We dare not forget what happened a year ago:
We just recently had the one-year anniversary of the horrific and satanic assault on Israel by Hamas terrorists. We know the numbers: 1200 killed (800 of them civilians); 250 people taken hostage; and with over a year now in captivity there are still some 100 hostages languishing in Gaza – if they are still alive.
Already there are quite a few new books out which describe the horrors of that day and its aftermath. Just some of the volumes worth being aware of include these:
Frantzman, Seth, The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza. Wicked Son, 2024.
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, Israel Alone. Wicked Son, 2024.
O’Neill, Brendan, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. Spiked, 2024.
Yingst, Trey, Black Saturday: An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza. Harper Influence, 2024.
I hope to speak to each of these books – and others – in the days ahead. I already wrote up O’Neill’s very significant volume yesterday, as I discussed in particular the sexual violence perpetrated against women by Hamas and the silence of Western feminists. That earlier piece of mine is found here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/10/12/feminists-duplicity-and-hamas/
So I will return to his book and offer a few more remarks about it, along with some choice quotes. While some of the other books on October 7 go into great detail about the horror and devilish frenzy of that fateful day, the shorter O’Neill volume, as the subtitle indicates, is mainly about the collapse of civilisation.
His book is more of a broadbrush commentary on what we have seen for the past year, including all the ugly anti-Semitism found throughout the West, and how that really does spell a major crisis. If Westerners – especially rulers, commentators, political figures and elites – cannot see a clear moral distinction between murderous Hamas terrorists and Israelis seeking to defend their beleaguered nation, then the West really is coming to an end.
Indeed, we are witnessing a descent into barbarism. When morally myopic moral equivalence is being pushed like this, then the West is on its last legs. The need for clear moral and mental thinking is more urgent than ever, but it seems that this precious commodity is in short supply.
As O’Neill states early on in his Introduction: “Hamas had not only tested Israel’s territorial security, but also mankind’s moral conscience. It laid down a gauntlet alongside its grenades. It dared us to pit our civilisation against its barbarism. It dared us to be decisive. And we failed.” (p. 8)
Much of the Western world slept through what happened that day, or, worse yet, sides with the assailants against the victims. The moral resolve of the West to stand up for those who share its values, and to resist those who would destroy everything, was almost nowhere to be found. A major moral test arose, and we failed it miserably.
Those familiar with what Israel has been facing over the decades, and its countless enemies, not just in the Middle East, but in Western universities, media outlets and political classes, will know about many of the gory and shameful details O’Neill recounts here. He quotes plenty of academics, journalists and those from the chattering classes who made it clear that they actually preferred to side with Hamas as they poured their vile contempt on Israel.
That is the real aim and shame of this book: the TWO aspects of barbarism and hatred: that of Hamas and that of its Western supporters. It is as if we learned nothing from the Holocaust of just 80 years ago. We have learned no lessons, and we have been blind to historical realities.
And those who should know better have been among the worst in this regard. O’Neill cites a December 2023 poll that found 60 per cent of American 18-to-24-year-olds actually said that Hamas was justified in carrying out this gruesome and fiendish attack.
For those who need some reminding, the word used throughout this book, including in its title – “pogrom” – means this: “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
The fact that so many Westerners cannot condemn what Hamas has done is a sure sign that ongoing pogroms continue here, and not just in the Middle East or Russia. That Jewish students feel quite unsafe simply walking in so many college campuses in America and England and Australia and elsewhere tells us all we need to know in this regard:
“Anti-Semitism sky-rocketed. How could it not, given this fervent praise for a modern-day pogrom on campuses, on protests, on social media?” As an example, just weeks after October 7, “anti-Semitic hate crimes in London rose by 1,350 per cent compared with the same period in 2022.” (p. 20)
He writes: “This was more than a spike in hate crime — it was a continuation of the pogrom. It was the globalisation of 7 October. It was the internationalisation of the Hamas ideology. It was the furtherance, across borders, of its reactionary edict that the Jewish state is the source of the world’s ills and the Jewish people guilty by association.” (p. 21)
A lengthy quote from his opening chapter is in order here:
This is what we need to talk about. 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’. ‘What did y’all think decolonisation meant?’, asked journalist Najma Sharif. ‘Vibes? Papers? Essays?’
And having conspired in the rise of an identitarian worldview that treats whites as oppressors and non-whites as victims, we should not be surprised that this is the only prism through which the young in particular can make sense of the 7 October pogrom and the subsequent war in Gaza. Israel white, Palestine brown. Thus, Israel bad, Palestine good. The ‘strange reluctance to see Jews as victims’, as Hadley Freeman describes it, has been intensified by these new identitarian ideologues that define entire social and ethnic groups as either ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressed’. The barbarous dearth of sympathy for the dead and raped of Israel is the logical inhumane conclusion to a pseudo-progressive politics that judges people’s moral worth by their skin colour, their presumed privilege and their placement on a racial hierarchy fashioned by the unaccountable overlords of western opinion.
That Israel is not a ‘white country’, but rather has more Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent than of European, Ashkenazi descent, makes not the slightest difference to its haters. It has been found guilty of ‘whiteness’ regardless. And thus it can never be the victim, even when its women are being sexually assaulted, its children kidnapped, its elderly people murdered in their homes. Even fascism can be excused, it seems, if its targets are those who have been damned as privileged by the elites.
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. Clocking these trends, and confronting them, is the great, pressing task of the 21st century. (pp. 23-24)
The chapters that follow look at all this in much more detail. As mentioned, the way in which so many Westerners actually refused to believe that Israeli women were being raped and abused by Hamas is but one example of this – and that despite the mantra that we are told we must take on board: ‘believe all women.’
Other chapters discuss related aspects to this, such as Chapter 5 that looks at the “unholiest of alliances” between secular leftists who champion things like homosexuality and the trans ideology, and radical Islamist killers and terrorists who are not exactly friends of the rainbow activists. I hope to focus further on these chapters in future articles.
Let me finish with the concluding paragraph of this much-needed work:
A fightback is needed against the indifference of our elites to the difficulties facing Jewish people, and against their excuse-making for pogroms, and against their infliction on our societies of a politics of jealousy and division that they falsely call ‘progressive’. And, most importantly, against the people on our streets agitating against ‘Zionists’, which means Jews. If you see them, tell them: You shall not pass. (p. 171)
Buy this book. In fact, buy two copies, and give one to a friend.
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