Kristallnacht now: Oct. 7 led to the worst demonization of Israel in history - opinion

Lest there be any doubt about their doings, they recorded it all with smartphones and GoPro cameras, posting the footage online in real time. They then abducted some 251 people of all ages at gunpoint, hauling them to Gaza for use as bargaining chips and human shields. Oh, and they gang-raped women, tormented children, and burned infants alive.

Were any further proof needed that Israelis were up against a brutal, implacable enemy, this was it. Here was the enactment of Hamas’s long-stated aim to rid the land of Jews from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Yet news of the massacre prompted cheerful throngs across the West to take to the streets and social media to glory vicariously in the bloodbath.

Among those in raptures were not only radical Islamists whose murderous hatred of Jews can be taken for granted but also affluent university students, tenured professors, influencers, and self-styled human rights activists. Ragtag masses of communists, anarchists, globalists, racists, and anti-racists suddenly found common cause in their antipathy toward Israel, which trumped all other ideological considerations. Why, even Swedish activist Greta Thunberg would stop her climate change campaign to jump instead on the anti-Israel bandwagon double-quick.

Many of them belonged to the familiar “yes, but” crowd. Yes, violence against civilians is objectionable in principle, they declared, but Israelis had it coming for their brutal treatment of Palestinians. Yes, the atrocities were gruesome, but Palestinians suffer much worse daily and have done so since 1948. Yes, Israelis have a right to defend themselves (thanks for the permission, I guess), but not the way they are about to do – whatever that way is going to be.

And so here we are a year after a horrific tragedy that has rocked the Jewish state to its core and from which it will take years to recover: the monstrous crimes of Hamas now safely memory-holed, Israel stands increasingly isolated while being blamed for a war that has been forced upon it. And this even as 100 Israeli captives, a two-year-old among them, still languish in Gaza, if they are still alive. Their plight, too, has been largely forgotten abroad, apart from perfunctory calls for their release, which Hamas can ignore with impunity.

In the Diaspora, meanwhile, Jews are being hounded and assaulted. Pugnacious students set upon their Jewish peers on university campuses in the United States. Heaving mobs of well-heeled protesters, invariably masked and draped in Chinese-made keffiyehs, march under Hamas and Hezbollah banners, baying for the blood of “Zionists” in London, Sydney, and New York. Marauding gangs of Muslim immigrants brutalize random Jews in Amsterdam.

All this tells us a lot more about the state of affairs in the West than about Israel. In fact, what we are seeing, argues Brendan O’Neill, a prominent British journalist, is “moral rot” on an epic scale. “There were two eruptions of barbarism in October 2023. The first was Hamas’s pogrom of October 7... The second was the sympathy for the pogrom across much of the Western world,” O’Neill stresses in his trenchant new book, After the Pogrom, a must-read for anyone who wants to make sense of what has transpired in the wake of October 7 from the blithe pooh-poohing of hard evidence that Israeli women were brutally raped to the downplaying of the Jewish people’s collective trauma, all relayed in thematic chapters.

“The lucidity of moral thought that this atrocious moment called for was shockingly absent. The marshaling of the human spirit against the pogromists failed to materialize. The world’s conscience slept,” he expounds. “Instead, people talked about ‘context,’ as if there could ever be a context for fascist murder. People said it was Israel’s own fault for mistreating the Palestinians, as if a pogrom is a legitimate response to grievance. People made excuses for evil.”

It’s hard to cavil about any of this bar perhaps the use of “fascist,” a word that, shorn of its original meaning, is deployed these days to denote anything objectionable. O’Neill, an eloquent polemicist with a strong command of facts, reels off demagogue after demagogue – academics, creatives, racial justice warriors – who couldn’t contain their delight at seeing “Zionists” (Jewish men, women, and children, that is) get their comeuppance while pronouncing Hamas terrorists to be “brave” and “heroic” for murdering these “occupiers” on “stolen land.”

One suspects they would have been first in line in Gaza when ululating Hamas sympathizers were handing out sweets as usual to celebrate another slaughter of Jews. More to the point, what’s obvious from O’Neill’s examples of all the odious faux-humanistic preening – and there are plenty in the book – is that often those who claim to champion morality, empathy, and compassion (so help me) exhibit the opposites of these virtues in their own conduct.

Alas, they routinely preach to the choir. An opinion poll conducted just two months after October 7 among college-aged Americans found, the author points out, that 60 percent of respondents saw Hamas’s massacre justified, while over half of them favored “a one-state solution in which the Jewish state would be brought to an end and the land handed to Hamas and the Palestinians.” In a poll of the same cohort in Britain, just as many respondents agreed that “the State of Israel should not exist.”

In other words, young adults who regard Israelis as ethnic cleansers want them ethnically cleansed, undoubtedly deeming this solecistic position morally sound. Then again, many young people have been inculcated so thoroughly in school and on social media into the morally absolutist dichotomies of bien pensant progressive ideology that they can’t help but view the world in stark Manichean terms. This notion holds that there are only victims and victimizers and never shall one become the other, for victims will always be victims and their victimizers will always be victimizers by some natural law or other, even when victims murder, rape, and kidnap victimizers, in which case victimizers simply become victim to their own victimization of others who are entitled to defend themselves “by any means necessary.”

