Brendan O'Neill has written a savage and necessary analysis of the moral depravity of the west.
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Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the October 7 pogrom when Israeli women, children and men were slaughtered, raped, mutilated, tortured, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped into Gaza by thousands of Palestinian Arabs spearheaded by the stormtroopers of Hamas.
So of course, over this weekend the west has erupted in demonstrations supporting Hamas, bellowing for the destruction of Israel and chanting for the further mass murder of Jews.
Hezbollah flags were being waved in Melbourne, New York and Toronto. In Dublin, mobs screamed “Burn Tel Aviv” and “Burn the settlers to the ground”.
Britain’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, declared:
Hezbollah is a proscribed terrorist organisation. Promoting it in Britain is a criminal offence. Extremism has no place on Britain’s streets. The police have our support in pursuing those breaking the law today.
Really?
Watch here as a Hezbollah flag is borne aloft in front of the Ritz hotel in London’s Piccadilly. Or see another such flag photographed here.
A mere 17 or so arrests were reportedly made in London as mobs chanted for the destruction of Israel and murder of Jews (both criminal offences in Britain). Watch here as a hate-crazed demonstrator waving a Palestinian flag screamed:
Terror state! Freedom fighters! They will finish you all off!
So what price Cooper’s stern-faced warning in the face of all this?
Watch here also as Muslims in London marked the October 7 pogrom with a performative expression of Islamist supremacism by assembling for mass prayer facing the Houses of Parliament, the cradle of British democracy.
And read (if you’ve the stomach for it) this Guardian piece by Naomi Klein headlined:
How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war
in which she referred to
the particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display.
Rub your eyes indeed. That’s how this individual describes Israel’s defence against a second genocide of the Jews. That’s how the despicable Guardian chooses to commemorate the biggest and most psychotic single act of slaughter against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — by claiming they have used what was done to them to justify their own evil acts, a charge redolent of Jew-hatred going back into antiquity.
There will be much, much more of this disgusting stuff over the next 24 hours. Untold numbers of decent people are utterly appalled by this, aghast at the moral sewer that Britain and the west have become. Very few in public life, however, speak up in support of Israel in its seismic battle against barbarism. Instead — whether through omission, two-faced evasions or active support — most line up with the depraved.
One of the very few who has courageously called this out is Brendan O’Neill, editor-in-chief of the website Spiked. Now he has published a book on it: After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.
He argues powerfully that the October 7 pogrom presented the west with a moral test which it has failed. He writes:
We need to talk about the pity for the pogromists that swept the west in the wake of 7 October. We need to talk about the exhilaration of the educated classes upon seeing kibbutzim invaded and Jews’ homes set on fire. We need to talk about the left’s rationalisation of the pogrom. We need to talk about the fact that when barbarism visited Israel, when fascism reared its head once more, many of our young took its side.
As he observes, right from the start the legions of the left, with teachers and professors often at the forefront, celebrated the slaughter of the Israeli innocents and said in essence that Israel had got what it deserved. As a result, antisemitism skyrocketed. It was all a manifestation of the same psychotic pathology. As O’Neill writes:
This was more than a spike in hate crime — it was a continuation of the pogrom. It was the globalisation of 7 October. It was the internationalisation of the Hamas ideology. It was the furtherance, across borders, of its reactionary edict that the Jewish state is the source of the world’s ills and the Jewish people guilty by association.
And he points the finger squarely at the radical ideologies of the left — “decolonisation,” critical race theory and intersectionality — as the cause of this insanity. He writes:
It seems to me that the post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the west’s turn against civilisation. Of our creeping abandonment of reason. Of our trading of the Enlightenment ideals of rational thought and democratic deliberation for the dead end of identity politics and competitive grievance. Having schooled the new generation to be sceptical of the gains of civilisation, we cannot now be surprised that some seem tempted by the lure of barbarism. Having encouraged a culture of self-loathing towards our colonial past, we cannot feign shock that some take pleasure in the vengeful “anti-colonialism” of a movement like Hamas. Having allowed a cult of “decolonisation” to flourish in the academy – decolonisation of curricula, of minds, of everything – we have no right to be startled by the noisy worship of 7 October as “decolonisation in action’’…
And having conspired in the rise of an identitarian worldview that treats whites as oppressors and non-whites as victims, we should not be surprised that this is the only prism through which the young in particular can make sense of the 7 October pogrom and the subsequent war in Gaza. Israel white, Palestine brown…
The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin colour, their presumed privilege and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of western opinion.
