Israel today is besieged by fanatical jihadists. Three boys are murdered by Palestinian terrorists and the world’s reaction is annoyance with the Jewish state.

What kind of insanity are we living in?

From its founding in 1987, the terrorist group Hamas has been sworn to Israel’s destruction. This isn’t hyperbole. I’ve seen in Jerusalem bodies hanging out bombed-out bus windows…all done in the name of Allah, jihad, fire and blood.

Yet Jimmy Carter has offered himself as a clueless interlocutor for these fiends, visiting Hamas leaders and “monitoring” elections in Gaza. You know what it means to monitor elections in a totalitarian, sharia culture, don’t you? It means you say the right things and pretend, so that you don’t end up starring in a beheading video.

And the current American president urges “restraint” on Israel, in the wake of these brutal murders.

An EU official clucks his tongue that the Europeans are getting tired of Israeli “settlers” building on their ancestral homeland.

Hey, over here. The story is the march of global jihad, with the white-hot conflict going on in the Middle East as the epicenter.

We have been mired in this madness on a colossal scale since 1994, when the Americans and their Western allies put the squeeze on Israel to accept the serial killer, Yasser Arafat, as a “peace partner.” They cleaned him up, gave him a shave and a hot meal, and trotted this killer of women and children out as a fantasy. He spent 13 nights in the Lincoln bedroom, as the guest of Bill Clinton. The Palestinian terror infrastructure was gifted with a quasi-government, billions in foreign aid, and a launch pad to attempt Israel’s destruction.

It was not always this way.

Thirty-eight summers ago today, Israel dealt with terrorists the old-fashioned way. At the height of tension over the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) hijacking of a French passenger jet, a team of elite counter-terrorism commandos poured out of planes in the dead of night at a remote Ugandan airport, Entebbe.

They managed to completely surprise the terrorists holding 105 Jewish men, women, and children at the airport terminal. Israel’s legendary unit, Sayeret Matkal, burst in the front door, firing at terrorists, all the while shouting at the hostages to stay down. The actual and efficient elimination of the terrorists and the loading of passengers onto waiting C 130 planes took an hour and they were then flown to freedom.

What happened to us?

The cowardice of the international community, the feckless and grotesquely unfeeling White House, the furious Palestinian propaganda being pumped into the American Church by evangelical leaders…this soggy mess in the face of lethal and existential threats brought on by jihadists is almost disorienting. Where is the leadership?

Israel is savaged in the international media, including by dupes such as the Christian writer Donald Miller, as if they were Nazis roaming through Palestinian villages.

Let me tell you something.

There is no more moral army in the world than the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF sends its sons to fight house-to-house in Palestinian terror towns and villages, so as to minimize civilian casualties.

I once visited with Surin Hershko, a member of the force that went to Entebbe. He told me that he would go again if called on.

And he told me this from a wheelchair. Surin was shot by a Ugandan that hot summer night long ago as he raced up a flight of stairs. Why did his adversary have the advantage to fire first? Because the rescue force had been ordered to be acutely mindful of civilians, so Surin’s finger was not on the trigger of his weapon. The man who shot Surin through the neck was gripping the arm of a woman as they passed in the night.

Surin Hershko has been a quadriplegic for 39 years because he is a moral human being.

Not so the enemies of him and his people. They are a death cult that will eventually burn out in that ring of fire and blood they rage about.

Meanwhile, the Protector of Israel will go on protecting His people and if Bible skeptics think that’s a quaint view, well, keep pushing daisies into the barrel of rifles and marinating in your own intellectual awesomeness. The rest of us will notice that God declares He will preserve Israel and the Jewish people long after their tormentors await the Final Judgment.

On this Fourth of July, I salute my own beloved country and I salute the true shining city on a hill, the nation of Israel.

Am Yisrael Chai.