Not surprisingly, this prescriptive term for carte blanche conduct is constantly trotted out to justify any form of brutality Palestinian “resistance fighters” (viewed as people of color and thus beyond all reproach) mete out to their Israeli tormentors (seen as “ultra-white” and therefore always at fault), regardless of actual skin tone on either side. And thus has the ideological circle been squared with no need for knowledge of anything beyond a simple formula that even a child can understand.

O’Neill provides ample evidence of this pernicious way of thinking. “While the pogrom was in full flow, 31 student organizations at Harvard University issued a statement saying ‘the Israeli regime’ is ‘entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,’” he reminds us, and as well he should. “Israel is ‘the only one to blame,’ decreed these Ivy League radicals. This was the politics of ‘She was asking for it.’”

He goes on: “As women were being raped and ravers murdered, 5,000 miles away, on the peaceful, leafy lawns of Harvard, the sons and daughters of privilege were saying it was their own damned fault. Not the knife-wielders of Hamas. Not that movement’s rapists and murderers. No, it was the country in which those men carried out their inhuman deeds that was responsible for it all; for its own suffering; for the sexual degradation of its women and the summary execution of its men.”

And this happened at a university where students are so assiduously shielded from so-called micro-aggressions that they can shelter in “safety zones, complete with Play-Doh, colouring books and calming music,” whenever a speaker whose views they don’t like comes to campus. Curiously, no tears have been shed by Hamas-glorifying students and their like-minded professors, as far as I’m aware, for the two scores of slain Thai workers, despite their being people of color and from disadvantaged backgrounds, too.

Far from it. Take the protest staged this November 30 by a motley mob, with irate expatriates among them, at the United Nations’ regional headquarters in Bangkok. Nope, not to call for the release of the six Thai nationals still held in Gaza but to demand that “watertight sanctions and boycotts” be imposed on “the apartheid regime” and that its “genocidal dictators” (i.e., elected politicians) be tried as “war criminals.”

Such doublethink is in keeping with the ignominy of agitators defacing the pictures of abducted Israelis posted on European and North American streets to muster public support for their release. “Everywhere you looked in London, you’d see remnants of the posters, scarred with the jagged claw marks of those who had tried to destroy them. These flapping shreds of paper, with just the eye or mouth of the kidnapped Jew still visible, were a testament to the anti-civilizational delirium that blew up in the West after Hamas’s pogrom,” O’Neill recounts.

“Some posters were defiled with the word ‘coloniser’ — a clear attempt to rob the hostages of their humanity, to turn them from the victims of violence into the perpetrators of it, from racism’s quarry to racism’s architects,” he writes. “One of the grimmest images of the post-October moment was found in Finchley Road in London, where the faces of the three-year-old Israeli twins [both girls] who were kidnapped on October 7 were daubed with Hitler moustaches,” the handiwork no doubt of someone who, like as not, simultaneously lionizes Hitler for the Holocaust. “Toddlers reimagined as fascists. Jewish children treated as legitimate targets for bigoted invective. It was hard not to hear echoes of past catastrophes.”

And the virulent agitprop was just getting started. Tallies of Palestinian civilians allegedly killed by the IDF were supplied daily by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, triggering ever more accusations of “disproportionate response” and “genocide.” It made no difference that the casualty rates might well be doctored and Hamas might be responsible for many of the deaths. Street protests intensified, and foreign governments kept on calling for a ceasefire, which Israel rejected and Hamas spurned.

The number of antisemitic hate crimes, already high, doubled in France, nearly tripled in Germany, quadrupled in the US, and rose by 1,350 percent in London. “Jewish shops were attacked, Jewish schools, Jewish people,” O’Neill observes. “A teenage Jewish boy was pelted with stones on his way to synagogue in north London. A Berlin synagogue was firebombed.” And so it has been ever since, from Madrid to Melbourne to Montreal. “This was more than a spike in hate crime – it was a continuation of the pogrom. It was the globalization of October 7. It was the furtherance, across borders, of [Hamas’s] reactionary edict that the Jewish state is the source of the world’s ills, and the Jewish people guilty by association.”

It’s no secret that Israel’s actions receive inordinate attention far out of proportion to their magnitude, especially in light of brutal conflicts elsewhere, be it Sudan, Congo, or Myanmar. In Ukraine, for instance, some 80,000 locals have been killed and half a million wounded right there in Europe, while 11 million Ukrainians have either been displaced or fled abroad. Yet have you heard of a mass protest lately against Russia, a country that keeps reducing much of Ukraine to a wasteland and propped up Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, where 600,000 people have died during a brutal civil war? Me neither.

“What’s happened,” the author posits, “is that the cultural elites have projected the sins of the world on to Israel [which], in their eyes, embodies every wrong of Western civilization, every crime of modernity, every ill of late-stage capitalism.” That’s one reason, certainly, since the charges leveled casually at the Jewish state are identical to those lobbed at the West over its past crimes, down to the benumbing jargon and performative sloganeering: colonialism, racism, slavery, exploitation, oppression, theft. Every civilization ever could justifiably be accused of the same evils, human nature being what it is, yet only Western nations and Israel (a “European settler colony” putatively born with the sins of imperialism) merit opprobrium in the eyes of the auto-indoctrinated chattering classes, for criticizing “non-white” peoples would be racist, Orientalist and Islamophobic.

