A Lion Roars, ‘Bibi’ in the House

The recurring themes throughout human history never change.

Empires, nations, and plain ‘ol murderers and thugs seek to prosper through conquest or intrigue. Kingdoms and assets are wagered and lost. Victorious leaders always reach for more while the defeated regroup, rebuild, and wait, scheming for another day. Prosperity settles into a familiar certainty only to be upended and lost to the unknown or unexpected. The poor remain the tools for the wealthy, whose fences and chains are violence and compulsion.

Every now and then, like a rolling summer thunderstorm, great men and women punctuate history’s rhythm. In eras of forgettable leaders, they not only shake the world but also empower it with their countenance of fearlessness and greatness.

In not-too-distant memory, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul confronted the darkness of a wobbling world order. The nuclear-armed Soviet Union had become more dangerous because it was increasingly endangered by its internal contradictions and economic incompetence on the one hand and the indulgence of weak Western leadership on the other.

It is no stretch to say that these three fearless leaders saved Western civilization. Each of them told the truth about freedom’s adversary and refused those who called for compromise and capitulation on any terms but those of the truth about the danger at hand. They were the lions of the day, calling evil evil. They refused to cede to it. They refused to lay down liberty, justice, and righteousness.

Now, the Western World finds itself in a not-to-dissimilar situation. The Soviet Union is long gone, yet a new evil rose in its place – radical Islam and its monstrous ambitions to erect a world Caliphate by blood and, in the case of Iran, a deliverable nuclear weapon. They scheme to destroy first Israel, then the “greater Satan,” the US.

Next, the rest of the West will fall. In their own words, they seek the end of civilization as we know it.

However, in one of those historic moments, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has become the fearless Lion of the West. He is civilization’s warrior and defender, after a long line of appeasers and enablers to radical Islam and other politicians who thought we could turn Islamists into Jeffersonian democrats.    

The former combat veteran, businessman, and government minister was the first directly elected Prime Minister of Israel and is now the longest-serving in Israel’s history. On Wednesday last, he stood for a historic fourth time in the well of the US House of Representatives to deliver a momentous warning call to a timid Western World. (You can hear his entire speech here.)

The English weekly The Economist lectured that he delivered “spectacle over substance” and offered “few solutions” in his speech, entirely missing the point of the Prime Minister’s words. It was a call to arms for the Western World and spoke for civilized and freedom-loving peoples across the globe. The clash between “barbarism and civilization” is at war in Gaza today, but left to its own devices, it will soon come for the rest of civilization.  

After the barbaric and inhuman attacks on defenseless Israeli citizens on October 7^th, which claimed over 1,200 lives – many were raped, burned alive, and mutilated – the Israeli Defense Force, or IDF, launched military operations in Gaza to “eliminate” Hamas, the terrorist group that came to power twenty years ago (in its last election since) and ran Gaza, economically and socially into the dust of grinding poverty and unending violence.

Like the PLO before them, Hamas and Hezbollah in the West Bank and the mullahs in Iran, among others, are crazed enemies of all humanity, incompetent at functioning government but expert at death.  

The solution Benjamin Netanyahu offered was that Israel would – after four decades of jilted peace agreements and rejected territorial accommodations by first the PLO, and now Hamas in Gaza – demolish the militarized terrorists. He thundered, “‘Never again’ is now!”

Radical Islam is an insatiable force for evil and, like the essence of any form of absolute totalitarianism, cannot be negotiated with or appeased – which should be evident after the preceding decades. Prime Minister Netanyahu succinctly summarized the reality the West never wants to accept about its self-proclaimed mortal enemies: “Courage and clarity begin with knowing the difference between good and evil.”

Great dangers lie ahead for Israel and the West. Hamas’s fabulously wealthy leaders have been joined after the attacks by Hezbollah’s fabulously wealthy terrorists in the West Bank and  Lebanon. Iran’s equally wealthy mullahs have already fired rockets into Israel and have threatened to widen the war. And ten days ago Israel’s air force made a 1000-mile surgical strike on the Iran-backed proxy Houthi terrorist regime in Yemen, destroying their largest port after a Yemenese-based drone attack on Tel Aviv.   

[The pattern of great wealth held by the leaders of Islamic terrorists accumulated through drug manufacturing and trafficking, human trafficking, and siphoning off foreign money doled out as bribes for peace is staggering yet rarely mentioned. One recalls that the former leader of the PLO in the utterly destitute Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, was worth $2 billion at his death.]

No words can convey the ignorance and insincerity of the massive protests against Israel in the Western World and the craven bleating of its leaders quick to condemn Israel. Half-witted college children who know little to no history of their own country, much less Israel’s 4,000-year past in its homeland, were encouraged by well-organized and financed Islamist radicals who have captured the corrupt corporate media’s favor.

During the Prime Minister’s speech in the House chambers, violent demonstrators attacked Union Station a block behind the Capitol complex and in Philadelphia, burning American flags, raising Palestinian flags, and vandalizing anything they could.

Ironically, while the Lion roared in the well of the House that Israel was now the West’s “frontline of civilization,” the “useful idiots” of our day were demanding its destruction to a darkness that had already blinded them.