The Iranian drone

Widespread media misreporting of these events constituted the usual combination of lazy incompetence and malice. Outlets including the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian and BBC News falsely implied that Israel was the aggressor; only by carefully reading these stories could the true sequence of events be discerned…

The immediate support shown to Israel by the US, which declared robustly that Israel had every right to defend itself, was obviously welcome. Nevertheless, there is surely something very wrong about this situation which everyone – including the US – appears to accept as normal.

Iran is a fanatical Islamic regime driven by the genocidal aim of exterminating Israel. It has repeatedly announced this to the world, accompanied by deranged and obsessive Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish calumnies. There can be no doubt about its implacable intention to realise this infernal goal.

In Lebanon its proxy army, Hezbollah, has embedded within the civilian population upwards of 150,000 missiles pointing at Israel. In Syria, Iran’s support of Assad has enabled it to reach Israel’s border. In Gaza, Iran is embedding itself through Hamas.

Since the debacle of the 2003 war in Iraq, launched with the aim of preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining or developing weapons of mass destruction, the west appears to have decided that pre-emptive strikes are off the table for ever.

This means Israel has to act like a sitting duck, waiting for Iran to attack it before it can do anything to defend itself. Even the drone is being said in some quarters not to have represented a real attack. In other words, Israel has to wait for its citizens to be killed (how many??) before it is entitled to take any military action (and even then, what’s the betting it would still be presented as the aggressor? Quite).