the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Only in a world where words no longer have an objective meaning could the Iranian drone and cruise missile attack on Israel last night, where 99% of the 300 launches were destroyed before they reached Israel, be described as ‘a success.’

And only in a world where the state ruthlessly enforces the narrative it wants to present to its people and where access to independent news sources is non-existent, social media is banned, and internet is use is restricted could this happen.

Such a state could then present its attack as self defence claiming it was response to the air strike on an Iranian consulate building in the Syrian capital Damascus, which killed 13  senior Iranian commanders. 

In such a world, a precise and well planned operation would be somehow equitable with a wholly indiscriminate and massively disproportinate attack.

That would be in a world that has largely forgotten the root cause of this current conflict, the pogrom inflicted on Israel by Hamas last year, which resulted in the the largest single number of Jewish deaths since the Holocaust.

A world in which Iran feels it is acting in a restrained manner when it threatens a bigger attack should Israel retaliate and warning that if the United States backs Israel, Iran will target their military bases.

Which in turn would lead to this shocking article in ‘The Guardian’  which effectively blames Israel for the attack ‘The Damascus embassy attack looks like a premeditated escalation designed to fortify Netanyahu’s domestic political position, silence criticism from the blind-sided Americans and deflect international pressure to halt arms supplies to Israel. And it has worked. Overnight, the criticism in Washington of the Gaza debacle has dried up.’

And only in a world where the Western political class has allowed the transient moral authority of social media and vocal activists to steadily supplant any pretence of effective, mature and consequentialist leadership, could this happen.

And a world which, to these eyes at least, seems increasingly more unrecognisable.