7 October, Israel and the crisis of civilisation
Ever since ‘A Heretics Manifesto’ came across my radar last year, I have been a fan of the writings of Brendan O`Neill. His latest book, “After the Pogram: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation”, is nothing short of a master piece. It’s honest, unflinching and raw. Brendan O`Neill is not afraid to call out those in the public eye who are on the left, and appear to have supported the October 7 slaughter.
This unflinching and uncompromising piece of writing has been called, “A bruising blow in the cause of liberty, tolerance and good sense. Thank God he is on our side” by Jake Wallis Simons, editor, Jewish Chronicle.
It’s also been called, “A brutally honest analysis of how the world failed the test of Hamas’s brutality” in the words of Eylon Levy, former Israeli government spokesman.
While both of those statements are accurate, this book is so much more. It is a fearless narrative of what happened on October 7, 2023 and how the West responded to it. The book sharply critiques how Western societies fell short of expected moral standards in response to the attacks.
The book is written beautifully and documents in extreme and very telling detail how commentators, news media, academia and activists all stepped up….for the terrorists. The west supported Hamas and made excuses for the worst violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
On university campuses, on the streets of our villages, towns and cities, and in the media, many chose their side. That side being the murderous persecutors of the Jews. There was even a resurgence of a distorted view of denying what had occurred, with some activists accusing the Jewish State of exaggerating or fabricating the events of 7 October.
We can ask how this happened. How so many felt that Hamas were in the right. We can question why so many educated don’t seem to care about the Jews and the slaughter that happened. We can wonder in disbelief, how the people of the world support Hamas, a terrorist group that have kidnapped, raped and murdered individuals. While we can ask all these questions, what we must see is action.
When I began thinking about how I felt the West had failed, I went back to a section of the book that seemed to sum everything up for me. It demonstrated how the world has its priorities so drastically wrong. From chapter 7 of the book we read,
“So, we live in an era when you can be banished from a university for saying women don’t have penises, but you’ll be fine if you say ‘kill all Jews’. We live in a time when asking someone where they’re from is considered a ‘racial micro aggression, but hollering ‘Globalise the intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ in which a thousand Jews were slaughtered is apparently okay. We live in a culture in which students will demand access to ‘safe spaces’, complete with colouring books and bean bags, if a speaker they hate turns up on campus. And yet these same students who fear words like the rest of us fear death, will happily cheer the invasion of Israel and the murder of hundreds of its citizens. No safe space for Jews, it seems. It was just two weeks after the pogrom that some students at George Washington University in Washington, DC projected that slogan, ‘Glory to our martyrs’, on to the exterior of a campus building. That is, glory to the mobs that had lately invaded the Jewish nation to rape and massacre innocents.”
In the end, these contradictions reveal the unsettling double standards that divide modern society. We are witnessing times where free speech is selectively protected, where the vilification of some is met with outrage while others are tacitly supported. The troubling irony is that those who claim to champion inclusivity and safe spaces are, in certain instances, the very voices amplifying hatred and violence.
Brendan’s book lays down these contradictions which leads me to ask one question. That question is: Is our moral compass so skewed that advocating for the destruction of a people is tolerated, yet benign questions or dissenting views are condemned?
If the answer to this question is yes, then we are failing as a society to uphold the very values we claim to protect.
