On the first anniversary of Hamas’s murderous foray into Israel …
… a foul pogrom killing 1,139 people and taking around 250 people hostage, of which 101 are still unaccounted for…
… and with Israel now having to fend off aggressors on multiple fronts …
… and in the face of extraordinary, immoral support for the aggressor …
… here I quote from Brendan O’Neill’s latest book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation:
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’’…
… 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.
Here’s to Israel and to it’s ultimate victory against entities that, as a foundational principle, aim for its destruction.
Brendan O’Neill is Righteous Among the Nations, a clear-sighted chronicler of our dispiriting times. I read and support Spiked, but I also subscribe to the Spectator where I found an article by Stephen Daisley that made me think of your post here.
I'll leave a snippet:
"As the conservative commentator Andrew Klavan notes mordantly: ‘I just hope Israel can save western civilisation before western civilisation can stop them.’ Truth be told, Israel isn’t in the business of saving western civilisation, it’s in the business of saving itself. It just so happens that doing so benefits a western civilisation that is busy dismantling itself. In hammering senior Islamist terrorists into the ground, Israel is taking a cudgel to both the handwringing accommodationism of the western liberal and the vengeful utopianism that defines the western leftist. It is redeeming the virtues of sovereignty, strength, and stability – and it’s winning."