The fight for civilisation is only just beginning
The West failed the moral test of 7 October. We must never fail like this again.
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.
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