IS THE WEST SALVAGEABLE ?

 

The fight for civilisation is only just beginning

The West failed the moral test of 7 October. We must never fail like this again.

Oct 07/24

So, it is here: the anniversary of fascism’s return. It is one year since Hamas’s pogrom. One year since that army of anti-Semites invaded the Jewish State and visited unspeakable terror on its people. One year since the atavistic hatreds of the last century leapt from the pages of the history books and violently imprinted themselves on our complacent world. One year since the pact humankind made in the aftermath of the last Great War – ‘Never Again’ – was turned to dust in the Negev desert and the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

Today is first and foremost a day of remembrance for the slain. Jews and their allies will light candles for the more than 1,100 souls extinguished by Hamas’s fascists. People will say ‘Never Again’ again. Yet alongside recalling the inhumanity Hamas wrought in Israel on 7 October, let us spare a thought for what that darkest of days revealed about our own societies, too. What it told us not only about Hamas, the Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement, but also about us. About how far we have strayed from the path of reason. About our betrayal of civilisation.

To my mind, there were two horrors on 7 October last year. There was the horror of what Hamas did. Its rape, kidnap and murder of more than a thousand Jews. Its execution of the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazis. Its gleeful, boastful sadism – let us never forget that this racist militia relished in its atrocities, filming them for posterity and even phoning home to gloat to loved ones about how many Jews had been slaughtered. Then there was the horror of the West’s response. The horror of our failure – our unforgivable failure – to stand with the Jews against their persecutors.

I knew the response of the West’s opinion-shapers and self-styled ‘progressive’ elites was going to be bad. Indeed, on 7 October itself, when the confirmed death toll was just 20, I warned right here on spiked that talking heads in the West would falsely laud this pogrom as a ‘rebellion’, as an ‘act of resistance’. And in doing so, I argued, they will expose to the world ‘the true extent’ of the West’s ‘moral decomposition’. Yet even I could not have imagined how bad things would get.

Even I did not foresee shit being smeared on a ‘Kidnapped’ poster in New York City featuring an image of the 12-year-old Jew who was kidnapped by Hamas. Even I did not imagine that Hitler moustaches would be daubed on the faces of the three-year-old twins Hamas kidnapped. Even I did not think ‘pro-Palestine’ activists would glorify the paragliding pogromists who descended on the Negev desert to butcher young Jews. Even I did not foresee our highest seats of learning being overrun by gangs of privileged Hamas sympathisers who would brand the Jewish State as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and tell Jews to fuck off ‘back to Poland’.

Even I could not have imagined that left-wingers in my own country would describe Hamas’s Jew-slaying spree as a ‘day of celebration’. Even I did not foresee mobs of upper-middle-class youths on our streets cheering the Houthis, a violently racist movement whose flag grotesquely issues ‘A Curse Upon the Jews’. Even I could not have foretold mobs of Israel-haters assembling outside the Sydney Opera House to chant ‘Fuck the Jews!’, and, worse, the left saying nothing about it. A left that spent the past decade damning everything it dislikes as ‘fascism’ – Trump, Brexit, gender-critical feminism – staying shamefully silent in the face of actual fascism. In the face of the slaughter of Jews, and the rank apologism for it in our own cities. Reprehensible doesn’t cover it.

The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. In the hours and days after the pogrom, a dawning, chilling realisation came: the West’s activist class and its educated elites were sympathising more with the pogromists than with the pogrom’s victims. They went from saying ‘Never Again’ to saying ‘All Right Then, One More Time’. The delirium of our post-civilisational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: the West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis.

And it continues to this day, the first-year anniversary of that wicked intrusion into Israel. Think about this: today is the anniversary of the worst act of racist violence of modern times, and yet so-called anti-racists will not be marking it. They won’t be putting a black square on their Instagram pages. They won’t hold any vigils. Not one tear will touch their cheeks for the thousand human beings murdered by racists a year ago today. No ‘anti-fascist’ will decry this fascism. On the contrary, they will spend today doing what they always do: feverishly hating on Israel, puking yet more wordy bile on to the Jewish State. They will hijack this day of Jewish remembrance to further their defamatory hatreds of the Jewish nation.

What we have seen over the past year is that when the young in particular are invited to reject Western civilisation, they might very well be tempted into the arms of its opposite: barbarism. When you educate a new generation to be wary of the West, to view our claim to be enlightened as just so much white man’s arrogance and bluster, you might just push them towards the West’s enemies. When you depict Western society as fallen, racist, phobic, shit – as so much fashionable thought does right now – you make anti-Westernism, even violent anti-Westernism, seem exotic, enticing. The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.

A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders, where some of the most regressive movements on Earth, sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, openly lust and agitate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish nation. And on the intellectual front here at home. In the academy, in politics, in hearts and minds. Only a full-throated defence of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured. We owe it to the dead of 7 October to stand by Israel and repair our own broken societies.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer