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The religious mania of Owen Jones

There’s a moral sickness in the bourgeois left’s loathing for Israel.

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer

Topics Politics UK World

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Some bad news for those of us who support the Jewish State – Owen Jones will never forgive us. Apparently, we have ‘crossed a red line’ with our support for Israel’s war on the neo-fascist militia of Hamas and it is ‘unforgivable’. ‘I will never forgive them’, Jones thundered on a recent episode of The News Agents, like some pipsqueak pope of bourgeois leftism who fantasises that it is in his gift to pardon or condemn lesser mortals than him. Quite how we will survive without the clemency of a man who thinks you can have a cock and be a lesbian is anyone’s guess.

We need to talk about Owen Jones’s religious mania. In the 15 months since Hamas’s pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel started the war in Gaza, Jones has morphed into one of Israel’s loudest and most lunatic critics. A day never passes when he doesn’t take to the internet to froth about Israel’s ‘genocidal mania’ and its ‘uniquely murderous’ war-making and the ‘depravity’ of its ‘cheerleaders’ who he hopes will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. Jesus Christ. The fire and brimstone is off the scale. I have never encountered such pious self-importance, and I was educated by nuns.

Jones’s commentary on the war in Gaza belongs less to the realm of judicious analysis than to the realm of demented religious conceit. Its key theme is moral censure, in particular of those sinners and miscreants who dared to assist Israel after the Jew-killers of Hamas invaded its lands. In his latest Guardian screed, he demands that those who supplied weapons ‘be put on trial’, and that all journalists who backed Israel’s war in Gaza have their ‘reputations’ reduced to ‘tatters’. There must be a ‘reckoning’, he insists, by which he means that he and his fellow Israel-haters in the English middle class should get to sit in judgement on those of us who don’t buy into the hysteria. Who think Israel should have a right to defend itself after suffering a pogrom. And who think it is just to want to destroy the army of anti-Semites that butchered its women and children on 7 October.

Jones’s commentary on Gaza has become increasingly lurid. It’s more Dante than Lenin, though without the poetry. He writes of ‘the smell of children’s burning flesh’. In reply to a journalist who demurs from the bourgeois conviction that Israel is the most loathsome state on Earth, he posted a clip of a distraught Palestinian kid and said: ‘I hope this boy’s screams haunt you for the rest of your life.’ The old priests threatened us with the torments of Hell – this new priest threatens us with the perpetual wails of suffering children. Imagine thinking you’re on the side of good even as you marshall images of grief-stricken kids to get one over on a hack you hate.

‘I’m not religious’, Jones said recently, ‘but if I was, these depraved pricks would be haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians they dehumanised until the end of time’. This isn’t normal, is it? Yes, there has long been a streak of vain and insufferable piety in middle-class leftism. I remember being an angry teen and going on anti-war marches and seeing plummy ladies in cashmere pashminas singing ‘Jerusalem’. Like that was going to help anyone. But Jones’s frenzied religiosity is of a wholly different order. He thirsts for nothing less than moral retribution against those he has judged in his godly wisdom to be ‘depraved’. He wants us tortured for eternity by the howls of the wretched of the Earth.

Like all fundamentalists, he permits not so much as a chink of doubt to meddle with his self-aggrandising doctrines. He told The News Agents that he just knows he is right about Israel and Gaza. And because he is privy to such glorious ‘moral clarity’, this means he has no doubts ‘gnawing at me’. ‘I don’t have any doubts’, he proudly announced. None at all? Having convinced himself that the past 15 months represent a ‘genocide’ and not a war, it has not once crossed his mind that there might be another side to this? Or that it might not be a good thing that the West’s activist classes responded to the worst act of anti-Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust by raging against the state that was its victim? Therein lies the problem: in the absence of doubt, arrogance festers. That Jones has no uncertainties ‘gnawing at him’ is nothing to be proud of – it is confirmation that he has fled the land of reason for the deathless embrace of dogma.

Some call Jones a ‘grifter’. His fervent Israel-bashing is a fame-making, money-raising ruse, they say. I disagree. It seems to me that anti-Israel animus has come to fill a howling void in the lives of many leftists. Perhaps this is true of Jones, too?

Following the demise of Corbynism, the crisis of woke and the working classes’ superb and sensible rejection of this middle-class left that defames them as ‘gammon’, leftists have been on the hunt for a sense of purpose, for some kind of mission. Many have found it in the rage against Israel. The intensity of their abhorrence for Israel is directly proportionate to the collapse of every other political programme they ever subscribed to.

That hatred for Israel has become a political life raft for a lost, defeated left is truly tragic. The consequences have been dire. For in this new religion, Israel plays the role of demon, if not outright devil. Every religion needs fiends against which the righteous might fume, and in this religion the fiend is the Jewish State. Daily we see the activist class rage against Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and the New Nazis and genocidal maniacs and ‘evil’. You don’t need a PhD in European history to know how potentially reckless it is to damn the world’s only Jewish nation as a frothing well of human wickedness.

In his latest column, Jones says the ‘reckoning’ with Israel’s apologists must come soon because the ‘far right’ is surging and we cannot allow ‘depraved violence [to] become normal’. Far right? I’ll show you the far right, Owen. There they are on those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches calling for the Army of Muhammad to return and finish off the Jews or branding ‘Zionists’ as the Nazi-like controllers of the media and world politics.

The reckoning we really need is with the scum that the left has found itself in witless alliance with since the barbarism of 7 October.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Picture by: Getty.

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