Exactly two years and eleven months ago the cover of this magazine warned that the election the week before of Joe Biden as President of the United States spelled war for the Middle East. ‘Peace nixed – the Middle East will plunge back into darkness’ was the headline, with the visual showing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris clutching aloft a birdcage with a dead dove of peace in it, akin to a dead canary in a coal mine. In the story that accompanied the cover, Dr David Adler warned that, ‘The Biden administration is likely to implement a significant shift in US policy concerning Israel and the Middle East broadly. Nowhere outside the US will the outcome of the presidential election have a greater impact.’ Indeed.

At the time, many found our dire prediction of war to be not only ‘wildly exaggerated’ and ‘tasteless’ but also ‘downright wrong’. Typically the rest of the mainstream Australian media (and most of the world’s media) greeted Biden’s election with excitement, enthusiasm and optimism. They were fools to do so.

Sadly, we now see the end result of what was – to us and to our readers at least – entirely foreseeable: death and carnage wrought again against the Jews. We take no pleasure whatsoever in being right in our predictions. Quite the opposite. But we only draw attention to this fact because the harsh truth is that the grotesque abomination the world witnessed last weekend was not some random, unpredictable event that astonishingly came out of the blue. Rather, it was the almost certain outcome of the West refusing to learn the lessons of the past and kidding itself that warm, fuzzy feelings and ‘liberal’ left-wing policies revering all ‘multi-cultural’ values were sufficient to guarantee peace in our time.

On top of which was the pernicious anti-Trump sentiment (Trump Derangement Syndrome) which still prevails among the elites everywhere and was so ingrained that even many who should have known better callously turned their noses up at, or downplayed, Trump’s unprecedented Abraham peace accords. And they then sat back and twiddled their thumbs as Biden set about rekindling the Obama-era nuclear deals with the Iranian devils.

Evil thrives in an environment of hesitancy, weakness, muddled thinking and a refusal to face reality. Evil thrives not only – as the saying goes – when ‘good men do nothing’, but also when those in power abandon traditional common sense values.

The weakness of Biden’s America, as Jason Thomas points out in this week’s issue, has only emboldened the most determined and ruthless enemies of the West. On top of which, the bungled retreat from Afghanistan left behind a treasure trove of high-tech armaments, some of which, almost certainly we will learn were used to butcher Jews in the Negev desert last weekend. Not only did the West look weak and untrustworthy, it also looked almost comically idiotic. Throw on top of that bonfire of insanities the six billion dollars handed to Iran a few weeks ago, which the ayatollahs immediately and publicly promised to put to their own version of ‘good use’ on their pet projects, and death, murder, rape and mayhem soon followed.

The full horror of the mutilation and desecration of those young women and babies by the sub-human butchers of Hamas will never be wiped away. But again, the harsh truth is that some if not all of those vile men, in all likelihood, were tutored in their Jew-hatred and savagery at schools partly financed by Australian tax dollars fed to them via the insidious United Nations Relief and Works Agency. (This magazine, by the way, was instrumental in getting $10 million of that money removed; only to watch in disbelief as Penny Wong in one of her first actions as Foreign Minister reinstated those funds. Let’s hope she can look herself in the mirror.)

This week you will, unsurprisingly, find a plethora of articles about the Hamas atrocities. Douglas Murray, Rod Liddle, Charles Moore and others give their thoughts from abroad, whilst here in Australia Alex Ryvchin attempts to dissect the vile antisemitism that continues to plague the world as Rebecca Weisser and Mark Durie look at the sickening behaviour of the hateful mobs on the steps of the Opera House; at the pathetic response of the Australian authorities who ignored them and instead arrested a lone Jewish man with a flag; and at what the future now holds for the Middle East.

Australians have been betrayed by successive governments. That individuals have been let into this country who can celebrate and fetishise the grotesque murder, rape, torture, dismemberment, decapitation and violation of young girls and babies is extremely disturbing.

We need to see arrests, convictions and deportation where possible for those who called for the gassing of Jews outside the Sydney Opera House, as well as strict new vetting processes for all immigrants in order to weed out people from towns, communities or organisations where such antisemitic and heinous views are accepted. Just because Biden is weak, doesn’t mean we have to be.