‘7 October tore at the fabric of civilization’
Brendan O’Neill on how the West failed the greatest moral test of our time
The 7 October pogrom was the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, but you wouldn’t get that impression among the Western intelligentsia. Ever since Hamas rampaged through southern Israel last year, the mainstream media have relentlessly presented Israel as the aggressor, for daring to fight back. ‘Pro-Palestine’ protesters routinely smear the Jewish State as a genocidal menace. We’ve witnessed glorifications of Hamas and other Islamist forces on our streets. Anti-Semitism has surged to historic levels. The West as a whole seems to be in a perpetual state of disarray, unwilling to fully defend Israel in its civilisational struggle against barbarism.
Brendan O’Neill’s new spiked book, After the Pogrom, powerfully details how the West’s moral rot has been exposed over the past year. To mark the book’s release, and the year anniversary of 7 October, spiked held an online book launch on 1 October, in which Batya Ungar-Sargon interviewed Brendan. This is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full interview here.
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Why do you think a generation of the most educated people in history failed the great moral test of 7 October?
Brendan O’Neill: Firstly, my book tries to remind people what happened – because I think people have forgotten – on 7 October 2023. But secondly, it tries to put forward some answers for why people failed the moral test. Cast your mind back to the days after the 7 October pogrom, when protesters were on the streets 24 to 48 hours after Hamas’s attack. Israel hadn’t even responded by that point, so why were people on the streets? They were there to celebrate the murder of Jews.
This happened in London, with a celebratory gathering outside the Israeli embassy around 36 hours after the pogrom, with people playing music and dancing. The same happened in Berlin and in Paris and even in the US. We knew at that stage what had happened. We knew that Jewish men, women and children had been raped, murdered and kidnapped. This was as sick and perverse as if people in London had poured on to the streets to celebrate Kristallnacht. It was then that I realised that this was going to be worse than I thought.
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