JEFF GOLDSTEIN: Tilting at Self Righteousness.

Just as I despised the Bush-era “war fighting” that cared more about optics than it did victory, I similarly despise the supposed “morality” of Israel giving evacuation warnings to a sovereign government that, as a matter of its own stated endgame, attacked Israeli civilians to facilitate the extermination of the Jews. As “pro-Palestinian” protesters in Western countries — in a remarkably transparent rebuke to the multicultural program supported by the global elite as a way to weaken wealthy Western nations while appearing benevolent — gather and chant “gas the Jews,” or “from the river to the sea,” it should be frighteningly obvious that the project of trying to reason and assimilate medieval tribal allegiances into propositional nations was and is a fools errand. It is not a “blessing of liberty” to enable the conditions for your own civilizational suicide because doing so grants you some temporary plaudits from those who, when the time is right, have every intention of wiping you out and subjugating those of you whom they don’t murder. In fact, its an astounding display of cultural arrogance and personal sanctimony — with the latter being a point of extraordinarly pride to those who, in different circumstances, would lecture us on the particular sin that impulse represents.

Here is the harsh truth as I see it: It’s time the West believes in its own civilizational exceptionalism — not market it like needy teens adopting the latest attitudes in order to finagle a seat at the “cool kids’” lunch table.

Israel has talked a good game, mobilized the reserves, and established a wartime coalition government. We’ll see if they deliver on the promise to end Hamas the way they must.