‘7 October tore at the fabric of civilisation’
Brendan O’Neill on how the West failed the greatest moral test of our time.
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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.
The thing that really struck me was those feral attacks on the ‘kidnapped’ posters that Jewish people and their allies had put up in various cities around the West. Everywhere I went in London, I would see these posters torn to shreds. On Finchley Road – in an area in north London heavily populated by Jews – there was a ‘kidnapped’ poster of three-year-old twins taken by Hamas, and someone had daubed Hitler moustaches on them. When that was reported, the anti-racist left said nothing about it. But to my mind, it was one of the worst things I have ever seen. The daubing of Jewish children with a Hitler moustache, the branding of Jewish children as fascists who presumably deserved what they got after they were kidnapped on 7 October by Hamas.
After seeing things like that, I started to think there is a moral rot in Western society. This moral decay, the turn against Enlightenment values, all of this is going to come surging to the surface of society. I think our chickens have come home to roost. We’re now seeing that if you educate an entire generation to look at their societies as institutionally racist, Islamophobic and born from the sins of slavery and colonialism, when you continually educate a new generation to have contempt for the communities in which they live, you are going to turn them away from the values of Western civilisation and possibly push them into the arms of its opposite. This is what we saw on 7 October: a complete tear in the fabric of civilisation. It ended up not being surprising to me that younger generations in the West found themselves warming to barbarism.
Ungar-Sargon: You talk about the ‘radicalism of the keffiyeh classes’. Tell us a little bit more about this and how it intersects with the class divide?
O’Neill: Tom Wolfe wrote scathingly about ‘radical chic’ in the early 1970s, and the point I make in my book is that the wearing of the keffiyeh is a kind of sartorial signifier of the luxury-beliefs class. It’s even worse than radical chic. It’s victimhood chic. To my mind, they have morally appropriated the entire sense of victimhood of the Palestinian people – and they’re really trying to get a moral kick out of it. When students put up the Gaza encampment at Columbia University, there was this fantastic video clip of some of them, all wearing keffiyehs, receiving ‘humanitarian aid’ through the university gates. It was probably just a blueberry muffin from the local Starbucks, but they were lapping up this sensation of temporarily being the wretched of the Earth.
On the one hand, it’s quite funny. But this culture actually feeds into Hamas’s strategy. When you have a culture in the West, among young activists, the media and in certain political circles, which almost craves images of Palestinian suffering in order to make themselves feel virtuous, you are going to goad Hamas to provide more of those images. You are going to encourage Hamas not to lay down arms, but instead to revel in some of the destruction that we’ve seen in Gaza as a consequence of the war it started. There is now this horrible, symbiotic relationship between a Western activist class that is myopically obsessed with Palestinian suffering and the willingness of Hamas to continue fighting against a foe it could never defeat. I think that relationship is something really worth critiquing.
Ungar-Sargon: Why do so many Western people fail to see Hamas for exactly what it is?
O’Neill: One reason is that we are often just not told the truth. The mainstream media coverage, with many honourable exceptions, has not been very good. BBC News had the most extraordinary line the other week, when its presenter said: ‘Israel has expanded its war by bombing the Houthis in Yemen, after the Houthis fired missiles at Tel Aviv.’ I remember thinking: ‘Am I losing my mind here? Or is that the worst, most deceptive sentence in modern-day journalism?’ Because, of course, what that actually means is that the Houthis expanded the war by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. And Israel responded to that expansion by firing missiles back at them. So that drip-drip effect of either outright media dishonesty, or just coverage that doesn’t get to the truth, can have a big impact.
Another thing I struggle with is trying to convince people about the true nature of Hamas, though it can be done. You can point them to its founding covenant from 1988, which commits it to a genocidal struggle against the Jews. You can point them to recent statements by Hamas leaders, where they encourage people to buy five-shekel knives and use them to kill Jews. And you can point them to comments that Hassan Nasrallah made in recent years, where he referred to Zionism as a cancerous presence in the Middle East. There are things you can do to really highlight the extraordinarily deep-seated anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny and racial hatred of these movements. The cluelessness about them is deep, but I think it is possible to draw attention to their true nature and chip away at people’s delusions about them.
Brendan O’Neill was talking to Batya Ungar-Sargon on The Brendan O’Neill Show. You can watch the full interview here.
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