So Iran’s civilisation is safe. Now what about the West’s?

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

The frenzy of the past 48 hours, following Trump’s potty-mouthed and threatening social-media posts about Iran, has felt unhinged. The nukes are coming, influencers wailed. Trump must be ‘removed as president’ in order to ‘prevent a catastrophe that our species will never recover from’, said the Guardian’s Owen Jones. Within hours of this giddy apocalypticism, this huddled descent of the chattering classes into the pit of End Times prophesying, Trump had done what many of us expected he would: struck a kind of deal. The great detonation was not of a nuclear bomb but of the common sense of the cultural establishment. That’s the only thing that got vaporised yesterday.

Then there was the sheer cant. It was Trump’s ominous yelp that ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight’ that got leftists and liberals frothing. It’s genocidal lunacy, they said. Let’s leave to one side that the target of his digital ire appeared to be the Islamic Republic, not Persia. ‘Forty-seven years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end’, he said. The more striking thing is the industrial-level gall of a cultural elite that is devoted to the dismantling of Israel, puffing itself up in fury over Trump’s hyperbole on Iran.

I agree that ‘A whole civilisation will die tonight’ is a chilling thing to say. That’s why I’m so horrified by the frenzied anti-Zionism of our times. Our intellectual classes furiously deny Israel’s ‘right to exist’. Our activist classes openly call for Israel’s excision from the family of nations, by intifada (violence) if necessary. Our celebrity classes cheer the armies of anti-Semites (Hamas, Hezbollah) that were founded with the express intention of vaporising the Jewish nation. One minute the keffiyeh set is accusing the likes of Pete Hegseth of being in the grip of an anti-Iranian ‘bloodthirst’, the next it’s chanting for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers.

Future historians will marvel at the brass neck of an influencer class that took 24 hours off from calling for the destruction of Israel to bash Trump for posting about the destruction of Iran. I raise this not to be facetious but to draw attention to the moral disarray here on the home front that has been so spectacularly exposed by events in Iran. For it is undeniable now – we are surrounded by people who salivate over the violent disappearance of Israel but who fret over the withering of the Islamic Republic. They have taken sides – the side of the barbarous regime that dreams of ‘Death to America’ over the side of the democratic state rebuilt by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I’m delighted the Persian civilisation is safe – now what about the West’s?

The mistake the media elites made these past 48 hours was to forget that diplomacy is always done behind closed doors. You won’t find any justification here of Trump’s impolitic, unpresidential language, but if you are viewing the Iran War through the prism of his purple prose, then more fool you. For as long as politics has existed, there has been a bright line between backroom machination and public spectacle. So as Trump threatened mayhem online, he pursued a ceasefire offline. Everyone should have known this was the likely situation.

We now know a two-week ceasefire has been agreed. Trump says it is conditional on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The remains of Tehran’s ruling class have issued a 10-point plan, which includes a commitment never to seek nuclear weapons and to end all conflict in the region, so long as US sanctions are lifted and Iranian assets held by America are released. The US and Israel are likely to agree to some of it, but not all. For instance, Iran has called for a cessation of hostilities against Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Israel says No.

The public discussion about this no doubt fragile half-deal feels unhinged, too. Perusing the press, you might be forgiven for thinking America has just suffered a Vietnam-level defeat while the Islamic Republic is buoyant from teaching the filthy West a lesson. That’s been the tenor of the coverage for weeks. ‘Advantage Iran’, said the front page of that bible of the boss class, The Economist. It’s beyond delusional. Yes, the regime survives, but vast layers of its leadership have been taken out and its weapons systems have been decimated. The mullahs’ capacity to rule has at the very least been diminished. The current tendency to exaggerate both the menace of Trump’s America and the stamina of the Islamic Republic strikes me as wholly ideological, even as wishful thinking. Some in the West seem to hope, possibly in spite of their better wisdom, that Tehran will help tame Trumpism.

That’s what has been confirmed by the past 48 hours of frantic anti-Americanism. That some are now so consumed by voguish wariness of the West that they have come to see even the murderous regime in Tehran as a possibly useful cudgel against our arrogant societies and wicked rulers. One feels as though one is in a Kafkaesque vortex of moral duplicity watching the media elites paint Trump as a singular threat to civilisation. For that is to be wilfully blind to the swarms of Westerners who have spent the past two-and-a-half years openly cheering the enemies of our civilisation.

This is why the Israelophobia of Trump’s hypocritical haters really matters. For nothing better sums up the anti-civilisational turn in our societies, the West’s revolt against itself, than these twisted dreams of Israel’s demise at the hands of the barbarous armies sponsored by the Islamic Republic. The media rage over Trump’s ill-advised invective acts as a distraction from this far more serious corrosion of our civilisational values. Here’s the thing: Trump clearly didn’t mean it when he said Iran would ‘die tonight’, but the virtuous and educated of our cultural elites do mean it when they say the world would be a better place if Israel didn’t exist. His intent was to deceive, theirs is to destroy. The genocidal imagination belongs less to Trump than to his noisy critics in the new moral clerisy.

I’ll tell you what alarmed me more than Trump’s posts – that large gathering outside Downing Street last night, where mobs waved the flag of Tehran’s anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic regime and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’. Any Brit who frets more over the oafish posts of a US president than he does over the presence in his own country of people who prefer Islamist tyranny to Western civilisation has entirely forfeited the right to be taken seriously. Let Iranians decide the future of their civilisation – we should focus on saving ours.

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 latest 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.