IF THIS WAR WAS MEANT TO ISOLATE ISRAEL, IT HAD THE OPPOSITE EFFECT

Jonathan Kay of the National Post's had some questionable positions at times, but here, he seems to get some things right about Israel's current crisis:

“The world stands disgraced” was the banner headline that Britain’s Guardian newspaper put on Thursday’s front page — a quote from a UN official outraged after Israeli shelling killed 15 civilians at a school being used as a shelter in Gaza.

War is hell, and this tragic accident was unusually hellish. So that sort of language is understandable coming from UN officials tasked with keeping Gazans safe. But when those words are selectively lifted for use as a sensational headline in a British newspaper, it raises eyebrows.

Syria’s ongoing civil war has generated more than 170,000 deaths. Islamists are destroying what remains of Christian civilization in Iraq. Russia is igniting the flames of war in eastern Ukraine, with the casualties thus far including 298 dead (80 of them children) in the destruction of Flight MH17 on July 17. And yet the planet’s reputation, we are to understand, somehow survived all this — until it was “disgraced” by Israel’s fighting men and women, who are waging war against a terrorist group that uses human shields. Really?

It should come as no surprise that this sort of coverage is coming from the same British media that promoted the bogus Jenin “massacre” story when Israel fought a similar campaign against Palestinian terrorists in 2002. One can only expect yet more award-winning cartoons from British cartoonists showing leaders of the Jewish state devouring Palestinian babies and the like. Some things don’t change.

But some things do. Unlike in similar conflicts in 2002, 2006, 2008 and 2012, this time around, the Arab world has been extremely muted in its support for Israel’s battlefield enemies.

While this is certainly true with Egypt, let's not think it says Saudi Arabia's changed - they're still bound to remain a Judenrein country for as long as nobody forcefully demands it be changed. They'll also remain a sharia-governed country for the same length of time. But Kay's take does have something to it here, and we can credit him for noting how the British media's propaganda about Jenin was phony. Yes, something has changed, though we shouldn't expect it to remain that way forever. But for now, it's good.