PETER HITCHENS: Bombs haven’t worked – but there is one thing Israel can do to avoid a trap by Hamas

Last week I said here: ‘Israel’s attack on Gaza is a mistake, mainly because it probably won’t work, and because it will make millions of people hate Israel again. They cannot do this at the moment. As long as the memory of Hamas assassins storming peaceful villages and slaughtering unarmed civilians and even babies still lingers in the public mind, Israel will have the support of millions of people and most of its opponents will keep their voices low.”

I didn’t realize how quickly my prediction would come true. As soon as Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, the extremely cynical global anti-Israel propaganda machine smoothly sprang into action. And Israel went from victim to villain in a matter of hours. The Hamas murders are already beginning to be forgotten. Yet perhaps something can still be saved. If the retaliatory measures against Gaza cannot be reversed, perhaps they can be reversed and stopped. But can there really be statesmanship or political courage to be found in Israel?

This photo taken from the southern city of Sderot in Israel shows a plume of smoke erupting during the Israeli bombardment in the northern Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023

Palestinians take cover as tear gas canisters fall during clashes with Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Nablus, October 13, 2023

According to Hamas, Judith Raanan and her daughter Natalie were released for “humanitarian reasons”, raising hopes that more of the 200 people abducted during their raid on southern Israel two weeks ago would follow suit.

I personally do not join in the easy, fashionable condemnation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is an extremely intelligent and experienced man, one of the few major figures in world politics to have actually been injured in combat. This is perhaps the most profound form of experience available, in a world where most Western leaders have never faced anything more demanding than a selection meeting or a university final exam.

He must know that he doesn’t have much time left at the top of Israel’s political dunghill. Why wouldn’t he crown his long career with a gesture to amaze the world?

Why don’t you say, ‘We’ve seen enough blood. There is nothing to be gained by shedding more of it. In fact, we are certain that our enemies want exactly that. We will stop bombing Gaza, and will abandon attempts at a ground invasion, which in reality will only cause grief, much of it innocent people. Most will understand our national anger at what was done to us and our initial desire to strike back. But our deliberate response to the Hamas killings is to turn to the world – and remind everyone in it exactly what Israel’s enemies did on October 7.

“These killings and kidnappings were not, as their advocates claim, a response to oppression or abuse. They were vengeful acts of racist hatred. They were driven by a powerful version of a much broader anti-Jewish phobia that is still all too common in the world. It was this phobia that led to the desperate measure of creating a national home for the world’s Jews, a place of last resort for those fleeing mass murder.

The aftermath of the October 7 attack on the Supernova music festival by Palestinian militants, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev Desert of southern Israel, pictured on October 8

A large rally in support of Gaza and the Palestinians takes place along Avenue Habib Bourguiba on the way to the French Embassy in Tunis, October 21, 2023

An Israeli Army Merkava battle tank is deployed along with others along the Gaza Strip border in southern Israel on October 13, 2023

“It is this shameful and bigoted phobia that has prevented general acceptance that Israel has as much freedom to exist as any other state. Look this hatred in the face. Look what Hamas did on October 7. Look at those who have apologized for it or tried to apologize for it. And stop helping them. We, in turn, will not please these fanatics by falling into the trap they have tried to set for us. We will track down and punish known individual perpetrators. But our goal is not to harm innocents.”

Just try it. The bombs and rockets didn’t work. Maybe this will be the case.

Evil lurks behind dope lies

One of the most stupid lies you’ll ever hear is the repeated claim from marijuana fans that legalizing their poison will “take it out of the hands of criminals.” When they first started saying it, it was clearly false. Legal dope would of course be taxed. And criminals would try to undermine legal sellers by avoiding that tax.

Now news is coming out of Canada about the failure of the five-year-old marijuana legalization program. Thousands of workers are being laid off as ambitious new drug companies go bankrupt. As anyone could have predicted, the criminal gangs, largely unaffected by the defeatist police, can undercut the legal suppliers on price because they don’t pay taxes. They can also ignore the pitiful attempts at “regulation” that the legalizers always go on about.

As Professor Michael Armstrong of Brock University in Ontario puts it: ‘The big trade-off with legal cannabis is: how do you make the legal market attractive enough to get all existing users into legal weed, but not like that? It’s attractive that you get a lot of new users.’

Even the Canadian government, one of the most naive institutions in the world, estimates that 33 percent of the trade was still in the hands of criminals four years after legalization. How can they be sure it isn’t much higher? They can’t.

Meanwhile, in California, the Los Angeles Times, another pioneer of legal dope, has uncovered serious corruption in the licensing of cannabis companies in the state.

Once upon a time, the claim that legalizing this pernicious, life-threatening drug would remove it from the hands of criminals was merely poorly researched propaganda. Now it is a proven lie, and you should keep this in mind every time you hear someone say it.

Evil is always trying to push behind a phalanx of lies, otherwise people would see it for what it is in time to defeat it.

Call time for this absurd interference

This time next week, the clocks of this country will once again be allowed to tell the correct time, instead of madly fooling us into living according to the Berlin meridian. I – and many other early birds – no longer have to get up in the dark and the evening will arrive a little earlier.

Idiots will claim that the change has deprived them of light, even though the amount of daylight will remain exactly the same.

The shortening and lengthening of the days is a natural process that would be gradual and quite pleasant if we did not bother with this pointless hassle.

The evenings have been drawing in for weeks. On September 23, sunset in London was at 6:59 p.m. Tonight it’s at 5:53 PM. Next Sunday, after the clocks return to where they should be, sunset will be at 4:39 PM GMT.

Why don’t we just leave them there for good? Are we so poorly educated that we cannot see that this violent biennial changing of the clock has only one effect: it forces everyone to go to work and school an hour earlier than necessary during the period we are in Berlin ( or ‘Summer’) Time?

For what? What use is this?

We rightly want our food to be natural, organic, etc. Why then do we agree to have our time falsified for months?