Politics is ultimately about having a strong character. But the fact is that most politicians in the West don’t. They are slick operators, not leaders

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all me a bigot — as in the soft bigotry of low expectations — but when it comes to the liberal media and Israel, I can’t find it in me to blame them for their bias. They’re simply not capable of any better.

Like a jury treating a juvenile shoplifter leniently if he’s raised by a pair of drug-addled petty crooks, I take the view that the world’s largest news organizations aren’t morally culpable for their warped Israel coverage. Their editors are too steeped in trendy hatred of the Jewish state to act differently.

Knowing that they’re incapable of making the fundamental distinction between a terror army and a democracy acting in self defense, I rarely get outraged when they fail to clear the lowest ethical bar.

Still, in a purely medical sense, it’s occasionally useful to examine some of the latest symptoms of Israel derangement. Such brain-rot as when the BBC’s head of news told staffers recently that the civilian wing of Hamas is really a bunch of impartial technocrats interested only in running a good civil service.

“It’s really important that we are clear that the Hamas-run government is different to being part of the military wing of Hamas,” said Deborah Turness.

Or the New York Times’ late-night non-apology after it turned out that the emaciated Palestinian child whose picture they’d printed on the front page as the centerpiece of a storm about mass starvation in Gaza actually suffered from a preexisting condition.

The fact that the original, uncropped images of the baby’s family, clearly showing that the others aren’t malnourished, makes the episode a case of outright journalistic malpractice. But don’t expect heads to roll, because many of these establishment media institutions genuinely can’t see what the fuss is about.

The putrefaction in the very marrow of the BBC is a parable for something much deeper: a catastrophic failure of leadership in the center of politics in Britain and across much of the West that has enabled the ongoing wave of anti-Semitism.

Because as much as large parts of the left are a lost cause, the center and right have played a supporting role — if not of commission, then of omission.

Why was it that over the course of 13 years of ostensibly small-c conservative government, the Conservatives did little to hold the BBC to account? It’s not for want of an obvious solution. The BBC is powerful because of its unique funding model based on a household license fee that provides some $5 billion in annual revenue. That staggering figure provides the government with a massive cosh to bludgeon the BBC into line, and stop them spewing out their slanted coverage at taxpayer expense.

So, why was that truncheon never wielded in anger? Simply because the only thing that the conservatives wanted to conserve was their own comfortable seat at the high table of the liberal elites. The ostensible conservatives were too busy blathering on about a climate emergency to bother with actual conservative priorities, like stopping uncontrolled illegal migration or dealing with bigotry at the national broadcaster.

Imagine for a minute that Vice President J.D. Vance were to stop off before his upcoming holiday in England’s bucolic Cotswold region, for a short detour to BBC headquarters. What might an American conservative do inside the glass-and-steel precincts of the news giant?

He would start with a DOGE-style bloodbath, gutting the editorial and reporting staffs. The principle would be simple: If you struggle to utter the words “Hamas” and “terrorist” in the same breath, you’re out.

Why is such action unimaginable in Britain? Why has the Trump administration been able to defund left-wing public broadcaster NPR, when Britain’s Conservatives couldn’t bring the BBC to heel? Why is the US southern border now sealed, whereas in 2023 — the last year of the recent Conservative government — migration via an armada of small boats topped one million arrivals? Why is the US justice system acting decisively against anti-Semitism on campus, whereas in the UK — even before Labour took over a year ago — no one lifted a finger?

You don’t need the critical-thinking skills of a BBC executive to figure out the reason for all this: In Britain, as in much of the non-American West, establishment conservatives are mostly conservative in name only.

In the UK, conservatism means the kind of tepid, weak-tea variety, which is really squishy centrism in disguise. Even politicians whose beliefs are genuinely of the right are often too cowed by the dominant liberalism around them to stand up and fight. Hence the chronic inaction on the BBC and all the causes that really matter to the country.

So, at root of the anti-Israel disease that has infected so much of the West’s chattering classes is 50 years of disastrous university education coming from the left, compounded by that failure of leadership on the right.

To look at the current crop of politicians who check polls with the fervor of a village headman consulting a soothsayer, you might not know that leadership has a very simple definition. It means having a clear vision, being honest enough to share said vision without prevarication, and then displaying enough guts to actually implement it.

For those in office who are unsure what that means in practice, look no further than Donald Trump. Whatever else you say about him, one thing is undeniable: Trump says what he means, then he does what he says.

Sitting next to Trump as the president held court at his Scottish golf course last week, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer looked like a vassal king hosting his imperial liege. Master of the poker face, Starmer barely winced as the torrent of patronizing friendship and petty slights washed over him. Poor fellow — it can’t be easy to be the face of British decline.

But part of the reason that Trump treated his host as an afterthought was that he detects the flaw at the heart of Keir Starmer. Trump respects strong leaders, and the former government lawyer is neither strong nor a leader.

Politicians have a certain amount of fickleness built in, like a factory setting. But the British prime minister is like a weathervane — he swivels around in the direction of whichever wind happens to be blowing most strongly at the moment.

When Jeremy Corbyn was ascendant, he was a loyal lieutenant. When Corbynism got a deserved kicking at the ballot box, he became the most zealous of anti-Corbynists, determined to detoxify the party from the leader he’d served until days before.

Shortly after Trump’s departure, Starmer gave a virtuoso display of that spinelessness when he announced that Britain would recognize a Palestinian state. In another context, it would have been a bold move. But coming after French president Emmanuel Macron had blazed a trail, it was just Starmer doing what he does best: following the leader.

Patently designed to distract from his floundering premiership, Starmer’s grubby gesture to the left will make few people happy.

For any ally who wants to see how the head of one of America’s junior partners can display leadership, look to Bibi Netanyahu. In an essay in National Interest, foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan — by no means a fan of the Israeli leader — writes of Bibi’s incredible statesmanship.

“The Middle East today is living through the Age of Netanyahu,” Kaplan says, one that Netanyahu has brought about as “he deals with levels of stress and anxiety on a daily basis that would psychologically immobilize the average Western politician.”

Alongside blame for the horrific failure of October 7, Kaplan says, Israel’s longtime leader can take credit for the first major Western military victory since the 1991 Gulf War:

History will remember Netanyahu’s methodical near-destruction of Hamas, followed by his methodical and thoroughly innovative destruction of Hezbollah; then the destruction of Iran’s air defense system, and a good part of its nuclear complex. He may have done more damage to the Houthis in Yemen than either the US Navy or NATO. And let’s not forget the toppling of the altogether murderous regime in Syria, which came about as a direct result of Israel’s dismantling of Hezbollah next door in Lebanon.

That he did all these things over the heads of his own security establishment, bringing in a skeptical President Trump, and teeing up the US to putt home the expanded Abraham Accords, marks Bibi as a “world-historical figure,” who has almost single-handedly changed the course of the region.

Contrast this, says Robert Kaplan, with today’s average politician, competent managers devoid of real beliefs.

Politics is ultimately about having a strong character. But the fact is that most politicians in the West don’t. They are slick operators, not leaders. They play it safe, hoping to bask in media praise, and consequently leave no mark.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. At Israel’s critical hour, Divine Providence has provided a leader of vision — even if he entered office when the flip phone was the latest sensation.

The rest of the world isn’t so fortunate. There are ways to tackle the anti-Semitism that is a symptom of the free world’s wider malaise that don’t involve pandering to the derangement of the anti-Israel left. The hour has come — but where are the men?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1073)