A moral inversion is taking hold across parts of the West, most visibly among segments of America’s elitists. Reality is no longer debated; it is reframed in support of a political agenda. In this framework, Iran and its proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, are recast as aggrieved actors, while Israel is cast as the aggressor. Violence is excused, if not justified. Self-defense is treated with suspicion. Facts are not argued over; they are selected, bent, and arranged to fit a predetermined conclusion.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the redefinition of “victory.”

The United States and Israel have systematically degraded Iran’s military capacity, its air and naval forces weakened, its missile and drone infrastructure damaged, its air defenses compromised, its leadership targeted. By any conventional standard, this is the very definition of defeat. Not partial. Not debatable. Indisputable defeat.

Yet we are told Iran has “prevailed” because it can still disrupt shipping lanes, unsettle energy markets, and impose costs. This is not analysis; it is narrative protection. If the ability to cause residual disruption after absorbing heavy losses counts as victory, then the word has been drained of meaning.

The logic is elastic to the point of absurdity. By this standard, any actor that takes a beating but manages to spike oil prices on the way down can claim success. That is not a metric; it is an excuse.

The same distortion defines the conversation around Hamas. Its military infrastructure is shattered. Its tunnel networks are compromised. Its ability to sustain offensive operations is sharply reduced. Israel controls large portions of Gaza. And still, claims of “victory” persist, because Hamas survives, because remnants of its fighters can still emerge and exert control over a trapped population.

But survival is not victory. It is what remains when victory is no longer possible.

Calling that outcome a success is not just analytically wrong; it is morally evasive. It repackages devastation of life, of infrastructure, of any viable future, as something resembling achievement. It asks observers to confuse endurance with success, destruction with resistance.

This inversion does not arise by accident. It rests on a fixed premise: Israel is the aggressor; its adversaries are the victims. Once that premise is accepted, everything else follows. Evidence is filtered. Contradictions are ignored. The conclusion is set in advance; the facts are made to serve it.

The same pattern shapes the treatment of the United States. Whatever one’s view of the current administration, the scale and precision of operations involving Iran do not materialize on their own. They reflect sustained American leadership: military, diplomatic, and strategic. To downplay that is not nuance; it is selective omission.

Europe, meanwhile, falls back on a familiar posture: cautious, equivocal, and deliberately noncommittal. Statements are crafted to avoid clarity, balance over judgment, process over substance, language over truth.

Looming over all of this is Europe’s historical burden. The failure to protect its Jewish populations during the Holocaust remains one of the defining moral catastrophes of modern history. Yet some now engage in a grotesque inversion, drawing comparisons that collapse under even minimal scrutiny. There are no extermination camps in Israel, no Nuremberg Laws, no death squads roaming its streets. These outlandish comparisons do not illuminate; they obscure.

This is not a mere disagreement. It is a collapse of standards.

When defeat is called victory, when aggression is recast as defense, when terrorism is re-framed as resistance, language itself begins to break down. And when language breaks down, so does the ability to think clearly.

A society that cannot, or will not, distinguish between fact and fiction, does not just lose arguments, it relinquishes its grip on reality, squanders its integrity, and loses its legitimacy.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)