Ironically, this dogmatic attitude is peculiarly Western, insular, and Eurocentric, reducing as it does the rest of the world to a mere historical casualty of the West and non-Europeans to bit players without their own checkered history in a grand morality pantomime wherein the West self-flagellates over its sins and seeks absolution for them from itself. Israel’s misfortune is to have been caught up in this strange postmodern zeitgeist whereby opinion shapers in the West, by and large, have come to regard the societies of which they are both beneficiaries and products as hopelessly toxic, alone of all societies on Earth.

“The post-October hysteria was the rotten fruit of the West’s turn against civilization. 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,” O’Neill argues. “[The elites’] howls of rage against Israel are howls of rage against Western civilization itself. Having burdened Israel with all the interconnected transgressions of Western society, they then fume against it in a borderline religious effort to extinguish not only that small state in the Middle East, but also what they have decided it represents: our own moral rot.”

Indeed. But this dualistic mindset with a profoundly ahistorical take on things necessitates plenty of mental gymnastics. Thus: Israeli Jews are denounced as interlopers in the land of their forefathers because many of them returned to it after a long exile from Europe, where they had been decried for centuries as alien trespassers, as rootless wanderers with no national loyalties, as foreign pathogens in the body politic. Concurrently, it’s taken as a given that Palestinian Arabs are indigenous to a land called Judea, albeit their self-assigned appellation suggests otherwise, seeing as the Philistines (who disappeared from history in the 7th century BCE) hailed from the Aegean, and Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula.

“To brand Israel the embodiment [as sundry academics do] of European settler colonialism and Hamas the potential liberators of ‘Historic Palestine’ is a double calumny,” the London-based journalist states, for the Jewish state gained its independence by throwing off the yoke of British colonialism, while Hamas wants to colonize all of Israel. Actually, it’s a triple calumny because erstwhile Muslim suzerainty over Palestine was itself the result of colonialism first by Arabs, then by Ottoman Turks, who are both, it so happens, technically “settler colonialists” (in the preferred parlance), the former across the Middle East and North Africa, and the latter in Northern Cyprus and Turkey, a territory seized by Ottoman forces from Byzantine Christians in the 14th and 15th centuries. So much for Hamas “decolonizing” the Jewish homeland.

Does this mean Palestinian Arabs have no rightful claims on any of Palaestina, a geographic label imposed on the area by vindictive Romans in the second century? Hardly. But so long as the zero-sum revanchism of Hamas’s brand of homicidal Islamism prevails in the Palestinian territories, the prospect of “land for peace” will remain as elusive as it has ever been. Hence, demonizing Israel no end while absolving Palestinians of all moral responsibility for their doings does them no favors whatsoever, children least of all, although they especially deserve much better. Further acts of Palestinian terrorism will continue eliciting further Israeli responses and on and on time without end, much to the detriment of Arab and Jew alike.

That is why most self-anointed champions of “Palestine” are peaceable Palestinians’ worst enemies by doing Hamas’s bidding. If anti-Israel agitators truly cared about Gazans, they would be up in arms against Hamas, since the terrorist group has inflicted far more harm on them than Israel has ever done by keeping them in penury as permanent refugees, even in their own autonomously run enclave where a mini Dubai could have sprung up in nothing flat since Israel vacated the premises in 2005. And all this in the name of a monomaniacal pipe dream that one day the Jews will be driven into the Mediterranean and “Palestine will be free.”

Then what? With Israel gone, a theocratic state of Palestine under Hamas and its ilk would be no more a bastion of democracy, religious tolerance, free speech, gender equality, and gay rights — which Israel is — than Afghanistan under the Taliban or Iran under the mullahs. It’s unlikely, though, that leftist anti-Israel diehards are thinking that far ahead. These days, having the correct “progressive” opinions relieves you of the burden of having to know much about the Arab-Israeli conflict or anything else.

There’s more: In a recent survey of American students, only one in two of those “who regularly chant the infamous slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ were able to name the river and the sea it references. Some thought it referred to the Nile and the Euphrates. Others to the Caribbean,” O’Neill observes. “Less than a quarter of the students knew who Yasser Arafat was. More than 10 percent thought he was the first prime minister of Israel.”

Such acute nescience would be comical if its consequences weren’t so dire for Jews everywhere. Across much of the world, particularly in Western Europe, they haven’t had it this bad since the Holocaust, and things are bound to get worse, what with the unrelenting demonization of “Zionists.” This, too, is telling, by the way: No Muslims in Europe need fear being lynched, stabbed, or blown up by said Zionists, but rare is the Jew safe from militant Islamists.

This headlong relapse into the oldest hatred greatly harms Jews and Israel, no question. But it harms the West no less because, as O’Neill’s book shows, when hard-won civilizational values erode, lunacy, bigotry, and savagery follow. ■