The countries of the West have tended to take the side of Israel against that of its Arab neighbors from 1948 onwards. This is particularly true of the United States, and, to a lesser extent, this is also somewhat more true of the English-speaking countries than of some of the other Western nations.
It might be felt that this requires an explanation. After all, Israel only came into existence in 1948, and there were people living in that part of the world already. Isn't this just a case of aggression and territorial conquest, pure and simple?
Of course, the first part of an explanation consists of pointing out the "elephant in the room", as the saying goes.
1948, the year in which the State of Israel was founded, is just three years after 1945 - the year in which the Second World War ended.
The world paid a terrible price to bring Nazi aggression, as well as Imperial Japanese aggression and Italian Fascist aggression, to an end. It would be an... immense... understatement to say that feelings towards Germany and its Nazi regime were quite strong at the time.
The world had been aware, from Hitler's speeches, and his infamous book Mein Kampf, as well as some of the actions of the Nazi regime, such as the Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938, and the Nuremberg Laws, that hatred of Jews was a prominent feature of Nazism. But this still had not prepared the world for the shock of uncovering the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in the closing days of the war.
One of the first concentration camps to be liberated by Allied forces was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; this took place on April 15, 1945. Starting with the initial news coverage of this event, the awareness of the nature of the Holocaust had a significant effect on the entire Western world.
Prior to World War II, racial bigotry, even if deplored by a few, was - in the United States, and a lot of other places - generally taken for granted as an inevitable part of the human condition, and was accepted or acquiesced in by nearly everyone (among those in the group containing its perpetrators, of course, not the groups that were its victims) at least to some extent.
It was the combined effect of the shocking and horrific nature of the Holocaust, and the fact that no one felt any reason to make excuses for Germany at the time, that led to a great many people at least beginning to ask themselves if, just maybe, racism was a problem people should do something about.
One dramatic illustration of this from more recent history is the failed Presidential bid of Reverend Jesse Jackson. In early 1984, a prominent black religious leader, Louis Farrakhan, who had been associated with Reverend Jesse Jackson to some extent, was cited in news reports as having made bigoted remarks about Jews, such as calling Judaism a "gutter religion". While Rev. Jackson did condemn those remarks, because his reaction had not been an immediate, categorical, and absolute utter repudiation and denunciation of Farrakhan, his prospects of winning the Democratic Presidential nomination essentially evaporated overnight.
Of course, even in 1984, there were plenty of white Americans who would never have considered voting for a black man as their President. But there were others who did not feel this way, which was the reason the Rev. Jessie Jackson had genuine prospects of a successful Presidential bid. But because the Holocaust was, to a large extent, the reason that this was the case, I believe that, by and large, they were still far more sensitive to any form of anti-Semitism than to racism directed against black people. And, therefore, even a slight perception of being "soft" on anti-Semitism would immediately destroy a black politician's base of support among white people, corresponding to the reaction that we saw at the time.
However, this is not the only factor at work. Sympathy for the sufferings of the Jewish people is a strong force, but it still can only get you so far. By itself, it isn't going to lead to the conclusion that we ought to take somebody else's land away from them in order to give it to Jewish refugees, whatever their plight.
Thus, we have to look more closely at the history of the region, to see why Western public opinion concluded that the Israeli narrative of these events basically coincided with the actual facts.
To start with, no one was proposing that the Arab population of Palestine be expelled in order to create room for an influx of Jewish refugees. Yes, Jews would be settled in Palestine, but if they wanted land for housing or to farm, they would have to buy it like anyone else.
There are two other factors that ought to be considered, though, before we conclude that there was nothing to be objected to.
For one thing, newcomers to a country, and their descendants, become voting citizens in time. If enough people, belonging to a different culture, a different faith, come to a country, then its laws will change, and likely become less suited to the culture and customs of the land's original inhabitants. I mean, this is one of the basic reason why people in a number of Western countries are currently making a fuss about the immigration policies of mainstream parties, and are starting to turn to extremist right-wing parties in increasing numbers.
And one can also cite the situation of indigenous peoples in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Democracy in those countries does not, by itself, automatically grant those peoples self-rule. Therefore, the laws under which they live are not necessarily in all respect the laws which the majority of them would choose. So, in an important sense, being outnumbered means that democracy is not real for them.
For another, there was an issue regarding land tenure in Palestine. Before it became a British Mandate, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Before the Turkish conquest, the Palestinian Arabs farmed land that belonged to them. But afterwards, while they continued to farm, they paid rent to Turkish landlords for the land they farmed. When Zionist settlers bought land to establish settlements, naturally they bought that land from its legal owners; the consequence of this was that the Arab farmers who fed themselves from that land were now displaced. One can, I suppose, think of this as analogous to that modern plague of the "condo conversion".
