What sounds more like fascism to you? A diminutive mum saying “People with penises are not women” or a mob of Islamists chanting “Gas the Jews”? A bottle-blonde campaigner gathering with other women to stand up for women’s rights or a gang of Israel-haters calling for Jews to be shoved in the ovens again?
It’s the latter. Of course.
The sight of those anti-Semites outside the Sydney Opera House spouting Holocaust-era bile chilled my blood.
I try never to use the terminology of the 1930s to condemn people in the here and now. Far too many people fling the word fascist at people they disagree with. Yet when I saw those blokes saying “Gas the Jews”, I thought to myself: “Nazi scum.”
But here’s the mad thing: self-styled anti-fascists got far angrier about the women mentioned above than they did about that mob calling for the elimination of the Jews.
I’m referring to women such as Kellie-Jay Keen, of course. Also known as Posie Parker, she’s the British campaigner who has become a witch for woke leftists because she says a man can never become a woman.
When she was in Australia in March she was furiously counter-protested against by Antifa. Swarms of masked men who fancy themselves as fascism’s implacable foes always shout and scream at her.
Yet during the past week, following the worst act of racist savagery against the Jews since the Holocaust, Antifa has fallen silent. Where are those brave Aussie fellas who screamed “Nazi” at Posie Parker? Why aren’t they counter-protesting against the people who chanted for genocide in Sydney?
It’s a strange anti-fascism that gets angrier about women expressing biological facts than it does about a mob dreaming of destroying an entire people.
It’s the same in Britain. The left here sees Nazism everywhere. Brexit? It’s like something out of the ’30s. People who think we need to get a handle on illegal immigration? Fascists.
Yet following Hamas’s anti-Semitic slaughter of hundreds, they’ve gone quiet. Worse, some have made excuses for this barbarism. What does Israel expect given its treatment of the Palestinians, they say. Shorter version: you had it coming.
Some leftists even celebrated Hamas’s genocidal assault.
“Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel”, said a headline in the Socialist Worker, the newspaper of Britain’s biggest radical party. It published that piece on Monday, two days after the Hamas attack. When we all knew what it had done. That it had massacred young Jews at a music festival, kidnapped Jewish grandmothers, eliminated entire Jewish families.
The Socialist Workers Party poses as anti-fascist. Its members march with placards saying “Never Again”. Yet when the worst massacre of Jews since the ’40s unfolded before the world’s eyes, it said: “Rejoice.” What moral depravity is this?
The commissioning editor of Novara Media, an influential left-wing magazine in the UK, described Hamas’s onslaught as a “day of celebration”.
Mobs in London gathered outside the Israeli embassy to taunt it over its dead Jews. One young protester was caught on camera saying to a Jewish man: “Aww, are your people dead?” “Yes,” the man replied. “Aww, good,” said the protester.
Mockery of dead Jews – I never thought I would see it in 21st-century Britain.
There has been a 324 per cent increase in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain since the Hamas atrocity. The details are obscene. A Jewish person entering a synagogue was accosted by someone who said: “No wonder you’re all getting raped.” A Holocaust survivor was called a “Jew pig”.
Pupils at the Jewish Free School in London have been told that blazers are optional right now, lest anyone recognise their Jewishness from their school badge and assault them. I live near the Jewish Free School. Seeing the kids in their zipped-up coats despite the clammy weather, hiding their Jewish insignias, fills me with a burning shame.
Across Europe, security has been beefed up outside Jewish establishments: schools, synagogues, museums. Major institutions are refusing to give visible solidarity to Israel.
The Scottish parliament says it won’t fly the Israeli flag. The Football Association refused to light up the arch at Wembley Stadium in the Israeli colours. It lit up the arch in the colours of Turkey, France and Ukraine after those nations experienced horrific attacks. But Israel? Forget about it. Apparently the FA fears a “backlash from some communities” if it flies Israel’s flag. In other words, the feelings of anti-Israel Brits matter more than the grief of Britain’s Jews.
For more than a year the FA encouraged footballers to take the knee for George Floyd. Yet it won’t fly the flag of the nation that just suffered a colossal atrocity. Does the life of one African-American carry more moral weight than the lives of a thousand Jews?
The thing that has disturbed me most has been the response of the next generation to Hamas’s monstrous act. Students at Harvard issued a statement saying Israel is “entirely responsible” for the violence in the Middle East.
At Stanford they hung up banners saying “The illusion of Israel is burning”. Imagine saying that as Jews were being burnt alive. Some were incinerated in their cars by Hamas, others in their homes. And Stanford radicals celebrated Israel’s “burning”.
Jewish students at the University of Sydney say they feel “deeply distressed” by the rise of anti-Israel agitation in recent days.
At the University of Cambridge, the student welfare officer liked a series of tweets celebrating Hamas’s assault.
This matters. These people are the future captains of politics, media and business. Yet they’re effectively siding with Hamas, a movement whose founding charter committed it to a “struggle against the Jews”. Whose officials have said, as recently as 2021, that people should “cut off the heads of Jews”.
Hamas is no “national liberation movement”. It is a singularly anti-Semitic entity, devoted to the violent destruction of Israel and the genocidal erasure of Jews. That bright, upper middle-class youths in the West are so relaxed about these fascist murderers is alarming. It is a testament to what happens when our universities are overrun by anti-Western self-loathing. We end up with a generation that thinks Hamas is cool because it puts a knife to the throat of Israel, the West, “us”.
This past week has felt deeply unsettling. For the first time in my life I understand how the Holocaust happened. How it is possible for once-civilised societies to let in extremism, anti-Semitism, barbarism. We have witnessed not just an assault on the Jews by Hamas but also a betrayal of the Jews by intellectuals in the West. It is intolerable.
Recent acts of Islamist terrorism have exposed the moral weakness of the modern West.
After 9/11 some said the US had it coming. After the slaughter at the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, even supposed liberals said: “Well, what did those cartoonists expect given they’re so rude about Islam?” And now, following a slaying of Jews that Hitler would have been proud of, people are “contextualising” it. It’s “resistance”, they say.
I’m sorry, but if your response to Jewphobic mass murder is to offer up “context”, then you are lost. Truly, completely lost.
We need a moral rearmament of the West. We must stand with Israel, the Jewish people and the values of Western civilisation.
Are you for civilisation or barbarism? That is what last Saturday’s atrocity asks of us. The future hinges on us giving the right answer.
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