The frontline in the war against Hamas is no longer in the Middle East

Telegraph

2 days ago

Militarily, Israel's campaign against some of the nastiest, most cunning terrorist forces that ever existed has been pretty darn successful. The IDF has torn through the heart of Hamas's power structure, killing off its thugs one by one, from Yahya Sinwar to Hakham Muhammad Issa Al-Issa, the military chief and October 7 mastermind who was reportedly eliminated this week.
The Israelis have largely neutered Hezbollah, destroying vast numbers of its rockets and taking out much of its leadership. Bashar al-Assad is now a distant memory, and Jerusalem used the opportunity of his regime's collapse to wipe out large quantities of Syrian armaments. With its proxies humbled or gone, Iran was humiliated by Israel's aerial assault. The extent of the damage to the Iranian nuclear programme is disputed, but nobody can surely deny that the ayatollahs' ability to harm Israel and the West has been degraded.
Unfortunately, on the other front in the war against Hamas, the enemy is global, worsening, and there is no end in sight. That is because in the case of Hamas's useful idiots in the West, the enemy lies within.
It lies in seminar rooms, on campuses, in hospitals, schools, on the streets, and obviously all over our culture, as the 'death to the IDF' chants at Glastonbury make clear. This, of course, is only the real-world manifestation of an intifada already globalised on TikTok.
There are daily reminders, each more ghoulish than the last, of how the enemies of freedom and justice are gliding to victory on this front, fuelling and, amazingly, lending legitimacy and momentum to a public, murderous passion against Israeli (and non-Israeli) Jews.
Witness the reports of the treatment of Noa Argamani, one of the Israeli hostages kidnapped from the Nova music festival and rescued by Israeli forces in June last year, at an event in Canada the other day. She shared a post on X, stating that members of the University of Windsor's Palestinian solidarity group had surrounded a Jewish fundraiser she was attending, 'blocking the only entrance and shouting at Jewish attendees'. In a clip, a voice is heard shouting: 'Hamas is coming'.
Argamani keeps a brave face. She says she will not let 'terror sympathisers control the narrative' but unfortunately no amount of right gets in the way of a world drunk, not for the first time, on wrong. Somehow, ferocious periods of moral and actual violence like the one we are in always seem to have Jewish lives as the punchline. There is something eerily familiar about it all.
Hamas came. Hamas kidnapped me. Hamas murdered my friends. But I won; I survived. Now, I speak for those who can't.
I'll keep exposing Hamas' crimes and fighting for the hostages' release—including my partner, Avinatan.
I refuse to let terror sympathizers control the narrative. https://t.co/93jfdPDAKW
— Noa Argamani (@ArgamaniNoa) June 28, 2025
Efforts to defeat this hydra also appear to be failing. No sooner did Trump try to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia University's pro-Palestinian activist, than he became the darling of the Left. I reckon we can expect a mayoral candidacy from him in future, should the likely tenure of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York, another man shot to prominence on the back of his criticism of Israel, ever come to an end.
Outside of Gaza, in the streets of US cities, where Jews and Israelis until recently did not feel especially unsafe, the war is most decidedly hot, and literal, not figurative. If you were in any doubt about that, recall the fatal shooting of the Israeli embassy workers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim last month, followed by shouts of 'I did it for Palestine' by the alleged killer. Who can seriously say that such a horrifying act of evil will never happen again?
Israel will never accept terror against its own people. It has proved that with devastating effectiveness in the time since October 7. The difference with the West is becoming ever more stark.