Be that as it may, because the response to Jewish settlement in Palestine in its earliest stages involved deadly violence against Jewish settlers, long before it posed any genuine threat to the existing population, Western support fell squarely behind the Jewish settlers.
Given that in several Muslim-majority countries, including Egypt and Pakistan, members of non-Muslim minorities living there do not enjoy the equal protection of the laws, and this has led to young women from these communities being kidnapped by men who then claim these women have voluntarily converted to Islam and married them, naturally this has led to the conclusion that life under Muslim majority rule would be a nightmare for anyone else, one which the Western world refuses to impose on the Jewish people of Israel.
And immediately after the United Nations, in response to violence against Jewish settlers in Palestine, proclaimed the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel, the armies of the surrounding states descended on the new nation of Israel in what appeared to be a war of extermination, one which the Israelis miraculously managed to survive.
Israel's early political leaders, such as Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir, made it abundantly clear that Israel was an enlightened democracy which did not discriminate against Israeli residents of Arab descent, giving them full equal rights as citizens.
A famous advertisement that appeared on the sides of buses in many American cities showed how the extent of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land increased over time. While the intent of this map was to garner sympathy for the Palestinian cause, each increase in Jewish territory shown on that map followed attacks on the Jewish people of Israel; the attacks on Jewish settlers in Palestine that led to the partition of Palestine, the war that followed the creation of Israel, the Six-Day War, which resulted from an Egyptian arms buildup which raised the distinct possibility of Egypt being able to carry out another war of extermination against Israel; and then the intifada that took place more recently.
Of course, though, various causes, such as a corruption scandal, and fatigue from the constant attacks Israel suffered, led to Israel electing Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, in the election of May 17, 1977. Relations between Western countries and Israel began to cool off under Likud, particularly after Israel authorized settlements in the West Bank which were in violation of the historic Camp David peace accords of September 17, 1978.
But the U.S. commitment to the survival of Israel and its right to exist remained unshaken despite this.
And then, of course, came the event that solidified Western public opinion concerning the conflict in the Middle East and similar issues.
I am, of course, speaking of the deadly terrorist attack which took place on September 11, 2001 on the soil of the United States itself.
Of course, this was the act of a single terrorist group; the entire Arab world, let alone the entire Muslim world, was hardly responsible for it.
And then, from the 20th to the 23rd of November, 2002, primarily in the Kaduna state of Nigeria, Muslim mobs stirred up by agitators murderously attacked non-Muslims because they were offended by a slighting reference in a newspaper to the objections of conservative Muslim clerics to the Miss World pageant planned to have been held in Nigeria.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, without actually thinking about the matter specifically, I tend to suspect that many Westerners would have, in effect, expected every Muslim in the world to enage in deep soul-searching to root out any inclination or temptation to commit terrorist acts. We were shocked to the core by the 9/11 attacks; naturally, we expected that everyone else would share our perspective, and that thus it would lead to a change in attitudes among Muslims, an essentially universal realization that terrorism is never an option, because, among other things (such as it being despicable) it will no longer be tolerated.
And, worse yet, the rioters in Nigeria were even ordinary people, not trained members of terrorist organizations.
This had a further strongly negative impact on how the West viewed the Muslim world. People asked "How could this happen?", and, rather than recognizing (and remembering from many past events that had appeared in news reports in the West) how distressingly common what India euphemistically calls "communal violence" was in Third World countries, carried out by people belonging to many different faiths, including Hindus in India, many of them came to the conclusion that the Muslim faith itself must turn at least some of its adherents into murderous monsters (or, to be fair, were reinforced in that conclusion, which they had come to long ago for other reasons) - which, of course, hardly boded well for any balanced consideration of the situation of the Palestinian people.
And the simple reason why the Western reaction to this event tended to take this form... is because the typical Westerner does not live in the Third World and is therefore not naturally familiar with how things are there.
And the dim view the West had of the Muslim world, as if it had needed any further confirming, was further solidified on January 7, 2015, when 12 people were murdered in the offices of the humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, once again on the basis that Muslims were slighted by a disrespectful portrayal of their Prophet. Surprisingly, though, in the wake of the event, there were voices reminding us that what the magazine had done could also have caused distress to innocent Muslims with no inclination to terrorism. Surprisingly? As I live in Canada, which is close to the United States, what seems normal to me is a unanimous blindly jingoistic response to any kind of an attack; how the views of others may differ from ours may be considered when things are calm and peaceful, but as soon as there is a threat, the society closes ranks.
However, the Charlie Hebdo massacre was perpetrated by two brothers, not a commando force trained in a camp run by a terrorist organization. Murders, even mass murders, are committed by people who aren't Muslims; Europe is where the Holocaust took place, which still deeply horrifies the mainstream of Europe, while the United States is where Jim Crow took place - and to this very day, particularly thanks to such men as Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, black Americans are continuing to be "thrown under the bus" in the interests of reconciliation with the white people of the South after the Civil War.