That Israel is not a “white country”, but rather has more Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent than of European, Ashkenazi descent, makes not the slightest difference to its haters. It has been found guilty of “whiteness” regardless. And thus it can never be the victim, even when its women are being sexually assaulted, its children kidnapped, its elderly people murdered in their homes. Even fascism can be excused, it seems, if its targets are those who have been damned as privileged by the elites.
The 7 October pogrom raised to the surface of our societies, like scum on water, some of the most disturbing and regressive trends of our time.
All too true. But O’Neill probes more deeply, venturing into the very belly of the beast of Jew-hatred to try to understand the murderous pathology which is consuming western culture like a flesh-eating bacillus. Discussing Holocaust denialism, he focuses on the way in which the cultural elites have tried to “de-Judify” the Holocaust by claiming it has been “hijacked” by Israel and its supporters.
And Naomi Klein figures here again because she has form on this, as demonstrated in another previous essay for the reliably repellent Guardian. In that one, she celebrated the film-maker Jonathan Glazer for his self-referential repudiation of Israel for “hijacking” the Holocaust to justify its “occupation”. Klein, notes O’Neill, identifies for us the putrid heart of the argument advanced by herself and Glazer:
We are entering a new intellectual era, she wrote, one in which people are openly asking if the Holocaust should be seen “exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal”. Where people are demanding “greater recognition for all the groups targeted for extermination [by the Nazis]”. Where people are querying whether the Holocaust really was a “unique rupture in European history” or a “homecoming of earlier colonial genocides, along with a return of the techniques, logics and bogus race theories they developed and deployed”.
Writing the Jews out of their own unique suffering like this — and even blaming them for it — is another ancient trope of Jew-hatred. But O’Neill doesn’t stop there. He probes yet more profoundly into the sickness — and discovers a truth that few have identified. This is that antisemitism causes jealousy.
I have myself written about this — that people complain “the Jews have sucked up all the victimhood in the world and left none for anyone else”. Crazy, or what? But as I wrote, faced with the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the complicity or indifference of the west in enabling it to happen, there are people who respond by wanting what, in their warped view, the Jews were given in response — an apparent shield, provided by the charge of antisemitism, against being blamed for anything bad they actually do.
These Jew-haters believe that antisemitism lets the Jews get away with it.
Get away with what, precisely? Well, all the things that antisemites believe about the Jews but aren’t allowed to say and, they believe, are true — for example, that the Jews hurt others in their own interests but hide it behind the charge of antisemitism. The Jew-haters (who purport merely to hate Israel) want that get-out-of-jail-free card for themselves. In other words, as I concluded, rampant Jew-hatred isn’t just an outcome of intersectional victim culture. It squats at its very core.
O’Neill writes:
We are living in an era of Holocaust envy. The ascendancy of the politics of victimhood has nurtured a palpable hostility towards the idea that the Holocaust was uniquely barbarous. In an era in which victimhood confers moral authority, when the way you secure both social sympathy and state resources is by claiming to suffer “structural oppression”, it simply won’t do that the Jews have a singular claim over the gravest instance of victimisation in history. And so their claim on the Holocaust must be questioned, weakened, loosened. What about the other victims of Nazi murder? What about other genocides? Challenging the distinctive nature of the Holocaust, even demoting the Holocaust further down the pecking order of human agony, is the grim inevitable consequence of a cult of competitive grievance in which accruing ever-more tales of pain is the way you move ahead.
There’s much else in O’Neill’s savage analysis of the west’s reaction to the October 7 pogrom — the betrayal of feminism by the refusal to acknowledge the rapes of the female Israeli victims, the cult of “keffiyeh chic” as the ultimate cultural appropriation, and the genocidal streak of the student “snowflakes” who preposterously claim they endure trauma from “micro-aggressions” such as the failure to use their preferred pronouns.
O’Neill views the moral obscenity of the reaction to October 7 as the confluence of Islamist and radical western thought — an alliance between one of the most barbarous and reactionary creeds on the planet with the ideologies of “decolonisation” and critical race theory to seek the destruction of the Jewish state as the forward salient of a war against civilisation and humanity itself.
Brendan O’Neill hasn’t just provided a valuable analysis of the west’s cultural meltdown. He is in himself a health-giving antidote to the poison coursing through the cultural elites of Britain and the west. Bravo.
Blogger: it is entirely right to pray that monstruous killers should receive their earthly punishments BUT - as Christians - we must equally pray for them to turn from their evil ways and have them repent that they might evade God's vengeance and the fires of hell.
Jesus requires us to do this. Our souls must not be polluted with hatred.
