“In a time of universal deceit,” George Orwell is often credited with writing, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” In his recent speech at the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed a revolutionary act by pushing back against the moral inversion plaguing Western democracies as much as the rest of the world.
He was greeted by protests both inside and outside the U.N. even before he spoke. But this says more about the state of the West today — the Third World has been this way for decades — than it does about Netanyahu or the tiny, embattled nation he leads.
Those who value all that the West represents — individualism, liberalism, and freedom — should not only heed Netanyahu’s message but also pay attention to the forces he is fighting. They threaten us too.
Opinions about Israel are about more than a country the size of New Jersey with a population of a mere 10 million. They are a litmus test for the future of Western civilization and for basic fairness and objectivity — for the ability to tell fact from fiction and good from evil.
It is a test that a growing number of nations are failing.
No fewer than 70 countries boycotted Netanyahu’s speech. The majority were from the Middle East and Africa. But several European nations, including Spain and Ireland, joined leading human rights violators such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea. It was a disgraceful and disgusting spectacle.
The coordinated walkout was part of a campaign to ostracize the Jewish state and its leader.
The propaganda war against Israel has been growing since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded the Jewish state, massacred more than 1,200 people, and took another 251 hostage.
Within hours of that attack, pro-Hamas protests erupted on college campuses throughout the West, accusing Israel of “genocide” before it had even begun its military response.
In other words, the accusation was reflexive and bore no relation to Israeli actions, and that is how it has remained for the past three years. The demonstrations have continued even though “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any nation in history,” as urban warfare scholar John Spencer of West Point has documented.
Facts and honest discussion are not what motivate many of Israel’s critics. There is a word for such an obsession: antisemitism. And it comes at a great cost to those who indulge in it. As the late British writer Paul Johnson observed, “wherever antisemitism took hold, political and social decline almost inevitably followed.”
This was certainly true in Nazi Germany, and it has been true for much of the Middle East. For centuries, Jews served as both scapegoats and canaries in the coal mine. Now the Jewish state serves the same purpose.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent weeks threatening to arrest Netanyahu as a “war criminal” responsible for “genocide,” only to acknowledge later that he lacks the authority to put the Israeli premier in cuffs.
Emmanuel Macron is the president of France, a country plagued by economic stagnation, burdensome regulations, and deep divisions. But he spent much of his time at the U.N. criticizing Israel. This is the rhetoric normally associated with a Third World leader presiding over a failed state.
Fixating on the Jews won’t improve his low poll numbers or reverse France’s deterioration. But Macron seems intent on taking a page from an old playbook and giving it a try.
The U.K.’s Ed Miliband, foreign secretary of another troubled European nation, has spent recent weeks accusing Israel of “terrorism” and boycotting products made in the Jewish people’s ancestral lands.
But at the U.N., Miliband met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, whose government has murdered tens of thousands of its own people. Miliband shook his hand, posed for pictures, and sat down for a conversation with the Iranian official. Miliband’s self-professed concern for human rights and terrorism is selective and sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Those who boycotted Netanyahu’s speech would have benefited from staying in their seats.
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Israel didn’t commit genocide in Gaza; it prevented one, Netanyahu said. A nuclear Iran is a threat not only to Israel but to the world, he reminded them. And there is no equivalence between terrorists and the democratic nations that fight them.
Some in the West have forgotten these truths. They will regret it. Decline is a choice. At the U.N., many doubled down on it.