It may actually be hard to blame America's leaders for prioritizing a strong and united country, given that at the time Britain was still a threat to the United States. And in the future, of course, Germany, Japan, and later Russia and China would also pose threats that required it to be strong and united - and those groups that were the largest and most powerful were the ones whose pacification was the most important.
Thus, remember that it was in 1946, not a much later year, that the Walt Disney Studios presented the movie "Song of the South" to the American people. A movie which had its good points, but is now regarded as toxic given how it whitewashed slavery.
Given, therefore, what seemed to me to be "normal", I was pleasantly surprised that the United States didn't round up its Muslim and Arab residents to put them in internment camps after 9/11... and almost astonished that after January 7, 2015, that the mainstream parties of Europe didn't begin laying plans for the mass resettlement of Muslims in Europe - in order to forestall the takeover of Europe by extremist right-wing parties.
Of course, though, many Westerners have long been bigoted against pretty much everyone who lived anywhere else. And even each other; it wasn't long ago that Italians and Irish and Poles were looked down upon in the U.S. and Canada. Sometimes it will be noted by an apologist for Islam that Islam regards Christians and Jews as "People of the Book". Historically, though, all that meant was that they got to live as dhimmi (literally, 'protected people', but in practice as people subjected to severe discrimination)... while pagans who failed to convert to Islam were slaughtered out of hand. And the Christian world does not reciprocate; it sees Jews as "People of the Book", that is, people who received and followed a true revelation from God, until somehow they apparently fell into apostasy, because how else can you explain their failure to recognize and follow Jesus when he came... but Muslims came afterwards, and so are viewed differently.
The same way Muslims view... someone the typical Westerner has never heard of.
The typical individual living in the United States or Canada has, however, heard of the Shriners. A charitable organization that holds a circus to raise money for sick children.
Their formal name is "The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine", and they have a symbol involving a scimitar, a crescent moon and a star. There has not been much discussion of the fact that being pretend Muslims like this might be considered as disrespectful to Islam. The organization was founded in 1872, however, back when people didn't think of things like that.
Anyways, for our purposes here, the thing I must also note is that the Shriners aren't a stand-alone organization; they're an "appendant body" of the Freemasons.
Somewhat later, some other Freemasons felt that the Shriners had dues that were too high, and that they shouldn't have all the fun. And so they formed a similar organization, also associated with Freemasonry, that did charitable work as well, this time aimed at children with special needs, but which had lesser requirements of its members.
This organization is known as "The Grotto", with the official name of the "Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm", sometimes known by their abbreviation, M.O.V.P.E.R..
And it is the historical figure that inspired their organization of which I speak. Actually, "inspired" is the wrong word; they were inspired by the Shriners, but they chose to use him as their mascot or symbol.
The basic view of Islam that the Christian world has... is much the same as the view that the Islamic world has of al-Muqanna bom Hashim, who claimed to be a prophet and who, along with his followers, rebelled against the Abbasid Caliphate. Not "People of the Book", but violent and dangerous heretics.
MOVPER was founded in 1889, seventeen years after the Shriners, but long before the Internet. In case you're wondering how its founders ever heard of al-Muqanna, it's because of a historical poem by Thomas Moore, titled Lalla Rookh.
In 1878, before MOVPER was founded, somebody else entirely started a debutante ball in St. Louis, Missouri, called the "Veiled Prophet Ball". Apparently local business leaders started it in order to compete with social events organized by (shudder) labor unions. As it was a segregated whites-only event until fairly recently, it has been attended by controversy. Not least because the face of the Veiled Prophet is concealed in the event not by a veil so much as a white hood, resembling those used by the Ku Klux Klan. However, while some sources vary, apparently the consensus view is that there was no direct connection between the KKK and this event. This too drew inspiration from the poem Lalla Rookh, as its organizers acknowledge.
Another factor is that in most Western countries, until very recently, immigrants from majority-Muslim countries and their descendents were a vanishingly small and nearly invisible minority.
On the other hand, dating as far back as the Middle Ages, people of Jewish origin and faith had been a significant minority in most Western countries, and, over the centuries, they had made incalculable contributions to the arts and sciences in those countries.
To even begin to make a list of those who had done so seems like an absurd task, as I will illustrate with a tiny list of a very few of the names of some examples:
Natalie Portman, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Barbra Streisand, Felix Mendelssohn, Benjamin Disraeli, Georg Cantor, Albert Einstein, W. F. Friedman.
