The Hamas massacre of Israelis has exploded two conflicts into public view. One is in the Middle East, where Israel is fighting a life-and-death war against barbaric, baby-and-grandmother-murdering Islamist pogromists.
The other war now confronting us is here, in the Europe and America. It is a political and culture war, against those in our societies who hate the West so much that they will even side with genocidal Islamists against it.
Our battle in the West may not be as violent as the Middle East (not yet, at least). But this war on the home front also poses an existential threat to our democracy and civilisation. And it is all the more dangerous because so many of our spineless political leaders refuse to recognise that threat.
We should stand with the Israelis, not only because they are in the right. But also because the Western Left’s reaction to the slaughter in Israel shows how far they have gone over to the dark side. It is surely time we looked upon them as barbarians within the gates of the citadels of the Western establishment.
Some hate Israel as a Jewish state. But the left elitists also hate Israel as a symbol of the ‘outdated’ principles that our Western nations are supposed to stand for. Principles such as national sovereignty, democracy, freedom of speech and of the press, and real women’s rights. (In Israel they know that a woman cannot have a penis, but that she can have a gun and fight to defend her nation and community.)
The Left’s repulsive reaction to the slaughter of innocent Israelis was shocking, but should not really have been a big surprise. The poison has been bubbling to the surface for a long time.
It began at the top, where ‘objective’ pillars of the liberal media from the BBC to the New York Times refused to even call a terrorist a terrorist. Instead they have insisted on referring to the Islamist gunmen massacring Israeli Jews as ‘militants,’ engaged in ‘militant activity’ (The Guardian). One might almost imagine that the Hamas butchers had been peacefully standing on a trade union picket line outside an Israeli town hall, rather than using machine guns and grenades to slaughter 250 young people at a music festival.
The space left by this phoney neutrality in the mainstream media has been filled on social media by toxic left voices across Europe and the West: at ‘best’ blaming ‘colonial/apartheid’ Israel for the mass murder of its own citizens, at worst, openly dancing on Jewish graves. Social media streams, never the purest of sources, were soon reduced to a sewer overflowing with anti-Israeli filth.
One early blast on Twitter/X from a Corbynite leftist captured the tone of many. Rivkah Brown, commissioning editor from the ‘literally Communist’ UK-based Novara Media, tweeted that “Today should be a celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide, as Gazans break out of their open-air prison and Hamas fighters cross into their colonisers’ territory.”
Never mind that any Palestinian attempting to support democracy, or human rights for women or homosexuals, inside the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip could expect to be imprisoned or worse by the Islamists. The rest of us are told to celebrate a pogrom as an act of liberation. (She has since tried to make a half-hearted retraction and deleted the tweet, but we got the message.)
These are not the brown-shirted anti-Semitic thugs of old. The most virulent anti-Israeli sentiments have often been expressed by educated middle class leftists in elevated seats of Western learning. While flag-waving Islamists came out to celebrate the slaughter in Israel on European city streets, some of their counterparts in top universities went online to join the hate-fest, having apparently come to the bigoted view that the deliberate, boastful killing and kidnapping of Jewish civilians could be a legitimate act.
At University College London, the Justice for Palestine society posted a quote from the Hamas political chief on Instagram blaming “fascist and criminal settlers” for the violence. At London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the student Palestine Society wrote on Instagram in praise of Palestinians fighting Israel “by any means necessary.”
At Harvard University in the US, no fewer than 31 student groups put aside their usual bickering to sign a joint statement which proudly declared that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”(emphasis added). Yes, you read that correctly; these expensively-educated young Americans believe it is entirely Israel’s own fault that Hamas killed those Jewish babies in their beds. Not that you would know Hamas had killed anybody from the rest of their statement. The only killings it mentioned were “the massacres in Gaza” as the Israeli military hit back. The brutal massacres in southern Israel were referred to simply as ‘today’s events’, as if it had been a debate on campus rather than a genocidal bloodbath. The academic left’s self-appointed thought police, normally hyper-sensitive to anybody using an incorrect word on campus or online, saw nothing wrong with any of this.
Of course leftists will always insist that they are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. However, when you single out the only Jewish state on earth and the only democracy in the Middle East for such special hatred, with a venom you never extend to Islamic autocracies, many may well draw their own conclusions. This is bigotry masquerading as anti-colonialism. Like Hamas, they don’t really care about ordinary Palestinians, but despise Israelis so much that some can celebrate barbarism as an act of heroism.
Let us be clear, this is not only about Israel. The reaction has brought out all that is rotten about the Western left, exposing the threat that these influential elitists pose to our own civilised values.
First, it shows how the Left is living in a fantasy past, still repeating the old mantra about how ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,’ imagining that the ‘Palestinian resistance’ is a ‘national liberation movement’ fighting against a ‘colonial settler state.’ That’s why they so often falsely accuse Israel of practising South African-style racial ‘apartheid’ against Palestinians. As comedy writer Caroline Gold put it well on Facebook, when it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, many will revert unthinkingly to “factory settings.”
To a former young leftie such as myself, however, it is obvious that Hamas is no national liberation movement. These terrorists don’t even want the ‘sovereign Palestinian state’ of which their leftist cheerleaders dream. They desire a global Islamist caliphate. And the big step towards that is wiping the sovereign state of Israel off the map entirely, ‘from the river to the sea.’ Hamas is part of a modern death cult, using terror as an end itself, in a bloody jihad to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. Any nostalgic leftist who tries to dress that up as a liberation war is a dangerous moron practising what we used to call ‘the socialism of fools.’
Second, the Left’s reaction to the massacres in Israel has exposed the mortal danger that identity politics pose to our societies today. In the divisive worldview of ‘intersectional’ identity politics, you are defined by who or what you are rather than what you do. That is why they can treat the terms Zionist, Israeli, and Jew as interchangeable, and try to dress up their support for anti-Semitic barbarism as progressive politics.
After all, according to the perverse outlook of identity politics, Jews are actually top beneficiaries of ‘white privilege.’ As such, they might even make legitimate targets. This is why a gormless celebrity such as Whoopi Goldberg could declare live on American television that the Holocaust could not have been racist, because the Jews were white, like the Nazis. So leftists who shout their outrage at any hint of ‘Islamophobia’ (sic) in the West will turn a blind eye to the spectacle of Islamists celebrating the slaughter of Jews on the streets of European cities.
The third and least-recognised aspect of the reaction is that it shows how far the Left has turned against Western civilisation itself. For some time now, Israel has stood out as the defender of principles that our political leaders have largely abandoned. In a ‘globalist’ world where Western elites have contempt for their borders and citizens, the Israelis have always insisted on their right to fight to defend their national sovereignty and democracy against all-comers.
The Left hates Israel because it has sought to stand up for bedrock principles of Western civilisation which many in the West long since abandoned. Like it or not, the ‘open borders’ Left has more in common with the caliphate-loving Islamist globalists than with the Israeli defenders of national democracy.
(It is striking that one of the global Left’s main complaints against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is that he wants to reduce the powers of unelected judges to interfere with the elected government; the same reason they have protested against sovereigntist ‘illiberal democracies’ in Hungary and Poland.)
Israel is fighting for its existence. We in Europe and the West also have to recognise what is at stake in the war on the home front, and stand up for the democratic values of our civilisation. Before it’s too late.
