How deeply would you have to hate Britain to damage our means of defending it?

Telegraph

5 hours ago

How deeply would you have to hate Britain to damage our means of defending it? Last night, activists broke into RAF Brize Norton on electric scooters and sprayed red paint into the engines of two Airbus Voyager aircraft that are used to refuel airborne fighter jets. In an additional flick of symbolism, one of the planes bore the Union flag and had previously carried the Royal Family.
The answer to my question, of course, is quite a lot. These people detest our country, our values, our traditions, our history, and evidently our national security.
Two weeks ago, RAF Typhoons were scrambled to intercept a Russian Su-24 that was buzzing an American logistics vessel in the Baltic Sea. This is the sort of vital, unglamorous, everyday mission that these activists are disrupting.
Do they want us to start learning Russian? Or Farsi, or Arabic? What lies behind such moral confusion? It will come as no surprise that these benighted souls belonged to a group called 'Palestine Action', a hyper-radical militant group known for acts of extreme vandalism involving red paint. Ostensibly, they tried to destroy British planes in the name of Gaza.
Only it wasn't about Gaza, was it? For one thing, although Sir Keir Starmer has shamefully refused to deploy the RAF to defend Israel's skies, preferring to sit back and watch as a hospital was hit in Beer Sheva and a world-leading cancer research unit was destroyed in Rehovot, he has recently said that our planes may go into action to 'defend allies' and interests in the region, which presumably no longer include Israel.
So this is about weighing the scales in favour of Iran, which is an entirely different matter to Gaza. The totalitarian regime in Tehran, which has done nothing to cure cancer by the way, is one of the most malignant on Earth.
Its people live under the threat of torture, execution and amputation – I can show you a photograph of Iranian authorities cutting off a man's hand with a circle saw – if they dare to speak their minds, dance in public, eschew the hijab or otherwise break the law, but the Ayatollah is the head of the octopus whose malevolent tentacles grip the region and the world.
Iran is the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism. At rallies, speeches by the supreme leader are greeted by chants of 'death to England' and 'death to America' as well as 'death to Israel'.
The driving ideology of the regime is to plunge the globe into apocalyptic war by destroying Israel, thus enabling a mythical Messiah figure called the 'Mahdi' to emerge from invisibility and lead the faithful to victory. This is not mere fantasy. It informs the Ayatollah's foreign policy, and a recent tweet shows that he believes this showdown is happening right now.
The true problem, however, is not the activists. It is the hesitancy in the mainstream to condemn them with their whole chests. How much does the public care about the vandalism of RAF planes? Forty-eight per cent of Britons say they would not take up arms to defend our country 'under any circumstances'. We have been taught to demean ourselves for so many decades that society has lost its immune system.
This spirit has been successfully connected with antipathy towards Israel. The gratuitous coverage of collateral damage in Gaza, which tragically resembles that of any war, has comprehensively turned people's hearts and minds against the Jewish state, even those who previously supported it.
If the same level of attention to civilian suffering had been applied to the far bigger wars in Sudan and Yemen, public sympathies would take a different form. But it is all directed at Gaza. And it's one-sided. When the Israeli hospital was hit – a hospital, guys! Anyone? Anyone? – it received no condemnation by the UN and barely made the news. This is information warfare and the widespread public hostility towards Israel is testament to its success.
As a result, many people feel deep down that the thugs from Palestine Action, and those who deface our streets with rallies on Saturday afternoons, are making a point that the country supports, albeit in especially vivid terms.
The unconscionable vandalism overnight at RAF Brize Norton should serve as an important reminder that when the keffiyeh slips, the hatred of these activists doesn't stop at the Jews.
Israel's success is a consequence of the fact that it has not discarded the spirit that formerly animated the West as a whole. Just like the generation of our grandparents, the Jewish state is unafraid to stand upon its history, identity, culture and values and defend them against those who wish it harm.
It is a place of love: love of family, love of country, love of life and humanity. Just like Britain of 1940, these are the principles for which it sends its young men to war. Yes, all conflict is ugly, but the operations in Iran, which have incurred so few civilian casualties, show the extent to which the Jewish state protects the innocent, and the effectiveness of its operations when the enemy is not placing his own people in the line of fire.
The gulf that has opened between the Britain of our grandparents and the Britain of today is matched only by the gulf between our country and the Middle East's only democracy. People hate Israel because it has retained those values that they have come to hate in ourselves. I'm only glad that my Jewish grandfather, who fought for our country during the D-Day landings, is no longer alive to see it.