. Tony Blair didn’t resolve the conflicting national and sovereign ambitions in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday peace agreement. He produced instead an arrangement of normalisation, in which sectarian violence became deeply abnormal, as it always should have been.
Even that seems a long way off, as war rages in Gaza. But then, normalisation in Europe or Japan must have seemed impossible in the early ’40s, too. The only conceivable road to peace now is to crush anti-Semitic Islam, terror group by terror group, state by state, until they finally get the message. It was a disaster to stop short of crushing Germany in 1918, it would be a disaster to stop crushing Muslim anti-Semitism now.
It’s a thankless task right now, of course, and it will take years, even generations to bear fruit. But first, Arab nations and Muslim terrorists must get the message that attacking Israel is a fatal mistake.
Once they get used, however grudgingly, to accepting that Israel is there to stay, they might start loving peace more than they hate Jews.