And then I'll add a short list of a few more examples:
Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Jascha Heifetz, Itzahk Perlman, Sigmund Freud, David Geffen, Jonas Salk, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Johnny Wayne, Frank Shuster, Carl Sagan, Franz Kafka, Tom Stoppard, Marc Chagall, Herb Alpert, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Lewis, Julio Iglesias, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Newman, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, Paula Abdul.
And here are a few more, for good measure, although even with these three short lists taken together, the list is still tiny.
John von Neumann, Leonhard Euler, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Mikhail Botvinnik, Garry Kasparov, Paul Ehrlich, Norbert Wiener, Emile Berliner, Leo Szilard, Max Born, Edwin Land, Betty Friedan, Hedy Lamarr, Hyman Rickover, Dennis Gabor, Emmy Noether, Seymour Papert, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman, Eugene Wigner.
None the less, the Western media still reported on the excesses of Israel's response to the terrorist attack of October 7, 2025.
And then, on December 14, 2025 a mass shooting took place in Australia's Bondi Beach which was inspired by the fanatical terrorist organization known as Islamic State, ISIS, or Daesh.
The last time most of the Western world had heard of Bondi Beach was when it was learned that the color of the first iMac, from August 15, 1998, was called "Bondi Blue" because it was inspired by the color of the waters of that beach.
At this point, once again because this time it was our ox that was gored, public sympathy and concern for the civilians of the Gaza Strip began to evaporate, or, at least, be muted in its expression. Of course, this is not just, but it is none the less to be expected.
Here is a bit of a personal meditation. In 1975, two years before Menachem Begin first took power in Israel, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379.
This was also before Stephen Harper's muzzling of Canadian scientists flipped me from being a conservative to a liberal... even before Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre. Was it Al Capp who said: my politics didn't change, the world changed around me?
My reacton at the time was that the Left was just making things too easy.
LESS IS MORE
PROPERTY IS THEFT
ZIONISM IS RACISM
which, of course, is a homage to a work by Eric Arthur Blair, in which the following appeared:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He had, of course, already shown his gift for boiling things down to short and simple phrases expressing their essence in his work Animal Farm.
But am I not being hideously unfair to the Left? Are not each of the three phrases I am condemning as outrageous lies all defensible?
Less is More: like Small is Beautiful, for which there was no room on the staircase, and which would have been in any case redundant, it just meant that material excess is not necessarily beneficial, and constraints can lead to ingenuity in coping with them, with ultimately better results.
Property is Theft: Aren't excesses of wealth a theft from the poor? Idolization of an absolute right to property allowed the rich to exploit the poor without redress.
Zionism is Racism: As already noted above, doesn't allowing another people to grab a land where Arabs lived and settle there and make it their home involve regarding them as a lesser people, just as the colonization of the Americas was justified by categorizing their indigenous people as savages?
But the thing is that the phrases George Orwell places on the steps of the Ministry of Truth can also be defended, and even people in 1948 knew this quite well.
War is Peace: Once the enemy attacks, the only way to unilaterally choose peace is to surrender. If surrender means annihilation, and the real goal of peace is that everyone live in freedom... then fighting back against aggression, as opposed to surrender, better serves the cause of peace.
Freedom is Slavery: The Founding Fathers well knew that true freedom can only exist where there are laws and there is order, because anarchy is not freedom, it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong.
Ignorance is Strength: Not telling the newspapers about the Manhattan Project while it was ongoing, or about the successes America was having in breaking the Japanese codes, made America's war effort stronger.
But that doesn't make 1984 dishonest or disingenuous. Something that starts out as a truth can be exaggerated by means of analogy to become an obvious and monstrous lie. That book was specifically intended as being about what war does to corrode freedom, as opposed to being simply a condemnation of the West's own totalitarian enemies, past and then present, as Orwell himself had pointed out.
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was also the author of The Road to Wigan Pier, and he served in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side.
Thus, he was dismayed at the use of his book 1984 as Cold War propaganda. At one point, he answered a journalist's question in a way that suggested that the book 1984 was about something... quite surprising... in the real world.
One piece of advice given to aspiring authors is "Write about what you know". A number of authors have had great success in writing books about life on a farm or in a small town, but these days it seems as though that market is sated, and for a book to sell well, it needs to be about something more exciting than the life of the typical individual with literary aspirations.
So I think that if one puts the following interpretation on Orwell's remark, it can indeed be made to make sense.
Instead of asking the question "What in the real world is 1984 about?" like the reporter, let's ask the question "How did you write such a convincing depiction of life under a totalitarian system when you never lived in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia?".
In that latter case, a perfectly sensible thing to say would be: I drew on my own life experiences as a BBC correspondent, finding characteristics in small in the ways of the bureaucracy of the BBC from which I could give flesh and substance to a picture of how life within a totalitarian regime would feel.
And thus we are saved from having to read 1984 as a savage condemnation of BBC bureaucracy, and not anything else.