Ruth Dudley Edwards: So many lucky inhabitants of the West and its wonderful civilisation have no gratitude for being winners in the lottery of life

I was pleased in 1987 when eight members of the Provisional IRA were killed in action as they attacked the RUC barracks at Loughgall.

As a Dublin-born London resident, I didn’t know Northern Ireland well at the time, though I had no doubt that the bad guys were the paramilitaries.

It would be years before I learned the details of how many good people had been slaughtered by the psychopath Jim Lynagh and his willing team of assassins.

These days, like so many, I drown in information about the horrors of the world.

I’m broadly pretty clear about who are the baddies and goodies, and I rejoiced last week at the death of the monstrous murderer Hassan Nasrallah.

But I struggle not to be depressed that so many lucky inhabitants of the West and its wonderful civilisation have no gratitude for being winners in the lottery of life and are taken in by charlatans who seek to make them despise rather than revere their freedom and the extraordinary richness of their culture.

I was delighted when the aspirant Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said bluntly that not all cultures were equal and cited the treatment of women and children as one of the proofs of the moral primacy of the West.

We are in such an ideological morass that young people think it racism to denounce the Taliban and other Islamist regimes that enslave women and rape children.

I am thankful every day for the genius and humanity of Elon Musk, who uses his vast, honourably-earned fortune to make our lives better, to seek somewhere in the galaxy where the human race can survive if we ruin this planet, and who fights every day on his X platform for the free speech without which our democracies would quickly wither.

It appals me that so few people support courageous little Israel, the jewel of civilisation in the Middle East that has brought so much to the Western cultural table, including an addiction to debate reminiscent of Presbyterians.

The badge on my coat lapel says “I stand with Israel”. I go to vigils for the return of the hostages and I speak up for Israel and Jews in company, but I wish I could do more.

And meanwhile, as an Irishwoman, I feel ashamed of the anti-semitism that is dirtying my native country.

I was used to President Michael D Higgins being a disgrace, but I was horrified that Micheál Martin, whom I mostly thought well of, joined the merry Irish chorus denouncing Israel for trying to save itself from annihilation by Iran and its proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, who long to extirpate Israel and exterminate all the Jews in the world.

People like our foreign secretary David Lammy, with his culpably naïve babbling about dialogue and diplomacy, make it all worse.

I hope an adviser tells him how in 1973 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir summed up the reality of having genocidal enemies.

“They say we must be dead. And we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.”