We need to talk about the crisis in Western civilisation
Brendan O’Neill
There were two eruptions of barbarism last October. The first was Hamas’s pogrom of October 7, in which more than 1000 people were slaughtered and many others maimed, raped and kidnapped. The second was the sympathy for the pogrom across much of the West. The celebration, even, of this army of anti-Semites that had paraglided, barged and driven into southern Israel to decimate the civilian population there.
The bodies were barely cold, the hostages not yet shackled in Gaza’s dank tunnels, the rape victims still reeling from their vile defilement, when a cruel, taunting cry came from the West: “Well, what did you expect?”
On campuses, on social media and on the streets, there was an explosion of empathy – not with Israel but with the brutes who had so horrifically violated its territory and its people.
Leftists, influencers and members of the educated classes issued excuses for Hamas’s butchery of civilians. Some outright crowed about it. It was “exhilarating”, said one American professor. “Glory to our martyrs,” said students at George Washington University in the US.
There was Hamas cosplay. Men in Hamas-style green bandannas were spotted on an anti-Israel march in London. Three young women in London were seen sporting paraglider stickers.
In the weeks following Hamas’s orgy of murder, legions of the West’s middle classes idly marched alongside radical Islamists who were chanting for jihad against the Jewish state. One pogrom wasn’t enough, it seems.
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We need to talk about this. We need to talk about this pity for the pogromists that swept the West. We need to talk about the fact when fascism reared its head once more, many of our young took its side.Today is “a day of celebration”, British leftist Rivkah Brown said on October 7, as Israelis were still being slain by fascists. While the pogrom was in full flow, 31 student organisations at Harvard University issued a statement saying “the Israeli regime” is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.
This was the politics of “She was asking for it”. As women were being raped and ravers murdered, 8000km away, on the leafy lawns of Harvard, the sons and daughters of privilege essentially were saying it was their own fault.
Universities were hotbeds of Hamas sympathy.
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On our streets, Hamas apologism ran riot. On October 9, before Israel’s military response had begun, protesters gathered at the Sydney Opera House to burn the Israeli flag and insult Jews.
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Then came the marches. Placards likened Zionism to Nazism. “From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada!” they chanted in Whitehall. Britain’s Jews quaked. At a London protest at the end of October, the slaughter of Israelis still fresh in Jewish Brits’ minds, a gathering of Islamists chanted the Arabic war cry: “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Mohammed will return!” That’s a reference to the 7th-century Battle of Khaybar that took place in what is now Saudi Arabia, when Mohammed and his armies slaughtered Jews. They were taunting Jews with tales of their annihilation, just weeks after a modern-day army of fanatics had annihilated more of them.
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Then came the most unsettling element of the West’s post-pogrom madness:
the frenzied tearing down of posters showing the Israelis who were kidnapped on October 7. Supporters of Israel put up “KIDNAPPED” posters in cities across the West. And almost everywhere the posters were attacked, torn, defaced.
Everywhere you looked you’d see remnants of the posters, scarred with the jagged claw marks of those who had tried to destroy them. These flapping shreds of paper, with just the eye or mouth of the kidnapped Jew still visible, were a testament to the anti-civilisational delirium that blew up in the West after Hamas’s pogrom.
One of the grimmest images of the post-October moment was found in Finchley Road in London, where the faces of the three-year-old Israeli twins who were kidnapped were daubed with Hitler moustaches. Jewish children targeted with bigotry and mockery – who ever thought we would witness this again?
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What was this fever? Why did self-styled anti-fascists cosy up to fascism? How did some of the highest seats of learning in Christendom come to be overrun by apologists for barbarism? Why did posters of kidnapped children evoke such fury that they were smeared with Nazi slander? What madness was this?
This is what we need to talk about. Urgently. The first eruption of barbarism in October 2023 – Hamas’s carnival of killing – confirmed what many of us already knew: that Hamas is a Jew-hating war machine that masquerades as a national liberation movement.
The second eruption of barbarism – the pogrom apologism in our own cities – points to something we are less willing to talk about:
the moral rot of a Western world that has turned its back on the virtues of reason, enlightenment and just plain decency.October 7 exposed our own crisis of civilisation. Ignoring it would be nothing short of suicidal.
This is an edited excerpt from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, published by Spiked Books and available now.
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